I meant the following to be posted in another thread, but since it’s quite pertinent to the previous discussion, here is a good chunk of it.
Compared to their neighbors, the Israelites contributed little in the way of originality to arts and crafts. Borrowers for the most part, they mostly produced works hardly indistinguishable from that of other cultures of the time. The proscription in Exodus against making
pesel (also cf. Deuteronomy 5:8), may have discouraged creativity in this area. Nonetheless, images did exist throughout the history of Israel until the postexilic period, a practice which the Bible does attest to. For example, Gideon fashions an
ephod of gold (Judges 8:27) and Micah’s mother contributed silver for the making of an idol (pesel) in Judges 17:3. The Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon themselves were, on the face of it, a direct contravention of the literal understanding of the commandment, yet the authors did not denounce them.
Pesel, which is derived from the verb
pasal, “to hew [into shape]”, “fashion by cutting” or “to carve” in Biblical usage would suggest a sort of image hewn from stone or cut from wood (later, the usage would extend to those cast from metal). If we take the wording literally here, the injunction would not include painted images. In most occurrences of the noun in the OT it generally means a sort of “cultic image” (i.e., an idol) and occurs almost exclusively in the context of references to imagery - apparently the word was so strongly colored by the contexts in which it is used. This usage is in contrast to other attested usages of cognates in Northwest Semitic languages, where the root
psl still had the main meaning of “to hew” or “to carve”. In Ugaritic for example psl designates craftsmen who work on stones and wood. The occurrences of psl in Punic and Nabataean inscriptions are also associated with stone- or wood-work. The Syriac (
psl) and Aramaic (
psl/
psylh,
pslh) cognates, as well as extrabiblical Hebrew usages of the word also fall along the same lines.
The prohibition was not so much against the act of making of images themselves but against idolatry (i.e. making an image in the purpose of worshipping it) to which the art could lead. The Israelites did, in fact, fashion images, which the prophets regarded, in a concept unique to Israel, as “idols” (cf. Isaiah 30:22; Hosea 13:2).
We now need to qualify this prohibition against images. Obviously, cherubim, serpents, lions, oxen and other images of ‘nature’ and ‘mythology’ were at times exempt from the ban. What seems to be forbidden is more often than not the depiction of the Deity Himself. We have as possible extant examples of such both the winged sun-disc symbol above the bull-calf on the top tier of the
Ta’anach cult stand and the winged disc/beetle symbol on the
seal impressionslmlk on the handles of royal Judahite storage jars.
Here we come to one of the unique features of ancient Israelite worship of YHWH – its aniconic character. For example, in one of the most important artifacts of Israelite religion, the Ark of the Covenant, a direct representation of YHWH is absent: His invisible presence is only indicated by His heavenly steeds/mounts, the two cherubim.
The absence of images of the deity and the concomitant prohibition against the representation of the divine in any form is anomalous in the ANE. The creation and use of images in the cultus was at that time commonplace for the religions of that time and place. For the most part in Israel, they were not present and were officially inveighed against.
The close tie between the command against
pesalim and the prior ban against worshipping other gods in the Decalogue suggests that the veto of images was directed toward any image that may be construed as an idol or cult artifact of another deity. The elaboration of this command in Deuteronomy 4:16-19 confirms that the commandment had in mind the ‘other gods’ of the previous one as at least the eventual understanding of this prohibition. Indeed the comprehensiveness of these formulations tended to make any kind of image, whether for purposes of worship or not, questionable.
They had 600+ of them actually, called “the law” collectivly.
lol
Here’s what I found:
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