“You shall not make for yourself a sculptured imagine, nor any object like something in the heavens/sky above, or in the earth below, or in the subterranean waters. You shall neither pay them homage nor serve them because I, the LORD your God, am a jealous deity, reckoning the ancestors’ iniquity to the sons, to the thirdlings and the fourthlings of those who reject me, but keeping faith even to the thousandth generation of those who are loyal to me and keep my commandments.” Exodus 20:4-6 (Victor Hamilton translation) Most of the time we treat the second commandment of the Ten Words as if it says only “You shall not make for yourself any graven image.” But the full text of this commandment includes quite a bit more. It involves a statement of God’s jealousy concerning His people, the acts of worship assumed to be part of filial attachment, and curses and blessings that result from these acts. Since the original text contained no chapters or numbers, no distinction was made between these arbitrary verse demarcations. The full text is the second commandment. In order to analyze it, we will have to take each part in its Paleo-Hebrew form.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 15:57:13 +0000