Wait, God Commanded (Anti-)Idols to be Placed in the Tabernacle?!

On one of the most confusing commands in the entire Torah

Welcome to the alliteratively and delightfully entitled Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah (it’s still pronounced “Controversial” – I just think I’m being clever). Subscribe to continue to receive these and please share with those you think would be interested.

I. The Golden Statues in the Mishkan

I don’t think it’s much of a knowledge bomb to point out that Judaism abhors idols. One of the best-known midrashim taught to every child charts the beginning of Avraham’s religious journey with his willingness to question idolatry – even going as far as to destroy them (Bereishit Rabbah 38:13). And the Ten Commandments we read just a few weeks ago could not be clearer in stressing God’s dislike of idols:

You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. (Ex. 20:4–5)

And if that weren’t enough, God once again prohibits idols in his first command to Moshe straight after the Ten Commandments:

The LORD said to Moses: Thus shall you say to the Israelites: You yourselves saw that I spoke to you from the very heavens: With Me, therefore, you shall not make any gods of silver, nor shall you make for yourselves any gods of gold. (Ex. 20:19–20)

And the reason for the repetition is, I think, obvious. Now that the Jewish people have just witnessed God’s revelation, He must reinforce the absolute prohibition against idols lest they be tempted – after seeing Him speak “from the very heavens” – to create some sort of image in gold or silver to represent what they saw.

And our instinct, at this point, is to jump a couple of weeks ahead to Parashat Ki Tissa, where the Jewish people fail in this exact way by making the Golden Calf – which Moshe himself describes to God as an elohei zahav, “a god of gold” (Ex. 32:31), the very same thing prohibited straight after the Ten Commandments.

But there’s another example in the Torah where the Jewish people fashion figures of gold to represent, in some sense, God Himself – only in this case, it’s explicitly commanded by God!

After describing the details of the aron, the Holy Ark which holds the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, God commands the people to make a cover for it upon which they must:

Make two cherubim of gold – make them of hammered work – at the two ends of the cover. Make one cherub at one end and the other cherub at the other end; of one piece with the cover shall you make the cherubim at its two ends. The cherubim shall have their wings spread out above, shielding the cover with their wings. They shall confront each other, the faces of the cherubim being turned toward the cover. (Ex. 25:18–20)

If you’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know exactly what the aron looks like. But I bet you’ve never stopped to wonder why, in the Holy of Holies – in the most sacred space Judaism has – there are two golden statues atop the Holy Ark?!

And if that weren’t enough, these golden statues serve a clear religious function, as described a few verses later – in which God tells Moshe that He will meet with Moshe from “between the two cherubim” (Ex. 25:22) – and in the very last verse of Parashat Naso, which tells us that Moshe would enter the Tent of Meeting to speak to God, and he would hear God’s voice “from above the cover that was on top of the Ark of the Covenant between the two cherubim” (Num. 7:89).

And if you’re not questioning everything you thought you ever knew about Judaism at this point, I don’t understand why – this seems to me to be the most theologically problematic idea I’ve ever come across since Dan Brown claimed in The Da Vinci Code that ancient Jews worshipped God in the Temple through ritualistic sex. (Which, I should stress, is all-caps, bolded, italicized NONESENSE, and should make you question all the other insane conspiracy theories he made sound convincing in those books.)¹

So how are we to process the command to build objects that look like golden idols atop the Holy Ark in the Holy of Holies from a God who explicitly prohibits all such things?

II. The Answer is Always “Look at the Context!”

One answer, which at this point won’t surprise you if you’ve read a bunch of Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah, involves the context of the Mishkan.

I don’t want to go into all the details now – because otherwise I’ll have nothing to write about when we get to the first half of Sefer Vayikra – but there’s a lot to be said for the various elements of the Mishkan mirroring other temples of the Ancient Near East.

This idea shouldn’t be so surprising and is most famously (if controversially) expressed by Rambam in explaining that the purpose of the entire sacrificial order is to rehabilitate the Jewish people from a desire to serve God in such primitive ways. As Rambam puts it, had God told the Jewish people not to worship Him via sacrifices it would be akin to a prophet nowadays telling us that prayer was useless (Guide of the Perplexed, III §32 [p. 526, Pines translation]).²

In other words, the entire reason God commanded the Jewish people to build the Mishkan was not because He really wanted a physical home on earth but because the people needed Him to have a physical home on earth in which they could worship Him. It’s all very well having a transcendent God in theory, but humans still need to feel like they’re truly worshiping their God somehow. And there’s lots to say – hopefully another time³ – about how the Mishkan is a near-exact replica of every other ancient temple.

But one feature of many ancient religions – particularly Egypt, where the Jewish people had spent 210 years having Egyptian religious ideas rammed down their throats – was that gods and kings were often depicted as flanked by winged creatures.

And so, the argument goes, the Jewish people would have rioted if they were told that God doesn’t have anything winged flanking him – that’s just how any half-decent self-respecting god presents themselves, let alone the One True God! Thus, God commanded cherubim be placed atop the aron within the Holy of Holies but, crucially, as Dr. Raanan Eichler points out in the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Exodus (p. 149), there was a difference. The cherubim faced one another with nothing in between to reinforce the fact that God Himself has no physicality and cannot be represented.

And while none of this changes the fact that the cherubim seem to contradict the prohibition of making golden images – in fact, this explanation seems to amplify the problem! – the simplest answer, I think, is that the very God who prohibits images can also permit them in a very specific, legislated way.

To go “full Rambam” here:⁴ If you completely prohibit the creation of any images, you run the risk of someone still wanting to do so because that’s all they’ve ever known religions to do. But if you permit one hyper-specific instance in which the image is built but hidden and closed off, you scratch the people’s religious itch while forbidding them from making any others.

