/lit/ - Literature

>>13782980
The prohibitions announced at Sinai against imagery and idolatry (Deuteronomy 4:15-40) are a necessary part of such a governing bias. There are two reasons for these prohibitions. First, images are fated to be representational to some extent, and so, whether bull, sun ray, stone, star, or ear of corn, connected to that cyclical nature the god himself was so infinitely removed from and was now commanding his people to live beyond. As Pedersen writes:

.". . . when the God was detached from the life of nature, and his relation to it consisted only in the creator's display of power, then the psychic strength was removed from nature, it became merely an instrument for the creator, a means for him to display his power. Then it would be absurd to seek divine life and holy strength in the things of this world. And if idols were formed in the shape of animals or men, it could only be understood as a ridiculous attempt to degrade the creator by ascribing to the limitations of creation that power which He alone possessed."

All images, he rightly concludes, are the fit objects of destruction because they are aimed at dishonoring Yahweh.

The second reason for the antiimage prohibitions is that traditionally images had been associated with shrines, which are in turn attached to specific localities. Here were people on the march; no attachment then was possible to the land, such as it was, and none was tolerated. Even Sinai (Horeb), the place of the grand theophany, was forgotten as a specific place, and the Promised Land toward which the god was turning the people's wilderness-weary eyes, was not to be revered for itself but only as a constant reminder of one portion of the bargain here sworn to.

>>13782980
The separation from nature and myth and the commitment to history is emphasized more dramatically and with greater political and cultural results in the new religion's monotheistic character. Though possibly there had been parallel conceptions among other peoples-and Freud based an entire theory of Jewish history on the short-lived monotheism of Amenhotepllkhnaton of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, whence he claimed the captive nation derived the idea-it was the Israelites who established monotheism in the spiritual geography of humankind. And with it came the terrible concomitants of intolerance and commandments to destroy the sacred items of others (Exodus 23:23- 24; 34:13-16) and to "utterly destroy" polytheistic peoples wherever encountered. Deuteronomy 7:16 commands the holy nation to "consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods. . . ." And Deuteronomy 13:16 goes so far as to specify that entire pagan cities must be offered up as burnt sacrifices to the one god, as odors pleasing to him. For polytheism is like imagery connected to nature in its concrete particulars and in its numina. It is for this reason that whatever savageries primitive peoples have visited upon one another, they have usually feared to desecrate idols and altars: there was felt to be too much power in these things, and besides, the gods of one people were quite often recognizable to their adversaries. This goes far to explain why the conception of genocide is foreign to polytheistic cultures. But the distinctions raised in the covenant between religion and idolatry are like some visitation of the khamsin to wilderness peoples as yet unsuspected, dark clouds over Africa, the Americas, the Far East, until finally even the remotest islands and jungle enclaves are struck by fire and sword and by the subtler weapon of conversion-by-ridicule (Deuteronomy 2:34; 7:2; 20:16-18, Joshua 6:17-21).

>>13782980
oreover, in a curious way the very oneness, the singularity, of this god emphasizes the separation from nature, for though he created the earth and claims all of it as his, yet he is not to be found everywhere in it: not in the primal chaos at its edges, nor in the cities of the idolators, nor in the deserts given over to demons. Light, truth, and holiness are to be enjoyed only where the god dwells, and he chooses to tabernacle exclusively in the camp of his people, thereby establishing a center of civilization beyond the boundaries of which lie darkness and death, a wilderness peopled with beasts, bestial pagans, and their theriomorphic deities. If the city in the ancient Near East is an oasis, the camp of these semi-nomads serves the same function and defines in the charged terms of religion the chasm between what lies within and what beyond. Thus in Leviticus 16:7-10, 20-22 are found the ritual prescriptions for sending the scapegoat bearing the tribal sins out of the god's camp into the wilderness, the territory of his adversary, Azazel. Thus too the charred corpses of the sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, who unlawfully offered a fire of incense to the god and perished for it; they must be dumped outside the boundaries of the camp where all ritually polluted things are to be thrown (Leviticus 10:1,2,4,5; Numbers 5:1-4; Deuteronomy 23:10-14). And so, though the tribes are now traveling through the heart of the wilderness, they are not really in it but are instead insulated by the god against it. Under no circumstances are they to surrender to it or to its temptations. This, of course, is what they continually threaten to do, for the wilderness tempts to disobedience, to riot and rebellion with its hardships, its disorderliness, its radical naturalness.

>>13782980
your romanticized approximations of theories concerning human activity some 12 000 years ago are a mistake

>>13782980
nice book faggot