Not so. As Moses' arms were held up to give the Israelites victory, so Christ's arms were held up upon the Cross as Death is defeated by His death.
10 So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. 11 As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. 12 When Moses hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands upone on one side, one on the otherso that his hands remained steady till sunset. 13 So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword.
Icons or images (both coming from the Greek word
eikon, meaning "image") that are venerated and saluted=/=idols that are worshipped and served. Christ Himself is the visible image of the invisible God, and we are all ourselves icons of God.
Solomon filled the Temple with images and carvings and icons of plants and cherubim, and God saw fit to dwell within that Temple. Images and icons are not in themselves forbidden by Scripture--indeed, we have ruins of a Jewish synagogue from roughly 250 AD where the walls were absolutely covered in iconography, very reminiscent of Byzantine Christian iconography.
Dura-Europos synagogue - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaBecause of the paintings adorning the walls, the synagogue was at first mistaken for a Greek temple. Though this was quickly corrected by the vice-director of excavations
Robert du Mesnil du Buisson in
Les peintures de la synagogue de Doura-Europos (Rome, 1939). Mesnil also made detailed comparisons of the friezes from the Dura synagogue with those of the
mithraeum, the Christian baptistery, and the temple of the
Palmyrene gods.
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The synagogue contains a forecourt and house of assembly with painted walls depicting people and animals, and a
Torah shrine in the western wall facing
Jerusalem. The paintings cover the walls of the main "Assembly Room", using three levels of pictures over a
dado frieze of symbols in most places, reaching a height of about 7 metres.
The scenes depicted are drawn from the Hebrew Bible and include many narrative scenes, and some single figure "portraits"58 scenes in total, probably representing about 60% of the original number. They include the
Sacrifice of Isaac and other
Genesis stories,
Moses receiving the
Tablets of the Law, Moses leading the
Hebrews out of
Egypt, the visions of
Ezekiel, and many others. The
Hand of God motif is used to represent divine intervention or approval in several paintings. Scholars cannot agree on the subjects of some scenes, because of damage, or the lack of comparative examples.
Stylistically they are provincial versions of contemporary Graeco-Roman style and technique; several different artists seem to have worked on them. Technically they are not
fresco (paint fused into wet plaster) but
tempera over plaster. Earlier parts of the building have decorative painting with no figures. Some of the paintings have figures whose eyes have been scratched out, especially those in Persian costume. (See the figure on the white horse in the picture at right.)
Scenes from the
Book of Esther from the Dura-Europos synagogue, 244 CE
Scholars think the paintings were used as an instructional display to educate and teach the history and laws of the religion. Some think that this synagogue was painted in order to compete with the many other religions practiced in Dura Europos; the new (and considerably smaller) Christian church (
Dura-Europos church) appears to have opened shortly before the surviving paintings were begun in the synagogue.
The large-scale pictorial art in the synagogue came as a surprise to scholars, although they already suspected that there was a tradition of Jewish narrative religious art at this period, which had all been lost, leaving only traces in later Christian art. The discovery of the synagogue helps to dispel narrow interpretations of Judaism's historical prohibition of visual images.
Really?