The two-day Jewish holiday of Shavuot — Hebrew for “weeks,” as in the four weeks that follow the holiday of Passover called the Omer — which begins on sunset of May 26, celebrates the revelation at Mt. Sinai where God gave the 10 Commandments to the Israelites.When the Jews proved unable to bear the divine voice, Moses was appointed to serve as an intermediary, as detailed in Exodus 20. But Exodus 32 elaborates on the events leading up to and immediately following the Sinai revelation.
God tells Moses in verse 7, “Go, descend, for your nation, which you [emph. mine] took out of Egypt, has acted destructively. They have have strayed hastily from the path to which I directed them. They made for themselves a graven calf, and they bowed and sacrificed to it and said, ‘This is your God, O’ Israel, which redeemed you from Egypt.'”
The rest of the story is legend, from Joshua’s confusion (he thinks the Jews are at war when he hears the idolatrous racket) to Moses smashing the Tablets of the Law and making the people drink the Golden Calf, which he has pulverized to powder. Moses and those who weren’t tempted to sin killed about 3,000 sinners that day, according to verse 28.
Along the way, there’s a curious verse which almost reads as an editor’s note, as Moses descends the mountain. “And Moses turned and went down from the mountain, and the two Tablets of the Testimony were in his hand — tablets which were written from both sides, they were written from this and that end,” states verse 15. The next verse adds, “And the tablets were the creation of God. And the writing was the inscription of God, etched onto the tablets.” That translation of the Hebrew harut as “etched” is a controversial one, as rabbinic interpretation states that the words of the 10 Commandments were carved through the tablets, rather than scratched into the surface.That means that there was a miracle at work, for the rabbis (in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath 104a and Tractate Megillah 2b, for example) interpreted the verses as meaning that the letters were carved through the tablets, and yet the words read correctly from both sides.
If one imagines cutting letters out of a piece of paper and then turning the paper around, the words would be backward. But the Tablets of the Law, according to the rabbis, read properly from both sides. And, according to the rabbis, there was another miracle. Certain Hebrew letters have dots inside of them, which, if carved through a tablet, would need to remain suspended mid-air. If one carved an English letter ‘B,’ for example, the two shapes of “negative space” inside the bee would be lost under normal circumstances. But that wasn’t the case with the tablets, where the negative space hung in the air of its own accord.
It’s no surprise that few artists have been so bold as to try to tackle the complicated biblical subject of God writing the tablets, but William Blake, the English painter, poet, and amateur theologian, often tread fearlessly where others wouldn’t touch with a ten foot brush. Blake — whose grasp of Hebrew I’ve questioned in this article in the Jewish Daily Forward — represents God from behind, having written a single letter, yud.
Yud is a curious letter to start with as the first word of the 10 Commandments actually begins with an aleph. As I noted in the Forward article, Blake just may not have known Hebrew. Or, he may have been aware from his dabbling in Christian Kabbalah that the letter yud was the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, so perhaps he intended it to represent the number of commandments. Or, perhaps Blake, who used Hebrew inscriptions of the Tetragrammaton in other works, intended to depict the divine name, Jehovah (Yehova in Hebrew, as Indiana Jones narrowly remembers before plunging to his death).
But there may be another aspect to Blake’s decision to use the letter which is simultaneously the most basic Hebrew building block, the letter which most resembled a suspended form floating through the air, and roughly the shape of the negative space which would have miraculously hung inside the other letters.
For more Iconia coverage of Shavuot and art, check out last year’s post, “Is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot making a mountain out of a mole hill?” and the previous year’s post, “Seeing thunder and hearing lighting: the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost) and its metaphor for Jewish art.”