Torah Revealed, Torah Fulfilled

Scriptural Laws In Formative Judaism and Earliest Christianity

Jacob Neusner, Bruce D. Chilton, Baruch A. Levine

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780567506344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The authors seek to identify the recurrent tensions, the blatant points of emphasis, the recurring indications of conflict and polemic. Framing the issue of the disposition of the Scriptural heritage in broad terms, they describe what characterizes the Gospels and the Mishnah, the letters of Paul and the Tosefta. In other words, if they take whole and complete the writings of first and second century people claiming to form the contemporary embodiment of Scripture's Israel and ask what they all stress as a single point of insistence, the answer is self-evident. Nearly every Christianity and nearly all known Judaisms appeal for validation to the Scriptures of ancient Israel, their laws and narratives, their prophecies and visions. To Scripture all parties appeal - but not to the same verses of Scripture. In Scripture, all participants to the common Israelite culture propose to find validation - but not to a common theological program subject to diverse interpretation. From Scripture, every community of Judaism and Christianity takes away what it will, but not with the assent of all the others.

PART ONE
Idolatry and Paganism

1
Scripture’s Account
Idolatry and Paganism

Baruch A. Levine

The principal mandate of biblical religion is the exclusive worship of the God of Israel, whose name is written with four Hebrew consonants, Yod-Heh-Waw-Heh (= YHWH), the Tetragrammaton. “Yahweh” has become the conventional pronunciation of this divine name in modern scholarship. The exclusive worship of Yahweh is specifically ordained in the second commandment of the Decalogue. It is introduced by the first commandment, which is more precisely a declaration: “I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exod 20:2; Deut 5:6). And so it is written in Deut 6:4: “Šěmaʿ Yiśrāʾēl—Give heed, oh Israel! Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is (the only) one.” The opening affirmation of the Decalogue generates the negation of polytheism, which follows immediately in the opening words of the second commandment: “You shall have no other gods in my presence” (literally, “facing my countenance,” Hebrew:

ʿal-pānāy, Exod 20:3; Deut 5:7).

Like any number of biblical statements on the subject of proper worship, the Decalogue acknowledges that “other gods” indeed exist, while emphatically prohibiting Israelites from worshipping them. Accordingly, the belief system underlying the Decalogue is best defined as henotheism, the worship of one national god, rather than universal monotheism, which negates the very existence of the “gods” worshipped by other nations. The conception of Yahweh as God of all nations was to emerge at a later stage in biblical religion, and it is expressed in unequivocal statements. An example is the exilic Deutero-Isaiah (45:5): “I am Yahweh, and there is none other; except for me, there is no god!” This stands in bold contrast to the epic tradition, epitomized in Exod 15:11: “Who is like you among the gods, Yahweh?”

After outlawing the worship of other gods, the second commandment continues with the prohibition of idolatry, which is defined as the worship of cult images thought to represent, or symbolize, divine beings:

You shall not fashion for yourself a sculptured image, nor any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or of what is on the earth below, or of what is in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor worship them. For I, Yahweh, am your God; an impassioned god [ʾēl aannaʾ]. who visits the guilt of fathers on sons, and on children of the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but who acts with kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love me, and keep my commandments. (Exod 20:3–6; Deut 5:7–10)

In sequence, the ban on idolatry is a corollary of the prohibition of polytheism; it prescribes a means of eliminating polytheism from the midst of the people of Israel. This is the ultimate objective of the second commandment. Although not all ancient Near Eastern cults were iconic, most were, by far, so that if Israelites were to avoid fashioning images and bowing down to them, so the thinking goes, they would predictably avoid worshipping “other gods” in the process. Understood in this way, the ban on idolatry does not constitute a separate commandment.

To put it in graphic terms, the Decalogue warns that Yahweh will not share the stage with other deities, which is what “facing my countenance [ʿal-pānāy]” connotes. Consequently, cult images of other deities were not to be installed in Yahweh’s sacred spaces, facing him, as was characteristic of the cultic scene in ancient Canaan and elsewhere. Normally, a cult installation, whether an open-air bāmâ (platform/high place) or an enclosed sanctuary, contained an assemblage of images, one usually representing the national god, who is joined by images of other deities, including a consort goddess. We know this, for example, from the contemporary Edomite cult site at Qitmit in the southern Negev, where the Edomites’ national god, Qaus, did share the stage with other deities. Yahweh will not countenance this sort of cultic choreography; he will punish idolaters and their descendants. This stipulation begins in the Decalogue as a prohibition affecting only Israelite cult sites where Yahweh was worshipped; in time it became territorial, so that idolatrous cults were banned from the entire land, no matter who the worshippers were. This expanded horizon is most clearly reflected in Deuteronomy, especially in the writings of the Deuteronomist, and subsequently, in the priestly literature of the Torah. It is also an essential, prophetic doctrine.

