The Old Testament Prohibition and Its Fulfillment

The hardest scriptural objection to icons is the Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image” (Exodus 20:4). This file treats the prohibition, stating the iconoclast case in its strongest form — the continuity the iconoclasts claimed with the plain command — and the answer the Church received as dogma: the discontinuity the iconophiles found both within the Old Testament itself, in the God-commanded cherubim of the Ark and the Temple, and in the coming of the visible God in Christ.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Commandment and Its Force

The prohibition is unambiguous in its own setting. “You shall not make for yourself a graven image (eidolon), or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Exodus 20:4–5; cf. Deuteronomy 5:8–9). Deuteronomy grounds the command explicitly in God’s invisibility at Sinai: because “you saw no form” on the day the Lord spoke from the fire, Israel is to make no form, lest it “act corruptly by making a graven image in the form of any figure” and fall into the idolatry of the nations (Deuteronomy 4:12–19). The Law’s severity toward images is total and repeated (Leviticus 26:1; Deuteronomy 27:15), and its historical purpose is plain: Israel is planted among peoples whose religion is image-worship, and its whole vocation is to confess the one invisible God against the idols (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images II.20; trans. Louth, SVS Press, 2003; Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei, Princeton, 1990, ch. 4).

The iconoclast case took its stand here. The Council of Hieria (754), the iconoclast synod, made the Second Commandment and the invisibility of God central to its horos, arguing that the Church had lapsed into the very idolatry the Law condemns and that the only faithful “image” of Christ is the Eucharist, not a painted likeness (the Hieria horos survives embedded, with refutation, in the Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6; see The Imperial Iconoclasm 726–787). On this reading the trajectory from Sinai is one of continuity: God forbade images then and forbids them now, and the icon is a relapse into paganism.

Continuity and Discontinuity: The Two Readings

The dispute is genuinely a dispute about the shape of biblical revelation, and each case is worth stating in its strongest form.

The case for continuity (the iconoclast reading). The prohibition is a moral, not merely ceremonial, command — one of the Ten Words spoken by God’s own voice, not a passing regulation. Its rationale, God’s invisibility, is a permanent truth of the divine nature, not a temporary circumstance: God remains invisible and uncircumscribable in His essence even after the Incarnation. The New Testament nowhere rescinds the command and repeats the warning against idols (1 John 5:21; 1 Corinthians 10:14; Acts 17:29, where Paul says the divine “ought not to be thought like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man”). On this view the icon stands under the plain word of the Law, and the burden of proof lies on those who would make images (this is the structure of the Hieria argument as preserved in the Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6; and of later iconoclast florilegia; Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word, Brill, 1996, ch. 1–2).

The case for discontinuity (the iconophile reading). The prohibition, the iconophiles answered, forbids idols — images of false gods and images of the invisible God who had not yet shown His form — and not all religious imagery whatever; and this is proved from the Torah itself, which in the very books that forbid graven images commands the making of sacred figures. God ordered Moses to make two cherubim of hammered gold overshadowing the mercy seat on the Ark (Exodus 25:18–22), and cherubim woven into the tabernacle curtains and veil (Exodus 26:1, 31); Solomon’s Temple, built by divine sanction, was filled with carved cherubim, palm trees, oxen, and lions (1 Kings 6:23–29; 7:25, 29); and God commanded Moses to make the bronze serpent, an image that healed those who looked on it (Numbers 21:8–9) — the very image Christ takes as a type of His own lifting up (John 3:14) (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.15; II.20–23; Pelikan, Imago Dei, 1990, ch. 4). The prohibition, therefore, cannot be a blanket ban on images in worship, for God Himself commanded images in worship in the same Law; it is a ban on idolatry — on representing the invisible God under a form He had not given, and on worshipping images as gods (John of Damascus, Three Treatises II.20).

And then, the iconophiles argued, the decisive thing happened: the invisible God gave His form. The rationale of the prohibition — “you saw no form” (Deuteronomy 4:15) — was tied to a stage of revelation now surpassed, for “the Word became flesh” and was seen (John 1:14; 1 John 1:1). John of Damascus draws the conclusion directly: “It is obvious that when you contemplate God becoming man, then you may depict Him clothed in human form… make an image of Him who condescended to be seen” (John of Damascus, Three Treatises II.5). The prohibition is thus not abolished but fulfilled — kept in its true intent (no idols, no depicting the invisible essence) and transcended in its temporary provision (no images at all), because the God who could not be depicted has now made Himself depictable in the flesh (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.8; II.5–8; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 1). Nicaea II makes this the heart of its answer, treating the icon not as a breach of the commandment but as its true issue in the age of the Incarnation (Nicaea II, 787, Horos; trans. Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, Liverpool, 2018).

This is not, for the Orthodox Church, an open question (METHODOLOGY §4.1): at Nicaea II and in the Triumph of Orthodoxy the Church dogmatically received the iconophile reading, and this collection confesses it accordingly. The iconoclast reading — the Second Commandment as a permanent, still-binding prohibition grounded in God’s invisibility — is reported above in its strongest form as the case the Council examined and rejected; the iconophile reading — a ban on idolatry, qualified within the Torah by the divinely commanded cherubim and transformed by the Incarnation — is the Church’s own.

The Cherubim as the Pivot

The cherubim of the Ark did the heaviest lifting in the debate, because they are the clearest internal counter-instance: figures of heavenly beings, made of gold, placed in the very Holy of Holies, at God’s own command, before which Israel bowed (Numbers 7:89; Psalm 79[80]:1, “you who are enthroned upon the cherubim”) (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.15; II.23). The iconoclasts answered that these were not venerated as the icons were, that they represented invisible spirits and not the divine nature, and that they belonged to a superseded ceremonial economy (the Hieria case, as refuted in the Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6). The iconophiles replied that the honor shown to the Ark and its cherubim was precisely the relative proskynesis they claimed for icons — honor passing through the image to God — and that if God could command images of the invisible cherubim, He could surely permit the image of the now-visible Christ, who is more, not less, depictable than an angel (John of Damascus, Three Treatises II.23; III.9; see Image and Prototype). The cherubim thus function in the tradition as the hinge on which the whole reading of the Old Testament turns: proof that the God who forbade idols did not forbid sacred images, and so that the Incarnation could open the door to the icon without contradicting the Law it fulfilled.

See Also

References

  • John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press (PPS), 2003. (I.8, 15; II.5–8, 20–23; III.9: the prohibition as a ban on idols; the cherubim and Temple images; the Incarnation as transformation.)
  • The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Trans. Richard Price. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. (Session 6: the Hieria horos and its refutation; the Horos of Nicaea II.)
  • Pelikan, Jaroslav. Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. (The Second Commandment in the debate; the internal Old Testament counter-instances.)
  • Parry, Kenneth. Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 1996. (The iconoclast use of Scripture and the iconophile reply.)
  • Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The prohibition fulfilled rather than abolished.)
  • Scripture: Exodus 20:4–5; 25:18–22; 26:1, 31; Deuteronomy 4:12–19; 5:8–9; Leviticus 26:1; Numbers 21:8–9; 7:89; 1 Kings 6:23–29; 7:25, 29; Psalm 79[80]:1; John 1:14; 3:14; 1 John 1:1; 5:21; 1 Corinthians 10:14; Acts 17:29.