This is a sample chapter (in draft) from the Sacred History of Being:
'Something paradoxical and intriguing about human religion'
This chapter looks at the body of Mesopotamian
ideas about the gods and the divine through the extensive commentary on these
ideas present in the books of the Old Testament. It draws extensively on a
study published in 1999, Born in Heaven,
Made on Earth, edited by Michael Dick.
The chapter also explores how Old Testament ideas about images were
understood by the christian writer Tertullian, in the early second century of
the common era.
….within the hierarchy of Mesopotamian ritual, the lengthy
performance of washing the mouth of the temple statue is the most solemn, most
sacred and most secret of rituals. This conclusion is reached from
consideration of the special circumstances of the performance of the mis pi,
the investment of time and resources, and the goal of the ritual. This ritual
calls upon all the knowledge and spiritual know-how of the ritual specialists
to transfer the deity from the spiritual world to the physical world. It
requires the most expertise in ritual matters and accomplishes the epitome of
ritual possibilities actualising the presence of the god in the temple. [1]
Though
not the intention of Born in Heaven, Made on Earth, the book brings
together much of the evidence for the case which argues that there was a
complex and philosophical metaphysic beneath Mesopotamian religion.
In addition to an introduction by Dick, there are four main sections, covering
prophetic parodies of making the cult image contained in biblical sources,
authored by Dick; a chapter on the induction of the cult Image in ancient
Mesopotamia (concerning the Mis Pi Ritual) co-authored with Christopher Walker;
an essay by the Egyptologist David Lorton on the theology of cult statues in
ancient Egypt for purposes of comparison, and finally an essay by Joanne Punzo
Waghorne on the divine image in contemporary south India, where much of the
practice known to the Assyrians and Babylonians is still in existence, though
it is a practice which has been maligned in modern times.
The following discussion mainly concerns Michael Dick’s contribution to the
book, and principally his study of the prophetic parodies of the making of the
cult image found in the Old Testament, which casts light on the intellectual
currents of a remote world in which cult images possessed great power,
prestige, and life, but were also the focus of theological disputation.
Dick has been interested in the detail surrounding cult statues since 1977,
when he worked in this area for a year as a post-doctoral student at Johns
Hopkins University, and it has remained a focus of his attention. His research
as he says in his introduction to the volume, ‘soon convinced me of the
importance of the Mesopotamian Mis Pi ritual used to “give birth” to the god
represented by the cult image’. He was introduced to Christopher Walker, who
had written his Oxford University dissertation on the Mis Pi rite, by Dr.
Jerrold Cooper of John Hopkins University. [2]
The introductory remarks on the cult Image are prefaced with a quotation from
James Preston, which is worth repeating here:
Through the study of icons and their
construction we are able to perceive some of the most vital impulses underlying
religious experience. Sacred images are products of the human imagination –
they are constructed according to systematic rules, and then they are infused
with sacrality and kept “alive” by highly controlled behaviours intended to
retain the “spirit in matter”. An analysis of this process of constructing
sacred images, and the corollary process of the destruction, reveals to us
something paradoxical and intriguing about human religion. [3]
Some aspects of religion are more religious
than others, and the paradoxical aspects of human religion are, as well as
intriguing, more religious than we are accustomed to accept.
The normal approach to the academic study of
iconic imagery in religion is phenomenological and comparative. The
phenomenological approach, as the term suggests, looks at the obvious and the
external, and the relationships and patterns which can be discerned. Mainly
this is a study of differences and similarities, but of course such a study can
be much richer in nature, and a great deal can be discovered in this way.
No-one however has been looking for a logical, philosophical and technical basis
to the worship of images, either in the ancient past or, as in the case of cult
statues in India, in contemporary human societies. This is because the
scholarly model in which cult imagery is understood presumes that no such basis
is present, and the phenomenological approach does not provide suggestive
evidence to the contrary. [4]
Immanence and Transcendence in Divine Images
Born in Heaven, Made on Earth treats
of cult imagery as a form of concretization of the divine. Dick argues that
attitudes (positive or negative) toward the concretization
of the deity represented by the cult image reveal significant positions about
the divine presence, about immanence and transcendence, about the very nature
of the deity. [5]
While there have been many struggles in history
between iconodules and iconoclasts, the seminal struggle is of course (as
things have worked out) the one which is represented in the Old Testament. [6] The
Israelites had come into very close contact with the Babylonian iconodule during
the exile of the 6th century B.C.E., although it is unlikely to have been
necessary for the Israelites to actually live among the Babylonians to
understand their culture enough to rebel against its icons. Dick points out
that many of the Bible’s ‘most strident’ parodies of making an image of the god
date from this period, and that even many of the Deuteronomistic legal
prohibitions concerning the making of a cult image probably date from the
post-Exilic period. The existence of these parodies within the Bible, which
have received little attention outside scholarly circles, will probably come as
a surprise to many. But that they are there suggests that the Israelites had at
the very least a rudimentary awareness of Babylonian ritual for the
installation of cult images. And of course there were long-standing connections
with Egypt, a culture which also had rituals for the making and installation of
cult images.
