Idols and Holiness
The Lord met Moses on
Mount Horeb and spoke to him from a burning bush. He said, “Remove your sandals
from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exod
3:5). At Mount Sinai, God warned the people not to set foot on the mountain. If
the people had stepped on the mountain, the anger of the Lord may have broken
out against them (Exod 19:21-23).
Even Israelite priests
had to consecrate themselves or face the Lord’s anger. This is similar to
Egyptian priests who performed a variety of purification rituals (bathing, shaving)
to consecrate them for holy service. The reason priests had to perform these
rituals was to convert or commute their impurity to an acceptable status.
But like the rest of
the ancient Near East, the gods of Egypt were captive to their statues. In
these images, the true presence of deity resided. The idols of the gods at
night would sleep in their stone kar naos in the inner chambers of the
temple. In the morning, the priests would dress the cultic idols with fresh
lines and carry them to the Great Throne. There, they would place their gods in
the sacred barques. From the sacred barques, the gods exercised their power in
the daytime.
The sacred barques
were the pinnacle of ritual processional furniture. The purpose of the sacred
barque was to create a holy place so that the gods of Egypt could assert their influence
upon the outside world. The gods ruled from their barque as if they ruled upon
the throne of a king. All their divine power and authority was answered from
inside the most holy of spaces. Moreover, the gods could extend their influence
from their barques outside in the profane world where defilement resided.
Even though the ark
used a visual language common to the ancient Near East, the message of the ark
was that the God of Israel was different. Without a cultic idol placed in the
center of the shrine, the normal message of this kind of furniture inverted.
Israelite theology could not behind their God to an idol. The presence of God moved
with the ark from place to place. But without an idol, God was not put to bed
at night, nor was he clothed, fed, or cared for by human hands. Without an
idol, God was shown to be utterly sovereign. The ark and tabernacle visually
communicated that God is holy, never leaves his throne, and never sleeps. (David
A. Falk, The Ark of the Covenant in its Egyptian Context: An Illustrated
Journey [Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Academic, 2020], 132-33)
