A number of years ago, in the course of teaching a survey of Western art from late antiquity to the modern era, I was struck by how many of the works we discussed in class were based on episodes from the Hebrew Bible. Considering this, I initially ascribed the frequency to my own predilection for these subjects. I must have been increasing the Hebrew-biblical content so as to focus on a narrative and religious tradition in which I was raised, I thought. I also happen to teach at a school, Yeshiva University, whose undergraduate students generally come from traditional Jewish homes and whose mission is guided by Jewish values. Maybe I was tipping the scale toward such material to satisfy not only my own taste but the value system of my audience and institutional setting as well.

But the more I thought about it, the more this didn’t seem to explain the phenomenon. In surveys of Western art and art-historical textbooks—in which the greatest or most important art works and expressions of artistic patronage and culture are featured—there is really no avoiding subjects that come from the Hebrew Bible. They are an integral and constant part of the art-historical tradition and are linked to some of its greatest masterpieces, most significant stylistic developments, and richest forms of artistic expression. One would be hard pressed to tell the story of the development of art from late antiquity to the modern period without regularly using examples of art works based on episodes or figures from the constituent parts of the Hebrew Bible—from the Torah (The Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (Prophets), and K’tuvim (Writings). Indeed, one could do so exclusively using such examples, for key stylistic and thematic innovations often occurred in the rendering of Hebrew-biblical stories, and some of the most recognized works of art depict Hebrew-biblical figures, Michelangelo’s sculpture of David and Rembrandt’s painting Moses with the Ten Commandments being only two of the most famous.

And this realization led to another—one that made me less comfortable. While the subject matter of so much important art was taken from the Hebrew Bible, the spirit in which it was produced was less related, skewed from its source. For every David, echoing the biblical ideals of individual sacrifice, providential guidance, and good triumphing over evil that are rooted in the story of David’s triumph over Goliath, there are also numerous works that upend or overturn longstanding Jewish interpretive tradition. And while Rembrandt’s depiction of Moses presenting the Ten Commandments may reflect, as has been suggested in these pages, a distinctly Jewish perspective on the moment when Moses descends from Mount Sinai with the second set of tablets of the law, there are many more paintings and sculptures from the Western tradition that play loosely with Jewish interpretation, if they do not downright subvert it. Many of the Catholic Church’s most stingingly anti-Jewish theological pronouncements were expressed through visual programs and were absorbed into the vernacular religious tradition not through texts but through church altarpieces, domestic icons, and personal prayer books.

So, which is it?

Does Western art function as a showpiece of Hebrew-biblical ideas and tradition, or does it undermine them? Do works from the Western canon reveal deep truths about the revolutionary vision at the heart of Judaism’s holy book, or do they obfuscate it?

The answer to these questions is, to varying degrees, I would suggest, yes and yes. The Hebrew Bible had a profound creative impact on art and visual culture. It helped artists to invent new means of telling stories visually, to imagine new ways to think about their role, and to conceive new ways of practicing their craft.

At the same time, the versions of Hebrew-biblical stories rendered for patrons and institutions of the majority Christian culture are dramatically different from how they are understood in Jewish interpretive tradition. (Much the same could be said for Islamic art, but we’ll leave that for a different essay.) If they don’t embody anti-Semitic stereotypes, they regularly reframe stories from expressing a Jewish theological narrative to articulating a Christian one. Such works of art were pervasive throughout the Christian world and played a powerful role in spreading Church doctrine and policy, especially in the pre-modern era, when large swaths of the population were illiterate and visual programs were vital educational and ideological tools. Since the vast majority of art from late antiquity up until at least the 19th century was produced in response to commissions, often via institutions or patrons linked to institutions or serving in official capacities, art could be characterized, in general, as expressing the general religious perspective—one that ran counter to Jewish ideas and tradition.

In other words, if one is interested in understanding art as an expression of human achievement and cultural progress, one has to contend with the role of Christianity in the development of the artistic tradition. In turn, one is likely to be surprised by what one finds: an artistic tradition that is unimaginable without the Hebrew Bible and that can reveal deep truths about Hebrew Scripture and Jewish ideas. It strikes me—and now I am speaking primarily as an art historian—that the depth, magnitude, and quality of Hebrew Bible’s influence on Western art have not been sufficiently or properly understood. While the narrative and symbolic use of biblical subjects has long been recognized, little attention has been paid to how the character and vision of the Hebrew Bible seem to pervade the Western visual tradition. My goal here is not to address comprehensively the ways the Hebrew Bible is used by Western artists, but rather to offer some reflections on what motivated artists to take interest in Hebrew Scripture and to suggest some of the ways these motivations were driven not only by Christian institutions and patrons—factors outside of the Jewish cultural context—but also by the inherent character of the Hebrew Bible and the remarkable vision of human existence it represents.