Indeed, this problem (how can gods be made?) is still at the heart of our
inability to understand the conceptual model which lies beneath the practice of
idolatry in the ancient Near East, and, more remotely, beneath the veneration
of cult images in modern India. Dick quotes an interesting statement by the
Assyrian king Esarhaddon, from the early years of the seventh century B.C.E.,
in which the problem is directly acknowledged, but also in which Esarhaddon
directly ties in the importance of cult images in Assyria with an intellectual
outlook and conceptual model of the world which was later familiar to the
Greeks. Esarhaddon says:
Whose right is it, O great gods, to create gods and
goddesses in a place where humans dare not trespass? Is it the right of deaf
and blind human beings who are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance
throughout their lives? The making of (images of) the gods and goddesses is
your right, it is in your hands. [7]
The insertion of ‘images of’ in the last
sentence is warranted only by the needs of our own perspective. The text
literally says ‘the making of the gods and goddesses is your right…’ [8]
The point which is being made here however is that there is a strange
circularity involved in the creation of the gods – a god must create a god, and
man cannot do this. So the craftsmen of Esarhaddon can only create gods (as we
shall see) if they are technically
gods themselves at the moment of their creation and installation, and that
they can only function in this way if it is the will and command of the gods,
mediated through the king, who is the representative of Assur, the chief of the
gods on earth.
This perception of a problem in the creation of
something quite ‘other’ is also reflected by the reverse scenario, found in
Plato’s Timaeus, in which god created a lesser creature - the Living Animal. But the Living Animal cannot be
made directly by the the god – it must be created by lesser gods, or as
Plato would say, demiourgoi,
otherwise there would be too much of the divine in the world. [9]
Esarhaddon expressly associates divinity with
knowledge in this text, in that man is defined as ‘deaf and blind’, and human
beings ‘are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance throughout their
lives.’ It follows that the divine has the opposite characteristics, and that
the artisans who build the statues must, at least temporarily in the cultic
context, possess the attributes of the divine. Thus there must be a roughly
parallel process in the creation of a temporary divinity in the artisan, and
the installation of a divine statue.
We have the Babylonian ritual procedures for the installation of cult images,
and a parallel rite from Egypt. But we do not have an equivalent from Greece.
Early Christian literature ‘often refers to similar Greek and Latin rites
(‘dedicatio’)’, but Dick suggests that it is not clear that such rites existed,
citing studies by Barasch in 1992, [10] and Walter
Burkert in 1985, who says that “there are no magical rites to give life to the
cult image as in Babylon”.[11] This is
perhaps showing undue deference to the statements of these very eminent
scholars. At this stage in this exploration, after the discussion of Plato’s
writings on images, the likelihood would seem to be that the Greeks did have
magical rites for the dedication and vivification of cult images – though
unfortunately they have not survived. It is also likely that the statues were
made divine on the basis of a similar (if not identical) notion of the nature
of the divine, and that the magical rites bore a resemblance to one another in
essential details. After all, both Plato and Esarhaddon equate the divine with
knowledge, and ignorance with earthly existence: they are both looking to one
thing, [12] the one
thing which transcends all categories of earthly existence and the ultimate
source of knowledge, and both (it would seem) believed that it may be accessed
through the mediation of form (eidos).
A significant reference to the installation of statues in Christian literature
is in the Octavius of Minucius Felix,
where the importance of the will of the operative is isolated as critical. To
Minucius Felix this is an argument against the credibility of the procedure,
but in theurgic practice, the will of the operative to sacralise an object, or
to work with the gods, is key to the process.
The Babylonian ritual procedures which prepared the statue of a god for
functional use were known as ‘mouth-washing’ or ‘mouth-opening’ rituals. [13] We have
texts which document both the ritual used, and many Babylonian and Sumerian
incantations which were an essential part of the ritual. The Egyptian ritual is
known as ‘performing the opening of the mouth in the workshop for the statue of
the god’. [14]
Exile and after
Dick’s essay on prophetic parodies of making the cult image emphasises that the
parodies are mainly restricted to the Exilic and post-Exilic prophets of the
7th and 6th centuries B.C.E. His essay isolates and treats the three principal
characteristics of the arguments against the making of cult images, which were
also later discussed in Hellenistic times by Jewish, Christian and Pagan
authors. Dick utilises an examination of the Israelite legal prohibition of
cult images by Christoph Dohmen, which identifies altogether five types of
texts dealing with these images. Of these, three are of principal importance –
narratives which mention images, but in which the images are not important to
that narrative; texts in the Deuteronomistic History or the Chronicler which
relate to cult reform; and prophetic texts which focus their polemic against
the making of cult images and their worship. These three types of argument are
found in Deutero-Isaiah, Jeremiah, and late wisdom texts; and prophetic texts
which mention cult images, but which are focussed on conflict with external
religions and gods; and the legal prohibition of cult images. [15]
Dick’s study concentrates on the third category of texts – the polemics against
the making of cult images. He says that Dohmen’s ‘careful study of the
evolution of the prohibitions against the cult image suggests that they were
largely the product of 6th century redaction’, and that the theological
stresses of 586 B.C.E. assured both the triumph of Yahwistic monotheism and of
aniconic worship; Yahweh’s cult had probably always been aniconic, but now
there were no gods but Yahweh, so there was utterly no room for any cult image!
