I’m recovering from a surgery and have limited use of my hands so this will be brief for now:
I’m not following you on this, so I’m probably misunderstanding. The noun for calf in Exodus 32:4 (and the OTOW referring to the image formed from the gold) is in the singular. In 1King 12:28 there are two calves because one was placed in northern Israel and one in southern Israel (perhaps also not so far from Jerusalem so as to supplant Jerusalem as the place of worship.) Geography and travel practicalities made two calves necessary for “national worship”.
Why would that be relevant? (We wouldn’t usually apply that standard in English or in most other modern languages—unless we had solid textbook reasons to think that the basic grammar of the language couldn’t function that way. But I certainly can’t see that standard applied to Greek or Aramaic of the first century. However, it is possible that I’m not following Dr. Roberts on her argument.)
Moreover, why would we apply that standard to the Aramaic syntactical construction which Jesus would have used—which has not been verifiably recorded in any ancient document which we can examine today and is therefore unknown—or to the Greek translations of Jesus’ words appearing in the Synoptic Gospels? [Yes, we can consult the Peshitta New Testament but (1) we don’t know that those are Jesus’ actual words, and (2) I don’t know of any evangelicals who claim the Peshitta is inspired and inerrant in the same sense as the Greek NT.]
To be clear, I’m not trying to deny anyone’s inerrancy views. I’m simply saying that the Greek of the NT has preserved Jesus’ teachings in terms of ideas–as expressed by the writers of the Gospels–but NOT in the exact Aramaic words Jesus used in his preaching. (Unfortunately, there are still some evangelical commentators who forget this basic fact. I will certainly admit that. But the best commentators don’t make that mistake.) Yes, there are a few rare instances where the actual words of Jesus–or some might say a paraphrase—are transliterated into Greek (e.g., “My God. My God. Why have you forsaken me?”; also when Jesus said “TALITHA KUM” to the little girl) but those are occasions few and far between.
Are you sure that that would be important? Even if we weren’t dealing with the complications of Jesus’ preaching in Aramaic but our having the New Testament in Koine Greek as our standard, is the Greek NT a sufficiently large corpus (even while containing multiple genre by a variety of authors) such that that would that be more important or relevant than finding such a usage in other Koine literature of the period?
In any case, I have no doubt that I could find analogous Greek contexts if I went looking for them—but whether or not they were associated with Jesus would be largely irrelevant.
It would be great if we had Jesus’ exact words (and, thereby, the exact syntactical construction Jesus employed) for such passages, but we do not. So this strikes me as largely irrelevant. Translation from Aramaic to Koine Greek does not necessarily mean that sentence divisions and syntactical structures are somehow preserved in the target language in such a way as to help make a weighty argument.
My apologies if I am misunderstanding the aforementioned. I hope to return to these topics when I have more clarity of mind (and dexterity of hands.)