Ṭāhā

فَاَخْرَجَ لَهُمْ عِجْلاً جَسَداً لَّهُ خُوَارٌ فَقَالُوا هَذَا إِلَهُكُمْ وَإِلَهُ مُوسَي فَنَسِيَ

أَفَلاَ يَرَوْنَ أَلاَّ يَرْجِعُ إِلَيْهِمْ قَوْلاً وَلاَ يَمْلِكُ لَهُمْ ضَرّاً وَلاَ نَفْعاً

88. “Then he (Samiri) produced for them a (mere) body of a Calf that lowed. So they said: ‘This is your god and the god of Moses’, but he forgot (both the Lord and Moses’ teachings).”
89. “Do they not see then that it (the Calf) returns to them no saying and possesses neither harm nor profit for them?”

One of the smartnesses of Samiri was that he did not show those people how he constructed the Calf, and the people, all of a sudden, were faced with a lowing Calf that Samiri had constructed. The verse says:

The Children of Israel did not contemplate that if that Calf were worthy of worship, Samiri himself, who was the constructor of it, would be more worthy of worship while they did not worship him. However, as a blame and reprimand upon those idolaters, Allah says:

A real deity should at least be able to answer the questions of the servants. Can the sound of lowing heard from the golden statue of a Calf alone be an acceptable and sufficient reason for people to worship it? Moreover, can a thing, which is not the possessor of the harm and the profit of others, or even of itself, be an object of worship? Besides, the intellect judges that the object of worship of a man should be able to attract profit for him and to repel harms from him.