The prophetic parodies respond to the same contemporary crises. Although they
stem from different traditions, the legal and the prophetic understandings of a
monotheistic and iconic Yahwism cope with the same catastrophe. [16]
Some terminology is borrowed from a recent discussion of aniconism by
Mettinger, who uses the term ‘aniconism’ to refer to cults lacking iconic
representation of the divinity, whether anthropomorphic or theriomorphic,
‘serving as the dominant or central cultic symbol’, whether or not the issue is
an aniconic symbol or ‘sacred emptiness’. Mettinger’s term for the former is
‘material aniconism’, and the second he calls ‘empty-space aniconism’. Dick
points out that Mettinger also distinguishes ‘de facto aniconism’ and
‘programmatic aniconism’: the former refers to an indifference to the absence
of images, and the latter refers to an active antagonism to images. [17] Parodies
by the prophets of the making of cult images clearly fall into the second
category.
Looking at the archaeological evidence, Dick suggests that ‘the complexity of
recent finds reminds us that the biblical prohibitions and the roughly
contemporary prophetic parodies are the end result of a long development within
Israelite religion and date from the last prophetic and Deuteronomistic phases
of the Exilic and post-Exilic periods (7th-5th centuries B.C.E.).’ He also
suggests that recent biblical studies tend to indicate that Israel’s monotheism
represents ‘the eventual triumph of a small “Yahweh alone” group over the
exigencies of the Exile following the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E.’
In other words, Dick is suggesting that a cultic group within Israel eventually
determined the nature of Israel’s pattern of belief. He reminds us that ‘this
victorious group played such a dominant role in editing the Hebrew Bible that
their final triumph has been anachronistically regarded as both normative and
universal during the entire preceding biblical period from 1200 to 600 B.C.E.’
This is quite extraordinary. If indeed the ‘Yahweh alone’ group did triumph
after the destruction of Jerusalem, then we are left with very little idea of
the nature of Hebrew beliefs before 600 B.C.E., except what we can infer from
the biblical parodies and prohibitions. [18] Probably
(says Dick) there were regional Yahwehs, with other deities in the pantheon,
though the main deity was probably ‘de facto aniconic from the beginning’.
However we have no evidence to explain why this Yahweh would be aniconic. But
we can be sure there were other images within the cult of Yahweh, since the
later prohibitions indicate this. Eventually the prohibitions excluded most of
the earlier iconography.
Clues about the intellectual context of Divine Images in Israel
The prohibitions are very suggestive about the origin and original intellectual
context of the cult of images. Dick cites the classic formulations of the
prohibitions, Exodus 20:3-4, and Deuteronomy 5:7-8. The first of these runs:
You shall not make for yourself an idol, and the form of
anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is
in the water under the earth.
The second is almost identical. We might
observe that the Exodus prohibition explicitly forbids the creation of images
of what is in heaven above, but does not give any clue that it was ever
conceivable to set up gods in heaven by means of the inauguration of cult
statues. Dick says that the prohibitions recorded in Exodus and Deuteronomy
seem to be ‘the end of a long development and not its beginning’, and so it
might be that the prohibition concerns the practice and conceptual model of the
time, rather than something long-established. It does however refer to images
in the water under the earth, which recalls the very old Mesopotamian image of
Ea/Enki in his shrine in the sea, in the sweet waters of the apsu.
The model of the evolution of aniconism in Israel used by Dick is based on that
constructed by Christoph Dohmen. Dohmen’s evolutionary model starts with a
reconstruction of Exodus 20: 23b and 24a:
Gods of silver and gods of gold you shall not
make for yourself; an altar of earth you shall make for me.
This commandment does not forbid image worship,
but rather simply the ‘making’ of gods of gold and silver. Dick says the
passage forbids ‘the ‘making’ of gold and silver statues’, but, once again, the
original does not say ‘images of gods of silver and gods of gold’. The making
of gods is exactly what is referred
to. Dohmen’s interpretation of the commandment is: ‘rather than cult images let
there be sacrifices and blood rites’. Whether or not we are looking at this
phenomenon from the point of view of a cultural evolution or as a theological
dispute between factions, both of which privilege the aniconic nature of
Yahweh, this commandment served to direct the Israelites away from notions of
contact with the divine by means of images, and to substitute contact via
ritual action rather than the worship of cult statues.