II. What Prompted Artists to Be Interested in the Hebrew Bible?

I’d like to begin by trying to explain why art became such a popular medium for representing the content of the Hebrew Bible and why it’s so well-suited to capturing its character and spirit. It’s valuable in this context to keep in mind that Judaism has always distinguished itself by its embrace of the physical world and for the ways it accepts, even celebrates, humanity’s natural, sensual participation in that world. Jews achieve sanctity through tangible and sensory means: acts of charity, song, prayer, studying sacred texts—and art. One might say that the Hebrew Bible is the template for this vision. As much as it may run counter to common perception of the two oldest Abrahamic religions, it’s fair to say that this aspect of Judaism is far removed from the more ascetic spirit of the Christian Bible and of Christianity.

It’s not surprising, then, that the Hebrew Bible is a richly and vitally visual text, from how it tells stories to the ways characters and themes are introduced. The young King David is “ruddy, with fine eyes and goodly to look on,” while Samson is described as having long hair. When such physical descriptions are used, they inevitably represent meaningful information or reflect inner character traits. That or they’re used to signal the potentially deceptive role of external characteristics. Thus, God’s directive to Samuel that he should “Look not to his appearance and to his lofty stature” signals that Jesse’s strapping son Eliab is not destined to reign as king over Israel and that Eliab’s small-statured but brave and good-hearted younger brother David is. “For man sees with the eyes and the Lord sees with the heart,” a line from the first book of Samuel that follows almost immediately, might be considered the ultimate summation of this lesson.

Artists were sensitive to these descriptions and to the subtle, sometimes indirect connections that were made between physical characteristics and inner attributes. Indeed, Michelangelo’s seventeen-foot-high marble sculpture of David is exceptional not only because of its technical mastery and conceptual power but because its monumental scale is dramatically different from most painted and sculpted depictions of the young shepherd. David is typically represented in diminutive stature or scale, echoing the biblical text and highlighting the remarkable, miraculous nature of his victory over the giant Goliath.

The same attention to visual detail extends from the characters themselves to the interactions between them, which are evoked in physical language that easily lends itself to visualization. As a demonstration of Jacob’s character, we learn that Jacob grasps Esau’s heel in the womb. He strives to get ahead, often taking shortcuts, like impersonating his hairy older brother to receive their father’s blessing. Jacob’s name—based on the root aqeb, heel—serves as a kind of emblem of his behavior, at least until he encounters and wrestles with the angel, who renames him Israel. An illumination of the birth of Esau and Jacob that appears in a manuscript of Augustine of Hippo’s City of God from the late 15th century features this episode, serving to punctuate Augustine’s assessment of Jacob’s innate character and the potential for his later spiritual transformation.

The scenery and context of Hebrew-biblical stories is likewise highly evocative. The description of the first falling of manna for the Israelites in the desert reads like a cinematographer’s dream:

And it happened in the evening that the quail came up and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. And the layer of dew lifted, and, look, on the surface of the wilderness—stuff fine, flaky, fine as frost on the ground. And the Israelites saw, and they said to each other, “Man hu, What is it?” For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, “it is the bread that the Lord has given you as food.”

The richness of this account served as the jumping-off point for a 15th-century panel by the Netherlandish artist Dieric Bouts, produced as part of a large altarpiece for a church in Belgium, which included three other scenes based on subjects from the Hebrew Bible.

Dieric Bouts, The Gathering of Manna, ca.1464-67, oil on panel (St. Peter’s Church, Leuven)

Such visual description is, as this example indicates, not limited to human characters. The Bible’s stories give weight to the physical, natural environment—a world that is, of course, understood as being a product of divine creation. The episode of Balaam and the donkey, for instance, is punctuated by multiple references to land vistas: roads, fields, fences, lanes, and vineyards—each one serving to mark distinct plot developments and shifts in the narrative. Readers are invited to visualize and experience the scene as containing markers or stages of its sequential progress, and artists responded to these prompts.

Two paintings of the subject—one by the 17th-century Dutch artist Pieter Lastman and another by the 19th-century Austrian artist Joseph Anton Koch—reveal how artistically stirring the story could be, but also what different kinds of work the biblical account could inspire. Lastman, who bears the distinction of being one of Rembrandt’s teachers and whose composition influenced his student’s own version of the subject, focuses on the figural group of Balaam, the angel, and the donkey, whose sighting of the Lord’s messenger has prompted it to stop in its path, crouching under Balaam, his fury perhaps just being interrupted by shock at his animal’s verbal outburst.

Pieter Lastman, Balaam and the Donkey, 1622, oil on panel (Israel Museum, Jerusalem)

Meanwhile, Koch, who specialized in Neoclassical and Romantic landscape painting, broadens the point of view to highlight the divine apparition at right and the offering of sacrifices in the background, framing the episode within the broader context of the Balaam story. (These images are not only different visual accounts; their visual difference stems from a difference in interpretation Lastman and Koch took toward the story. This happened often: like talmudic and midrashic commentators, artists were inspired to conceive vastly different stylistic and thematic interpretations of Hebrew-biblical episodes.)

