In our June issue William Schack reviewed the exhibition of a group of leading Israeli painters now being held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, under the sponsorship of the American Fund for Israel Institutions. Now Leo Steinberg discusses the accompanying exhibition of recent archeological finds from Israel (both shows will run until Labor Day).
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In a showcase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hangs the jawbone of an ass—“like the one Samson used against the Philistines,” said the press release. Next door lies a slingshot and stone—the very type, archeologists say, that David used against Goliath.
The situation is evocative of more than the familiar Bible heroes. For these exhibits —part of the current showing “From the Land of the Bible”—almost seem to reinstate a bygone age of faith and gullibility, when the trafficking in relics was a lucrative and solemn trade; when the peddler at the fair displayed among his staples feathers that had dropped from the angel’s wing as he wrestled with Jacob; or chunks of rock salt, mounted in silver, from the forearm of Lot’s wife.
Are we back with the relic-mongering of the Middle Ages? No, not altogether. No more so than a repentant sinner is back in the state of innocence. For we have come through two centuries of skeptical rationalism to discover that the Bible stories are probably true. And where the medieval relic was authenticated by a letter from an Eastern bishop stating that this rusty blade before us was indeed the very sword which Balaam said he wished he had (Num. 22:29), the relics at the Metropolitan are vouched for by tough-minded archeologists.
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The stated purpose of this great exhibition is to “make the Bible live.” In a chronological sense—and in this sense only —the claim is staked too narrowly. The show actually assembles the material remains and artifacts of every period of Palestine history, from Paleolithic data (of which Israel produces a rich crop) down to 6th-century Byzantine. Items range from monumental sculpture and mosaics to coins and earthenware. Many have not been previously shown, being the fruit of recent excavations. And one is somewhat astonished to learn that the government of Israel has carried out nearly 200 large and small digs during the last five years.
This does not mean that the Israeli government is earnestly devoted to archeological exploration. It reflects rather the hectic building activity in the new state. Wherever a spade is turned in Israel, the ground sooner or later yields some potsherd, statuette, bronze implement, or coin. And whenever this happens it is the government’s hope (not always satisfied) that its Department of Antiquities will be called in. Then one of its too few archeologists comes down to make a lightning survey of the site before those fragile traces of the past are lost forever.
Perhaps the most spectacular recent find occurred two years ago near Caesarea, seat of the Roman procurators of Judea. Here the men of a new kibbutz, breaking ground for cultivation, lighted on a splendid 7-ton porphyry statue. Seated and, alas, without a head, the colossus now dominates the Metropolitan’s main hall. It is a late Roman work, well over double life-size, and with that hieratic calm which Roman art, Orientalized, eventually substituted for its own factual, no-nonsense realism. It sets one of the themes of the exhibition—the theme of cultural miscegenation on the scant soil of Israel.
Even the prehistoric pieces mark Palestine as a crossroads of remote ethnic trails. A Neolithic model of a house (or shrine) shows the oval plan and half-submerged igloo design familiar to Old Stone Age scholars from sites in South Russia and Moravia. An anthropoid stone amulet traces a silhouette found as far afield as Lake Baikal in Eastern Siberia. The ugly little Neolithic “Venus of Tel Aviv” offers the same piscine reduction of the human face (two profiles joined along a central ridge) as do the figurines of Crete and the Indus Valley. The remains from more historic times are tokens of migrations from Anatolia and Elam, of political submission to Egypt, and of cultural surrender to Mesopotamian, Hittite, Aegean, Minoan, Cypriot influence.
Migrations, conquests, infiltrations, and a lively trade by land and sea: Palestine reveals itself as a restless corridor. Its artifacts are less like the appointments of a family home than like the scattered leavings in a public hostelry.
And throughout these early phases—down to the Babylonian Exile—there is almost no sign of Hebrew sojourn. What abounds, on the contrary, is evidence of the abominations practiced in the Holy Land: bronze Baals on rachitic legs brandishing pin-swords, and shameless little Astartes clutching their bare paps—“till good Josiah drove them thence to hell.”
Few of these works pass beyond the point of barely respectable design. There are some handsome pots from the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1500 B.C.E.), and Phoenician workmanship stands out for elegance—which proves King Solomon had an appreciative eye. But any comparison with the arts of Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Elam is bound to be invidious, for it makes Palestinian work look gross and provincial. And yet the exhibition invites comparisons both subtler and more damaging. It shows imported potteries and local imitations side by side, the latter nearly always recognizable for their unfailing gaucherie.
It should be noted here that not one of these Canaanite objects can be certainly ascribed to Hebrew artisans. Whatever the Israelites of the Two Kingdoms produced of pottery, ornament, or idolatrous representation is either nonextant or undistinguishable.
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In View of this patent backwardness in material culture the phenomenon of the Bible as a Palestinian product becomes the more miraculous. Had the Bible not survived, archeologists, judging the ancient Hebrews from recovered artifacts, must have concluded that they were unproductive, imitative, and untalented. And even where the post-Exilic period offers more examples of Judaic manufacture, there are none that would give the least clue to the narrative power and the boldness of thought and symbol that went into the Bible. The workmanship of Hebrew artists remains naive and inept. Allowing for the fact that little has survived the devastations of Samaria and Jerusalem; allowing for the general rule that it is precisely the best metropolitan art which most insistently invites theft and destruction, one is still struck by the crudeness of Hebrew pottery forms and decoration.
