4/1/2023 0 Comments Whats a graven imageA possible and certainly plausible alternative is that it was a votive statue for the performance of child sacrifices.ģ And He sent forth the form of a hand, and He took me by a lock of my head, and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven, and it brought me to Jerusalem in the visions of God, to the door of the gate of the inner 2 which faces to the north, where the seat of the image of jealousy which provokes to jealousy was. The majority view is that the image of jealousy was a statue of Asherah. Smith says, in The Early History of God, page 172, that child sacrifice was Judean practice in the seventh century BCE, and that it was performed in the name of Yahweh as well as other gods. I feel that Middlemas does not support Odell's argument, which she calls a 'provocative suggestion', but she agrees that it does fit to some extent with Ezekiel's concerns about child sacrifice elsewhere in the text (16:20-36 20:26,31 23:37).Ĭhild sacrifice was as repugnant to Ezekiel as it is to us, but Mark S. In her view, the sacrifices most likely to raise the angst of Yahweh are child sacrifices. Odell suggests that this is a votive statue and argues that the sacrifices made at the statue are the problem. Jill Middlemas ('Transformation of the Image', published in Transforming Visions, page 117) says that an interpretation offered by Margaret Odell might be more fitting in the context of Ezekiel. Ezekiel does not tell us that Yahweh is jealous of 'all the idols of the house of Israel' in the inner court (Ezekiel 8:10), nor Tammuz (8:14) or solar worship (8:16), so why just this one? If we read קִנְאָה to mean 'anger' or 'wrath' then we may have a new perspective. The clue to the idol's identity is probably in the reference to קִנְאָה, which is usually translated as jealousy, but can also mean anger. Cooke ( ibid) says what particular god is represented is unknown. Sweeney ( Reading Prophetic Books) suggests that the image is not a statue, but a stele, although this seems unlikely since the word translated here as 'image' (sémel) generally refers to a statue of a god or goddess (G.A. On the other hand, it appears that Baal had probably disappeared from the Hebrew pantheon long before the time of Ezekiel. The second is that if we see קִנְאָה as meaning 'jealousy', it is hard to imagine Yahweh as jealous of her in the way he might have been jealous of Baal or any other god. The first problem I see with this is that throughout the Old Testament, the cultic objects for Asherah are never referred to as statues. Most commentaries (for example The Pulpit Commentary, The Catholic Bible at page 1155 and Ezekiel and the Ethics of Exile at page 121) that attempt to identify the object of the 'statue of jealousy' suggest that it is likely to have been of the goddess Asherah. A problem for the study of Ezekiel is that, with the exception of the sun and Tammuz, he avoids naming the objects of worship that he finds objectionable and even refuses to acknowledge that they are worshipped as gods or goddesses, preferring to use words such as 'abominations'.
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