Joseph Anton Koch, Landscape with the Prophet Balaam and his Donkey, ca.1832, oil on canvas (Staedel Museum, Frankfurt)

To appreciate just how vividly descriptive and how oriented toward visual characterization the Hebrew Bible is, one need only compare it to the New Testament. Take the way key individual characters are described in the latter. This might sound surprising, but there is no physical description of Jesus in any of the four Gospels—nothing about his size, appearance, stature, features, or bearing. Church fathers, like Augustine, saw this absence as intentional and meaningful, suggesting it allowed readers to develop their own mental image of Jesus. Echoing Christianity’s universalist ideal, he wrote, “The physical face of the Lord is pictured with infinite variety by countless imaginations.” And, indeed, Christian theologians used a prophecy from the book of Isaiah, which refers to the devoted servant of the Lord, as a prooftext for this idea: “He sprung up like a shoot before Him, and like a root from parched land. He had no features nor decent appearance—we saw nothing in his looks that we might desire.” Jewish interpreters understand the servant of the Lord variously as referring to the prophet Isaiah himself or as a representation of collective Israel. These lines are often taken by early Christian writers as alluding to Jesus’s bearing, even though there are no palpably descriptive characteristics included. They read what immediately follows the words from Isaiah above—“Despised and shunned by people, a man of sorrows and visited by illness”—as a prophecy of Jesus’s Passion and a foretelling of the Christian story.

As representatives of an emerging religious faith, early Christian artists necessarily turned to earlier traditions as a primary source for their subjects and programs, sensitively mining and appropriating not only Hebrew-biblical but also Egyptian, ancient Near Eastern, and classical motifs.

The specificity and descriptiveness of language in the Hebrew Bible, which reflects, I would suggest, the ideal of particularity at the heart of Judaism, served both as inspiration for the appearance and character of individual works of art and also for the broader artistic enterprise of connecting meaning and the divine hand to physical nature and surroundings. The Hebrew Bible includes detailed descriptions of objects and structures used for ceremonial practice and worship, like the menorah and the Temple of Solomon, as well as references to specific artists, something the New Testament once again does not. Artists, therefore, could see themselves reflected in its text. But on a deeper level and in perhaps a more speculative vein, I suspect artists were also attracted to the Hebrew Bible because it has a sophisticated understanding of great art and of what is required to create great art.

This is most palpably evident in the account in Exodus of the design and creation of the Tabernacle. God informs Moses about the artist whom he has handpicked to lead the project: “See, I have called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. And I have filled him with the spirit of God in wisdom and in understanding and in knowledge and in every task, to devise plans, to work in gold and in silver and in bronze, and in stonecutting for settings and in wood carving, to do every task.” In practical terms, the text reflects awareness that each aspect of the making of the Tent of Meeting, the Ark of the Covenant, the covering for it, and all the furnishings contained in it require distinct skills across diverse materials and technical processes. These are skills, the Hebrew Bible makes clear, that Moses and Aaron do not possess and that are noteworthy in their level of specialization and accomplishment.

And while the myths of the Greeks and of other cultures attribute to the gods the power to pass on artistic skill, the Hebrew Bible indicates that it is human beings, inspired by God, that are endowed with the gift of inspiring and teaching others.

But the most vivid demonstration of the Hebrew Bible’s sensitivity to the realm of art is its characterization of Bezalel’s skill. It is not his technical expertise that is highlighted. His ability to “work in gold and in silver and in bronze, and in stonecutting for settings and in wood carving” comes across as something of an afterthought, briefly summarized in the words “to do every task.” Rather, it is his vision and conceptual insight that distinguishes him: “I have filled him with the spirit of God in wisdom and in understanding and in knowledge,” God says to Moses, suggesting that it is insight and intellect more than technical mastery that makes him worthy of the tasks assigned to him. Such emphasis on the intellectual source of artistic achievement—as opposed to associating artistic greatness with purely physical skill—is something we perhaps take for granted in the modern era. But this idea only came to be recognized and celebrated in the Renaissance era.

Indeed, Bezalel is characterized much as artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are described in 16th-century biographies—as endowed with divine spirit or a spark of divine creativity. Giorgio Vasari, the artist-writer often credited with inventing the genre of artistic biography in the Renaissance era, begins his account of Leonardo in the following way:

The greatest gifts are often seen, in the course of nature, rained by celestial influences on human creatures; and sometimes, in supernatural fashion, beauty, grace, and talent are united beyond measure in one single person, in a manner that to whatever such an one turns his attention, his every action is so divine, that, surpassing all other men, it makes itself clearly known as a thing bestowed by God (as it is), and not acquired by human art.

Vasari’s account of Michelangelo, who represented for the biographer the highest expression of artistic achievement, begins in even more elevated fashion:

[T]he great Ruler of Heaven looked down and . . . resolved . . . to send to earth a genius universal in each art. . . . He further endowed him with true moral philosophy and a sweet poetic spirit, so that the world should marvel at the singular eminence of his life and works and all his actions, seeming rather divine than earthy.

One recognizes in Vasari’s accounts traits that are strikingly similar to those that characterize Bezalel: marked by a divine spirit, endowed with preternatural abilities, granted both intellectual and technical skill.

In other words, the Hebrew Bible offered artists more than just a rich array of subjects and stimulating visual prompts and source material. It served as a model for the artistic enterprise. Artists—at least those of the pre-modern era—used the natural world and their observational faculties as primary tools of the creative process. The Hebrew Bible’s description of figures and settings and its expressive narratives served as vivid inspiration for artists. It echoed the way they saw the world.

