METHOD

&THEORY in the
STUDY OF
RELIGION

Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (2012) 301-306 brill.nl/mtsr

Images and the Political:

On Jan Assmann’s Concept of Idolatry1

Aaron Tugendhaft
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, 1 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003, USA
atugendhaft@gmail.com

Abstract
This essay explores the political implications and historical basis of noted Egyptologist Jan Ass-
mann’s assertion—based on a distinction made canonical by Carl Schmitt—that the Biblical
prohibition of images polarizes the world into friend and enemy. The focus is on two aspects of
Assmann’s position: his claims regarding how the Bible represents Egypt and how he reads the
first two commandments of the Decalogue. The essay concludes that Assmann relies more on the
reception history than on the biblical text itself and ends with a suggestion regarding how to get
at an alternative view of the Bible’s political understanding of idolatry.

Keywords
idolatry, Jan Assmann, images, Carl Schmitt, political, Decalogue, friend/enemy distinction

In a recently published volume of essays devoted to the biblical Decalogue, Jan

Assmann contributed an interpretation of the second commandment—the
so-called “prohibitions of images” or, to use the German term, Bilderverbot.
Alluding to what Carl Schmitt deemed the essence of the political, Assmann
writes: “The Bilderverbot polarizes the world into friend and enemy [. . .] The
image is the touchstone for God’s distinction between friend and enemy”
(Assmann 2006: 20). I would like to investigate this proposed connection
between images and the political.
Assmann’s essay is a recent installment in a series of studies he has devoted
to the question of idolatry. The most famous of these is Moses the Egyptian: The

1
This paper was first delivered at the workshop on “Defining Heresy” at the Institute for
Advanced Study of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in July 2007 and is presented here largely
unchanged. An English version of Assmann’s essay “Was ist so schlimm an den Bildern?” has
since been published in a book for which I served as co-editor; see, Jan Assmann, “What’s Wrong
with Images?” in Idol Anxiety, ed. Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011), 19-31.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/157006812X635718
302 A. Tugendhaft / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (2012) 301-306

Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, now over ten years old. There he
defines idolatry as more than mere aniconism, that is, opposition to images.
“Idolatry does not merely denote a certain religious attitude based on the wor-
ship of ‘idols’ or images,” he tells us, “it is a polemical term which expresses a
strong cultural/religious abomination and anxiety” (Assmann 1997: 42). This
anxiety has political implications: “Idolatry is the umbrella term for what must
be warded off by all means” (Assmann 1997: 42). Religions use the concept of
idolatry as a means to define their “Other.” This act of definition, furthermore,
is rooted in a particular act of distinction—the distinction between true and
false in religion. Assmann calls this distinction the Mosaic Distinction because,
he says, tradition attributes it to Moses. Mosaic monotheism, so his argument
goes, was the first religious system (Amarna religion aside) to be rooted in the
distinction between true and false. Prior to this “revolutionary monotheism,”
“different peoples worshipped different gods, but nobody contested the reality
of foreign gods and the legitimacy of foreign forms of worship. The distinction
I am speaking of simply did not exist in the world of polytheistic religions”
(Assmann 1997: 3). It is only with the advent of the Mosaic Distinction that
we enter into a realm polarized between “the error of idolatry [and] the truth
of monotheism” (Assmann 1997: 7).
The attempt to reveal the historical roots of this distinction has contempo-
rary relevance for Assmann, who reveals his motivations when he writes:
The phantasm of the religious Other and the phobic idea of contagion and con-
spiracy never ceased to haunt Europe . . . Our own century [by which he means the
20th] has seen the greatest excesses of this collective psychosis. Therefore, it is
important to trace this history back to its origin, with the hope that this anamne-
sis and “working through” may contribute to a better understanding and an over-
coming of the dynamics behind the development of cultural or religious
abomination. (Assmann 1997: 44)
I will not comment on these motivations. Rather, I want simply to acknowl-
edge that though Assmann’s intentions may be moral or ethical, his method is
historical. Rather than attacking ethical problems abstractly, as a philosopher
might, he approaches them as an historian. He presents his argument in the
form of historical narrative and his allusion to psychoanalytic practice in the
phrase “working through” suggests why this is important. Because history is
important to him and his argument, it seems legitimate to scrutinize his recon-
struction of that history. For even if we choose to abandon the Mosaic Dis-
tinction, and with it the distinction between true and false in religion, we may
still opt to hold onto some sense of true and false in historiography.
In this spirit I would like to examine what Assmann has to say about the
origins of the Mosaic Distinction in the Bible’s second commandment, for
 A. Tugendhaft / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (2012) 301-306 303

