A third area where Israel was thought to overtop its neighbours was that of covenant, for the Old Testament, especially in Deu-teronomically affected areas, makes much of a covenant forged between the people of Israel and their God. Other covenants are described, notably the Davidic covenant articulating the dyn-astic ideology of the royal house of Judah. This latter has par-allels, but the concept of a God specially bound to his or her people by covenant was otherwise unknown.18 The introduction of the political treaty into the discussion offered explanation for formal elements of the biblical national covenant and even poten-tial clues to dating, though it was disputed whether the second millennium Hittite treaties, as the best examples of a more wide-spread treaty tradition in the period, or the Neo-Assyrian rep-resentatives of the first millennium provided the closer compar-ison. The popular view that the Old Testament national cov-enant concept had developed in Deuteronomic hands under the
15See W.G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, Oxford 1960, 110-5.
16I am grateful to Professor W.G. Lambert for helpful comments on the status of the ‘royal’ prophecies in the Ashurbanipal library.
17Cf. Parpola, Assyrian Prophecies, lxvi.
18Cf. S.A. Geller, ‘The God of the Covenant’, in: Barbara N. Porter (ed.), One God or Many?: Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World (Transactions of the Casco Bay Assyriological Institute, 1), n.p. 2000, 284: ‘Nowhere else is a God attached to a people by a covenant, nowhere else is there such a radical break with myth and mythology.’
impulse of Neo-Assyrian political practice certainly rendered it
‘of the earth, earthy’ but did not, of itself, impair its essential uniqueness.
This too has changed. Eckart Otto, for example, notes that the idea of a covenant between a god and human subjects is also found in Neo-Assyrian texts and in one of the Arslan Tash in-scriptions, whose genuineness Otto is happy to accept.19 At first Otto lumps together covenants involving kings and covenants in-volving the general populace,20 but the necessary distinction is observed when he comes to discuss the Neo-Assyrian text K.
2401, ‘Prophecy for Esarhaddon’.21 This he understands as re-quiring both Esarhaddon and his subjects to fulfil the terms of the covenant made initially between Asshur and the king.22 The Arslan Tash inscription even refers to an ‘eternal covenant’ ( lt
lm) made between Asshur and the citizens of H
˘adattu, hence judgments on its authenticity are very important for the ‘Israel only’ discussion.
Otto claims that the distinctive feature of Judean religion in the seventh century was not ‘covenant theology as such’. What was ‘innovative’ was Judah’s deployment of covenant theology in
19E. Otto, Das Deuteronomium: Politische Theologie und Rechtsreform in Juda und Assyrien (BZAW, 284), Berlin 1999, 73, 81-2, 85; Idem,
‘Der Ursprung der Bundestheologie in Assyrien und Juda: Eine forschungs-geschichtliche Orientierung’, in: Idem, Gottes Recht als Menschenrecht:
Rechts- und literaturhistorische Studien zum Deuteronomium (BZAR, 2), Wiesbaden 2002, 128-66 (161-6). Otto assumes the authenticity of the Arslan Tash text, citing (Das Deuteronomium, 85 n. 371) J. van Dijk, ‘The Authen-ticity of the Arslan Tash Amulets’, Iraq 54 (1992), 65-8, and F.M. Cross, quoted in T.J. Lewis, ‘The Identity and Function of El/Baal Berith’, JBL 115 (1996), 401-23 (409). See already Z. Zevit, ‘A Phoenician Inscription and Biblical Covenant Theology’, IEJ 27 (1977), 110-8, for the suggestion, on the basis of the Arslan Tash text, that the national covenant concept was not unique to Israel (118).
20Otto, Das Deuteronomium, 73.
21Titled ‘The Covenant of Assur’ by Parpola in his Assyrian Prophecies, 22.
22Otto, Das Deuteronomium, 82. For the text see Parpola, Assyrian Proph-ecies, 22-7. Parpola thinks that the covenant is made with Ishtar rather than with Asshur, though he also believes that, for the author of the text, Asshur and Ishtar were identical (pp. XIX-XX). For the covenant as a ‘double coven-ant’ between god and king and then between king and people see T. Ishida, The Royal Dynasties in Ancient Israel: A Study on the Formation and De-velopment of Royal-Dynastic Ideology (BZAW, 142), Berlin 1977, 115-6.
‘Comparativism’ and the God of Israel 51
opposition to Assyrian imperial and royal ideology.23But it would also be true to say, with Bernhard Lang, that it was only the Judeans who gave this covenant theology anything like developed theological expression.24 Thus the national covenant becomes a key theological concept within the Old Testament, such that even the Judean dynastic covenant is swallowed up in the national cov-enant in one well-known text (Isa. 55:3), when the ‘sure mercies of David’ are extended to the whole non-monarchical community of the later exile.
