Jeremiah’s Polemic Against Idols

022023

Biblical archaeology envisions a dialogue between artifacts and the scriptural text. In many ways archaeology can provide the context that brings the text to life. Recently I completed a book on Jeremiah and archaeology in which I fill in the background of the prophet’s entire work.¹ Here we will look at a single passage where the prophet, dripping with sarcasm, delivers a satire on idolatry, ridiculing idols as worthless contrast to Israel’s omnipotent God.

This famous passage from Jeremiah 10 (see the sidebar “The Lord of the House of Israel versus Foreign Gods [Jeremiah 10:1–16]”) has received much linguistic analysis, and the several versions we have differ considerably. The Hebrew textus receptus (the Masoretic text) is longer than the old Greek text (the Septuagint or LXX). My own view, and that of many distinguished scholars, is that the Hebrew text is sound; 024therefore that version will form the basis of this discussion.

Different scholars date the text variously, either to the end of the First Temple period (seventh century B.C.E.), or to the Babylonian Exile (sixth century B.C.E.) or to the post-Exilic period (fifth century B.C.E.). Some scholars identify the author as Jeremiah, whereas others, because of the text’s similarity to Isaiah 44:9–20 (see also Psalm 115:3–8), attribute it to Deutero-Isaiah.^a

One interesting peculiarity should be noted: Verse 11 is in Aramaic. This is the only case in the entire Hebrew Bible of a single Aramaic verse within an otherwise purely Hebrew passage.² By Jeremiah’s time, the Israelites in Assyria had already begun speaking Aramaic. The authenticity of this Aramaic verse, moreover, is supported by the fact that it fits the passage’s pattern of alternation, whereby the speaker moves from a polemical contempt for idols representing foreign deities to praise for Israel’s God. After verse 1, which is an introduction, the following verses weave back and forth between idols and the God of Israel:

Verses 2–5—foreign idols

Verses 6–7—the God of Israel

Verses 8–9—foreign idols

Verse 10—the God of Israel

Verse 11—foreign idols

Verses 12–13—the God of Israel

Verses 14–15—foreign idols

Verse 16—the God of Israel

Because of this symmetrical pattern, alternating between a satire on idolatry and praise for Israel’s God, the Aramaic verse 11 would seem to be an integral part of the text.

Jeremiah, whose introduction addresses the entire “house of Israel,” both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, warns the Israelite nation against following the “false” ways of other nations. God is angry with the house of Israel, specifically, for worshiping foreign idols. But who were these nations, and what were the idols of Jeremiah’s diatribe?

In Mesopotamia—the area that includes both Assyria and Babylonia—an idol was not merely a representation, nor was it completely identified with a deity. True, the gods were depicted anthropomorphically. But the same gods could be depicted in many other ways, indicating that the images were not meant to portray the appearances of gods, but to convey their functions and attributes. As one scholar has put it, “These designs were probably pictograms, not portraits.”³

Images of gods were variously cast in bronze, hewn of stone or modeled in clay. Some of these Mesopotamian cult images were life-size, constructed in temple workshops from a wooden core and then overlaid with sheets of silver and gold, with eyes made of precious stones.

In the words of A. L. Oppenheim, “the deity was present in its image if it showed certain specific features and paraphernalia and was cared for in the appropriate manner.”⁴ Those who came to venerate the statues did not, in fact, worship the image itself, but rather the god they believed was present in the image. The paradox of the identity and non-identity of the god with the statue is somewhat confusing to Western habits of thought, but apparently made sense to the Assyrians and Babylonians.

A mystic unity was thought to exist between the god and the image, whereby the statue became what it represented. As Thorkild Jacobsen explained it, “The god is and at the same time is not the cult statue.”⁵ The spirit of the deity dwelt within the idol. The material image, to was, to use Jacobsen’s sword, “transubstantiated” into the god it represented.

The god was made present in the image through a ceremony of consecration known as “opening” or 026“washing the mouth.” This rite transformed the image into a living entity. The presence of the deity in the statue was sustained through proper care and offerings.

The gods were placed as a family group within the temple, where the priests were responsible for the care and service of the statues. Since the statues were believed to be animate, they required nourishment and care in the same manner as human beings. The images the temple in Uruk (biblical Erech, modern Warka in southern Iraq) were fed twice a day, with the principal meal served in the morning and a second meal at night. A table, with a bowl of water, was set before the statue, which was then provided a repast of mainly meats and fruits. During the meals, the image was closed off by linen curtains; after the deity received the food, the king consumed it. The idol slept at night and was awakened by the sunlight.