though idolatry—as we have seen—is not reducible to aniconism, Assmann

maintains that its root lies in the Bilderverbot. This necessarily takes us into the
realm of biblical philology and Israelite history. And so I will here present an
analysis of how Assmann reads the Bible, of how he sees in it a condemnation
of idolatry as that which is “false” in religion and how this condemnation is
rooted narratively in a rejection of Egypt and her images. This will have impli-
cations for the “politics of idolatry” because Assmann’s argument sees the
friend-enemy distinction as predicated upon and growing out of this condem-
nation of idolatry.
It will be useful to divide our discussion of Assmann’s reading of the Bible
in two. First, I will consider his treatment of the image of Egypt in the Bible
and his argument that it constitutes a counter-image to Israel, standing for all
that is false: polytheism, idolatry, images. I will then proceed to how Assmann
reads the Decalogue, focusing, of course, on the first two commandments.
I begin with the biblical image of Egypt. Assmann claims that Egypt repre-
sents the religiously wrong, with image worship at its core. Towards the end of
Moses the Egyptian he writes: “The Biblical image of Egypt means ‘idolatry.’ It
symbolizes what ‘the Mosaic distinction’ excluded as the opposite of truth in
religion . . . The Egypt of the Bible symbolizes what is rejected, discarded, and
abandoned,” (Assmann 1997: 208-9) and again, “the Bible has preserved an
image of Egypt as its own counter-image. The central term here is idolatry”
(Assmann 1997: 211).
As part of his attempt to establish the semantic importance of Egypt in the
Bible, Assmann tells us that Egypt’s role “must be sharply distinguished from
the roles that Assyria, Babylonia, the Philistines, and other Iron Age powers
play . . . Egypt’s role [in the Bible] is mythical: it helps define the very identity
of those who tell the story” (Assmann 1997: 209). Now, Egypt’s mythical role
in the Bible cannot be contested, nor can its central role in defining Israelite
identity. What is questionable, however, is the place that idolatry—and in
particular image worship—plays in this story. In fact, unlike in many stories
concerning those nations whose importance Assmann wants to downplay,
Egypt is never associated with idol worship in the Exodus narrative. We do
find biblical stories that mention religious images: Dagan in Philistia, Rachel’s
theft of the Teraphim, Nebuchadnezzar’s golden statue, to name but a few.
None of these stories relate to Egypt. In fact, the Exodus narrative reveals
almost no information whatsoever about Egyptian religious beliefs and prac-
tices. Assmann declares that Egypt is the image of idolatry par excellence, but this
is based on his knowledge of Egypt from elsewhere, not on the biblical text.
Egypt does play a central role in the myth of Israel’s formation as a people—
but it is different than the one Assmann maintains. The role is political, not
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theological. Egypt is not presented as the counter-image of Israelite religion—

this role, if it applies to any nation in the Bible, is best reserved for the Canaan-
ites. Jeremiah, for instance, rebukes Judah’s children for remembering “their
altars and their asherim beside every green tree and on the high hills” (Jer. 17:2);
by contrast, nostalgia for Egypt is most prominently presented as a longing for
food and living conditions, not modes of religion. “We remember the fish
which we ate in Egypt for nothing,” the Israelites complain to Moses, “the
cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic”
(Num. 11:5). Egypt is the enslaver from whom God redeems his people—
even if they sometimes long for a return to that state of slavery. It is striking
how silent Assmann is on the role slavery plays in this narrative. Exodus does
describe the formation of a people, but it does not do so by predicating that
political distinction upon a distinction between true and false in religion. The
exodus is not an exodus from falsity, idolatry, or images.
The stakes involved in Assmann’s typological reading of Egypt and Israel
become more apparent when he introduces into it the concept of time:
The narrative of the Exodus emphasizes the temporal meaning of the religious
antagonism between monotheism and idolatry. “Egypt” stands not only for “idol-
atry” but also for a past that is rejected. The Exodus is a story of emigration and
conversion, of transformation and renovation . . . and of past and future. Egypt
represents the old, while Israel represents the new. The geographical border
between the two countries assumes a temporal meaning . . . (Assmann 1997: 7)
The problem is that there is no indication that the exodus, according to the
terms of the text itself, constitutes a “conversion.” The Israelites are never
depicted as changing religions, as moving from old false ways to a new way of
truth. Assmann’s reading of the text is strikingly reminiscent of Pauline exege-
sis in Galatians. The Apostle tells his Gentile converts: “Before faith came, we
were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be
revealed . . . But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his
Son . . . to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the
adoption of sons” (Gal. 3:23; 4:4-5). Redemption from the Law is typologi-
cally parallel to redemption from slavery in Egypt. Moreover, Paul tells his
audience that just as the Jews have been slaves to the Law, the Gentiles have
been slaves to false gods. For both Jew and Gentile the new dispensation is
equated with redemption from slavery. Slavery is equated with living in error.
Once redemption is conceived as conversion to the truth, the original political
meaning of the biblical narrative loses its force. No longer is Exodus about the
redemption of a people from slavery; it is now about the adoption of proper
doctrine and belief, an act open to any individual. Rather than forming the
basis upon which the narrative is built, political distinctions are understood as
 A. Tugendhaft / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (2012) 301-306 305

