At its simplest the word names a young bull, an animal valued enough to fatten for an honored guest and fit to lay on the altar. Because a calf is young and lively, biblical writers reach for it as a picture too: a people skipping for joy, a nation too wild to be led, a foot that stamps and gleams, a rescued flock leaping out to pasture.
That same everyday word becomes one of the Bible's sharpest terms for false worship. When Israel melts its gold at the mountain, and again when the northern kingdom builds its rival shrines, what gets made is a calf: a cast-metal image of the very animal people knew from the stall and the sacrifice. The offense is partly that they bow to a farmyard creature, and the single word holds the ordinary sense and the idolatrous one right next to each other.
So the two senses below are not two different words. They are one word, calf, pointing in one case to a real young bull and in the other to a statue shaped like one.
Nuances
1aa young bull as a living animal: raised as livestock, fattened for a feast, offered in sacrifice, or used as a vivid picture of vigor or helplessness.
the Hebrew word also names a cast-metal image shaped like a calf and worshiped as a god, a sense the English word never carries on its own.Exo 32:41Ki 12:28
Both
both words name a young bull, an animal of the herd not yet full-grown.Lev 9:2
Only calf
in English "calf" also means the young of many other animals (a whale calf, an elephant calf) and the back of the lower leg; the Hebrew word carries none of those senses.
“young bull”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How egel differs from similar Hebrew words
עֶגְלָהthe feminine of the same picture: a young cow rather than a young bull. It names the heifer worked in the field or offered when its neck is broken, and it is never the word for the golden calf.
This is the young male animal, the bull calf, and it is the ordinary name for Israel's cast-metal idol: the golden calf at Sinai and the images Jeroboam set up at Bethel and Dan. Almost every mention of those images uses this word.Exo 32:4Exo 32:81Ki 12:28Hos 8:5
It is the prized calf raised for the table, the fattened animal slaughtered to honor a guest or squandered by the complacent rich.1Sa 28:24Amo 6:4
Both
Both name young cattle brought as an offering in worship.Lev 9:21Sa 16:2
Both picture a lively young animal, fat and frisking, as an image of thriving.Mal 4:2Jer 50:11
Both are used of the cattle images at Israel's northern shrines, but not evenly: the calf is the standing name for them, while the heifer is used that way only once, in Hosea's line about the shrine at Beth-aven.Hos 8:6Hos 10:5
This is the young female animal, the cow. It is the one chosen for rites that demand a beast never yoked or worked, such as the covenant sacrifice and the atonement for an unsolved killing.Gen 15:9Deu 21:3
It serves as a figure for a nation or a laboring animal, whether a fair cow, a trained one broken to work, or one that treads the grain.Jer 46:20Hos 10:11Jdg 14:18
פַּרa bull, typically a mature and weighty animal and the leading choice for the great sacrifices; the calf is its younger, smaller counterpart.
The young animal, and above all the cast-metal calf-idol: the golden calf at Sinai and the calves Jeroboam set up are this word.Exo 32:4Exo 32:191Ki 12:28
A picture of friskiness and freedom: it skips, is let loose, or is fattened in the stall, drawing on the energy of a young beast.Psa 29:6Jer 34:18Mal 4:2
Both
Both name a male of the herd brought to the altar, so the priest's own consecration could call for a young calf while another sin offering called for a grown bull.Lev 9:2Lev 4:3
The full-grown bull set apart as the chief sacrificial victim for the gravest offerings: ordination, the sin offering, the Day of Atonement.Exo 29:1Lev 4:3Lev 16:3
Counted out in large numbers as costly festival and dedication gifts, where the tally of bulls measures the offering.Num 7:87Num 23:1
שׁוֹרa single head of cattle, an ox or bull counted as a working or owned animal; it names the beast by its kind, while calf marks its youth.
Names the animal by its age: a young one of the herd, still in its first growth. That is why it can be described as one that has never been trained to pull, or specified as an animal within its first year.Jer 31:18Mic 6:6Lev 9:2
It is used of a live animal going about ordinary animal life: grazing where a city used to stand, skipping about, or simply as the familiar shape of a hoof that a writer can compare something else to.Isa 27:10Psa 29:6Ezk 1:7
This is the word for the young bull made into an idol: the gold one cast at Sinai, the pair set up when the kingdom split, and the one the prophets keep throwing back at Samaria.Exo 32:41Ki 12:28Hos 8:5Psa 106:19
It names the animal used in the ceremony that sealed an agreement, cut into two halves so that the people binding themselves could walk between the pieces.Jer 34:18Jer 34:19
Both
Both name prime cattle kept for eating, and both are what gets killed when a meal has to be put on for guests.1Ki 1:91Sa 28:24Amo 6:4
Both are animals people bring to the altar, and both turn up where the question is whether God actually wants the offering.Isa 1:11Amo 5:22Lev 9:3Mic 6:6
Both can stand for people who have grown fat and comfortable and are about to be cut down, with well fed soldiers and leaders pictured as the meat at somebody else's table.Ezk 39:18Jer 46:21
The one verse that has both words sets them side by side with a young lion and a small child leading them, so the two prize animals that would normally end up as somebody's meal are the ones left unharmed.Isa 11:6
Names the animal by how it has been fed: a beast fattened up to prime condition. The word says that all by itself, with no extra word for the stall or the feeding pen, so a list of what was slaughtered can run "sheep and cattle and fatlings" and the last word already means the best fed stock on the place.1Ki 1:92Sa 6:131Ki 1:25
Every time it appears, the animal is at the point of being killed, either for a feast or on an altar. It never names a working beast, a grazing beast, or an image; the fat is being burned or the meat is being eaten.Isa 1:11Amo 5:221Ki 1:19
egel in the other biblical languages
μόσχοςGreek“calf”the Greek word for a calf; in the New Testament it covers both the fatted calf killed for a feast and the golden calf Israel made, the same double range this word has.
It is the word for the cast-metal calf that Israel bowed to as a false god, the great symbol of idolatry: the golden calf at Sinai and the calves Jeroboam set up. The Greek word in the New Testament never carries this idol sense.Exo 32:41Ki 12:28Hos 8:5Psa 106:19Neh 9:18
Both
Both are the plain word for the young of the herd, a calf as a literal animal.Isa 11:6Rev 4:7
Both name the fattened calf, an animal specially raised and then killed to mark a joyful feast.1Sa 28:24Amo 6:4Luk 15:23Luk 15:27
Both name the calf offered in sacrifice, the victim whose blood is presented to God.Lev 9:2Jer 34:18Heb 9:12Heb 9:19
The standard lexicons (BDB, HALOT) and the theological dictionaries (TWOT, TDOT) agree that the noun denotes a calf, a young bull, with a well-attested Semitic background (compare Ugaritic ʿgl, Akkadian agalu, Arabic ʿijl). Its meaning is not in dispute. The lexicons list two ranges of reference under the one word: the ordinary animal (livestock, food, sacrifice, and imagery) and the cult-image, the molten calf of Exodus 32 and the calves Jeroboam set up at Bethel and Dan. What scholars debate is not the word but the religion behind the images: whether the calves were idols of a Canaanite storm-and-fertility deity, or empty pedestals on which the invisible God of Israel was thought to stand, comparable to bull imagery known across the region (Cross). That is a historical and theological question about the objects, not about what the word means. The feminine noun for a heifer is a separate entry.