At the same time, the Hebrew Bible envisioned art not primarily as a physical enterprise but as an intellectual, conceptual, or spiritual one. It modeled the idea that objects created by human hands could be vital to ceremonial processes and the expression of the divine presence—something that was recognized by the Christian Church and by the artists who worked to express its theological vision.

II. The Theological Role of the Hebrew Bible in Western Art

There is, of course, a rich and significant body of art based on the Hebrew Bible that was produced for Jewish patrons and for Jewish settings or contexts—from synagogues to private homes, and from haggadot to Esther scrolls. Yet the story of Western art is driven mostly by the history of Christian patronage and image making. Christianity was the dominant political culture from late antiquity to the early modern period, and Christian patrons were enthusiastic about art, seeing it as a means to convey doctrine and to evoke proper responses and understanding in viewers. One of the final pronouncements of the Council of Trent, the ecclesiastical body that instituted the Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, provided guidelines for the making and use of religious art. It asserted that “paintings or other representations” should prompt not only proper understanding of and salutary examples from Scripture but also induce viewers to “be excited to adore and love God, and to cultivate piety.”

So seriously was art taken that artists who didn’t properly follow these guidelines could be brought before the inquisition to defend their work. Such was the case with the Venetian artist Paolo Veronese, whose monumental Last Supper, filled with what the Church deemed inappropriate details and heretical motifs, was the subject of one such trial.

Of course, using art to profess and communicate Christian doctrine did not begin with the Venetians and the Counter-Reformation more broadly. The earliest Christian communities, even those operating quite literally underground to avoid offending the pagan authorities, used art as a potent object of devotion and propaganda. And even from these first stages, the stories of the Hebrew Bible formed the most common and important subjects. The early Christians mined Hebrew Scripture, what they called the Old Testament, for proof to support their perceived connections between events in the Hebrew Bible and those in the texts they called the New Testament. Through the doctrine of fulfilled prophecy, key episodes from the Hebrew Bible were re-interpreted to establish the pre-history of their messianic faith. They found it effective, therefore, to bring along imagery from that pre-history, which formed a visual language with which viewers would have been familiar. Among the episodes from the Hebrew Bible that frequently appear in early Christian art are those of “Moses striking the rock,” “three Jews in the fiery furnace,” “Daniel in the lion’s den,” and the story of Jonah. Each of them was used allegorically to refer to the life of Jesus and to evoke themes of salvation and resurrection.

A case in point is one of the many images painted onto the walls and ceilings of the Roman catacombs, underground passages, and chambers where thousands of early Christians (as well as Jews and adherents of pagan sects) were buried. Painted in the middle of a circle on the ceiling of one such early 4th-century Roman catacomb is the image of Jesus as Good Shepherd, one of the most common ways he was depicted in the early Christian era. Oriented around this central image are abbreviated depictions of four scenes from the story of the prophet Jonah, although only three of them are still legible.

Why is Jonah represented like this in the middle of a Christian catacomb? His story was read and understood by early Church followers as a precursor to the story of Jesus. The prophet being swallowed by the fish was likened to Jesus’s crucifixion and death; Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish were interpreted as a prefiguration of the three days Jesus spent in the tomb following the crucifixion; and Jonah’s expulsion and rescue from the fish were read as rebirth and thus prefiguring Jesus’s resurrection. In the context of the catacomb in which this painting appears, one recognizes an additional level of resonance the story of Jonah had: it alluded not only to the perceived association between the Hebrew-biblical prophet and Jesus, but also to the hope for rebirth and redemption of the souls of the dead who were interred in the chambers below.

Such typological associations between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were not dreamed up by the painter of this catacomb or by any other artists. They followed emerging ideas and doctrines that were based on the ways the Gospels and other canonical texts within Christianity re-interpreted the Hebrew Bible. In the Gospel of Matthew, for instance, the story of Jonah is invoked to predict the resurrection of Jesus and to distinguish and elevate Christian prophecy from and beyond its Hebrew predecessor. It goes without saying, of course, that such re-readings veer dramatically from Jewish interpretive tradition. But this really is the point, isn’t it? The Hebrew Bible had to be re-envisioned by Christian thinkers in order to lay the groundwork for their religious narrative and ideals. Art then came in and helped secure and popularize the theological associations that had already been made around the Hebrew Bible.

A later work of art reflects the way such typological associations came to be established systematically. A monumental pair of bronze doors were commissioned and possibly even designed by Bernward, bishop of Hildesheim, for the Church of Saint Michael in Germany in the first quarter of the 11th century. The doors were intended to serve as gates to the crypt or burial site at the lower level of Hildesheim and so, like the catacomb painting, referred to themes such as rebirth and redemption. In this elaborate scheme, eight scenes represented on the left-hand door are drawn from the book of Genesis, while eight scenes drawn from the Gospels are represented on the right-hand door. The scenes from Genesis proceed chronologically from top to bottom, beginning in the uppermost scene with the creation of Adam and ending in the lowermost scene with Cain killing Abel. The scenes from the Gospels proceed chronologically in the opposite direction upward, from the annunciation to Mary as the lowermost scene and the ascension of Jesus into heaven at the top.