A lot of ink has been expended over the years on this crucial development in
the history of the Israelites. Dick quotes Dietrich and Loretz’s summary of
several traditional reasons for an aniconic religious culture in Israel. They
argue that the culture is
….an expression of primitive aversion to
images, a particular preference of the Israelites for “hearing” (over
“seeing”), a peculiarly Israelite spirituality in its concept of the deity, the
Israelite sense of awe before the divinity, Yahweh’s jealousy of the Caananite
gods, the prohibition against other gods, cultural poverty resulting from
the desert experience, animosity towards luxury items among prophetic-Levitical
circles, the dependence of the Yahwistic religion on the aniconic worship of an
early Semitic main god.
Quite why there should be a ‘primitive’
aversion to images is not explained. Likewise, there is no real basis for
arguing a ‘a peculiarly Israelite spirituality’, since that explains nothing.
‘Awe’ is not a response confined to aniconic divinity, and to qualify it as an
‘Israelite sense of awe’ simply implies that they responded differently to
everyone else. The other reasons given for the Israelite struggle with cult
images are equally unhelpful.
However there is another ‘related but distinct’ argument for aniconism in
Israel, suggested by the scholar Ronald Hendel in 1988. Hendel documented the
‘close connection between the royal iconography and the portrayal of such main
Canaanite deities as El.’ He suggests
that, since in the ancient Near East ‘the earthly king, who was at times
described as the “image/statue” of the god, was the embodiment of the main
god’, it is possible that ‘ancient Israel had such a deep hostility toward the
institution of the monarchy that it could consequently have adopted an aniconic
representation of its god to reflect that he had no royal counterpart.’ [19]
This is a much more persuasive suggestion, and hostility of this sort was
clearly part of the process by which Israel moved towards an aniconic mode of
religion, shorn of all religious imagery. But this evolutionary model of the
development of an aniconic Yahweh seems to imply an iconic precursor (i.e., a
symbol of kingship), which is not supported by the archaeological and textual
evidence. If there is no iconic precursor, it is difficult to see this process
as evolutionary.
In the time of the Early Monarchy it seems that the Ark of the Covenant
symbolised the presence of God, and Dick argues that it was essentially
aniconic, though it is clearly a cult image. The Ark was moved to Jerusalem, [20] in the discussion of the construction of the
Temple [21] it was
placed in the normal location of the main cult image. Later texts however place
the Ark in a position subordinate to that of the Cherubim (often described in
conjunction with the Ark), [22] and indeed
the Cherubim were understood to represent the throne of Yahweh. Dick suggests
that
Solomon made a compromise by combining the Cherub-throne
and the empty throne represented by the Ark. In which case, at this period it
appears there was no general prohibition against images – other symbols in the
cult, such as the bronze serpent (attributed to Moses) and Jeroboam’s bull,
were retained.
Dick points out that when Jeroboam ‘wished to
establish a rival for the Jerusalem Temple, he set up the bull postament in
Bethel, and it probably served like the Jerusalem Cherubim as part of the
throne for the invisible Yahweh’.
Dick identifies the prophet Hosea as a critical player at an important stage of
Israel’s development of aniconism. Hosea [middle of the 8th century] stood
against syncretism, and for the exclusive worship of Yahweh, to the exclusion
of all other gods. At Hos. 13:4 there are the lines:
And I am Yahweh your God from the land of
Egypt; and you shall not know any gods besides me, and there is no saviour but
me.
Here there is no polemic against cult images as
are found in later periods, but his criticism of ‘idols’ ‘represents an
important step in that direction’. From the time of Hosea onwards, the foreign
gods of other nations were ‘idols’.
The 8th and 7th centuries B.C.E. were decisive for the emergence of the proscribers
of images. Dick suggests that the ‘seductiveness of Assyrian religion created a
further crisis in the South.’ [23] The cultic
reforms of Hezekiah and the centralization of the cult under Josiah, led to the
prohibition of images. Among the reforms of Hezekiah was the expulsion of the
bronze serpent. [24] This action may have been influenced by the fact that the serpent played a role
in Assyrian religion. However, there does not seem to have been in place a
general antipathy to images even as late as the 7th century. According to Dick,
‘some scholars argue on the basis of seals from the 7th century, which
generally prefer inscriptions to images, that there was already a commandment
against images.’ However, the son of Hezekiah, Mannasseh, reversed his father’s
reforms, and foreign cults were reintroduced. Dick suggests that the
Deuteronomic movement may have arisen in response to the reintroduction of
syncretism in religion.
