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King James Version (en)

Deuteronomy, Chapter 4, verse 23

²³Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee.

NOTES

Who is God? What is important for us to know about Him? The God of heaven and earth, invisible and unimaginable, appearing in darkness and flame, gives people...

The Torah devotes considerable space to the theme of depicting God, or more precisely, to the prohibition of such depictions. It should be noted that this kind of requirement looked somewhat strange against the background of the religious ideas and religious practice generally widespread in antiquity in the Near East, and not only there. Indeed, for a pagan a god exists only insofar as he has his altar and sacred image to which one can bow down. A god who had neither one nor the other was considered gone or even dead; no communion with such a god could be in question. But the God of Israel, on the contrary, requires the absence of any sacred images whatever as an indispensable condition of communion with God. Any depiction of God, even a symbolic one, becomes an obstacle to communion with Him. Why?

Of course, any image, even a symbolic one, potentially has the chance to become an object of worship itself, which in the history of very different religions, including monotheistic ones, has happened more than once. But this is still an anomaly of spiritual life, a consequence of the spiritual degeneration of a tradition: after all, even pagans, educated ones of course, understood perfectly well that a sacred statue or sacred image is not a god, but only his symbol and a means for communicating with him. The matter, as is evident, was still something else. What?

It lay in those image-based associations that any symbols, even those most saturated with spiritual meanings, inevitably generate. Even the image of the sacred bull, the calf, cast from gold by the Jews at Sinai, for all its symbolic character, for the fact that it was supposed simply to signify the power of God, the power God used to lead His people out of Egypt, still could not help tying Yahweh to the image of the Egyptian Apis. And no symbolism could help here. Yahweh is not Apis, and even His power is not the power of Apis. There was only one way out: to avoid any images, any associations, any symbolism. It is no accident that in the Tabernacle, from the beginning, only one sacred relic was kept: the text of the Decalogue carved on small stone tablets. No symbols, no associations. Only the will of God, clearly expressed by God Himself.

The Book of Deuteronomy did not receive its name by accident. To be fair, it should be noted that it was named this by the translators who translated the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch into Greek in the second century BC, but the name proved very successful: it is a matter of a second law, a new version of the Torah that appeared later than the first, earlier one that we find in the Book of Exodus. Biblical scholars speak of the late origin of the Book of Deuteronomy, while its author himself places his text in the time of Moses; but, whatever the case, it is at least understood that the laws we find in the Book of Deuteronomy appear later than those contained in the Book of Exodus.

Law develops: this is the main thing, and everything else is only historical detail that does not change the essence of the matter. If the Torah can change over time, it is no longer so important whether forty years or six centuries pass from one change to another; what matters is the very fact that the Torah changes, develops, and takes shape in the process of history. The Book of Deuteronomy, its first introductory chapters containing a historical survey of the path the people have traveled, bears witness precisely to this development of the Torah. Here the legislation is preceded by a description of the path that has been traveled, and it is on the basis of that path that the legislation is given.

The Torah changes in accordance with this path, and at the same time it defines the path, giving it meaning, without which the whole path traveled by the people would have been worth nothing. One could say that, in a certain sense, the Torah itself becomes the path: the path of the people before God, for which the external, geographical, and historical path proves to be the outward form. The path of the Torah cannot exist without that outward path, but the outward path itself, without the Torah as its spiritual core, remains only an empty shell. There is no history without the Torah, at least no history of the people of God precisely as the people of God.

Yet there is no Torah outside history either. For even if the Torah is viewed only as legislation or only as a moral code, it is unthinkable without the people who will fulfill it, outside the context of their history and their spiritual and life journey. The Torah is embodied in history, above all in the history of the people of God, and at the same time it becomes the power that gives history its spiritual form and quality, filling it with meaning: not passing human meanings, but God's meaning, eternal and unfading, the meaning that links earthly history with the Kingdom.

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