The First Commandment

Idolatry

“I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me, and showing loving kindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments."

The focus of this blog has largely become ethics. This is not intentional; circumstances in the passing parade have forced this to the fore.

Perhaps, then, it is time to look at the basic rules of Judeo-Christian morality, and understand exactly what they say.

Above is the full text of the First Commandment, as Catholicism numbers them, taken from the Book of Exodus; World English Bible translation.

Note firstly that it does not deny the existence of gods other than Yahweh. This is a common misconception. The commandment is that they must not be given priority over Yahweh, must not be “before him.” Other gods are understood as daemons, demons—real spiritual beings with real, limited power. If not necessarily positively malign, they are amoral. They are not the friends of man. This describes the Greek gods of legend.

Then there is the prohibition against “graven images.” This is taken quite literally in some forms of Islam, and Protestants regularly criticise Catholics for having statues of the saints, as supposedly violating this commandment.

But the Bible, and Yahweh, clearly do not literally mean that there is something wrong with visual arts. For in this same Book of Exodus, Yahweh commands Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and raise it above the Hebrews on a pole. This seems to preempt such an understanding.

Not idolatry

More pointedly, the Bible itself is a set of “graven images”—for that is what any written language is. So were the tablets Moses brought down from Sinai—so is this very commandment. The Book of Exodus even refers to the tablets as “graven.”

Not idolatry.

The prohibition, then, is not against making graven images, but worshipping them.

And then again, is even this quite literal? Does anyone ever really worship a literal image? The whole point of an image is that it represents something else. So anyone who worships an image instead of what it represents is simply making an obvious error. It is more or less self-evident. There are not actual little people in your TV set, for example.

So the real prohibition must be against worshipping “anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

That is, it is against worshipping material things, things immediately present to the physical senses.

In a word, it is against worshipping “nature.”

Which is obviously a temptation, because it is a temptation into which most people fall currently.

It is a prohibition against worshipping “science,” or “nature,” or “ecology,” or “Gaia,” or “the Earth,” or “the environment.” Or physical health and comfort, and not our souls.

These things are no doubt, like the pagan gods, of some significance. But we must not put them above the spiritual, or above man himself.

And what is their significance? The reference to graven images expresses it. To worship the seen world or any part of it instead of the invisible spiritual world is just like mistaking the image for the reality it represents.