@Thomas said:
His ‘divine image’ exegesis I find questionable ... Neither architecture of the Temple nor or the Ark of the Covenant are a ‘Divine Image'.
I stand by that.
Divine images did exist and were used in ancient Israel, especially in earlier periods.
I don't dispute that at all. A wiki article touches lightly on the topic –
Aniconism in Judaism " ... Jews were not under a blanket ban on visual art, despite common assumptions to the contrary, and throughout Jewish history and the history of Jewish art, created architectural designs and decorations of synagogues, decorative funerary monuments, illuminated manuscripts, embroidery and other decorative or artistic religious items."
So I would treat the ban as contextual, what image, and what is its provenance? I would have though a ban against pagan image and practice would be the object of these prohibitions. priestly robes were adorned with all manner of symbols, including floral motifs.
The veil in front of the temple at Jerusalem was supposed to display an entire cosmography.
But I see neither the Temple nor the Ark constituting a 'divine image'
per se, any more than a synagogue, church, shrines or temples.
I think they all, in their art and architecture, offer a
mystagogy, an ascent from the mundane realm.
The use of a
mezuzah or a
menorah, for example.
As Torah.com notes:
"Unlike Deuteronomy, the priestly literature—both P and H—expresses no hostility to
asherim. Priestly literature has its own conception of what constitutes heterodox worship and condemns it. For example, it prohibits the use of idols and cast metal gods (Lev 19:4), and of idols (again), sculptures, standing stones, and stone reliefs (Lev 26:1). It condemns high places and “incense stands” (חַמָּנִים) (Lev 26:30). And it mandates the destruction of the Canaanites’ reliefs, cast metal images, and high places (Num 33:52). Nevertheless, it never mentions
asherim.
As I understand it, cultic objects can be reverenced if they originate within Judaic practice and not imported from pagan belief. Whilst the
asherim, a stylised device signifying a staff or tree, were common to the beliefs of the time, the Judaic practice refers to Aaron's staff specifically, of which the Lord God said, "Put Aaron’s staff back in front of the Testimony, to be kept as a sign to defiant people… " (Numbers 17:25).
So the
asherim signifies a staff, Aaron's Rod, by which God showed his power and his mercy towards Israel. It's not a 'divine image' but an instrument of divine activity.
The Ark of the Covenant is described as a "shrine model" that would have housed miniature divine images like the tablets of the law (which McClellan suggests were miniature standing stones with God's name on them) ...
Any evidence of that, though?
Professor Thomas Römer argues that “clearly… the tablets of the law are a substitute for something else.” He proposed that “the original Ark contained a statue of Yhwh”, which he specifically identifies as “two betyles (sacred stones), or two cult image statues symbolizing Yhwh and his female companion Ashera or a statue representing Yhwh alone."
He derives his argument from the studies of Professor Sigmund Mowinckel (1884-1965), who proposed the cultic image idea, but did not go so far as to suggest an image of the deity and his wife.
"Sigmund Mowinckel ... in an article that was published in 1929 in the French journal
La Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses. The title of the article (translated into English) was: “When Did the Cult of Yhwh in Jerusalem Become Officially a Cult without Images?”
He opposed the traditional view that the worship of Yhwh was aniconic from the beginning, quoting among others 1 Kings 12. According to this story, after the separation between the South and the North, Jeroboam established sanctuaries in Dan and Bethel, where Yhwh was worshipped as a young bull. He also focused on the Ark of Yhwh, which he saw as another indication of the existence of representations of Yhwh. The strange verse of 1 Kings 8:9, which concludes the installation of the Ark into the Jerusalem temple’ s Holy of Holies, indicates that the Ark did not originally contain the two tablets of the law. According to 1 Kings 8:9, “There was nothing in the Ark except the two tablets of stone that Moses had placed there at Horeb, where Yhwh made a covenant with the Israelites, when they came out of the land of Egypt.” This emphasis on the “nothing else” (אין בארון רק) makes it very likely that this statement about the Ark’ s contents has resulted from a relecture of its original function.
He ... ultimately envisaged the original Ark as containing a zoomorphic representation of Yhwh (as a bull) and having been taken (by Pharaoh Sheshonq c. 926BCE). The Jerusalemite priests then made a new Ark and placed within it two stones, as a more abstract representation of Yhwh (and maybe his spouse Ashera?) akin to the
maṣṣebot. These stones were later identified by Deuteronomistic redactors with the tablets of the law, as in Deuteronomy 10 or 1 Kings 8. Mowinckel assumed that there were several arks, with each important sanctuary hosting its own. The ark of the sanctuary of Shiloh, mentioned in the opening chapters of the book of Samuel, was probably the oldest, but it is not very plausible that this ark was transferred to Jerusalem as the Bible would have us believe."
(
The Mysteries of the Ark of the Covenant Thomas Römer, in the Nordic Journal of Theology, 2023)
McClellan believes that the shift away from these images occurred around the time of Josiah in the 7th century BCE.
So the relevance of this is some way removed – by 700 years – from Jesus' time.
And here McClellan seems to mislead his audience:
"... this is the logic of Divine Images that's going on here, and Divine Images were how people could see the god themselves while just looking at a piece of material media, and we see this in the Hebrew Bible as well and we see this in the archaeological data. The Temple at Arad, for instance, has a standing stone that is very clearly a Divine image in the holy of holies in the ancient Judahite Temple. So what Jesus is saying here is ..."
Hang on ...
The Temple at Arad was deconsecrated and destroyed in the Josiah reforms 700 years previously – so it's at best highly dubious and at worst a false equivalence to use something that was not the case for 700 years to equate to what Christ is saying in the here and now.
The
massebot ('standing stone' or 'pillar') is
not 'very clearly a divine image' at all – it's significance in cultic practices are unknown and disputed.
Too often McClellan presents his thesis as seemingly the only viable explanation when there are others.
Why no reference to Divine images at Jerusalem? Because there are none. The Holy of Holies is an empty space .... that, I would suggest, is the understanding of Jesus' contemporaries.
