Imagi–Nation

The First Commandment prohibition did not allow the people to make any image of anything in the heavens, on the earth or under the water. What we in the West have a hard time comprehending is that the Mosaic Law and, in fact, all the books of the Torah — for Christians, the Law section of the Old Testament — were the one and only law of the land of ancient Israel, not just the heavens. All else was commentary. Lawfully permitted decorative artwork did not include human hand renditions of anything real.

The small sculpture of the fertility goddess above is an example of a kind of “contraband” that archeologists find in settlements  all over the ancient Kingdom of Israel prior to the return from the Babylonian Exile in the 3rd Century BCE. And these were not just ornaments. They are actually ancient examples of pornography lifted to ritual status. The Assyrian based worship of the goddess Ashtoreth or Ishtar (which is where we get the term “Easter”) included male masturbation before the stone and clay female images with the ritual spreading of the semen upon the roots of the temple shrubbery. Of course the statues in the Assyrian temples themselves were far more comely and  lifelike than the household statuettes were —  but the latter had to be easily disguised or hidden if a priest or a lawyer were to show up at the door.

The Biblical accounts claim that this practice drove the entire Nation of Israel mad, and was the cause of it’s downfall in the centuries before the coming of Christ.

In the light of this, the effect of having these crude, rudimentary imagery of the naked female body in the homes of this people who were to worship the Loving and Invisible Transcendent God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob alone — what’s going to happen to us?