Idolatry: It's Complicated

by James Davisson

Like Faith or Salvation or Brisket, Idolatry is a religious concept that sounds much simpler than it is.¹ "The Bible says 'don't worship idols,'" you may say, "how complicated is that?"

Complicated. As with pretty much anything in the Bible, the instruction to not worship idols has been interpreted in lots of different ways over the years. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians have said "Yo, it's cool to make images of Jesus and the saints and whatever as long as you're not actually worshiping the images" whereas Protestants have tended to be like "Nuh-uh, sounds like idolatry to me bro" and the Puritans were like "NO RELIGIOUS IMAGES EVAR NOT EVEN THE CROSS." Guys, I love the Puritans so much. Not even ironically.

Judaism has tended to side with the Protestants on this one, basically saying "Look, even if you worship God while you look at an image to help you out, that's still idolatry, mang." Slightly further afield, Islam has said "Definitely no pictures of God or Muhammad. But prolly stay away from pictures of people too. And animals. You know what? Just to be safe, best stick to calligraphy."

So the spectrum on idolatry runs from "Religious images are totally fine as long as you don't worship them" to "Just, don't even draw things, dude." So it's pretty dang complicated, just within the Abrahamic religions.

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The root of these conflicting ideas is how idolatry gets talked about in the Bible. As far as much of the Hebrew Bible is concerned, Israel's worship of idols is Reason #1 for the exile: Israel wasn't faithful to God, so God sent them away. And the exile is pretty much the Big Problem in the Hebrew Bible that its authors have to deal with, so idolatry is super important and gets a lot of press throughout the ol' HB.²

Mostly, though, the HB is content to be like "HEY YOU: stop worshiping Baal, God doesn't like it" (but, you know, more poetically than that). It's taken for granted that the Israelites knew why they shouldn't worship idols and that the authors didn't really need to go into detail about what people were actually doing when they worshiped one.

This is Baal. Not to be confused with YHWH.

But sometimes they did, actually, go into detail about that. And that's when things get a little weird:

As a thief is shamed when caught,
     so the house of Israel shall be shamed—
they, their kings, their officials,
     their priests, and their prophets,
who say to a tree, “You are my father,”
    and to a stone, “You gave me birth.”
For they have turned their backs to me,
     and not their faces.
But in the time of their trouble they say,
     “Come and save us!” (Jeremiah 2:26-27, NRSV)

I'm sorry, what? No, Jeremiah, no, I don't think anybody was actually doing that. When you worship another deity besides God, that's, uh, quite different from going up to a tree and being like "What's up, Dad?" To say the least.

In fact, what the HB is doing here and elsewhere is confusing worship of a god, who is represented with a physical object, with worship of a physical object itself. Check out Isaiah, for example, who has a whole riff on this:

The carpenter...cuts down cedars or chooses a holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!” (Isaiah 44:13-17, NRSV)

In other words, "Some people are so dumb, they think they can just make gods out of stuff, you know? Isn't it stupid to cut some wood, burn half of it, and think the other half is going to save you?!"

Which, again, is not what you're doing when you worship an idol. When you worship an idol, you think there is a certain god out there, and you make an image that you then use to help you direct your worship towards him. That's what Isaiah's contemporaries were actually doing when they made and worshiped idols.

In my Biblical Hebrew class in college, we read and translated Isaiah 44 together,³ and while we were doing so, the professor mentioned the fact that Isaiah hadn't properly described what idolaters were actually doing. He said that scholars actually still disagree about whether Isaiah merely didn't understand or, what I think is more probable, that he was simply parodying or satirizing them in this passage.⁴ Satire or not, though, it's kind of an odd thing to find in one's Bible.

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If this view of idolatry is incorrect, why is idolatry wrong? There are a couple ways that people have answered this question, having to do with different interpretations of what idolatry is, which has led to the complications I talked about at the beginning.

