the Week of Proper 26 / Ordinary 31
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Bible Dictionaries
Statue
Vine's Expository Dictionary of OT Words
or Tselem (צֶלֶם, Strong's #6754), “statue; image; copy.” Cognates of this word appear in Ugaritic and Phoenician (perhaps), Akkadian, Aramaic, and Arabic. Old Testament Hebrew attests it 17 times.
This word means “statue”: “And all the people of the land went into the house of Baal, and brake it down; his altars and his images brake they in pieces thoroughly …” (2 Kings 11:18; cf. Num. 33:52).
This word signifies an “image or copy” of something in the sense of a replica: “Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land; and ye shall give glory unto the God of Israel …” (1 Sam. 6:5). In Ezek. 23:14 tselem represents a wall painting of some Chaldeans.
The word also means “image” in the sense of essential nature. So Adam “begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth” (Gen. 5:3). Human nature in its internal and external characteristics is what is meant here rather than an exact duplicate. So, too, God made man in His own “image,” reflecting some of His own perfections: perfect in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, and with dominion over the creatures (Gen. 1:26). Being created in God’s “image” meant being created male and female, in a loving unity of more than one person (Gen. 1:27). It is noteworthy that in Gen. 1:26 (the first occurrence of the word) the “image” of God is represented by two Hebrew words (tselem and demut); by selem alone in Gen. 1:27 and 9:6; and by demut alone in Gen. 5:1. This plus the fact that in other contexts the words are used exactly the same leads to the conclusion that the use of both in passages such as Gen. 1:26 is for literary effect.
In Ps. 39:6 tselem means “shadow” of a thing which represents the original very imprecisely, or it means merely a phantom (ghost?), a thing which represents the original more closely but lacks its essential characteristic (reality): “Surely every man walketh in a vain show [tselem]; surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them” (cf. Ps. 73:20—the word represents a “dream image”).
These files are public domain.
Vines, W. E., M. A. Entry for 'Statue'. Vine's Expository Dictionary of OT Words. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/vot/s/statue.html. 1940.