Within the Deuteronomistic theology, the view of Hosea about the ambivalence of
images developed into the demand that every image or cult object that could
point toward another god ‘was to be rejected’. Dick argues that the reform of
Josiah [25] had a
Deuteronomist agenda, and that the destruction of the Asherahs and Massebahs
was not the result of a prohibition of images, but rather out of the demand for
an exclusive Yahwistic religion. There are no allusions to a prohibition of
images in the accounts of Josiah’s reform, and according to Dohmen, the
prohibition at Deuteronomy 5:8 – ‘You shall not make for yourself an image’ –
probably stems from the later post-exilic Deuteronomistic movement. Dick
reminds us that the earliest form of the prohibition against images was not a
broad prohibition against all religious representational art, but only against
cult images, quoting the text at Leviticus 26:1 –
You shall not make for yourselves idols, and cult images and massebah you shall not set up for yourselves, and a worked stone you shall not place in your land to bow down to it because I am Yahweh your God.
Thus, the prohibition of images arose
originally as a special instance of the commandment against other gods, but the
prohibition of images became dominant. Leviticus 26:1 goes further than the
dismissal of foreign gods as ‘idols’ found in 19:4 by identifying these gods
with their images, and prohibiting their making. [26] The
prohibition of the making of cult images thus subordinates the commandment
against foreign gods, and emphasises the focus on cult images by means of the
specification of the objects meant – cut stone; stone; cult image; and
massebah.
The prohibition is in close proximity to the Holiness code found in Leviticus
19-26, which I think is of some significance. The formula found at Leviticus
19:2, “you shall be holy because I Yahweh your God am holy”, implies that
worship of the divine Yahweh may confer holiness on earthly individuals: a fact
of some relevance to the business of the creation of divine images within
religious cult. [27]
The prohibition was expanded to all representation during the late Exilic
period. Deuteronomy 4: 16-25 reveals this latest stage in the development of
the prohibition:
Lest you worship and make for yourselves a cult image, a representation of any beast on the earth, a representation of any winged bird in the heavens, a representation of anything that crawls on the land, a representation of any fish which is in the waters under the earth….. Lest you forget the covenant of Yahweh your God which he made with you and make for yourselves a cult image, the form of anything…. and bow down, and you make a cult image, the form of anything.
The ‘form of anything’ (it has been suggested)
is perhaps an editorial expansion to eliminate any ambiguity about the
commandment. [28] Or, perhaps, just possibly, it represents the core of the objection, peeking
out, giving us a clue as to the real basis of the objection to cult images.
In any case, the original prohibition was expanded to list various types of
likeness, and then extended to cover all types of cult objects, both
anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, as well as symbols and posts, etc.
Summarising this discussion, as we have seen, there is no evidence that there
ever was a physical representation of Yahweh in Israel – it seems as though
Yahweh was never represented as a cult image. The concept of Yahweh seems
according to the evidence we currently have to have always transcended the idea
of physical representation. It is clear also that artistic representation and
even cult images were not prohibited during the pre-Exilic period, and some
survived into the post-Exilic period. The cult images which did exist may well
have had some important religious functions in relation to Yahweh, and when
these cult images were prohibited, it would be necessary to find some
alternative way to address these functions. This difficulty was addressed by
the legitimising of the use of an altar of earth.
The conventional model argues for an evolutionary development of the cult of
Yahweh, in which the deity is progressively isolated from religious iconography
and cult images, whether or not Yahweh himself was at any time represented by
an image. Eventually of course, not only was all imagery suppressed, but worship
(and also the practice of sacrifice) was later centralised in a single cult
centre based in the temple at Jerusalem.
Thus the trajectory of the cult was to circumscribe more and more the liberty
of the Israelites to engage with their god. Prophecy was forbidden, and
superseded by priestly interpretation of the law. Together with the removal of
the license to worship and sacrifice at altars of earth, this small caste of
iconoclasts managed to remove entirely the personal aspects of the Israelite
religion from its adherents. Eventually sacrifice also was abandoned, after the
destruction of the temple.
This picture of this development indicates that the adherents of the cult of
the aniconic Yahweh were engaged in extending the prohibition of the cult image
to all images associated with their religion. That is to say, that in addition
to the necessity of avoiding the representation of Yahweh, it became ultimately
desirable for them to destroy all the religious images of Israel. This suggests
very strongly that, unless they were possessed by some kind of mania which had
little to do with their religion, it was the idea of images which was close to
the heart of the problem, not simply the representation of the god of the
Israelites.
So it might not be the case that the prohibition against the cult image was
aimed principally at dissociating the Israelite religion from echoes of the
logic of Mesopotamian religion, in which the king was seen as an image of the
supreme deity. Nor is it likely to be the result of a ‘cultural poverty’
produced by a desert existence – the objection to imagery was clearly much more
fundamental than that. So fundamental in fact, that, ultimately, it gave rise
to proscriptions reaching beyond the removal of images. In other words, the
target of the iconoclasts was something even more fundamental than the danger
which inhered in the Israelites response to images, though part of the same
complex of religious ideas.