Did the Hebrew prophets identify the Mesopotamian gods with the idols representing them, or were they aware of how the Assyrians and Babylonians understood the cult images? In either case the biblical polemics against the worship of idols, such as Jeremiah’s, make it clear that the prophets denied the reality of these statuary gods.

The idols were often outfitted in splendor. Jeremiah, in verses 4 and 9, describes the statues as made of wood, overlaid with silver and gold, and lavishly clothed in blue and purple. Archaeological finds not only confirm these aspects of the images, but provide a real-life background to the production of the idols.

Gold was and is the more valuable metal, approximately 13 times as valuable as silver in ancient times.^b Gold is extracted from the earth simply by collecting and washing it. Because it is found in nature in a relatively pure state, gold was one of the first metals used by ancient man and soon became a symbol of wealth, power and position. In the Nahal Qanah Cave in western Samaria, eight gold and electrum rings were found from the Chalcolithic period (fifth millennium B.C.E.). Two of them are almost pure gold.

Gold is worked in two ways: by beating it with a hammer into thin sheets, since it is quite soft, or by melting and casting it. Most objects, however, were not made out of pure 24-karat gold; they were ordinarily fashioned from plated gold, as was the case with the statues Jeremiah satirizes in our text.

Gold is mentioned in the Bible more frequently than any other metal. The interior of the Temple was richly decorated with gold (1 Kings 6:21–22; 1 Kings 7:48–50), as were the vestments of the high priest (Exodus 28:4–8; 39:2–3). The incense-altar was entirely overlaid with gold (Exodus 30:3).

Among precious metals, silver ranked next to gold. Mentioned more than 300 times in the Bible, silver was also a symbol of rank and affluence. In addition to ornamentation, silver was used as an early form of currency. Hoards of silver ingots, and bits and pieces of jewelry, precursors of coinage, have been found at several sites in Israel—En-Gedi, Eshtemoa, and Tel Miqne/Ekron.

Since silver was used as the conventional medium of exchange, kesef (silver) is often translated simply as “money.”

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Silver, seldom found pure, generally must be extracted from ore. In our passage, Jeremiah alludes to the process of extracting silver from its ore by smelting with the aid of bellows. He uses the refining process as a metaphor for his own prophetic function, comparing himself to an assayer who tests the value of the metal—that is, the rectitude and faithfulness of the Israelites. The people, Jeremiah laments, fail the test: “in vain the refining goes on, for the wicked are not removed. / They are called ‘rejected silver,’ for the Lord has rejected them” (Jeremiah 6:29–30).

Because of its malleable property, silver was used for ornaments, amulets, jewelry, decorations, cult vessels and images. A remarkable example of silver ornamentation is a recently-discovered statuette of a silver calf, found at the coastal city of Ashkelon and dating to about 1600 B.C.E. According to the excavator, “The calf was once completely covered with a thick overleaf of pure silver.”^c Not surprisingly, vessels for the Temple were also made of silver (1 Chronicles 28:14–17; 2 Chronicles 2:7).

The idols Jeremiah refers to in the passage we are examining are clothed in blue and purple (verse 9). A clear-cut distinction between the precious blue (techelet) and purple (‘argaman) dyes is difficult to make. Some scholars suggest that techelet was a violet purple, while ‘argaman was probably a bright red purple. In descriptions of the drapery for the Tabernacle and Temple, techelet and ‘argaman occur together (for example, Exodus 26:1; 2 Chronicles 2:7) as they do in descriptions of the decorations of priestly vestments (Exodus 28:4–5, 31–33). Both colors were associated with the wealthy and influential because the dyes, unlike vegetable dyes, were very costly. These expensive dyes were obtained from a shell or mollusk that attached itself to the rocks on the Levantine (ancient Phoenician) coast, where heaps of discarded shells from dye production have been found at various sites. Secretions from the hypobranchial glands of murex mollusks produced the dyes. Murex, in fact, means “purple fish.”

As early as 2000 B.C.E., purple dye was associated 028with the Phoenicians, who traded in purple-dyed fabrics. The names “Canaan” and “Phoenicia,” in fact, are probably cognate terms meaning purple. The word “Canaan” may derive from the Akkadian kinahhu, “red-purple,” while “Phoenicia” probably comes from the Greek word phoinos, “dark red.”

An important site in antiquity for the production of purple dyes was Zarephath in Phoenicia (Sarafand in modern Lebanon), extensively excavated by James Pritchard in the 1970s. In the industrial sector of the city. Pritchard discovered three sherds from a storage jar covered with a purple dye, along with a spouted vat containing purple sediment. He also unearthed a collection of murex mollusks from a pit. Zarephath no doubt exported purple-dyed textiles throughout the Mediterranean basin.