The Bronze Doors of Bishop Bernward, Church of St. Michael, Hildesheim, Germany, ca. 1015, bronze

Each of the scenes from the Hebrew Bible represented on the left-hand door is paired typologically with a scene from the Gospels on the right-hand door. So, the third and fourth panels down from the top of the left-hand door, representing the fall of Adam and Eve and God reproaching Adam and Eve, are read as prefiguring the respective scenes on the right-hand door, the crucifixion and Jesus appearing before Pilate and Herod. Such parallels had become firmly established in the theological imagination and in the repertoire of artists by the late-medieval era when these doors were made. One might also say that art not only echoed such ideas but also strengthened the very way they were experienced. The orientation of scenes from Genesis on the left-hand door, tracing what Christians understand as the fall of man, meant viewers would literally see them from top down, while the orientation of scenes from the Gospels, revealing the movement toward redemption ending with a heavenly assumption, would be read upwards, reinforcing the effect of the ideas and the experience of the viewer.

This polemical, ideological reading of the Hebrew Bible in Christian art is perhaps most emblematically represented by the tradition of depicting Moses with horns. There are different theories about the origins of this motif, many tracing it to the first substantial Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible, the 4th-century Vulgate of Jerome, which became the core of the authorized Catholic edition of the Hebrew Bible. Jerome’s translation famously alters the description of Moses upon coming down from Mount Sinai from “Moses did not know that the skin of his face had glowed when he spoke with Him” to “And [Moses] knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord.” Much debate has revolved around the intention of Jerome’s translation. Some suggest that it evoked for Jerome the positive, divine associations with horns within the ancient world, others recognizing in it an innocent misunderstanding of the rare biblical Hebrew verb qaran, while others see in it a more sinister and coordinated attempt on the part of Christian adapters to eliminate any sense of Moses’ glorious effulgence or even to generate a disturbing portrait of a false prophet.

The visual tradition of representing Moses with horns did not begin until some seven centuries after Jerome’s translation, when the motif is found in English manuscript illuminations of the mid-11th century. Yet within just another two centuries so conventional had the representation of Moses as horned become that he is represented this way in a scene by the English manuscript illuminator William de Brailes of the Seventh Plague of Egypt–Hail, which takes place chronologically before Moses’ encounter with God at Sinai (from which the motif of the horns ostensibly emerges). But while this motif likely migrated from virulently anti-Semitic liturgical dramas and street performances sponsored by the Church, which featured Moses in a horned headdresses, the subsequent tradition suggests that even the horned figure of Moses functioned as a valuable, if somewhat ambivalent, symbol of the Hebrew Bible’s foundational role in Christian artistic programs. As prophet, lawgiver, and leader of the Israelites, who, under God’s hand, takes them out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in the promised land, Moses was considered within Christian theology as both a precursor of Jesus and a model for the pope’s role as intercessor on behalf of followers of the Church. The series of six monumental fresco paintings depicting scenes from the life of Moses that was executed as part of the Sistine Chapel’s first decorative program in the 15th century and Michelangelo’s famous marble sculpture of Moses—represented horned—which was conceived for Pope Julius II’s tomb in the early 16th century, highlight the necessary place of the Mosaic vision in the conception and representation of the Christian one.

One final example may serve to indicate how widespread such typological reading of the Hebrew Bible had become by the time the Church became Europe’s ultra-dominant religious authority, and how potently Christian art echoed such interpretation. Another of the subjects frequently depicted in the catacombs, as well as in early Christian funerary sculpture, is the binding of Isaac, which Christians called the sacrifice of Isaac and likened to Jesus’s crucifixion. In addition to the over twenty depictions of the episode that have been found in Christian catacombs, there are approximately 90 representations of the scene sculpted in relief on Roman sarcophagi, in addition to several important mosaics and dozens of smaller objects, including ivory pyxides, glasses, lamps, and bowls.

Indeed, the perceived parallel between Isaac and Jesus was one of the earliest typologies established by the Christian church. It was one of the topics discussed at the First Council of Nicaea, an assembly of bishops convened in 325 by the Roman emperor Constantine, among other things, to establish principles and consensus around issues related to the divine nature of Jesus and his relationship to God. Among the principles of faith promulgated through the Nicene Creed is that Jesus was “begotten,” that he came miraculously into being out of the essence of God the Father. This served to help generate for theologians a thematic correspondence between Jesus and Isaac, who at the beginning of the binding episode in Genesis is referred to as “your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love.”

