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Texts, Statues and the Cult of the Divine King! TEXTS, STATUES AND THE CULT OF THE DIVINE KING! by WILLIAM W. HALLO New Haven, Connecticut The perennial search for Yahweh-idols and Yahweh-statues goes on apace, but it is as unlikely as ever to produce results. We would be hard put to say what such idols or statues might look like - and it is no coin­ cidence that Moses' request to see God's presence was denied (Ex. xxxiii 23). One may argue whether the God of Israel could be conceived in other terms - e.g. as a bull, the symbol of EI - by appeal to the bull figures fashioned by Aaron in the wilderness and by Jeroboam I at Dan and Bethel, or even to the actual icons in bull form found in the excava­ tions. 2 Or contrariwise one can suggest that such figures are only the pedestals of the deity, as in comparable examples from Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and Anatolia3 - but in contrast to these bearing an invisi­ ble, aniconic deity. 4 One can interpret the Second Commandment of the Decalogue as proscribing all representations of living beings, or under­ stand the" graven image" exclusively as sculpture in the round. 5 One can apply it to representations of Israel's God, or confine it to the" other gods" of the opening sentence of the Commandment (in the Jewish division).6 1 Presented to the XIIth Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (IOSOT),Jerusalem, 26 August 1986. The text reproduces the paper approximately as given; the notes are fuller than usual and add details which the available time did not allow for. 2 Amihai Mazar, "The 'Bull Site' - an Iron Age I open cult place", BASOR 247 (1982), pp. 27-42; "A cuI tic site from the period of the Judges in the northern Samaria hills", Eretz-Israel16 (1982), pp. 135-45 and pIs 15-18 (in Hebrew; English Summary pp. 256*-257*); "Bronze bull found in Israelite 'High Place' from the time of the Judges", Biblical Archaeology Review 9/5 (1983), pp. 34-40. 3 W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (Baltimore, 1940), pp. 202-3, 229-30. 4 H. Th. Obbink, "Jahwebilder", ZAW47 (1929), pp. 264-74. 5 C. H. Gordon, "On making other gods" , Biblical and Related Studies Presented to Samuel Iwry (Winona Lake, Indiana, 1985), pp. 77-9. On the related prohibition against melting down foreign idols for their silver or gold (Deut. vii 25), see Hallo, "Biblical abomina­ tions and Sumerian taboos" ,JQR, N.S. 76 (1985), p. 35, n. 70; the "ensnarement" here feared uses the same root (yqS) as recurs with the ephod of Gideon, for which see below, n. 9. 6 W. Zimmerli, "Das zweite Gebot", Festschrift fur Alfred Bertholet (Tubingen, 1950), pp. 550-63. TEXTS, STATUES AND THE CULT OF THE DIVINE KING 55 But for all these divergent interpretations of the textual and artifactual evidence, recent research has led to an emerging consensus that Israelite attitudes toward the artistic representation and worship of divinity underwent an evolution over time, that the prohibitions of the Second Commandment, and their parallels in the Deuteronomic legislation (e.g. Deut. iv 15-18, 23), were not all of equal antiquity. It is possible that an essentially aniconic ethos (as applied to Israel's God) coexisted with a more tolerant attitude towards other icons from Mosaic7 to Deuteronomic times. 8 The evidence has been summed up by Mettinger who assesses the significance of Moses' bronze serpent, Aaron's golden calf, Gideon's ephod,9 Micah's statue,10 and Jeroboam's bull images, and concludes that full-fledged iconoclasm awaited the prophetically inspired reform movement of the eighth century. 11 If, however, Israel was not always the home of an iconoclastic ethos, what then becomes of the presumed contrast with the iconodule ethos of the surrounding Near East? The familiar prophetic and apocalyptic denunciations of Babylonian image-makers and image-worshippers - to the extent that they may be relied on at all - likewise date from the 8th century onward, and cannot enlighten us about earlier conditions. Here too, recent research prompts a second look and, where ancient Mesopotamia is concerned, a greater sensitivity to the long historical 7 But see K.-H. Bernhardt, Gott und Rild. Ein Beitrag zur Begrundung und Deutung des Bilderverbotes im A. T. (Berlin, 1956), Part III, who argues that the iconoclasm of the Sec­ ond Commandment was founded in and dated to Mosaic times as an integral part of Yahwistic faith, based on the amphictyonic theory of a central shrine with a movable ark for which a statue might have been a dangerous rival. 8 For an "iconoclastic" study of Deuteronomic iconoclasm (and cult centralization) see Joseph Gutmann, "Deuteronomy: religious reformation or iconoclastic revolu­ tion?", in J. Gutmann (ed.), The Image and the Word: Confrontations in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Missoula, Montana, 1977), pp. 5-25. 9 R. de Vaux, Ancient Israel: its Life and Institutions (London and New York, 1961), p. 351 (= Les institutions de l'Ancien Testament 2 [Paris, 1960], p. 202), cites the opinion that "the word )eph6d stands sometimes for a statue of a god", though which of his dozen sources (p. 544 = pp. 446-7) ventures this opinion is not stated. Cf. also Hallo (below, n. 13), p. 16 and nn. 125-7. 10 Repeatedly described as "a statue of Yahweh" by M. Haran, Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1978), ch. 2, esp. pp. 16, 28-9, 35, 42. But there is no indication to this effect in the text, nor that it was "apparently of anthropomorphic features" (n. 28, end). That it was "a statue poured from a single casting, in contrast to a statue put together from pieces" (n. 39) may be granted; cf. also M. Noth, "The background of Judges 17-18", in B. W. Anderson and W. Harrelson (ed.), Israel's Pro­ phetic Heritage: Essays in Honor ofJames Muilenburg (New York and London, 1962), pp. 68- 85, esp. pp. 72-3. 11 T. Mettinger, "The veto on images and the aniconic God in Ancient Israel", in H. Biezais (ed.), Religious Symbols and their Functions (Stockholm, 1979), pp. 15-29. Cf. previously W. L. Moran, "The conclusion of the Decalogue (Ex 20,17 = Dt 5,21)", CRQ 29 (1967), pp. 543-54, esp. pp. 553-4. .
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