Idolatry and Iniquity
What could this great danger be? We need to move forward in time by several
hundred years, and to another part of the world, in order to find a wider view
of the supposed iniquity of idolatry. The clearest existing discussion of the danger
of idolatry is found in one of the works of the first of the Christian
theologians, Tertullian, who lived in Rome, and who wrote around 200 A.D, some
seven hundred years after the codification of Hebrew scripture. He is not
popular with modern christian scholars, partly because there is a whiff of the
extremist in his writing, which nevertheless has intelligence, wit, and
clarity. He is unrelenting about the implications of scripture for the
limitations of the engagement of Christians with the world - limitations which
the urbane modern christian has left far behind.
He wrote a short book On Idolatry [29] which
survives, which tells us a great deal about the underlying objections to
idolatry in the ancient world. He suggests that ‘the principal crime of the
human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the whole procuring cause
of judgment, is idolatry’. This is because, apparently, all crimes can be
understood as aspects of idolatry. Tertullian acknowledges that ‘each single
fault retains its own proper feature, …[and] it is destined to judgement under
its own proper name’…. yet he says that: ‘it is marked off under the general
account of idolatry’.
Tertullian argues that in former times there were no idols, and that temples
and shrines stood empty. Yet even at that time idolatry was practised ‘not
under that name, but in that function’. This is because it can be practised
outside a temple, and without an idol. He argues that ‘every art which in any
way produces an idol instantly became a fount of idolatry…’ since:
it makes no difference whether a moulder cast, or a carver
grave, or an embroiderer weave the idol, because neither is it a question of
material, whether an idol be formed of gypsum, or of colors, or of stone, or of
bronze, or of silver, or of thread.. For since even without an idol idolatry is
committed, when the idol is there it makes no difference of what kind it be, of
what material, or what shape….
There is not much room for the excuses of the
sinner if idolatry is a broader crime than that of making or worshipping idols!
But we have here a discussion of a core objection to the cult image, and the
model of reality in which the crime of idolatry can reach beyond the use of
idols, which may have underpinned the Israelite struggle with the presence of
cult images in their religious life.
He argues that the idolater is a murderer, an adulterer, and a fornicator. A
murderer, because his idolatry murders not a stranger or a personal enemy, but
his own self, through the snares of his own error. His weapon is the offence
done to God, and the number of blows are as many as his idolatries. He is an
adulterer and a fornicator,
for he who serves false gods is doubtless an adulterer of
truth, because all falsehood is adultery. So, too, he is sunk in fornication.
For who that is a fellow-worker with unclean spirits, does not stalk in general
pollution and fornication? And thus it is that the Holy Scriptures use the
designation of fornication in their upbraiding of idolatry.
In exploring the intellectual background of
idolatry, Tertullian explicitly refers to the terminology for images found in
Plato [eidos, signifying ‘form’, and eidolon for ‘image’]. [30] He
suggests there is a cognate pattern of meaning in his own language (Latin)
which means that he regards an idol as a ‘formling’. He says that ‘every form
or formling… claims to be called an idol’.
He reminds us that the prophet Enoch had
predicted that:
the demons, and the spirits of the angelic
apostates, would turn into idolatry all the elements, all the garniture of the
universe, all things contained in the heaven, in the sea, in the earth, that
they might be consecrated as God, in opposition to God…. The images of those
things are idols, the consecration of the images is idolatry…. Ye who serve
stones, and ye who make images of gold, and silver, and wood, and stones and
clay, and serve phantoms, and demons, and spirits…and all errors not according
to knowledge, shall find no help from them.
The reference to ‘errors not according to
knowledge’ makes it clear that we are here essentially within a quasi-Platonic
model of the world in which only apprehension of the ultimate form constitutes
real knowledge – everything else represents illusion and error. And Tertullian
has no difficulty in placing this interpretative scheme beneath the world view
of the prophets and lawgivers of the Israelites who lived before Plato. [31]
The standard scholarly response to this would
be to argue that Tertullian is retrojecting into antiquity a theological
reading where no such understanding of the world existed. Yet without such a theology
being present in the 8th and 7th centuries, we have little to explain the
nature of the epochal religious struggles in the development of the religion of
the Israelites. The phenomenological analysis of the history of religion in
Israel leaves us with a struggle whose motive is essentially unfathomable, and
which leaves evidential details unexplained.
So if, like Tertullian, we infer a philosophically based theology beneath the
outward form of the religious history of the Israelites and their struggle with
idolatry, how well does it fit? Is it broken as a frame, or does it infuse the
evidence with life?
First, the question of the aniconic nature of Yahweh ceases to be a difficulty.
It is aniconic because the definition of the deity places it beyond all
imaging. This it has in common with Plato’s definition of the Good: as we found
in the Sophist, the form of forms has
no colour, shape – or indeed form. In this the god of the Israelites has the
same nature and properties as the transcendent divine among the Assyrians,
their principal antagonist to the north-east.
In the early part of the 1st millennium B.C.E., this aniconic divinity held
principal place in a cultural context which sanctioned the use of cult images.
The use of cult images in Israel might have been closely analogous with the
practice in Assyria.