Yet the fact that Abraham’s son was spared while the son of Christianity’s God was not enforced for Christians the incompleteness or imperfectness of the original biblical story. It was only in the New Testament, they understood, that a true or full form of sacrifice was achieved. As Melito of Sardis, an early church father, stressed regarding the unequal parallel between the two stories, while Jesus actually suffered and died, Isaac was released from his bonds. This difference represented for him and others one of the fundamental reasons why Christianity provided its adherents a path to achieve true salvation while Judaism only served as a signpost. It is not surprising, then, that the sacrifice of Isaac was frequently represented in early Christian art, associated as it was with the hope for rebirth and the renewal of the soul, creating a parallel between Isaac’s reprieve from death and the Jesus’s resurrection. Indeed, there is a line of interpretation within Christian theology proposing that Isaac was actually sacrificed on the altar by Abraham at Mount Moriah and that his “re-appearance” and existence in the following chapters of Genesis foreshadows Jesus’s miraculous resurrection.

Art served as a powerful theological instrument of the Church—and the Hebrew Bible played a valuable role in this process. Hebrew-biblical figures, like Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and Jonah, were familiar to much of the community from which Christianity emerged. Representations of their stories helped ground Christian believers in their faith and were used sensitively by artists to popularize doctrines advanced by founders of the Church and the theologians that followed. As we have seen, their interpretation of the Hebrew Bible recast the lives and journeys of the patriarchs and prophets as ancestral histories of Jesus and his mission. It would be easy but, I think, misleading however to characterize Western artists’ use of the Hebrew Bible as pervasively antithetical to traditional Jewish interpretation. Artists were sensitive to themes and ideas that were central to the Hebrew Bible—and drew inspiration from them—even when working for patrons far removed from a Jewish context. The Hebrew Bible influenced artists on other levels too, often much more worldly ones.

III. The Political Role of the Hebrew Bible in Western Art

One of these other uses was political. For centuries spanning the Renaissance and Baroque eras in particular, patrons and artists also turned to the Hebrew Bible when they wanted to express political ideals and social values. The liberational story of the Israelites’ path from bondage to freedom and national-covenantal sovereignty was regularly used to model the pursuit and attainment of political freedom and independence from tyranny. In many works of art, the Hebrew Bible served to symbolize the ability and inevitability of the righteous underdog, bolstered by moral strength and divine guidance, overcoming a more powerful, evil opponent.

The story of David defeating Goliath was the episode used most frequently by artists to evoke this idea. Michelangelo’s seventeen-foot marble sculpture of David was not intended to stand under the gaze of hundreds of tourists in the Accademia Museum in Florence. When it was unveiled in 1504, it stood in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, seat of the city’s government, as a symbol of the strength and independence of Florence and its citizens. David stands, having set Goliath in his sights, and is about to unleash the stone that will strike and kill his enemy, freeing his people from the threat of the Philistines. Beheld in its original location oriented toward the Arno River, the city’s primary commercial access route, a Florentine citizen might have imagined David staring down not his ancient biblical enemy but contemporary villains like the Dukes of Milan or Romagna, who threatened Florence’s physical and commercial sovereignty for parts of the 15th and early 16th centuries. The sculpture of David resonated for Florentines with its hope that they, like the Israelites, would, with steadfast courage and divine blessing, emerge victorious over their physically stronger foes.

Replica of Michelangelo’s David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy

The story of Queen Esther appearing before King Ahasuerus from the book of Esther was another especially popular theme during the late-Renaissance and Baroque eras, when city-states and nascent national entities sought to define and protect their independence from larger political forces like the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdoms of France, Spain, and Naples. This subject was especially popular in the republic of Venice, where artists from Tintoretto and Veronese to Antonio Palma and Artemisia Gentileschi represented it. Just as Florence adopted the figure of David as a symbol of their righteous struggle against more powerful foes, the doge and leaders of Venice, where Gentileschi lived around the time she painted her work, saw Esther as a personification of their city, symbolizing their drive to enlist political partners to defeat their sworn enemies. The theatrical quality of Tintoretto’s and Gentileschi’s paintings, evoking the appearance of staged dramas, echoes the parodic character of the Esther story itself. Though set in the world of the Persian empire and the culture of its court, recognizably evoked through its bureaucratic procedures, lavish banquets and dress, and strict etiquette, the dramatic quality of the book of Esther makes it resonate powerfully as political allegory.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Esther before Ahasuerus, ca.1628-1635, oil on canvas (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY)

Of course, just as patrons under the domain of the Church made use of Hebrew-biblical subjects to undermine the Jewish interpretive tradition and assert Christian theological doctrine, so too did courts and magistracies twist the political script of the Hebrew Bible. The patron of another of the many 17th-century paintings depicting Esther appearing before Ahasuerus—this one by the Italian Baroque painter Guercino—used the subject as an allegory to support the conversion of Jews to Christianity within Counter-Reformation society, with King Ahasuerus serving as the stalwart but gracious hero and Esther as its misguided but redeemable neophyte. It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic reversal of how the political fortunes of the Jews play out in the book of Esther than this; one can recognize in the way the Hebrew Bible was used typologically by early Christians to establish foundational theological principles a kind of template that was adapted to establish political values for the ruling classes as well.

IV. The Hebrew Bible and the Interpretive Character of Western Art

Until now, I have looked at  ways in which the Hebrew Bible was used as a vital source of theological programs and political allegories for Western artists. To a great degree, these were based on associations with the Hebrew Bible that were made not by artists themselves but by well-established tropes and standards. There were, however, ways artists made use of the Hebrew Bible that were wholly their own and particular to their profession.

