I. PRIMARY IMAGES IN RELIGION
The Bible, as Western civilization's principal reli-
gious book, illustrates the pervasiveness of unself-
conscious imagery—only later to be distinguished as
metaphor—in primary or nontheoretical religious dis-
course. There can be no fixed boundaries delineating
what is “image” from what is not, as we shall see, since
various theories of religious metaphor will make these
demarcations at very different points, but a few obvious
examples drawn from various contexts of religious
usage will give at least preliminary substance to this
concept.
Prophetic speech, first, is rich with imagery, often
of great power. Even the comparatively straight-
forward threats and denunciations of the first great
prophet, Amos, are mingled with such images as the
personification of Israel as a prostrate young woman:
Fallen, no more to rise,
is the virgin Israel;
forsaken on her land,
with none to raise her up
(Amos 5:2; RSV).
His immediate successor, Hosea, used imagery of vari-
ous kinds to express God's agonized love for a faithless
people. God is depicted as a father and (in a mixed
image) as a compassionate herdsman.
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals,
and burning incense to idols.
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of compassion,
with the hands of love,
and I became to them as one
who eases the yoke on their jaws,
and I bent down to them and fed them
(Hosea 11:1-4; RSV).
Hosea is still better known for his image of God as
righteously angered but nonetheless loving husband of
the adulterous wife, Israel:
Plead with your mother, plead—
for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband—
that she put away her harlotry from her face,
and her adultery from between her breasts;
lest I strip her naked
and make her as in the day she was born,
and make her like a wilderness,
and set her like a parched land,
and slay her with thirst
(Hosea 2:2-3; RSV).
Not only in speech, but also in significant action, a
prophet could express his images. Hosea may have
actually married a whore as living enactment of his
central image, though scholarly opinion is divided on
this question. Certainly other prophets did communi-
cate in part through nonverbal imagery, however, as
is illustrated by Jeremiah who publicly broke a potter's
vessel after proclaiming “O house of Israel, can I not
do with you as the potter has done? says the Lord.
Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you
in my hand, O house of Israel” (Jeremiah 18:6).
Jeremiah, indeed, is an especially fertile source of
image in speech and action. God is represented as a
fountain of living waters (Jeremiah 2:13), a planter of
good seed (2:21), a husband (3:1), a father (3:22), a lion
(4:7), and so on. Other later prophets, like Ezekiel,
Deutero-Isaiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi con-
tinue to create and employ imagery in the service of
the prophetic ministry.
Devotional literature, despite its very different con-
text of use, is no less crowded with imagery. To take
a few obvious examples, one finds God pictured in
many of the Psalms as a rock, a shield, a fortress, a
horn, besides being represented anthropomorphically,
as in the familiar pastoral:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want;
he makes me to lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul
(Psalms 23; RSV).
Not all even of devotional images are so idyllic, of
course, nor so concerned as those above with security
and protection, but they are typical. A rather startling
contrast is presented by the discourse of apocalyptic
literature. The imagery of apocalypse, as in Daniel,
is far more removed from ordinary experience:
And four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from
one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles' wings.
Then as I looked its wings were plucked off, and it was
lifted up from the ground and made to stand upon two feet
like a man; and the mind of a man was given to it
(Daniel 7:3-4; RSV).
With the discourse of apocalypse, however, we have
come to the end of what deserves the title of primary
or unself-conscious religious imagery. The images are
consciously constructed with an esoteric significance
known only to the initiates. This phenomenon of en-
coded imagery itself is widely encountered in various
religious and cultural traditions, which justifies to some
extent the inclusion of apocalyptic imagery, as a pri-
mary religious expression, within the present section;
but by the time Daniel was being written (ca. 166 B.C.)
in Hellenized Palestine, the conscious distinction be-
tween levels of religious meaning had clearly been
made. We must go back to examine how this occurred.
