Arts of Description

Psalm 115 is among the Bible’s major poems about cult statuary. Scholarship on these poems tends to focus on ontological issues, drawing on Mesopotamian rituals of enlivening and asking to what extent ancient Israelites and Judahites regarded images as alive, instantiating a deity’s presence, or contending with a monotheistic worldview. In such treatments, these poems are considered part of a continuous discourse of “anti-idol polemics,” in which the purpose of these poems is to eradicate or “deface” images with rhetoric. Instead, considering its art of description as an example of ekphrasis, Psalm 115 reveals other potentials within the constellation of ideas about images. The poem certainly denies the liveliness of the image. But by its very denial the ekphrasis manifests the image: it makes a face appear. How do descriptions of images help us to understand the rich and complex world of ancient ideas about the fabricated and the real? Psalm 115 uses ekphrasis as a technology to navigate the real by describing images as votives that correspond not to deities but to their human makers.