Aniconism
My fourth example of a diminishing differentia is that of anicon-ism. The rejection of images to represent Israel’s God, or any god, gives the biblical writers a point d’appui for their attacks on polytheism, and has been recognized as a defining feature of Old Testament – perhaps even Israelite – religion. However, the work of T.N.D. Mettinger (especially) has raised questions about this uniqueness of Israelite aniconism.25 Mettinger argues that an-iconic worship is a more general West Semitic phenomenon, and that Israel reflects this common outlook. Much of his evidence is late, coming principally from Nabatea and Phoenicia – Mettinger self-consciously works back from the later evidence to his conclu-sions about earlier periods – and much depends on the validity and the significance of his category of ‘material aniconism’ which he distinguishes from the ‘empty-space aniconism’ most often as-sociated with the religion of the Old Testament. Examples of this second category outside Israel are especially few and late.26 Because of this assumed West Semitic background, Mettinger holds that aniconism was a feature of Israelite religion from the beginning. But what was special to Israel was the development of programmatic iconoclasm; nowhere else in the ancient Semitic world was there an actual veto on the use of graven images (196).
23Otto, Das Deuteronomium, 86.
24B. Lang, The Hebrew God: Portrait of an Ancient Deity, New Haven 2002, 38.
25T.N.D. Mettinger, No Graven Image?: Israelite Aniconism in its Ancient Near Eastern Context (CB.OT, 42), Stockholm 1995. See also the review by C. Uehlinger, ‘Israelite Aniconism in Context’, Bib. 77 (1996), 540-9.
26See Mettinger, No Graven Image?, 100-2 (cf. 113) on the (very late) Sidonian ‘votive’ (possibly) thrones, the only datable one coming from ad 59-60. On the aniconism of the ‘Aten revolution’ in Egypt see ibid., 49.
The exclusion took place late in the history of Israel-Judah: Met-tinger claims that the accumulation of anthropomorphisms in the Old Testament prophetic literature reflects a situation in which ‘a strictly aniconic theology remained unarticulated’ (15). This fits with his view that explicit prohibition occurred only in the exilic or early post-exilic period, but reads strangely when put against, say, Isaiah 40-66, which has pronounced aniconic moments, yet is very free in its use of the anthropomorphisms of God’s mouth, arm, hand and even eyes and ear.27
Mettinger has unquestionably altered the terms in which dis-cussion about Israelite aniconism must be carried out.28However, it is a problem that, if the evidence for ‘material aniconism’ is not late, it is as likely to be early and ‘mute’. This applies espe-cially to the standing stones of the Bronze and Iron Ages that Mettinger dignifies as ‘aniconic’. His discussion of West-Semitic
‘aniconism’ rests heavily on these stones. It would assist greatly if we knew how those that are genuinely cultic – for they are di-vided into several classes – were viewed by the people who made and used them.29 The problem can be illustrated by reference to the Assyrian deity symbols that Mettinger discusses at one point. There is textual evidence to confirm that these symbols could be treated just like images, even to the extent of undergo-ing the mouth-washundergo-ing ritual (47), and Mettundergo-inger is not inclined to regard them as aniconic (42). By contrast, West Semitic seals of the ninth to sixth centuries displaying divine symbols such as the sun disk are regarded as tending towards (material) anicon-ism (194). The distinction between ‘iconic’ and ‘aniconic’ can, therefore, be fluid enough.
The definition of ‘aniconic’ is an issue to which Mettinger re-turns in a later study, in which he cites the use of ‘aniconic’, in
27The view that the polemics against the manufacture of images in Isa.
40–55 are secondary is a potentially complicating factor, but, even if the hypothesis were granted, Isa. 40–55 would still have its ‘aniconic moments’.
28As well as Mettinger, some others who have written on the subject have contributed essays to: K. van der Toorn (ed.), The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East (CBET, 21), Leuven 1997. See further J.C. de Moor, The Rise of Yahwism: The Roots of Israelite Monotheism (BEThL, 91A), Leuven21997, 42, 52-4, 60, 128, 264, 297, 354, 358.
29On Mesopotamian god-symbols see W.G. Lambert, ‘Ancient Mesopot-amian Gods: Superstition, Philosophy, Theology’, RHR 207 (1990), 115-30 (123-5).
‘Comparativism’ and the God of Israel 53
the study of Greek religion, for certain kinds of cultic stones and pillars.30Here he also allows a greater importance to the ‘empty space’ aniconism of the Jerusalem temple as a ‘background factor’
in the eventual development of the prohibition on images (189, 204). No doubt, part of our problem is that ‘aniconic’ and ‘an-iconism’ are terms of considerable interest to the biblical theolo-gian, and in that context suggest a concept, and a quite abstract, theological one at that, which may owe little to the niceties of archaeological typology.