Brent A. Strawn Editorial Introduction: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Hebrew Bible The evidence from the Cave of Lascaux and comparable, even earlier prehis- toric sites demonstrates that long before human beings wrote linguistic signs they were adept at making quite beautiful artistic ones. Art antedates written text, that is, and by millennia. Of the two, artistic image and written word, it is the image that is, quite irrefutably, the prior human communicative system, the more fundamental Urform. To be sure, visual representation is a kind of symbolic communication that can also be spoken of in terms of language (the so-called “linguistic turn”), but, as theorists have increasingly noted, language, too, can be spoken of in terms of image (the “pictorial turn”). In these latter days, therefore, word and art take turns leading and following and perhaps that is the more excellent way – image and word, text and art proceeding always somehow together. 1 That kind of synergy is the way it has been with art and the Word par excellence, Holy Scripture, which comes to us in an irreducibly logocen- tric, though not necessarily logomonic, form. 2 In truth, the conjunction of art and biblical text has a starting point: the birthday for the academic study of the Hebrew Bible in light of ancient Near Eastern iconography is 1972, when Othmar Keel published his breakthrough book Die Welt der altorientalischen Bildsymbolik und das Alte Testament: Am Beispiel 1 See esp. the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, for example: Iconology: Image, Text, and Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); idem, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); idem, “Word and Image,” in Critical Terms for Art History (2 nd ed.; ed. R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 51–61; idem, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and, more immediate to the study of the Hebrew Bible, R. P. Bonfiglio, Reading Images, Seeing Texts: Towards a Visual Hermeneutics for Biblical Studies (OBO 280; Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). 2 See, inter alia, J. M. F. Heath, Paul’s Visual Piety: The Metamorphosis of the Beholder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). HeBAI 13 (2024), 1–5 DOI 10.1628/hebai-2024-0002 ISSN 2192-2276 © 2024 Mohr Siebeck Dies ist urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material. Bereitgestellt von: Duke University Libraries, 11.04.2025