In Mesopotamian sources, the sacred vestments of the gods are not simply blue and purple, as described by Jeremiah; they are decorated in gold and are sometimes referred to as “golden garments.”⁶ Among the most common ornaments on these sacred vestments were golden rosettes with four small holes or metal rings to attach them to the cloth. These ornaments could be removed for cleaning and repair.

A study of Assyrian reliefs reveals that these gold rosettes consisted of six petals. The rosettes alternated with other golden ornaments shaped as disks or squares. Rosettes sometimes covered entire garments, both inside and outside. Such vestments depicted on reliefs appear as early as the twelfth century B.C.E. in both Assyria and Babylonia.

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At least two excavations have provided examples of these golden rosettes. From a tomb at Tepe Gawra (c. 3000 B.C.E.) in northern Iraq come several of these rosettes. Five-petaled gold rosettes were also discovered at Megiddo (c. 1250 B.C.E.) in Israel, in a treasure hoard hidden beneath the floor of a Late Bronze Age palace.

The idols referred to in the Jeremiah text have a wooden core that has been shaped with an implement called a ma‘asad (verse 3), here translated as “ax.” In the Bible, the word appears only here and in Isaiah 44:12. It would probably be more accurately translated “adze.” One of the earliest invented tools, the adze resembles an ax, and was used for smoothing and dressing wood. Before the introduction of metal, the had of the implement was made of stone, flint or bone. It had a curved blade affixed at a right angle to the handle. The word ma‘asad used in Jeremiah also appears on a list of implements from 14th-century Ugarit, one of the main cities of the Hittite empire on the Mediterranean coast in present-day Syria.

In verse 9, Jeremiah speaks of kesef meruqqa’ (“beaten silver”) referring to silver cast in the shape of a bar or block in preparation for decorating the idols. These bars of silver, according to our text, come from Tarshish, and the gold from Uphaz. Several sites have been suggested as the location of Tarshish. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus identified it with Tarsus in Cilicia (modern Turkey), a conjecture accepted by some scholars. Others suggest Tartessus in southern Spain, which was a Phoenician trading colony in the vicinity of Gibraltar. The American biblical archaeologist William F. Albright proposed that the word tarsis is a loan word from Akkadian (Babylonian) meaning smelting plant or refinery.⁷Other scholars think Tarshish was an idealized port situated in some remote area.

The location of Uphaz is also unknown. Some biblical manuscripts in Syriac and biblical paraphrases known as targumin read “Ophir” instead of Uphaz in this passage. Ophir may be situated in present-day Somalia on the East African coast. An eighth-century B.C.E. ostracon (an inscribed potsherd) found at Tell Qasile in modern Tel Aviv bears the inscription, “gold from Ophir for Beth-horon 30 shekels.”⁸ This certainly suggests that Ophir was an actual place, not a myth.

Hebrew has several words for idols, a number of which are included in our passage from Jeremiah. One of the most common, pesel, comes, appropriately enough, from a root meaning “to hew into shape.” It designates the sculptured image, whether wood or stone, often covered with plates of precious metal. Another word, nisko in verse 14, is translated as “their images.” Nesek (image) comes from a root meaning “to melt, to cast,” and nisko here refers to an idol made of metal, a molten image condemned by the Second Commandment.

Jeremiah evidently chose his language carefully to counter the threat posed by Mesopotamian cult statues to the religion of the Israelites. Not only did he use concrete terms referring to the materials of the statues and the processes by which they were made, but he also employed terms pointing to their significance. In verse 8 he speaks of the worshipers of “idols” (havalim, which literally means “nothingness”) as stupid and foolish, for the images they adore are nothing but dumb wood and have only a material existence. The same word in its singular form (hevel) is translated as “false” in verse 3 and “worthless” in verse 15.

Thus archaeology does have something to, contribute to our understanding of the Bible. Jeremiah’s polemic against false and worthless gods—gods like “rejected silver” even though finely cast and elaborately garbed—is made more immediately, more direct and concrete, by our knowledge of the times in which he lived.

Biblical archaeology envisions a dialogue between artifacts and the scriptural text. In many ways archaeology can provide the context that brings the text to life. Recently I completed a book on Jeremiah and archaeology in which I fill in the background of the prophet’s entire work.1 Here we will look at a single passage where the prophet, dripping with sarcasm, delivers a satire on idolatry, ridiculing idols as worthless contrast to Israel’s omnipotent God. This famous passage from Jeremiah 10 (see the sidebar “The Lord of the House of Israel versus Foreign Gods [Jeremiah 10:1–16]”) has received much linguistic […]