the ramifications of a shift in thought. Only by reading the text typologically,

as a “conversion,” can Assmann portray Israelite political identity as the con-
sequence of a rejection of Egyptian thought.
Assmann’s boldest claims about the political ramifications of the biblical
narrative occur in his exegesis of the Decalogue—the telos of the Exodus story.
We began this presentation by quoting his claim that the Bilderverbot polarizes
the world into friend and enemy. This commandment, along with the one that
precedes it, is read as a rejection of Egypt and all Egypt is supposed to repre-
sent. Egypt, Assmann writes, “appears explicitly in the first commandment
and implicitly in the second” (Assmann 1997: 209). The first claim is of course
correct; Yahweh declares himself as the god who took Israel out of Egypt. That
the second commandment implicitly refers to Egypt is less certain. As we have
already seen, though Assmann recognizes Egypt as the quintessential land of
image worship and therefore the obvious target of any attack on images, it is
not clear that the Bible conceives of Egypt in this way. Furthermore, to under-
stand the commandment as a rejection of images because they are false—and
by implication an entire religious system as false—is to misinterpret the text as
it appears in its original narrative setting.
The Decalogue is the core of a treaty between the formerly enslaved Israel-
ites and their redeemer, Yahweh. When the deity requires that Israel have no
other gods beside himself, he is not stating that no other gods exist. Though
other gods might exist, they are not to be worshipped by Israel as this would
constitute an act of disloyalty, an act of apostasy. To invoke a metaphor used
elsewhere in the Bible, to prohibit adultery is not to demand the belief that no
other men exist—it rather demands loyalty to one’s husband precisely because
of the very real temptation that other men present. Furthermore, the biblical
commandment is not simply about proscribing the worship of other gods—it
is more precisely about proscribing the gods of others. The Decalogue belongs
to a world where political groupings each have their own chief deity—the
Edomites have Qos, the Moabites Chemosh, and Yahweh is the god of Israel.
The Decalogue takes for granted the fact of political divisions in the world. It
neither produces these divisions, nor does it formulate them in terms of true
and false. The ban on images in the Decalogue is not a rejection of “the false.”
The images under discussion are cult statues—the day’s common expression of
worship. Their ban is a corollary of the proscription of worshipping other
people’s gods. The Bilderverbot does not produce the distinction between
friend and enemy, it is a product of that distinction.
So where has this gotten us? One might respond: “So what? So the biblical
text, in its original meaning, doesn’t produce political divisions based on a
notion of true and false. The fact remains that it came to be read in a way that
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did precisely that—with all the consequences that rightly concern Assmann.
What does an original meaning, forgotten almost as soon as it was written
down, matter when dealing with the long tradition of religious intolerance in
the West?” To this objection I would like to make two points, and with these
I will conclude. First, our reconstruction of the biblical text makes it clear that
the ideas so important for Assmann’s inquiry into religious intolerance are the
product of biblical interpretation—they belong to the text’s Rezeptionsge-
schichte. Some of this exegesis is early, but it is nonetheless exegesis. The topic,
therefore, calls for a more nuanced study of the earliest stages of interpreta-
tion. Here I can only hint that such a study would reveal as central the role
Greek thought played in producing the reading dominant in Assmann’s story.
Suggestive of this is the list of post-biblical authors Assmann uses to elucidate
his position on the meaning of idolatry: the author of the Wisdom of Solo-
mon, Falvius Josephus, Strabo, Tacitus. No rabbinic exegesis is cited—the
exception that proves the rule being Maimonides. Second, though the biblical
text in its original meaning does not construct political groupings according
to a distinction of true and false in religion, it is by no means thereby opposed
to political distinctions as such. Only by scraping away the exegetical tradition
through which we by now naturally read the Bible as grounding a politics
upon a basis of metaphysical truths can we hope to arrive at an understanding
of the Bible’s position concerning political truths.

References

Assmann, Jan (1997). Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism.
——— (2006). Was ist so schlimm an den Bildern? In H. Joas (ed.) Die Zehn Gebote: Ein
widersprüchliches Erbe? 17-32. Cologne: Böhlau.
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