RT Article
T1 Aniconic propaganda in the Hebrew Bible, or: the possible birth of religious seriousness
JF Religion
VO 47
IS 3
SP 399
OP 407
A1 Jensen, Hans Jørgen Lundager 1953-
LA English
PB Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
YR 2017
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1639461981
AB The Hebrew Bible promotes aniconistic worship: images of the god Yahweh were prohibited. In the Ten Commandments, aniconism follows immediately after the monolatrous rule not to ‘have’ other gods than Yahweh. The reason for the prohibition against ‘idols’ is Yahweh’s singularity, but not his inherent indescribability; in the Bible, there is no lack of literary images of Yahweh who is described as or compared with humans and animals as well as with meteorological phenomena. Among biblical scholars, aniconism as a religions program has often been regarded as a local, ‘Israelite’, phenomenon. My proposal is to see it in the context of the religious revolutions of the so-called axial age in the middle of the first millennium BCE and regard it as an example of a transformation from a ‘pre-axial’ type of religion, based on cult, ritual and material culture, to an ascetic, and cognitively more sophisticated, form of religion.
K1 Aniconism
K1 ascetic religion
K1 Axial Age
K1 Hebrew Bible
DO 10.1080/0048721X.2017.1295827