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Between the sixth and eighth centuries CE, the image emerged as a rhetorical category in religious literature produced in the Mediterranean basin. The development was not a uniquely Christian phenomenon. Rather, it emerged in the context of broader debates about symbolic forms that took place across a wide range of ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups who inhabited the late Roman and early Byzantine world. In this book, Alexei Sivertsev demonstrates how Jewish texts serve as an important, and until recently overlooked, witness to the formation of image discourse and associated practices of image veneration in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Addressing the role of the image as a rhetorical device in Jewish liturgical poetry, Sivertsev also considers the theme of the engraved image of Jacob in its early Byzantine context and the aesthetics of spaces that bridge the gap between the material and the immaterial in early Byzantine imagination.

Summary

This final chapter extends the argument in chapter five by investing the “Prince of Torah” section in the earliest Jewish mystical corpus known as the Hekhalot literature. It reads through the extended narrative of this text through the genre of a historiola, demonstrating that the rhetoric through which it separates between a “human, earthly” Torah and a “divine Torah” resonates with the manner in which Neoplatonists, Manichaeans, and “Jewish Christians” distinguished between “mere prognosis” and “divine prognosis” in chapter five. Not only does this text present the reader with a way of elevating his own learning faculties to be more like the angels, but Torah itself is conceptualized as something that is “instantly knowable” in a moment of divine comprehension.

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Jews, Christians, and the Discourse on Images before Iconoclasm

6 - Angelic Contemplation in the Sar Torah and the Prognostic Turn

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Jews, Christians, and the Discourse on Images before Iconoclasm

6 - Angelic Contemplation in the Sar Torah and the Prognostic Turn

Summary