Gott im Bild

In the present day, the term ‘idol’ is often associated with a personality cult, but it still contains traces of its ancient meaning, namely above all the idea of worship. But this exactly creates a problem for the faith in God attested in the Old Testament. Worship and imagery obviously contradict the Old Testament commandment of worshipping the God of Israel without any image. This study fills a gap in the research in theological and religious studies by systematically exploring the various uses and connotations of the term eidôlon. The starting point is an examination of the use of eidôlon in Greek literature and in Egyptian sources from the Hellenistic period. The main part of the work is devoted to the various connotations of the term that later find their way into the Septuagint, the Greek Bible. There, as well as in later Jewish-Hellenistic literature, eidôlon becomes the terminus technicus for the pictorial representation of deities.