Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Right from the off, the Ten Commandments enjoyed a pretty mixed reception. Within a few chapters of their foggy delivery from Sinai in Exodus 20.4, the Lord finds out in a fury that his "stiff-necked" people have already broken Number 2 by worshipping the golden calf. "They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them," he moans to Moses, an outburst of divine kvetching more than matched over the next three millennia by human demands for clarification, and by plenty of creative spin on the stuff about stealing, killing and adultery - not to mention coveting thy neighbour's ass.

On 5 March, Jewish Book Week (which opens tomorrow evening) will close with a further bout of far-from-reverent backchat. "Taking (on) the Tablets", a debate in association with The Independent, will see Helena Kennedy chair a panel of prize wranglers - Simon Baron-Cohen, Michael Bywater, Giles Coren, Anne Karpf, Piers Paul Read - in a scrutiny of the old orders and (perhaps) a search for some fresh additions.

Curiously enough, the first commandment to be flouted now looks again like the hottest prohibition of the lot. The divine ban on "graven images" and rival gods fed a deep-seated fear of idolatry. It persists among many monotheistic believers - a fear whose lingering force lies behind the genuine (as opposed to all the state- manipulated) alarm over the Danish cartoons.

Lest anyone imagine this is solely a Muslim taboo, remember that as recently as the 1950s Hollywood Biblical epics - notably The Robe and Ben-Hur - shied away from any direct depiction of the face of Jesus. A British film censors' veto on screening Jesus lasted until after the Second World War. And successive waves of Protestant iconoclasm left - in hundreds of British churches - bare interiors enclosed by whitewashed walls.

Indeed, the second commandment doesn't merely confine itself to banning sacred images. It stretches to cover "any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth". So don't even think about sketching that fish.

The Puritans' suspicion of the image, and their worship of the Word, left a mark on British culture deep enough - one would have thought - for us to spot the similarities between the idol- and icon-phobias often shared across the "Abrahamic" creeds. It may be silly beyond belief, but if so this is home-grown silliness, hard-wired into monotheistic minds - and not some alien fad.

A core of fierce iconoclasm, and a matching faith in the holiness of written scripture, fuels all the single-deity belief systems. Naomi Alderman (see page 25), who will also be appearing at Jewish Book Week, has the dying rabbi in her novel Disobedience remind his flock that God "could have given us a painting, or a sculpture, a forest, a creature, an idea in our minds to explain His world. But He gave us a book. Words."

The picture-hating God of Moses shows a distinctly spoil-sport attitude to eye-candy of all kinds. Early Christianity would soften this text-fixated rigour by drawing on the pagan visual glories of the Greek and Roman worlds. Later, many Muslim courts would also come to cultivate the forbidden splendours of figurative art.

Yet that old Mosaic ire over the divine image - and its human reflection - continues secretly to drive our arguments over blasphemy, sacrilege, pornography, privacy, decency and so on. For some unearthly reason, I was a bit startled to see the two naked ramblers at John O'Groats on a newspaper front page this week. God knows why.

Jewish Book Week is at the Royal National Hotel, Bedford Way, London WC1 (0870 060 1798; www.jewishbookweek.com) 25 February to 5 March