A Graven Image

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

-- Exodus 20: 4 (KJV)

The Israelites were perhaps the least visual people in the ancient world, as they showed little interest in painting, decoration, or representations of any sort. Above all, they shunned depicting their God Yahweh in drawings or statues, thus obeying the commandment (quoted here) against "graven images."

Despite what God seems to say in the King James translation, he is not really forbidding representational art -- just representation of divine things. Among all ancient deities, Yahweh is uniquely abstract, and the most insistent not only on his ineffability but also on his singularity (all other gods are "false"). As he famously puts it in verse 5, "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God" -- a claim he will prove over and over again in the Hebrew Bible.

Other passages in Exodus (15: 11; 18: 11; and 32: 4, for example) suggest that the Israelites acknowledged pagan gods as real. Yet they saw Yahweh as a greater god and were monotheists in the practical sense, worshiping only him -- except, that is, on those all-too-frequent occasions when heathens enticed them into their loose rituals. And on the matter of "graven images" -- carved statues -- they were absolutely rigorous; no archeologist has ever excavated a statue of Yahweh.

Such rigor indicates not only a powerful sense of difference from other Near Eastern cultures (in which idol worship was widespread) but also a somewhat more interior notion of God (which, however, did not preclude sacrifices and burnt offerings to him). As time went on, the Israelite image of Yahweh grew even more abstract and less anthropomorphic, and those portions of the Hebrew Bible written later reflect a special contempt for pagan idols -- typical epithets, as listed in Harper's Bible Dictionary, include "powerless ones," "pellets of dung," and "shameful things." The relatively tame English phrase "graven image" dates to the 1388 revision of Wyclif's translation of Exodus (the original, from 1382, read "graven thing").

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!