Page - 29 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

The Body and Voice of God in the Hebrew Bible | 29www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 23–33 widespread Jewish convention, persisting for hundreds of years, might be confirmed by the Beth Alpha synagogue mosaics (cf. fig. 2), located near Beit Shean in northern Israel, which date to the sixth century CE.23 The existence of these Jewish pictorial im- ages from disparate times and settings may dispel too narrow an interpretation of his- torical prohibition of visual images of God, for it appears that there has existed some scope within Judaism to depict divine action pictorially and anthropomorphically. As Jewish tradition developed through the centuries and into the medieval period, influential sages like Maimonides (1135–1204) would re-emphasize a notion so clearly indicated in the interpretation of the Targumim: any suggestion of God’s body or hu- man appearance is to be regarded as purely allegorical. The third of Maimonides’ Thir- teen Principles, a distillation of essential Jewish beliefs as drawn from Torah, stresses Jewish belief in God’s non-corporeality and that God is unaffected by any physical occurrences, including movement, rest, or dwelling.24 Alongside this discomfort with divine corporeality, pronounced emphasis on the voice of God and its authority remains central in this later period. The voice of God is already powerfully present in the Hebrew Bible. Its accentuated prominence in the Targumim is indicated by the common substitution of “the Lord” or “YHWH” with mēmrā, “the (divine) word”. In the rabbinical writings of the Tosefta, Mishnah, and 23 Again the hand of God appears here in a visual representation of the attempted sacrifice of Isaac. The manus dei (“hand of God”) or dextera domini (“right hand of God”) was also a prominent motif in pre- Renaissance Christian visual art. 24 For a full discussion of the Thirteen Principles and the complex history of their interpretation, see Sha- piro 2004. Fig. 2: Bet Alpha Synagogue – the hand of God prevents Abraham from sacrificing Isaac. Stähli 1988, 63.