On one level, I suspect they experienced the inherently revolutionary character of Hebrew Bible, which abandoned the idea of fate-driven polytheism in favor of individualized covenantal monotheism, as a model for their own radical artistic expression, a model that became more powerful and vital as the role and prestige of the artist increased in the wake of the Renaissance.

This role, as well as the social, financial, and creative pressures that accompanied it, led artists to identify with one biblical figure in particular: the prophet Jeremiah. More than any other prophet from the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah felt the burden of his calling. In addition to the physical suffering and administrative challenges put to him, Jeremiah’s dire predictions and somber assessments in a time of war made him far from popular, and he was constantly beset by anguish over his prophetic calling. Yet through this, he persevered with the mission he understood to be given to him by God. This combination of determination and disappointment, of duty and unworthiness, distinguish him in the context of the other prophets, and inspired artists to identify their lot with his.

Most famous and influential of the many artistic depictions of the prophet is Michelangelo’s painting of Jeremiah for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in which the artist fully embraced the identification of Jeremiah with the act and attitude of lament. Sitting hunched forward, his legs crossed over each other and his eyes downcast, he rests his head on and into his right hand, which seems to bear the head’s full weight. Michelangelo’s Jeremiah evokes both the way the prophet has been brought low by his prophetic mission, and his determination to endure. Many have recognized a self-portrait of the artist in Jeremiah’s features, and a mirror of Michelangelo’s own struggles in Jeremiah’s—struggles not only with patrons, including Pope Julius II and his advisers, with whom the artist famously quarreled, but struggles that were part of his identity as an artist. Beyond the intellectual capacity of artists touched on earlier, Jeremiah’s prophetic struggle expressed for Michelangelo and artists of subsequent eras tensions that came to be fundamental to their work—between personal independence and the oversight of patrons, between discrete taste and the value system of society, between the will to produce art and creative frustration.

As this characterization of Jeremiah suggests, artists of the Renaissance were looking for human qualities as well as theological ones. They sought to represent figures whose actions were guided by perceptible motivations or whose characters were revealed through expression, gesture, and bearing. Again, they turned to the Hebrew Bible as a source of such qualities, which one might term psychological. They found in it, far more than in the New Testament, a rich vein of psychological motivations—intrigue, dramatic and not always functional family dynamics, and individuals of emotional depth and tragic flaws. In other words, biblical episodes that were formerly viewed in purely theological terms were increasingly represented by evoking their psychological depth and emotional undercurrents.

In this context, the binding of Isaac played a new role for artists. When the professional guild responsible for the maintenance and decoration of the Florence Baptistery decided around 1400 to commission a new set of bronze doors to serve as the main entrance to the building, they organized a competition to determine the artist best suited for the job. The subject they called on the seven competitors to depict (in the form of a bronze relief) was the sacrifice of Isaac. Reflecting Florence’s return to economic and artistic flowering in the wake of the Black Death and echoing the legends of ancient masters engaging in artistic duels to reveal an artist’s preeminence, the competition for the Baptistery’s bronze doors is regarded as a key point in the birth of the Italian Renaissance movement.

Though only two of the entries in the competition survive, they are the two that were deemed the best—those of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi. The two works contain all the same elements from the story, but they represent two distinct narrative interpretations. While Brunelleschi’s Abraham is marked by steadfast determination to follow God’s command to sacrifice his son, Ghiberti’s reveals an Abraham who is decidedly ambivalent and conflicted. While Brunelleschi seems to reinforce Abraham’s supreme faith in, and abidance by, God’s command, Ghiberti uses the scene to mine its dramatic content and character. The difference between the two depictions highlights and echoes the divergence between two strands of biblical interpretation in the visual arts—between those that assert a theological interpretation and those that dramatize action in terms of human psychology and motivations. The monumentality of the binding of Isaac story is that it was able, through its associated symbolic meaning and its inherent narrative richness and depth, to prompt visual demonstrations of both strands of interpretation.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Sacrifice of Isaac, 1401, gilded bronze (National Museum of Bargello, Florence)

Filippo Brunelleschi, Sacrifice of Isaac, 1401, gilded bronze (National Museum of Bargello, Florence)

In the wake of this development, later Baroque artists, like Caravaggio, Rubens, and Rembrandt, among many other, used different tools—dramatic lighting, vivid expressions, legible gestures, and rich textural contrasts—to represent the binding of Isaac as a devastating psychological trial for Abraham and his son. Such works demonstrate how art had developed the ability to represent fully perceptible dramas, filled with urgency, tension, and conflict. It is in exploring the inner motivations and drama beneath the surface that Western artists were most inspired by the biblical story.

In this way, even for artists of the modern era, for whom religious subject matter did not occupy as prominent a place in their repertoire, Hebrew-biblical subjects continued to be influential. Of particular interest for the artists of the 19th century, when academic traditions of painting and sculpture were being challenged and overturned, was the episode of Jacob wrestling with the angel. For the great French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, the story of Jacob’s encounter with the angel served to represent his conception of art and  the struggle of the artist.