If these images (for example) served as the elements in a chain of images
leading to the contemplation of Yahweh (as Plato would say, ‘looking to one
thing’; a thing transcendent of all appearance), the removal of the images
would necessitate the creation of a new way of worshipping Yahweh, and an
alternative way of focussing the minds of the worshippers on the nature and
power of the god. The alternative suggested at Exodus 20: 23-24, as already
noted, is the altar of earth. In other words, sacrifice to Yahweh was the
substitute form of engagement with the god.
There are several possible motives, stemming from the centrality of an aniconic
divinity representing Being itself, for the proscription and removal of the
images (it is unlikely that the reasons were simple): it could be that it was
decided that the role of images in the cult of Yahweh ought to be reduced on
the grounds that the proper focus of attention and worship ought to be the
unchanging and unfathomable nature of Yahweh. Or, since the nature of Yahweh is
to be beyond representation to the ultimate degree, it might have been argued
that any representation in a cultic context would offer the danger of
misleading the adherents of the cult. Another possibility is that
representations within the cult involving the use of form to recall that which
is utterly without form, which ought to be represented as a paradoxical
phenomenon, might instead be represented as a contradictory practice, and as a
species of error. In which case the proper course of action would be to remove
all images from the cult.
Another possible scenario is that, given the former importance of the images to
the functionality of the cult, those members who understood the point of having
images in the cult of an aniconic deity, might have found themselves arguing
the undesirability of images in public, but attempting to continue the cultic
procedures and the worship of images in private.
It is one thing for a religion to have two views of its icons, however - one
for the initiated priesthood, and another for the ignorant and ill-educated - but
another altogether to try to remove cult images from all public view and use,
yet keep them for private priestly worship. To have attempted this would very
quickly have exposed the priesthood to charges of heresy and hypocrisy, and
would have threatened the life of the cult. [32]
The likeliest explanation is that some faction of the cult of Yahweh (the one
which eventually triumphed) came to believe that images were unacceptable in a
cult which had as its focus an aniconic deity. Like statues themselves, which
live and think, yet do not move, there was a paradoxical element in a religion
which venerated a divinity which transcended form, and yet surrounded it in
ritual which utilised a number of images. Unlike the Assyrian religion, the Israelites
do not seem to have had a complex of myths around the idea of a trickster god,
emphasising that one of the ways in which the transcendent nature of the
divinity expresses itself is through actions and judgement which do not make
sense to mortals. [33]
My own view is that the Israelites, for whatever reason, lost their
understanding of Yahweh as a philosophically based concept, and ditched all
cult images, without a consensus understanding of the cultic consequences of
this action. The radical faction perceived only contradiction, not paradox, in
the proximity of an aniconic divinity, and cult images.
The essential aniconic nature of Yahweh would be (on the face of things)
defended by this development, but at the cost of demolishing a significant part
of the supporting theology and the cultural model of Yahweh, in that a cult
originally using images and forms to point to an aniconic deity would lose its
former means of contact and continuity with that deity. The substitution of
sacrifice for this continuity would break the connection between the world of
appearances and the divinity, and images no longer would be understood as a way
of recalling the divinity and its role in the world. [34]
If this interpretation is broadly correct, what we are looking at is not so
much an evolutionary process, but a revolutionary one, which has had profound
and long-lasting consequences
Boden, Peggy Jean, The Mesopotamian Washing of the Mouth (Mis Pi) Ritual:
An Examination of Some of the Social and Communication Strategies Which
Guided the Development and Performance of the Ritual Which Transferred the
Essence of the Deity Into Its Temple Statue. Ph.D Diss. Near Eastern
Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. Pp 1-261, 1998.
Early on Walker and Dick discussed working on two related publications – one
(as Dick says) a haute vulgarisation
on the making and dedication of the cult image in the Ancient Near East (Born in Heaven, Made on Earth) and also
in Egypt, and secondly, a critical edition of the ritual mis pi in its various
versions.
Preston, James J. “Creation of the Sacred Image: Apotheosis and Destruction in
Hinduism”. Pp. 9-30 in Gods of Flesh,
Gods of Stone, ed. Joanne Punzo Waghorne and Norman Cutlet. 1995,
Chamberberg, Penn.: Anima.
The
Christian struggle with idolatry has been extremely long, and biblical attacks
on cult images have had an impact on the relationship between the West and
cultures of the East, even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dick
points out for example that when the East India Trading Company assumed the
role of protector of India’s shrines in the mid-nineteenth century, there were
denunciations in Parliament about the ‘idolatrous’ expenses for England in
giving protection to cult images. Dick also mentions that scholars had
difficulty explaining how an urbane and literate society such as India could
still practice so-called ‘primitive idolatry’. In Born in Heaven, Made on Earth, Eisenbrauns, 1999 p ix.
Op. cit., ppviii-ix. Citing the apocryphal Letter of
Jeremiah, dating to the second or third centuries B.C.E., which ‘attacks the
making and worship of the cult image as a mere ‘work of human hands’, which is
contrasted with the ‘work of God’. This topos (“How can the product of human
hands be a god?”) is at the core of the biblical assault on the cult image. How
could the great ancient religions of Babylon and Egypt (and the Hinduism of
modern India) explain that a statue crafted by human hands can embody the
divine?’
