Beyond ‘Image Ban’ and ‘Aniconism’: Reconfiguring Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Religion\s in a Visual and Material Religion Perspective

Abstract

Prohibitions against the production and worship of images representing one's own or other deities (oft en referred to in the singular as 'image ban' or Bilderverbot)-as much as their seeming corollary, the so-called aniconic worship of a single supreme deityare commonly held to be distinctive characteristics of ancient Israelite and Judahite, Jewish and Islamic religion. Th e two aspects (the normative rejection of a given ritual practice and the realization of its opposite as alternative practice) are oft en considered as two faces of a coin. Yet the relation between the two is much more complicated. Th e terms image ban and aniconism are problematic and both certainly need to be properly defi ned and qualifi ed. 1 Scholars such as Tryggve Mettinger (1995 , 2006), Brian Doak (2015), Milette Gaifman (2012) and others have recently off ered important contributions to that end, focusing on fi rst-millennium-bce Israel, Phoenicia and Greece. Th e present chapter aims at continuing this conversation while putting it into a wider horizon, both disciplinary and theoretical. Neither programmatic prohibitions of cultic images nor de facto abstention from producing and using them in cultic rituals or imageless rituals are exclusive to early West Semitic traditions, Judaism and Islam (see the essays collected in Gaifman and Aktor 2017); 2 however, they distinguish these traditions from many others past and present. Moreover, both scholars and the wider public associate these traditions with the concept of monotheism. To be sure, none of the traditions studied by Mettinger, Gaifman and Doak should be considered monotheistic in any way. But the history of Western Asiatic and Mediterranean religion\s since late antiquity seems indeed to privilege an elective affi nity of sorts between the belief in a single, invisible, transcendent deity on the one hand ('monotheism') and the injunction not to represent that deity in a cultic image on the other hand. Monotheistic theologies have

The Genesis of Iconographic Exegesis

“…The dissertation title unsurprisingly became proverbial. Combined with other works of the time (e.g., Dohmen 1987 ), the existence of images in ancient Palestine/Israel became more broadly accepted, and triggered new discussions, for example, on the Jerusalem temple’s image (e.g., Uehlinger 1996b ; 1997 ; Keel 2001 ) and the Bilderverbot (e.g., Uehlinger 1993b ; 2003 ; 2019a ).…”

Destruction, Death, and Drama: Narratives of Religiocide in the Hebrew Bible

“…I refer to the pre-exilic, historical religious traditions as "pre-Jewish" lived religion. We do not have any extensive direct textual sources for pre-exilic traditions,8 but they were likely a set of templeand sacrifice-oriented religious traditions focused on obtaining blessing and fertility similar to what we see elsewhere in the ancient Near East, in the Levant, and in the broader Mediterranean area in this period (Uehlinger 2019;Stavrakopoulou 2016;Stern 2006).9 Importantly, these lived religious traditions 4 See note 3. 5 For that reason, it does not make sense to fully change our nomenclature to "Judean" as some have suggested (contra Mason 2007).…”

When and from Where did YHWH Emerge? Some Reflections on Early Yahwism in Israel and Judah

“…(Smith 2002, XXIX) It does not seem immoderate to state that thirty years later not very much has changed, par- [4] ticularly with regard to the data on the early history of Israelite religion. In terms of methodology, we are still assembling and examining data and steps towards a satisfactory theoretical framework (Uehlinger 2015). There are nevertheless several important monographs on the topic, such as Bernhard Lang's The Hebrew God: Portrait of an Ancient Deity (2002) and Thomas Römer's The Invention of God (2015).…”

“…The study of early Israelite religion and the emergence of Yahwism as "religion(s)" has indeed taken part in the material turn in several ways (Mandell and Smoak 2019, 3). Particularly iconographic studies have become a natural part within studies on ancient Israelite religion (Keel 2007;Uehlinger 2019;Bonfiglio 2016Bonfiglio , 227-310, 2020. Finally it cannot be denied that archaeology has contributed tremendously to the study of Yahwism in the past three decades (Faust 2020), for instance the excavations of Tel Moẓa, Tel Reḥov, Lachish, Ḫirbet ʿAtarūz, etc. Notwithstanding all progress and the admission to religious plurality particularly in the [5] time of the divided monarchy, the underlying paradigm of early Yahwism is still framed by two main assumptions: (1) YHWH was the God of a group of people named "Israel" from the earliest traceable records of this group in Israel/Palestine, and (2) YHWH was already the national deity in the tenth century BCE.…”