Delacroix painted the subject in the context of the last major project of his career: a series of three monumental wall paintings for the Chapel of Holy Angels of Paris’s Saint-Sulpice, a late-Baroque Catholic church whose interior the French state restored and decorated in the wake of the damaging upheavals of the French Revolution. The ambitious program took over twelve years to complete—from 1849 to 1861—and is documented through the entries in the artist’s own journal. Delacroix conceived of the all-night battle between Jacob and the angel as “an emblem of the trials which God sometimes sends to His chosen ones.” As one bound up in a physical struggle to achieve a blessing and, thus, an expression of his legacy for future generations, Jacob came to represent for Delacroix the ultimate struggle of the artist: one who, in his case, uses his talents and the tools of his trade to create a pictorial record that will live on after the artist’s death. This vision was embraced by contemporary writers, like the poet, critic, and essayist Charles Baudelaire, who championed Delacroix’s work, singling him out in a eulogy after the artist’s death in 1863 as the greatest religious painter of the 19th century. Baudelaire likewise recognized in Delacroix’s depiction of Jacob and the angel a metaphor for the role of the artist and for the struggle of artists in modern society.

And here the emphasis on psychological revelation led to an emphasis on metaphysical subjects. The Hebrew Bible offered artists a platform through which they explored new ways of representing ideas that lie beyond the physical world. The subject of Jacob wrestling with the angel was of particular importance within late 19th-century Symbolism—the movement of writers and artists who rejected naturalism, which was considered superficial and mutable, in favor of representing absolute and constant truths through metaphoric language and imagery.

Most significant among the visual artists in this movement was Paul Gauguin, who used the story of Jacob and the angel at a key point in his career when he was looking to move away from Impressionist painting, which used firsthand observation of the natural world as its primary source of inspiration. Gauguin sought to dislodge the basic tools of the visual artist, especially color, from their role as a means to represent the natural world, and to use them in the service of conveying abstract concepts and higher truths. The painting that most vividly expressed the artist’s vision was The Vision after the Sermon, painted in 1888, when the artist was living in a small rural river-port town in Brittany, in northwestern France, where he and several other like-minded artists had formed a commune in order to generate a new style and approach to art. Subtitled Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Gauguin’s work is meant to represent not an actual landscape, event, or religious narrative, but a manifestation of Jacob’s struggle with the angel in the imagination of a group of Breton women engaged in prayer after having listened to a sermon on the story.

Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon/Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888, oil on canvas (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh)

In a letter to Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin wrote, “For me, in this painting, the landscape and the struggle only exist in the imagination of the people praying, as a result of the sermon. This is why there is contrast between natural people and the struggle in its landscape, unnatural and disproportionate.” There is vibrant debate in Jewish sources over how to characterize Jacob’s encounter with the angel. Did it physically happen? Is it a visionary representation of an internal struggle? The tensions built into the story, revealed through its rich interpretive tradition, encouraged artists to break with earlier artistic practices and, in Gauguin’s case, to invent new ways of depicting the intersection of the material and immaterial world.

V. Recognizing the Richness of the Source

The Hebrew Bible has had a profound influence on the history of art, not only as an illustrative text with profound theological and political resonance, but also as a model for interpretation. Its narratively sophisticated and psychologically insightful stories, its rich interpretive tradition, and its inherently revolutionary spiritual character inspired dynamic responses in art.

It is my view that art historians have not sufficiently availed themselves of the richness of this source. This is not, of course, to say that there haven’t been many sensitive interpretations of individual works of art based on subjects from the Hebrew Bible or that there haven’t been broader attempts to analyze the role of Jewish culture on Western artists. To take just one example, the recent international conference, “Rembrandt Seen Through Jewish Eyes,” did exactly that. And the work that its organizers and participants— Mirjam Knotter, Steven Nadler, Shelley Perlove, Gary Schwartz, Larry Silver, Simon Schama, and Michael Zell, to name just some—have done in other contexts suggests that taboos handed down from centuries ago about interweaving Jewish culture and Western art may not be unshakable. But Rembrandt is perhaps the only major Western master with whom such an interpretive approach has significantly been used. Curators and art historians have continued not to explore the broader and deeper connections between the Hebrew Bible and Western art. If they did, they would find that the Hebrew Bible influenced the visual arts in ways well beyond the frequency with which biblical episodes or figures are used or the regularity with which biblical scenes convey religious or political allegory.

It is not a coincidence, as I have argued here, that many works of art associated with key stylistic and thematic innovations are based on Hebrew-biblical subjects. The Hebrew Bible offered artists a platform and model for depicting the inner life of characters and the motivations and psychology behind human actions. It inspired artists toward new ways of representing the immaterial world, and of expressing the tension between the physical and spiritual realms. It helped artists recognize fundamental challenges in creating art, in attempting to express higher truths in a chaotic and idiosyncratic human world. Delving more deeply into the original text of the Hebrew Bible, its associated religious and cultural context, and the rich interpretive tradition that follows in its wake would deepen and enrich the understanding and perspective of those interested in the visual arts.