CARVED IN STONE

A glimpse at some of the absurdities inherent in the beginnings of Abrahamic religions - all of them!

You've got to feel a bit sorry for the ancients, especially the ancient Egyptians who proclaimed their greatness in stone plaques and on carved monuments only to have the next generation come along and, occasionally, deface them to the extent that they were wiped from history. These days all you need is a rubber eraser or the delete key on your keyboard, but back then a hammer and chisel was barely enough to wipe a name from the stone it was etched into. And they did like to proclaim their deeds using the only medium they knew much about: stone. We are, after all talking about very early in the story of man's literacy, when Pharaohs ruled and life was hard for the common man and slaves.

These days we're so used to posters and placards that we barely notice them. Huge coloured images advertising this or that useless commodity proliferate and can be torn down in mere moments, to be replaced by others that are equally vacuous. But back in the day when a stonemason had to spend days working on a single pronouncement: you'd notice that all right, and if you could make sense of the language it was written in you'd read every word, every syllable, every nuance being imprinted on your brain (assuming the stonemason made no blunders, which they were known to do, maybe at the end of a week of back-breaking toil).

Stone was the medium for communication, then. Carved stone. Etched basalt. Sandstone engraved to beautiful perfection. It was part of life, like sex.

So when Moses (a bit of a mountaineer by all accounts) was offered a set of rules to present to his people by the lord God Almighty then they were bound to be inscribed in stone.

Pardon me?

The Creator, the Omnipotent, the Omniscient, having to communicate via the gift of stone carving? What is this? How can it be?

Surely a deity capable of creating a Universe and everything in it in under a week can do a bit better than offer his commandments on stone tablets, each one carefully etched and carved so that they made sense?

And although we might be tempted to suggest that the reason he used stone for his book of rules was because it was permanent, don't let us forget that it was quite a common practise for stone-masons, in the land Moses and his followers had just escaped from, to eradicate from the past what future generations didn't want to be reminded of. There are, for goodness sake, whole episodes of the life of some Pharaohs that have been wiped out, reduced to sandy dust and last seen blowing to anonymity on a desert wind.

But those rules, those laws, were quite important because if you believed the magic of a nomadic leader being offered them by an unseen deity at the top of a mountain then you had to believe in the whole kit and caboodle and accept that a deity that chose to communicate, in stone, on the tops of mountains, really exists. And the spooky thing is the people were ordered, on pain of the suffering of future generations, not to worship anything but the god who carves on stone and delivers his instructions in the rarefied air on the top of mountains.

No graven image, then, save on the stone tablets. It's a shame they exist, despite the assumed permanence of stone, as no more than an oral tradition because it would be good to see the language they were etched in. If they were etched at all, of course.

Reviews

[charlie]

It may be but one small half-step removed from idolatry, though one has to consider if the tablets were intended to serve as a token; an outwardly tangible reminder of the spiritual points spelled out in the commandments. The story shows that the newly liberated Israelites were so want for something concrete, they even melted down their gold and fashioned a bovine statue. That's when Moses broke the first edition in torment...(and slaughtered a few thousand of his tribesmen)... The tablets might be representative of placating to the fledgling strength of that particular crowd at that particular time...? (Yet, fast forward a few thousand moons, and the people lost their entire city - holy temple to boot...)

There could be meaning in it all, perhaps. Some things we'll probably never know. How about you, Peter: a dad of four. 72 yrs old... Are there any keep-sakes from your time so far which you might hold meaningful?

Don't let me leave without confessing my admiration for your writing. It's good stuff.

[Peter Rogerson]

The ten commandments resonate with most societies and still make sense today and no doubt the stone tablets were some sort of allegory defining an ideal future society - no bad thing. Moses required something concrete with which to convince his people, hence the stone tablets which probably never existed and have passed through aural history as being more concrete than they ever were (God showed me some laws etched in stone because here are the stones...)
Thanks for your comments.