Saturday, October 30, 2021

Brittany E. Wilson on Divine Images and Idol Polemic in the Ancient World

  

Divine Images and Idol Polemic in the Ancient World

 

In both modern and ancient discourse, the prohibition against crafting images in the Decalogue (Exod 20:4; Deut 5:8) remains one of the most persistent rationales Jews and Christians cite in their defense of an invisible God. When we look more closely at this famous prohibition, though, it becomes clear that the primary issue is not God’s visibility or lack thereof but God’s superiority in relation to other gods. In Exodus and Deuteronomy, the prohibition of “idols”—itself a pejorative term used to describe someone else’s divine images—is closely connected with the prohibition of worshiping other gods besides the God of Israel. The commandment, which immediately follows the commandment to have no other gods before “the LORD your God” (Exod 20:2-3; cf. Deut 5:6-7), begins with “You shall not make for yourself an idol . . .” and then goes on to say, “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God” (Exod 20:4-5; cf. Deut 5:8-9). As W. Barnes Tatum argues, the second commandment is not anti-iconic but anti-idolic; the commandment is not against images per se but against images that represent other deities (Tatum, “The LXX Version,” 181). Furthermore, the explanation for this prohibition in Deut 4:15-18, the text does not prohibit the Israelites from making idols because God lacks a form but because they did not see God’s form: “Since you saw no form when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out o the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure . . . “ (Deut 4:15-16). Indeed, Deuteronomy indicates that sight itself is still important in perceiving divine revelation, for Moses claims just a few verses earlier that Israel saw God’s voice: “you could see no likeness; only a voice [תמונה אינכם ראים זולתי קול]” (cf. “you did not see a likeness, but rather a voice [ονοιωμα ουκ ειδετε, αλλη φωνην]” LXX) (Deut 4:12).

 

Idol polemic found in Scripture more broadly likewise indicates that God’s form remains a forbidden object of material representation, not that God lacks a form altogether. A number of texts, though, are certainly critical of idols. Second Kings and 2 Chronicles describe the destruction of idols in the context of cult reformers under Hezekiah and Josiah (2 Kgs 18; 22-23; 2 Chr 29-30; 34), and the prophets and psalms critique foreign nations for their association with idols (e.g., Ps 106:38; Isa 10:10; 19:1; 46:1; Jer 50:38; Ezek 20:7-8). Idol parodies in particular contrast Israel’s “living God” with lifeless idols, claiming that such idols displace the Creator with the created thing as the object of worship (e.g., Pss 115:4-8; 135:15-18; Isa 40:18-20; 44:9-20; 46:1-13; Jer 10:1-16; Hos 13:2-3; Hab 2:18-19). In none of these accounts, however, is there a suggestion that God cannot be represented as an image because God is invisible or formless. Moreover, there are times in Jewish Scripture when images appear in a manner akin to “idols” but without any sense of critique. The ark of the covenant, for example, is sometimes depicted as being functionally equivalent to an idol since it is a physical object through which the God of Israel becomes manifest (e.g., Num 7:89; 1 Sam 5:1-5). Some scholars even argue that the Israelites had an iconic representation of YHWH in the Jerusalem temple, maintaining that biblical references to “seeing God” connect to seeing the cult statue (see Dick, “Prophetic Parodies”; Levtow, Images of Others; Bonfiglio, “Images and the Image Ban,” 2c, “Idol Parodies in Prophetic Literature”). Regardless, recent studies on scriptural aniconism demonstrate that Israelite religion was not imageless, and although Israel’s aniconic tendencies intensified over time, as Tryggve Mettinger argues in his landmark work on this topic, scriptural texts preserve a variety of stances toward images themselves (See Mettinger, No Graven Image?).

 

Scriptural accounts of divine images becomes especially suggestive when we turn to Gen 1, for here human beings are said to be made in the “image of God” (Gen 1:27). This first creation account relates that God creates humans in God’s “image,” using a term (צלם in the MT and εικων in the LXX) that regularly refers to the statues or visible depictions of the divine (e.g., Num 33:53; 2 Kgs 11:8; Ezek 7:20; Amos 5:26). In his summary on this account, Mark Smith notes that “[h]umanity is not only the representation of God on earth; the human person is the living representation pointing to a living and real God, perhaps unlike the lifeless images of other deities made by human hands” (Smith, The Priestly Vision, 101). Zainab Bahrani and Stephen Herring push this argument even further. Bahrani maintains that images in some ancient Near Eastern contexts were viewed as constitutive of the reality they represented, and Herring similarly concludes that images were not replicas, but extensions of the referent’s very presence (Bahrani, The Graven Image, esp. 121-48; Herring, Divine Substitution). As created in God’s “own image” (צלם; εικων) and “likeness” (דמות; ομοιωσις) (Gen 1:26), humans arguably reach this same level of confluence; in the words of Randall Garr, humanity itself is akin to a theophany (Garr, In His Own Image and Likeness, 117). If humans are “visible embodiments” of God, then they might reflect not only God’s “mind” or “reason” (as interpreters wed to an invisible God often maintain) but also God’s very body. (Brittany E. Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church [New York: Oxford University Press, 2021], 25-27)