What Does Exodus 20:4 Mean?
You shall not make for yourself a hewn image, or any shape of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters under the earth.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:THE KEY
The command bars the seen world from becoming a carved container for the unseen.
THE MEANING
This command speaks to the impulse to make the divine graspable as something you can see and shape. It spans heaven, earth, and waters, closing every part of the visible order as a source of forms that can stand in for the one addressed in the preceding command. The boundary concerns representation itself: a made likeness cannot contain the one it depicts.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that the divine becomes more accessible when captured in a form you can own, display, or control.
THE ROOT
פֶּסֶל
pesel
GROWS FROM
פ־ס־ל
p-s-l
to hew, carve, or cut into shape
“hewn image” in this verse is pesel. The word translated “graven image” names an object by the human act of carving that gives it shape. The root keeps that act inside the noun: the command bars a made form from claiming to be an adequate likeness of the one addressed in the preceding command.
ALSO GROWS
pāsal: to hew or carve
פָּסַל
It names the shaping action behind the carved object.
pesilim: carved images or idols, plural
פְּסִילִים
The plural form carries the same root into the many carved representations the command excludes.
THE PATTERN
When no visible form has disclosed the divine, a human-made likeness cannot claim to contain it.
So guard yourselves very carefully, for you saw no shape of any kind on the day the LORD spoke to you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire.Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.Since then we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think the divine is like gold, or silver, or stone, carved by craft and by human imagining.THE THREAD
Lest you ruin yourselves and make for yourselves a hewn image, the shape of any form, the likeness of male or female,The phrase “graven image” in both verses is פֶּסֶל (pesel, “carved image”), from פ־ס־ל (p-s-l, “to hew or carve”). Deuteronomy links the act of carving to the making of a likeness, extending this verse’s scope from every realm to the act of producing a form.
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