The contextual exegesis of the second commandment raises critical questions at the outset: If, indeed, the image ban was directed at representations of “other gods,” where, if at all, does the Hebrew Bible explicitly prohibit fashioning images of Yahweh himself? Do we have evidence of the utilization of images of Yahweh in ancient Israel? There is every indication that the proper cult of Yahweh was aniconic from the very outset. For this reason, most likely, we lack a clear, biblical statement banning images of Yahweh; such a statement was deemed unnecessary!

Most modern scholars have read the second commandment differently, however, and have concluded that the Decalogue’s ban applied as well to images of Yahweh by inference, or a fortiori. That interpretation of the second commandment collides with the tone of biblical pronouncements on the subject of idolatry, as we shall see. What is more, it impacts our understanding of official attitudes toward idolatry in biblical Israel by implying that polytheism is sinful because it is idolatrous. The converse is closer to the mark: Idolatry is sinful because it is intimately associated with polytheism. It is the eradication of polytheism, with its mythological conceptions of the divine, that is, after all, the principal religious challenge addressed in the Hebrew Bible. As the political horizon expanded beyond native Canaanites and neighboring peoples, idolatry came to symbolize, as well, the threatening power of the idolatrous empires of the world, especially the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. At that point Israelite prophets began to expound the doctrine that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is the only deity who truly exists and exercises power.

Because idolatry was a prevalent feature of polytheism, its meaning and practice cannot be discussed in detachment from polytheism. And yet, it would carry us beyond the extent of the present inquiry to engage the protracted struggle against polytheism in all of its aspects. Consequently, we will limit ourselves to biblical sources that relate explicitly to idolatry, while remaining aware that much more could be said about the varieties of worship in ancient Israel. The selected sources are of several types, ranging from laws and rituals, to etiological narratives and prophetic polemic.

The Ban on Cult Images: Iconoclasm in the Service of Cultic Exclusivity

Prohibitions and Admonitions in the Torah

In Torah literature, the closest we come to an implied prohibition of images of Yahweh is in the Deuteronomist’s recollection of the theophany at Mount Sinai/Horeb. Thus, Deut 4:12, 15–20:

Then Yahweh spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of words but perceived no pictorial form [těmûnâ]—nothing but a voice.

Exercise great care for yourselves—since you beheld no pictorial form on the day Yahweh spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire—lest you act wickedly by fashioning the form of any symbol for yourselves, a design [tabnît], either male or female. [Or] the design of any animal on the earth, or the design of any winged bird that flies in the heavens, or the design of any creeping creature on the ground, or the design of any fish that is in the waters under the earth. And [this is] lest you lift your eyes heavenward and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, the entire host of heaven, and you are lured away into bowing down to them and worshipping them, those that Yahweh has apportioned to all the peoples under the heavens. But Yahweh adopted you, and brought you out of the iron blast furnace, from Egypt, to become his land-possessing people as of today, [cf. Deut 4:23, 25]

The main thrust of this statement is surely the prohibition of polytheism, not merely of idolatry, strictly speaking. As a matter of fact, some astral cults of the kind alluded to here were aniconic. A prime example is the Egyptian cult of Aten, in which Raṭ, the sun god, was worshipped exclusively. The House of the Aten in Tell el-Amarna contained no cult images, only a stela representing the Pharaoh and his queen worshipping the Aten. The Aten temples were open to the sky so as to ensure that the sun in the heavens would be worshipped, not some emblem symbolizing the sun.

And yet, the wording of the Deuteronomist presumes an expectation on the part of the Israelites that a proper deity would have manifested his presence in an image or pictorial representation. The message is clear: Yahweh has no desire to be represented morphically. Rather, he made his presence felt by means of words spoken in a resounding voice emerging from mighty flames, and by his mighty acts of liberation, which the Israelites had experienced. More will be said on this subject when we discuss idolatry as a phenomenon (below).

The rest of Torah literature is consistent regarding the ban on cult images to be directed at representations of “other gods,” not toward prohibiting images of Yahweh. We begin with Exod 20:19b-20, in the introduction to the Book of the Covenant:

You have seen for yourselves how I spoke with you from the heavens. Therefore, you shall not fashion gods of silver with me [ʾttî], nor shall you fashion gods of gold for yourselves.

The force of prepositional phrase ʾttî, “with me,” is graphic: “near me, alongside me.” This formulation reflects the description of the cultic scene, as it has been described above. See further, in Exod 23:24; 34:14, 17:

You shall not bow down to their gods nor worship them, nor fashion objects like theirs. Rather shall you surely tear these down, and smash their cultic stelae.

For you shall not bow down to any other deity, for Yahweh is named “the impassioned one.” He is truly an impassioned God.

You shall not fashion for yourselves molten gods.