Not that the aesthetic impulse is unacknowledged. Rosettes, stars, and ornamental borders do appear, as on ossuaries (clay or limestone chests for the reburial of bones); but they are clumsily done—one is tempted to say, inattentively—though there was a guild of craftsmen in Jerusalem responsible for their production. Art they are not. The aesthetic transformation of the raw material has not taken place. What they possess is at best the moral-sentimental charm of utter artlessness. Nothing learned or acquired comes between impulse and execution. And there seems to be little desire to arrest admiration, let alone contemplation. If gifted neighbor nations were seeking for, and achieving, perfection in the management of plastic forms, the Hebrews, one feels, weren’t even trying. A profound unconcern with finite forms seems to have precluded the cultivation of skill in the making of images.
Indeed, it is worth asking what motives there were to induce art among Israel’s neighbors. It will be found that they were, one and all, incompatible with the single-minded God-obsession of the Hebrews.
Was the image to be an effective instrument of magic, like the Egyptian funerary statue or relief? There was the Second Commandment to restrain such labors.
Was art to manifest the supreme glory of the king, as did the art of Babylon? The Hebrews were too conscious of the king’s contingent status under God to have much heart for such an enterprise.
Was art to be a luxury for the enhancement of the sensuous life, like the tinsel of Tyre and Sidon? There was the puritanism of the prophets to degrade all decoration into frippery and to damn its pretensions. “The Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornament,” says Isaiah (3:18).
Or was the work of art, after the Greek fashion, to incarnate some formal principle of timeless, sacred, and immutable perfection? The underlying impulse of Greek art was to put forth the unembodied prototype, the self-existent form of forms behind the drift of accidence. But this impulse too was inadmissible within the Hebrew frame of thought. In the Biblical conception of a holy and transcendent God, nature, though real, was desanctified, along with all its forms, whether visible or antecedent. Worship belonged to the living God alone, and there was no such thing as Beauty, Fruitfulness, Number, or Essential Reason to be personified in myth or incarnated in aesthetic form.
The creative originality of the Hebrews, therefore, is to be looked for not in their art, but in the fact of their iconoclasm. On the evidence of this exhibition their position on art, down to the Common Era, strikes one as a case of studied indifference. Life, they seem to say, is too short for art
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Passing into the Talmudic era we note a change of attitude. “In the days of Rabbi Abuna,” says the Tractate Avoda Zara, “they began to depict designs on mosaics, and he did not hinder them.” Synagogue decoration in the 3rd century c.e. seems to have been widespread and often sumptuous. And since the excavations in the early 1930’s at Dura Europos, we possess at least one set of fine synagogue frescoes. Dura is not represented in this show. But there are Jewish lamps of baked clay depicting Samson “between the middle pillars of the House”; Daniel confronting a lion; or the imagined facade of the destroyed Temple. There are also more monumental carvings of the Menorah and the Arc of the Covenant on wheels—all executed with a rough simplicity and want of skill. One is reminded of St. Augustine recommending a “diligent negligence” (rather than a Ciceronian polish) to the preacher.
At the exhibition almost an entire wall is given over to a large mosaic, part of the floor of the 6th-century Synagogue of Beth Alpha. It represents, with unbelievable naivety, the sacrifice of Isaac. On one side stands Abraham, shapelessly garbed, a carving knife in his right hand, his left tossing the infant Isaac on to the flaming altar, or perhaps holding him aloft for emphasis. Both figures, identified by Hebrew characters, look squarely at the spectator, as if to say— “We are not self-engaged; we act for you.” In the center is “the ram caught in the thicket”—a woolly toy of an animal, tethered to a levitating shrub. Above the beast is the hand of God protruding from a cloud. Two fuzzy-haired dolls and an amorphous donkey at the left represent the servants waiting. Three rudimentary twigs in the leftover spaces take care of the landscape.
Once again, the manner is too unprofessional, too innocent to sustain aesthetic criticism. It is a debased naturalism that lacks all feeling for stylistic abstraction. The promise of Dura Europos has come and gone. Done three centuries later, Beth Alpha marks a descent into a folksy primitivism. And yet it did not fall below the expectation of the donors. A Greek legend under the sacrifice scene reads: “May the craftsmen who carried out this work, Marianos and his son Hanina, be held in remembrance.”
So they should be. For though their work was once a decline, it may yet become the ground of ascent for a new liturgical art. There has been some interest lately in modern art for American synagogues. If the interest is genuine then there is much inspiration in these ancient Hebrew efforts. Here, ready to hand, is a repertory of symbols and, more important, a flat, rugged, frankly symbolic style that easily translates itself into contemporary terms. For those whose Jewish interests go beyond antiquarianism this challenge is perhaps the highest value of the present exhibition.
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