HTCG 02g

Chapter 2 continues.

Section D: The Impression of God

Part 2: Imago Dei

I rather expected what I got on this question. Boman chases a lot of theological meaning, bringing up two major figures in his educational background (Paul Humbert and Hermann Gunkel) who wrote at length on what “image of God” means in the Genesis context. He still chases the JEPD nonsense, trying to pin the passage on a later source. At any rate, he still comes up missing the point: “this does not prevent God from having a bodily form”.

The two Hebrew words in the phrase translated as “in Our image, after Our own likeness” at root mean an exact copy and yet something similar. In western minds, it can’t be both. Boman offers a confused attempt to explain how man is neither animal nor elohim (he gets that term right), but seems to forget this is before the Fall. We can’t imagine what mankind was like before the Fall. What we were meant to be is not what we are now.

Thus, anything we might say about what “image of God” is supposed to mean, it applies to some quality that transcends anything we can think or say. It belongs in Eternity, not here. Stop trying to make sense of it intellectually. He almost gets there when trying to assert that this developed late in Hebrew history, whereas the anthropomorphism is from earlier, primitive Hebrew thinking. He fails to notice that it was God Himself who spoke in terms of anthropomorphism. You get the feeling Boman doesn’t believe God actually communicated that clearly.

Excursus: Jewish Pictorial Art in the Disapora

Because he seems to accept a secular humanist evaluation of Hebrew religion, it’s no surprise he cannot identify Judaism as a clear departure from it. He shares with us how Diaspora Jews were less strict about the Code of Moses in regards to artistic renderings of real life. Their synagogues featured visual artwork depicting scenes from the Old Testament, something pointedly forbidden in Moses.

In the case of ruins found in the ruins of Dura, Syria, the synagogue artwork at least did not try to show the face of God, but at most, a hand here and there. Instead of trying to raise up an image to venerate, the art showed God in action.

But in recent times, we’ve seen archaeological ruins of synagogues even in Palestine from the early centuries after Christ that show a substantial disregard of Moses with artwork. Some synagogue ruins feature statues that should be called “idols”. No matter how you slice it, this is not an extension of Hebrew culture, but a corruption of it. And this all fits right into the pattern painted so very clearly in the Gospels, of Judean leadership leading the people astray.

Let me note that the older academic notion of how primitive the Hebrew people were in the Exodus or prior to that is not borne out in the literary evidence of the general level of sophistication in the rest of the ANE. There is no reason to suppose that the Hebrews didn’t benefit from the sophistication of their progenitor, Abraham. The Mesopotamian culture in his time was not in some dark ages just out the troglodyte stage. The Hebrews did not start out as animists; they had a clear revelation from Jehovah. Meanwhile, it’s the same high intellectual climate that built the pyramids in Egypt. We keep finding sophisticated structures all over the world reaching back to the Flood of Noah, and perhaps before.

The Hebrew people were in on the highest culture of Mesopotamia and Egypt before they ever went out to Sinai. The ancient peoples, to include the Hebrews, we not somehow more primitive than modern western materialistic culture, they were just very different.