Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East

by Michael Brennan Dick (Editor)

Pejoratively referred to as "idols" in the Hebrew Bible and in western tradition, the cult image occupied a central place in the cultures of the ancient Near East. In Mesopotamia, a ritual (mis pi) was used to "give birth" to the god represented by the cult image. In this volume, three separate essays examine the topic within different ancient Near Eastern cultures, and a fourth provides a modern analogy as counterpoint.

Genres: Religion

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1999

Reviews

[Thomas Yaeger]

This is a wonderful book. The first modern treatment of cult images in the Ancient Near East, accessible to non-specialists. For the most part, the detail of ancient polytheism and its intellectual context has been ignored by scholarship, partly because it is assumed to be a species of nonsense with no rational foundation. But as Wittgenstein pointed out, it is a mistake to assume that because something ancient makes no sense to us, it makes no sense at all. He suggested that if ancient ideas and beliefs were looked at in their original context, the sense of them might be understood. And indeed, when explored in its proper context, the logic which lies beneath polytheism in the ANE starts to become apparent.

This book is a partner to a scholarly edition of the Mis Pi ritual for the inauguration of cult images in Assyria and Babylonia. It contains a wider discussion of the context and meaning of cult images in Mesopotamia, and also in the context of Israel, which was in the cultural and political orbit of Mesopotamia during the middle years of the 1st millennium BCE. The fact that images were eventually entirely rejected in Israel tells us something about how polytheism was understood in Mesopotamia, and the contemporary objections to it. It is a complex story, which is not completely understood, partly because what is in the Old Testament was written by the winners in a long struggle for political and cultic power.

The book also contains a discussion of polytheism in Egypt, and also polytheism in contemporary India. It still makes sense to modern Hindus.

I wrote a chapter called 'The Idea of Being in Israel' (in 'The Sacred History of Being'), which draws heavily on this book and its discussion of the objections to the polytheistic understanding of reality. The chapter is available as a blogpost at: https://t.co/WYnVhopYbt

[DAJ]

The cult image, a statue of a deity that serves as the focus for the worship of that deity, was once a fundamental element of many religions worldwide. Understanding it is necessary for understanding ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, not to mention many living traditions around the world. Judaism condemned and mocked the worship of inanimate objects, and Christianity and Islam have inherited that attitude. Thus, cult images are an alien concept to most people in the Western world, and the most straightforward word for them, "idol", is tainted by derogatory connotations. Using the neutral term "cult image", this book sets out to understand how ancient cultures thought it possible to interact with a deity through a statue. Many cultures that could be included are left out, and the studies aren't well integrated with each other, but the book is valuable for studying such a neglected topic cross-culturally.

The first chapter analyzes the attacks on cult images in the Old Testament prophetic books, mainly Jeremiah and Isaiah. It isn't a complete analysis of biblical aniconism, because a lot of other biblical passages that deal with idols—the golden calf in Exodus is the best-known—are left out. This focus on the prophetic texts does serve a purpose within the book. Unlike many of the other biblical passages discussing idols, the prophets focus on one argument: if the images are created by human hands out of ordinary materials, how can anyone worship them as gods? The latter part of the chapter points out that Greco-Roman philosophers and even some Mesopotamian texts raised this same question, which the rest of the book sets out to answer.

The next chapter is an in-depth analysis of the Mesopotamian mis pi ritual, which was meant to enliven cult images once they were made. I'm not very knowledgeable about Mesopotamian religion, but I gather that the mis pi is a complex subject, and scholarly reviews of this book suggest that this chapter is best read alongside other analyses with a slightly different perspective. The upshot of this chapter is that the Mesopotamians' elaborate rituals denied that the craftsman created the statue and instead claimed that the statue was "born in heaven", with the gods participating closely in the process.

David Lorton's chapter on Egyptian religion is the longest in the book and the most detailed Egyptological analysis of cult images. It discusses a variety of interactions with cult statues, including the daily offerings, festivals, and the Opening of the Mouth ritual. It was not a problem for the Egyptians that the statue was formed by human hands, because the theology of the ba and the ka explained how gods could manifest themselves in any image.

The last chapter is different, describing the making of a cult statue in modern India. Hinduism is probably the closest thing in the modern world to the religions of the ancient Mediterranean, and scholars of those religions really should draw on it for comparison more often. However, while this chapter is interesting, it isn't closely connected to the others, and it serves mainly to justify how people in a modern society can revere cult images.