Constitutional Law
Part 2: “What Were They Thinking?”
Digression: “A History of Government in 6 Revolutions: From the Paleolithic to Philadelphia”
109. Inventing God and Law: Yahweh Is.
Title: Part C: Yahweh Is.
Panel 1: An amorphous, abstract rendering of tumultuous clouded heavens, with bits and pieces of mythological gods from old-master paintings cut-and-pasted all over the place. A bolt of light from the distance blasts the gods all ahoo.
NARRATION:
Gods replaced other gods all the time, of course. Whenever a new dynasty took over a kingdom, or a new migrating/conquering people dominated a land, it was normal for them to rewrite their predecessors’ founding myths with their own gods as supreme.
The new gods might defeat the old ones in a cosmic battle. As when Zeus and his Olympians defeated the Titans… who had defeated the primordial deities…
Or the preceding pantheon might get demoted, reduced to mere children of the new dynasty’s cult god. The Egyptian pharaohs did that all the time.
But that is not what happened when Yahweh merged with El!
-=-
Panel 2: Yahweh, with long beard and flowing hair, has a thin golden halo encircling his head.
NARRATION:
This merger erased the father-son relationship between El and Yahweh.
Yahweh now had no father.
He wasn’t even his own father.
Nobody had sired him. Nothing had created him. Not even himself.
Yahweh just…
…was.
This would have some unexpected consequences.
YAHWEH:
Odd.
How did I get…
here?
I’m curious about the origin of the modern depiction of Yahweh, or God the Father, if they are the same. For that matter, what is the origin of modern depictions of Jesus as a Caucasian with long hair and wearing a sash?
According to the commentary for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the iconography for God is based on an old English cricketer named W.G. Grace. But I suspect that might not be entirely accurate.
More seriously, as for Jesus being Caucasian, he was Semitic. Semitic peoples (arabic, jewish, etc.) are Caucasian. Why did artists depict him as a more northern-European Caucasian than a Levantine Caucasian? Because that’s where they lived and who their audience was. Wherever you live, a Christian wants to think of Jesus as “one of us.”
Depictions of God the Father are unheard-of until the Renaissance – prohibitions against idolatry were strictly enforced in the Middle Ages. Given their fascination with Ancient Greek culture, I suspect Renaissance painters patterned their depictions of God after Zeus. It’s also worth noting that between Zeus/Jupiter, Odin and Marduk it’s fairly common for Europeans and Middle Easterners to portray their main god as an old man with a beard.
If you’re interested, I recommend Zulfiqar Ali Shah’s book, Anthropomorphic Depictions of God: The Concept of God in Judaic, Christian and Islamic Traditions—Representing the Unrepresentable. At least for the moment, the full text is free to read on Google Books.
Very interesting.
Ain’t it, though?