Be the Idolatry That You Want To See In the World

On Making Graven Images, Pt. 1

Continuing on with our series on the Decalogue, starting in on the 2nd commandment. Before we ask about what it means to make graven images, we need to see that the gods need for it to happen: they simply can’t do it for themselves.

The Idols Never Appear When You Want

As we move toward the 2nd* commandment¹, the question shifts from not only who the Decalogue is for, and how allegiance to other than God emerges, we are in position to ask what it means for idols to have visibility and representation. First, we’ll ask questions about visibility.

With respect to the 1st commandment, I took an approach which emphasized not so much the specific form that idolatry takes, but the process by which idols happen. When we take a look at the idols of the Old Testament, we are given no history of the gods, nor are we given any details of what these gods are. What we are given is an account of the way in which idols gain traction among us.

The irony of the second commandment is this: the gods cannot become visible on their own. In theological terms, revelation is not something other gods but God can do. We’ve spent most of our time with Exodus 32, but Israel’s history with idols is something of a forgotten family history. From Genesis 31:

Then Jacob put his children and his wives on camels, ¹⁸ and he drove all his livestock ahead of him, along with all the goods he had accumulated in Paddan Aram,^[a] to go to his father Isaac in the land of Canaan. ¹⁹ When Laban had gone to shear his sheep, Rachel stole her father’s household gods….

Having had enough of her father’s trickery, Jacob and his family make a run for it, and Rachel takes Laban’s household gods with her, unbeknownst to Jacob. When Laban eventually catches up to them, a courtroom scene ensues to adjudicate where exactly those darn gods went off to:

Jacob answered Laban, “I was afraid, because I thought you would take your daughters away from me by force. ³² But if you find anyone who has your gods, that person shall not live. In the presence of our relatives, see for yourself whether there is anything of yours here with me; and if so, take it.” Now Jacob did not know that Rachel had stolen the gods.

³³ So Laban went into Jacob’s tent and into Leah’s tent and into the tent of the two female servants, but he found nothing. After he came out of Leah’s tent, he entered Rachel’s tent. ³⁴ Now Rachel had taken the household gods and put them inside her camel’s saddle and was sitting on them. Laban searched through everything in the tent but found nothing.

Note that in this—the sole explicit mention of idols in Genesis²—the gods are made hidden (not by their own power), and cannot be made known by their own power. They remain hidden beneath Rachel, subjected in the dark, the footstool of the mother of Joseph³.

In Katherine Sonderegger’s treatment of God’s unity, she makes the compelling point that God’s not being seen is in fact God’s revelation: that God being hidden (being unseen by any) is just how God appears among us in creation, as the unhidden-yet-unseen God. In contrast to Laban’s gods—who must be made visible and hidden—God is the one who remains always among us, as the unseen one. God appears in signs and wonders, figuring the divine presence in burning bushes, clouds, plagues, and the darkness on the mountain, always unbidden and always in a shape which may not be constrained.

The invisibility of God, when contrasted with the invisibility of the idols, begs the question: how can the gods become visible? These graven images are the result of the aspired beings to be given shape in the world, but it is never a shape that the gods themselves would make or wish: they remain put upon, given shape, given form amidst the formless and void.

Becoming the Form of the Gods

One of the reasons that the 2nd commandment fell into question among Christians was because of the advent of Christ, God in the flesh. For if God has come among us in the form of a human, has not the 2nd commandment been set aside⁴? But again, this turns on the notion of God’s self-disclosure: God has come to us in Jesus of Nazareth, in this form, accompanied by the descent of the Spirit and the eternal processions of the Son from the Father.

No one makes God appear.

Moving forward from the dynamics of the idols’ appearance in Genesis, we find similar beats in Exodus 32: the golden calf can only appear through the litourgia, the literal “work of the people” in forming the god out of gold. But the appearance of the god does not end with the calf:

¹⁹ When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. ²⁰ And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.

For the real appearance of the god is not that it takes the form of the calf, but that it takes root in the bodies of the worshippers. Unlike the household gods, who remain objects external to the self, the golden calf has been dissolved into the worshippers themselves: the worshippers make the calf visible as their own bodies.

Much has been made about the ways in which idolatry demands a form, but little, it seems to me, has been said about the way in which the having of idols ultimately means becoming that the worshippers donate their own flesh to the idols, giving to the god the ability to become visible.

A servant donating part of their body that the master might be made visible sounds….familiar.

The dynamic we should see first, thus, is that idolatry lends itself naturally to making the gods visible, not only because the gods cannot do it for themselves, but because comporting ourselves to the gods is just what idolatry does. Those meant to be the imago dei become the graven image.

The implications of this, as well as what it means to live well with the God who cannot be seen, will occupy us next time.

1. As a reminder, treatment of the Decalogue has not been unified. Protestants and Orthodox tend treat the 1st commandment as only “Have no other gods”, while Catholics and Lutherans treat “make no graven images” as part of the 1st commandment. I’ll be following the Protestant treatment, not only to be honest about where I find myself, but also because the logical distinction between the two allows us to get as some important elements.

2. There is a tradition of pointing to idolatry as the capital sin, stemming from Adam and Eve making of their own agency an idol, and it’s understood that there was worship of other gods going on, such as with Moses’ father-in-law, the “priest of Midian”. But this remains the sole mention of other representations of the gods.

3. One can see here an early type of fulfillment of the promise to Eve, that the serpent will be crushed by the woman, with the gods being sat on by Rachel.

4. The 8th century debates over the use of icons in Christian worship turns on this question. God the Father remains (for the most part) undepicted in art, while Jesus’ appearance is the caveat for upholding the 2nd commandment.