How a Dead Man's Image Became a God

Idol worship did not begin with a theology. It began with grief.

The account comes from Jerahmeel, who found it in the book of Strabon of Caphtor, and it traces a line from Nimrod to Bel to Ninus with the exactness of a legal history. Nimrod, according to this source, was the son of Shem rather than Cush, and his kingship began in Babylon. His son Bel succeeded him. Bel's son Ninus succeeded Bel and captured the land of Ashur and built Nineveh, a city whose length required thirty days to walk from end to end. Ninus also defeated Zoroastres the Wise, who had written down the seven sciences on fourteen pillars, seven of brass and seven of brick, so that they would survive both water and fire. Ninus burned those books. He was not a man who tolerated rival forms of power.

When Bel died, Ninus was not ready. He carved an image in his father's exact likeness and called it Bel, after his father's name. He grieved at the loss, and the image was how he held onto him. He called all the gods Bel after his father's name, so that the word spread across the empire meaning both the deity and the man. Then something happened that Ninus had not planned. He discovered that anyone he hated, any enemy or criminal who came before the image of Bel in supplication, was pardoned. The image interceded. Ninus honored its rulings.

Word traveled. The whole world began to honor and worship the god Bel. Some gods were called Baal, and there was a Ba'al Pe'or and a Ba'al Zebub. One man's monument to a dead father had become the engine of a religious system spread across the ancient world, and the account in Sefer haYashar records the spread with the tone of a chronicler watching something inevitable unfold.

The calendar is precise: in the forty-third year of the reign of Ninus, Abraham was born. On that same day, the first King Pharaoh began to reign in Egypt. The name Pharaoh belonged to every king of Egypt until Ptolemy; the name Antiochus to every king of Assyria; and the name Caesar to every king of Rome. The world was organizing itself into dynasties and divine names while a child was being born in Babylon who would spend his life dismantling what Ninus had built.

The Book of Jasher preserves Abraham's upbringing inside this same world. His father Terah kept twelve gods of wood and stone, one for each month of the year, and served each one with meat offerings and drink offerings in its appointed month. All the great families of the earth had done the same. Even Noah's descendants, within a generation of the flood, had forgotten the God of the flood and built wooden gods to replace Him.

When Abraham was young and studying in hiding with Noah and his son Shem, he watched the sun cross the sky one day and concluded it must be God. When it set, he turned to the moon. When the moon set and the sun rose again the next morning, he understood: neither the sun nor the moon was God, because neither endured. Both were servants of another Master. He had arrived at monotheism by watching the sky for a single day and night. The conclusion seems obvious once you see it. No one around him had seen it for generations.

When Abraham was ten years old, Ninus died. His wife Semeramit ruled Assyria for forty-two years. When she died, her son Shim'i built the city of Babylon. The succession continued without interruption, and underneath the succession, Abraham grew into the man who would challenge everything the succession had built. The idol worship that began with Ninus carving his father's face in stone, that had grown into the Ba'al cults and the Bel temples and the twelve wooden gods in Terah's house, would be challenged by a man who asked the customers in that house a simple and devastating question: how old are you? And you bow to something we made this morning?

The line from Abraham to the confrontation with Bel worship is direct. The same tradition in Ginzberg's Legends that traces Abraham's early realization about the sun and moon also records that he spent thirty-nine years in Noah's house learning the ways of God before he emerged into a world that had already forgotten Him. Every idol in every household descended from the same grief Ninus had refused to work through. Grief is not always innocent. What Ninus built out of mourning required generations to dismantle. The dismantling was violent, and it began with a child who looked at the same sky everyone else looked at and asked who made it.

What Ninus had not understood, and what Abraham would spend his life demonstrating, is that an image cannot intercede. It can only absorb the projections of those who need it to. The pardons Ninus granted in Bel's name were his own pardons, given through a carved face.