Abstract
Since the 1990s, studies by scholars such as Steven Fine, Eric Meyers, Katherine van der Toorn, and Gary Anderson have nuanced the traditional perception of ancient Jews as devoutly and rigorously aniconic. Ehrenkrook continues this revisionist trend with this concise and elegant study of Josephus, an author renowned for his particularly strict interpretation of the Second Commandment.
He begins by placing the discussion in a broader context. Frequently it has been maintained that prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, Jews strictly rejected all images, because they felt strongly threatened by paganism and hence interpreted the commandment strictly. After 70 A.D., they relaxed their interpretation as the pagan threat was felt less intensely. Ehrenkrook challenges this paradigm on a number of grounds. The archaeological record for the Second Temple period is not unequivocal; regional variation in attitudes to images is very plausible. The literary record suggests that Jews were shaped by and contributed to the same ‘sculptural environment’ as their neighbours, sharing a similar language of images and similar assumptions about the ways images functioned in religious, political and social life. The Second Commandment itself was widely interpreted as a prohibition of divine images, especially of the Jewish deity, rather than as a condemnation of all images. Josephus’ approach to it is complex: when he writes with a view to exegeting the Torah, his interpretation is more nuanced than when the commandment appears in the course of a narrative.
In the second half of his book, Ehrenkrook unpacks Josephus’ rhetoric about images particularly in relation to sacred space and the story of Jewish origins. He shows that the ways in which Josephus portrayed Jewish aniconism, while asserting Jewish distinctiveness, appealed cannily to Roman sensibilities. For example, Josephus knows that other cities mark sacred space by statues, but he indicates that Judaea, Jerusalem, and especially the Temple are marked out by aniconism. Violations of this bounded holiness he associates not merely with pagan tyranny, but specifically with Greekness. This would be appreciated by a Roman audience nervous of philhellenism, particularly after Nero’s infamous reign. Josephus depicts the Jewish constitution as one of pristine aniconism, rooted in the customs of the fathers; in this he is drawing not only on Jewish tropes, but on Roman ones, which looked back nostalgically to the legendary unsullied aniconism of early Rome.
Ehrenkrook’s scholarship mediates well between historical and historiographical issues, and between his tight focus on Josephus and the broader questions of constructing cultural relationships between Jews and non-Jews in antiquity. He builds on work previously done by Joseph Gutmann and John Barclay, in which they suggested the significance of rhetoric and politics in Josephus’ accounts of images, and Barclay defined Jewish attitudes to host cultures as ‘resistant adaptation’. However, Ehrenkrook’s study significantly extends the scope of these earlier investigations. It is a fine piece of scholarship. The SBL paperback version has the advantage of being less than a quarter of the price of the hardback Brill version, which was published in 2012.