For Christians and Jews (and, I suppose, Musilms), the basic reason that idolatry is wrong is simple: it's worshiping gods that are not God. Israel (and, by extension, Christians) made a covenant with God to worship only God and no one else: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God" (Exodus 20:2-5, NRSV). In other words, idolatry is wrong because it's the same thing as worshiping other gods.

In this orthodox icon, St. George is totally owning that dragon.

This interpretation is what gives us the Orthodox/Catholic view: it's okay to make religious images because we're not using them to worship other gods.⁵ I'm cool with that, but others have pointed out that God seems to not only be saying "Don't worship other gods" but also "Don't worship God by making images either." This has led to the other, more extreme views of idolatry, all the way up to the awesome Puritan version.

The big question I have about that is: then just why is it wrong? I don't think we need to have a debate about why, say, murder or theft is wrong. I'm down with God leaving the reasons for those commandments pretty vague, but if what God intended to say in Exodus 20:2-5 was "Don't even make images of me, bro" then it's a little frustrating that God left out the "why." I guess, for me, it's a little like declaring that you're not allowed to eat shrimp: while murder and theft have clear negative consequences, shrimp is just shrimp. Without a clear "why," it's just puzzling on the face of it.

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I recently read the deuterocanonical book The Letter of Jeremiah, whose entire premise is mixing up idols and the deities they represent.⁶ The commentary in my Bible suggests the following:

What was the danger of idolatry to which this text and others point? The danger is that the worshiper may come to believe that the deity is manageable, subject to the control of the worshiper, able to be won over, placated. Israel's God is sovereign and utterly free, and Israel is called to hear, obey, and adore. (The New Interpreter's Study Bible, pg. 1531)

I think that comes the closest to articulating why using an idol, even an idol that's supposed to represent God, might be dangerous. 

Idolatry is a weird subject. The Hebrew Bible is a little hazy about what it actually is, and it doesn't seem to fully grasp why people might participate in it. But, like just about any religious subject, I think talking about it and examining people's different perspectives on it is inherently good.

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1. Off hand, I actually can't think of any truly un-complicated religious concepts. "God loves you" is tempting, but I'm betting I could find plenty of people willing to complicate even that if I tried.
2. I don't know about you, but typing out "the Hebrew Bible" every time just seems silly to me. I'm going to call it "the HB" when I feel like it for the rest of this essay. Christians: just mentally replace the letters "H" and "B" with "O" and "T" and you'll be fine. Stop hyperventilating.
3. We actually worked directly from pictures of the Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was awesome. I still have my copy of this book, and inside, between the pages and the cover, is a photocopied page from another book I found to help me decipher the script in the Isaiah scroll, which is pretty different from the square script I was trained on in Hebrew class.
4. This is a fairly common way of talking about this subject in ancient Jewish thought. For another example, Check out this passage from the Wisdom of Solomon, a book written several centuries after Isaiah and Jeremiah (it's included in some Christian groups' Bibles, but not in others. I just read it as part of my ongoing attempt to read through the whole Bible, Apocrypha included.).
5. Note that this interpretation runs into the problem of the relevance of this commandment in modern times, when Christians have long since ceased to believe that other gods exist. This, I think, has led to the common explanation that things like money, status, power, and even cars can be "idols" that we "worship" if we care about them more than God. I like this interpretation, though it probably has relatively little to do with the author of Exodus's original intent.
6. Sample verses: They deck their gods out with garments like human beings—these gods of silver and gold and wood that cannot save themselves from rust and corrosion. When they have been dressed in purple robes, their faces are wiped because of the dust from the temple, which is thick upon them. One of them holds a scepter, like a district judge, but is unable to destroy anyone who offends it. Another has a dagger in its right hand, and an ax, but cannot defend itself from war and robbers. From this it is evident that they are not gods; so do not fear them. (Letter of Jeremiah 1:12-16)

Photo sources:
Photo 1 (modified):  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Worshiping_the_golden_calf.jpg
Photo 2:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baal_Ugarit_Louvre_AO17330.jpg
Photo 3:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orthodox_Bulgarian_icon_of_St._George_fighting_the_dragon.jpg