And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. (Exodus 32:4)
The “calf” would naturally suggest itself to the Israelites because they had witnessed in Egypt the worship of Apis the bull. But the golden calf was presumably a material representation of the true God, not of some heathen deity (see v. 5).