man-made

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The Ark and its cherubim were kept in the publicly inaccessible Holy of Holies while the calves were placed in the courts of the Temple, where the people could see and kiss them (cf. Hos. 13:2).... Jeroboam's bulls, contrary to the Ark symbolism, were meant to be accessible to worshipers in the temples (cf. I Kings 12:27); and thus they developed from symbols of the Lord to fetishes in their own right (cf. e.g., II Kings 17:16; Hos. 8:5-6; 10:5; 13:2).

Moses Aberbach, “Golden Calf,”, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2008

For a state-of-the-art survey of What Kind of Creatures Are the Cherubim? see article by that name in TheTorah.com by

Dr. Raanan Eichler here.

For a state-of-the-art survey of The Cherubim: Their Role on the Ark in the Holy of Holies see article by that name in TheTorah.com by Dr. Rabbi Zev Farber here

[Regarding the proposed Billy Rose Scultpture Garden at the Israel Museum] One sticking point was the biblical injunction against graven images. The Second Commandment forbids making graven images and bowing down to such images as idols. As we'd seen with the Beit Alpha mosaic and countless other frescos, rabbis had loosened their restrictions on two-dimensional representation centuries ago. But we were still concerned about sculpture. In Hebrew, the word for sculpture is pesel - the same term used in the Ten Commandments referring to the forbidden idols. We worried that the term would upset some of Jerusalem's more conservative citizens.

I visited a number of rabbis, trying to understand the injunction and devise a solution. If we directly translated Sculpture Garden, it would be Gan Ha'pesalim--literally, "garden of idols." That clearly wouldn't work. Monument had a different, and less offensive, Hebrew translation, but that obscure word hardly seemed appropriate for a garden full of modern and contemporary art. Eventually, the rabbis, Rose, Noguchi, and I agreed that instead of calling it a sculpture garden, it would be the Billy Rose Art Garden--with Noguchi's name just underneath. (It ultimately would be shortened by many frequent visitors to become, simply, the Rose Garden.) Rather than the standard PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH Signs, we posted a slew of signs that read, PLEASE DO NOT BOW DOWN.

The Exhibitionist: Living Museums, Loving Museums Hardcover – September 27, 2016 by Karl Katz pp 171-172

The comparative-religious information points to what Yehezkel Kaufmann calls “the basic problem” in tracing the roots of Israelite monotheism: that throughout the HebrewScriptures—not only in the satires—the writers argue against paganism only as “fetishism,” the worship of images, and never against the actual mythological beliefs of the pagans. Kaufmann finds it “incredible” that the Israelite writers did not know the pagan myths, and he argues that the Israelite religion stood apart from all othersbecause of its non-mythological character.

Eyes That Do Not See: Scriptural Satires of Idolatry, Carl Bridges

The question of the emergence of Israelite religion is a sui generis problem in the history of the human spirit first of all because of the popular character of Israelite monotheism. To our way of thinking, the idea of God’s unity is one of the most abstract ideas in human thought. We regard this idea as bound up with abstraction (hafshatah) from the multitude of phenomena manifested in our world and with grounding all reality on an invisible unity beyond our comprehension.

The one God is the cause of causes, eternal substance, the being of all beings, transcending everything sensible and conceivable, beyond all conception of time and space, a supreme idea. The question is: How could such a faith come into being in ancient Israel? Israelite culture was a culture of shepherds and farmers.

Israelite monotheism could not comprehend idolatry or magic. At best, idols and various forms of polytheistic worship were treated as fetishes, things used in rituals that were not associated with any meaningful mythology or theology. On a popular worship of objects that was not genuinely polytheistic (because it is unrelated to any specific foreign deity) but was “a magical, fetishistic, non-mythological worship of images”, a worship that was fundamentally unfamiliar with the realities of polytheistic worship and the icons that played a role therein: “Worship of ‘dumb idols’ is, in the biblical view, arrant, sinful foolishness”, for the idols, unlike the lower ranking gods, are not real; they have no power, not even the derivative power that, say, Chemosh or Marduk enjoy in the view of biblical monotheism.

Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. and abridged by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1960), pp. 7-20

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The solution is this: the decisive battle with paganism in ancient Israel occurred at the beginning of the dawn of the new idea, in Moses’s day. The battle was short. Israelite paganism was smashed to smithereens, and the new faith was implanted in the Israelite nation.

Something like this battle also occurred in Arabia in the days of Muhammad. Paganism disappeared once and for all from the horizon of the Arab nation, and was perceived as from behind a cloud. Only fossilized remnants of paganism remained among the Arab people. Likewise, the influence of foreign paganism on ancient Israel was fossilized from that time on and consisted of worship of idols. The cultural legacy that Israel received from paganism—legends, laws, poems—was the legacy of Israel’s pagan past, which in the previous period had been connected to the pagan cultural world. There is nothing in that legacy to compel us to assume contact in the later period. For this reason, the entire Bible perceives paganism through a cloud and conceives it to consist only of idol worship. We should recall that paganism was forgotten by the writers of Islam, too, in a relatively short time, and they knew it as little more than idol worship.

Yehezkel Kaufman, THE SECRET OF NATIONAL CREATIVITY

Whose right is it, O great gods, to create gods and goddesses in a place where man dare not trespass? This task of refurbishing (the statues), which you have constantly been allotting to me (by oracle), is difficult! Is it the right of deaf and blind human beings who are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance throughout their lives? The making of (images of) the gods and goddesses is your right, it is in your hands; so I beseech you, create (the gods), and in your exalted holy of holies may what you yourselves have in your heart be brought about in accordance with your unalterable word. Endow the skilled craftsmen whom you ordered to complete this task with as high an understanding as Ea, their creator [god]. Teach them skills by your exalted word; make all their handiwork succeed through the craft of Ninshiku [another name for Ea].

Christopher Walker and Michael B. Dick, “The Mesopotamian miµs piÆ Ritual,” in Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, ed. Dick (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), pp. 64–65.

the priests did have a ritual called Miμs PiÆ (pronounced “miss pee”), the Washing (or Opening) of the Mouth, by which cult images were consecrated. During the ceremony, the wooden statue was transformed into a divine image that either represented or was the deity. Until this happened the statue was just a piece of wood, a dead product of human artisans: “This statue cannot smell incense, drink water, or eat food without the Opening of the Mouth!” ...

The ritual is a two-day affair. On day one, which takes place along the riverbank, the god-statue is first distanced from the human craftsmen who worked on it in the temple workshop. The workers’ tools are sewn up in the body of a sheep and consigned to the river, the domain of the craft-god Ea. On the second day of the Miµs PiÆ, the craftsmen’s hands are bound with red yarn and symbolically cut off with a wooden tamarisk sword while each swears, “I did not make you, rather the craft-god made you.” The cult image is thus ritually established as acheiropoietos, Greek for “not made by (human) hands.”

Isaiah was not a historian of religion. He was not trying to provide a complete and accurate account of Mesopotamian beliefs. His goal was to counter the apparent supremacy of the Babylonian creator deity Marduk over Yahweh. Marduk had destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem. Isaiah hoped to restore Yahweh to his rightful position by dismissing Marduk and his pantheon and showing them to be powerless, as wooden and lifeless as their statues.

From: Bible Review 18:2, April 2002 Worshiping Idols | What Isaiah didn’t know By Michael B. Dick