Clearly resonating with the Decalogue, these statements equate images with gods by metonymy, so that the worship of “other gods” is expressed as bowing down to the idols that represent them. Furthermore, these statements are also Deuteronomist in tone, as is brought out by a passage in the introduction to the Deuteronomic Code, in Deut 12:2–3:

You must utterly destroy all of the cult sites where the nations you are about to dispossess used to worship their gods, atop high mountains and on the hills and under every luxuriant tree. You must tear down their altars, smash their cultic stelae, and their Asherim burn in flames, and cut down the statues of their gods, so that you obliterate their name from that site.

This aggressive policy, couched in the context of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, is preceded by other, similar statements in Deut 7:5, 25; 9:12, 16. The same theme also informs the covenant curses in 27:15; 28:36, 64 and the admonition of 29:15–17. The Deuteronomic Code itself (roughly 12:4–26:19, with interpolations), addresses the issue of polytheism in a prominent way (12:29–31; 13:7–19), but hardly, if ever, refers explicitly to idolatry in that context.

The priestly source in Torah literature, in the Holiness Code of Leviticus, contains a statement explicitly prohibiting idolatry: “Do not turn toward idols or fashion for yourselves molten gods (Lev 19:4). The idiomatic pānâ ʾel-, “to turn toward,” used in this verse, connotes both reliance upon and deference toward the object of the act, in this case the idols representing other gods. Further on, Lev 19:31 employs the same idiom in prohibiting certain kinds of divination. In what appears to be a postscript to the Holiness Code, Lev 26:1 prohibits fashioning and installing various cult objects:

Do not fashion for yourselves idols, nor erect for yourselves any image or cult stela, nor install in your land any figuratively decorated stone upon which to bow down; for I, Yahweh, am your God.

A passing reference to idolatry comes in Lev 26:30, in the curse section of the epilogue to the Holiness Code. Yahweh threatens to destroy the Israelite cult platforms, where forbidden idols had been installed. Finally, in Num 33:52 we read Moses’ words to the Israelites in the steppes of Moab, as they prepare to enter the promised land:

You must drive out all of the inhabitants of the land from your presence. You shall ruin all of their figurative objects, and all of their molten images shall you ruin, and all of their cult platforms shall you destroy.

In summary, the commandments, laws, and admonitions of the Torah, often resonating with the diction of the Deuteronomist, were aimed at preventing the worship of other gods on the part of Israelites; they do not directly address the use of images of Yahweh as an issue. At the most, the Deuteronomist conveys an awareness of the appeal of idolatry, urges resistance to it, and reminds the people that at their pristine theophany, they had not seen any morphic representation of Yahweh. As we close the book on Torah literature, the image ban has become territorial, prohibiting all those who inhabit the promised land, Israelites and others, from practicing idolatry.

Etiological Narratives Related to Northern Israelite Cults

In the search for indications that images of Yahweh, as distinguished from those representing other deities, may have been in use in ancient Israel, some have pointed to various biblical narratives that relate to cultic activity in northern Israel. First to appear in biblical literature, and set at the time of the Exodus, is the episode of the golden bull-calf, related in Exod 32 (and recollected in Deut 9:16). Then there are the narratives about the idols possessed by Micaiah/Micah, preserved in Judg 17–18. We also find cryptic references to an Israelite bull cult in Hosea’s prophetic condemnations (8:5; 10:5), and Judg 6 preserves a narrative relating how the charismatic leader Gideon/Jerubbaal affirmed his loyalty to Yahweh.

The episode of the golden bull-calf would allow us to conclude that Yahweh was depicted in image form only if the golden bull-calf was intended to represent Yahweh. Historically, this narrative is associated with the sin of Jeroboam I, king of northern Israel in the latter part of the 10th century BCE. He is condemned for having installed bull calves at Dan and Bethel (1 Kgs 12:28–33; 2 Kgs 10:29; 2 Chr 11:15; 13:8). If, however, the image of the golden bull-calf represented, for example, the Syro-Canaanite deity El, often depicted as a bull, and who bore the epithet ṯr il, “the Bull, Ilu,” in Ugaritic mythology, then its fashioning would not indicate that images of Yahweh himself were employed as objects of worship by Israelites. Similarly, the discovery of statues of bulls at ancient sites in the land of Israel does not mean that such artifacts represented Yahweh.

The account of the golden bull-calf is admittedly ambiguous and sends a double message regarding the character of worship in ancient Israel. It appears that, like most etiological texts of this sort, it has undergone extensive redaction, responding to developments in Israelite religion. On the one hand, we read that Aaron identified the image of the bull-calf as “your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exod 32:4; cf. v. 8). This resonates with and yet directly contravenes the first commandment of the Decalogue. It is as if to say, “This image, not Yahweh, is your god.” On the other hand, we read in Exod 32:5 that Aaron announced a festival to Yahweh when the image of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE Idolatry and Paganism
• PART TWO The Nazirite
• PART THREE The Sabbath
• PART FOUR Dietary Purity
• PART FIVE Sexual Purity
• PART SIX Lex Talionis
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page