And there is a fascinating statement of Ḥazal, that tells us that on each of the shalosh regalim – Pesaḥ, Shavuot, and Sukkot – the curtain dividing the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Beit ha-Mikdash would be removed so that the people could see the cherubim (Yoma 54a).

Perhaps a purpose of the Jewish people seeing the cherubim three times a year was to reinforce the fact that, though there were two golden statues in the Beit ha-Mikdash, they did not represent God but rather represented the fact that God defied any physical representation.

III. Taking This Idea Even Further

And there’s one further element here which comes from a fascinating (if seemingly outlandish) theory of Rabbi Yaakov Medan, a rosh yeshiva at Yeshivat Har Etzion.⁵

It starts with the well-known argument that the order in which things are described in the Torah – in which after the people are commanded to build the Mishkan they then commit the Sin of the Golden Calf, after which they actually build the Mishkan – are purely stylistic. As Rashi himself states, the episode of the Golden Calf happened yamim rabbim, “a considerable time” before any command to build the Mishkan was uttered (Rashi, Ex. 31:18).⁶

And this means that we can view the cherubim as being commanded in reaction to the Golden Calf. And this is important because R. Medan thinks it’s possible to reconstruct the Jewish people’s motivation for a Golden Calf. Though Moshe stresses that the Jewish people never beheld God Himself at Mt. Sinai, he follows that with a reminder to not create the likeness of any creature (Deut. 4:12–18). Because, as R. Medan argues, the Jewish people would have seen God’s chariot – which, while I know “chariot” is the correct word, I think it’s better imagined as a “retinue” – in which the angels, as the prophet Yeḥezkel states, had a single foot ke-khaf regel ‘egel, “like a single calf’s hoof” (Ezek. 6:7).

In other words, when the Jewish people were desperate to create an image to represent God, they chose the closest thing to what they had seen – which, itself, was not God Himself but something else in His retinue – and so they made an image of a calf out of gold. As R. Medan puts it, “the golden calf was not outright idol worship, but rather an attempt to portray characters found on the heavenly chariot, which were revealed to the people at the assembly at Mount Sinai.”

And because of this, for R. Medan, the Jewish people displayed a desire for golden images to represent God. Thus, when the Mishkan was commanded, God conceded to this desire – à la Rambam – and commanded the construction of the cherubim. But this is not only why Moshe was so insistent that the Jewish people only ever heard God – “you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape – nothing but a voice” (Deut. 4:12) – but also why it was important for the Jewish people to see three times a year that God had no actual physical form between the cherubim.

IV. The Anti-Idols

I’d like to coin a term for the cherubim: “anti-idols.” Because while they share many features of the very idols prohibited by God, their purpose is the complete opposite.

And while I’m having trouble trying to frame all this precisely, I think that the cherubim resolve an otherwise fundamental flaw in the way Judaism prohibits images of God.

Because, while nowadays the temptation for idolatry is nonexistent – either because we live in a world that generally resists idolatry (even if Christianity loves iconography) or because, as Ḥazal famously describe, the temptation for idolatry was slaughtered in the days of the prophet Zekhariah (Sanhedrin 64a) – Rambam is right in recognizing the general need for idolatrous, cultic rituals in the ancient world in which Jews lived.

And though it makes sense for it to be impossible to have any physical representation of the One True God who cannot be represented by any physicality, that’s not going to stop people from wanting it. And so, God commanded the creation of anti-idols, the cherubim. They were made to combat the idolatrous tendencies of the Jewish people by appearing no differently to idols in theory but being radically different in practice.

Because this is a major theme of the Torah, after all. We are not the first people to use different plants before the rainy season to serve God, but we are the first to deny them any particular power. We are not the first to declare “an eye for an eye” but, as I said last week, we are the first to place those in the framework of a covenant.

And we are not the first to place golden images in our Temple – but we are the first to declare that they reinforce the pointlessness of idols.

1. In the interest of scholarly rigor, I asked Words of Myrrh’s resident expert on ancient religious sex cults, Rabbi Dr. AJ Berkovitz, who pointed out that while it’s an ambitious theory it emerges from the facts that (a) this was common in other ancient religions and (b) this is why the Torah is at pains to prohibit the kedeisha, the ritual prostitute (Deut. 23:18). In other words, the Torah’s fear that this would happen doesn’t mean that it did but that the counterfactual exists as an academic theory. If you’re an academic who believes the Torah is a product of multiple authors then the prohibition of kedeisha exists to oppose the practices going on. Additionally, there were definitely moments in the history of the Jewish people where they adopted such idolatrous practices. While Sefer Yirmiyahu does not explicitly explain that this is part of the worship of the “Queen of Heaven” when describing the Jewish people’s idolatrous ways in chapter 44, it’s probably a component given what we know about the wider worship of such deities. But it is never endorsed, encouraged, or required as part of Jewish worship. Dan Brown is just writing nonsense (which, I’m sure was also a sentence used by reviewers when reviewing his books).

2. What, exactly, the corollary is to Rambam’s statement here is a source of strident debate as he also states that in Messianic times the sacrificial order will be restored (M.T. Laws Concerning Kings and War 11:1).

3. Because there’s another few weeks of the Torah discussing the construction of the Mishkan and not much to talk about (though I can at least speak about Purim for a bit the next two weeks)

4. When I taught in Maimo any argument in which the need to concede to the people of the time’s religious needs was raised, my students would call that “going full Rambam.”

5. R. Medan actually has a more complicated way of explaining this so I’m simplifying it a bit.

6. There is, obviously, a different school of thought that thinks that the order describes these events chronologically.