Published originally (in German) in Die
Inschriften Asarhaddons, Königs von Assyrien. AfO Beiheft. 9. Graz
This is the essence of the practice of theurgy – the making
of whatever it is that is essential to the divine, to the gods, and thus the
creation of gods and goddesses. The results of the procedure is gods, not
merely their images. Dick is of course well aware that Mesopotamian texts often
do not distinguish between the god and the image of the god. He says [Born in Heaven, Made on Earth, p32] ‘There is no question that cuneiform
texts from Mesopotamia, both historical and religious, can refer to the statue
as if it simply were the god himself/herself. The multiple peregrinations of
Babylon’s statue of Marduk due to raids were often phrased as if the God Marduk
went on a journey’. He instances a text from the reign of the Kassite king of
Babylon Agumkakrime (1602-1585 B.C.E) which talks of Marduk’s return from
captivity in Hana:
When the Great Gods told by their pure word Marduk the Lord
of Esangila and of Babylon to return to Babylon, Marduk determined to return to
Babylon…. I planned and paid close attention and made him ready to take back to
Babylon; I supported Marduk who loves my reign. I consulted King Shamash
through a lamb of the bārû priest.
This
way of thinking is common to both Mesopotamian and Greek models of the creation
of man. For the Mesopotamians the world was created by lesser divinities. In
the case of Plato’s description of the creation, the world is a copy, a moving
image of eternity, and created by the demiourgos, after the pattern of
unchanging eternity itself. For both cultures, this reflects the notion that
the begotten world could not be created by the unbegotten divine directly.
Barasch, Moshe Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea.
New York: New York University Press, 1992.
and I sent to a far country to the land of Hana so that
they might take Marduk and Sarpanitu who love my reign by the hand; and so I
brought them back to Esangila and to Babylon. In the temple which Shamash
carefully fixed (by oracle) I returned them.
In
his book Greek Religion, trans. John
Raffian. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1985. Of course Greek literature
contains many references to divine images. It would be a strange circumstance
if divine statues in Greece were uniquely not
associated with rituals for installation.
The former in Babylonian are referred to as mis pi rituals, and in Sumerian
KA.LUH.U.DA. The latter are known as pit pi in Babylonian, and in Sumerian
KA.DUH.U.DA).
The Egyptian term for statue is ‘tut’. The name of Tutankhamun is read as
‘Living image of Amun’ – thus the term ‘tut’ for statue may also mean ‘image’.
In
Exodus 20:4, 23; 34:17; Leviticus 19:4; 26:1; Deuteronomy 4:15ff; and 27:15
Born in Heaven, Made on Earth, pp1-2. Dohmen’s work was published in 1987 – Das Bilderverbot: Seine Entstehung und Seine
Entwicklung im Alten Testament. 2nd. ed. BBB 62. Bonn: Athenäum.
Mettinger, T. 'No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in Its Ancient Near Eastern
Context.' ConBibOT 42. Stockholm: Alqvist & Wiksell, 1995.
Dick suggests that earlier Israelite religion ‘probably tended toward
henotheism or monolatry rather than monotheism.’ However this suggestion
depends on the inference that there was an evolution in the pattern of Hebrew
belief during the 1st half of the 1st Millennium B.C.E.
Hendel, Ronald S. “The Social Origins of the Aniconic Tradition in Early
Israel”. CBQ 50: 365-82.
1
Kings 8:7; 2 Chron 3:8ff.
For the reason that images can become quickly more important than the ideas
which they represent, and offer the danger of assimilation to other cults.
However this identification may have been implicit in the conceptual model
within which cult images made sense. As we have seen, modern translators are
reluctant to recognise an ancient identification of gods with their images
where their manufacture is concerned. This difficulty was present for
commentators in antiquity also.
According to D. Knapp in Untersuchungen zu Deut. 4. Ph.D Dissertation.
Göttingen [no date]. Cited in Christoph Dohmen’s Das Bilderverbot: Seine Entstehung und Seine Entwicklung im Alten
Testament. 2nd. ed. BBB 62. Bonn: Athenäum.
Published in The Ante-Nicene Fathers,
vol. iii.
Knowledge has an ancient association with altars as well as statues, since the
altar is a point of ritual contact with the divine.
Such things do happen however. For example, Queen Elizabeth I is known to have
attended Catholic Mass in private at least once, though she was the head of the
Protestant Church of England which forbade them.
The
lamentations of Job indicate that the cult was aware that Yahweh necessarily
transcended the capacity of its adherents to understand the divinity. Or at
least that the nature of divinity was problematic for mortals.
This might explain why the Hebrews came to read the action
of Yahweh in the world in terms of events and history. The bibilical texts are
however full of images, constantly echoed by those in other books.
