NOTES for Deu 4:23

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.