Word: graven
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...Kippur, two doves--"the poor woman's sacrifice"--to celebrate a child's birth. Before buying an animal, visitors changed their Roman denarii (the dollar of the day) for shekels, or Temple coins, that had no portraits on them and so did not violate the Jewish prohibition of graven images. Herod appears to have allowed the money changers onto the Temple platform, which may have spurred Jesus' scourging of them in "my father's house." Joshua Schwartz, a professor of historical geography at Israel's Bar Ilan University, styles the stairway as a Judean version of London's Hyde Park...
This strain of Puritan denial of the graven image seems never to have quite vanished from American art. But how can you create a way of painting that is devoid, or at least as short as possible, of the delicious pleasures of light, shade, drama, color and suggestive texture--not to mention the primal infantile pleasure of smearing colored mud around on a virginal surface--associated with making a picture? The piety of this search, seen as an act of exemplary denial, is the ghost that haunts the machine of American abstraction--and the emotionless grids of LeWitt's work...
There's an instructive scene early in Jesus (CBS, May 14 and 17, 9 p.m. E.T.) in which Roman soldiers insist that their insignia be displayed in Jerusalem's temple and the priests vow to die rather than let graven images inside. TV producers might do well to observe a similar proscription when it comes to the Bible, given their tendency to engrave religion as a greeting-card punch line (God, the Devil and Bob) or a pious, thundering bore...
Bill Gates ran the word commandment through a database search and found that God had dumped a whole bunch of them on his Designated Population Group--no graven images, no stealing or coveting, keep the Seventh Day holy, and also what to eat and stuff--and then, later, to love God and love thy neighbor. Gates wrote...
...Commandments is divided into sections that correspond to the laws on Moses' tablets ("My Mammogram" counts the virile male physique as perhaps the ultimate graven image). Its theology is deeply personal, more biographical than biblical. "My Old Idols" remembers the crisp erotic sting of a parochial school instructor wielding a pointer while drilling pupils in Greek: "Accounts of murder and sacrifice/ Only suggested the heavy price/ I longed to pay at his behest." Born on the Main Line, an upscale, old-money suburban Philadelphia neighborhood, McClatchy has an aristocratic tartness that comes through both in his stanzas...