Ancient Jewish Art

Leo Steinberg’s “Bible Age Relics and Jewish Art” are astounding conclusions about the art of the ancient Jews. Judgments based on exhibition are unproductive, imitative, untalented, naive, and inept—are not, careful archeological work, but reflect the new state.

Except to discharge the art of person, who created the spiritual structures as imitative and puerile, on the basis of a hastily unearthed collection of art crafts, does scant justice to scholarship and even less to this ancient people. They could only express in words and not in art symbols the theory that their feelings of awe and majesty of the human and divine.

There is sufficient evidence to the divergent. The chapters of Kings and Chronicles in the Bible are rich in description of the magnificence of the art products created by Jewish artists. These are not fanciful tales. Book Ages in Chaos by I. Velikovsky is described the Temple of Deir el Bahari near Thebes, which has the pictures of the gifts given by Solomon to Queen Hatshepsut (Queen of Sheba). He describes the bas-reliefs on the walls of the Karnak Temple in Egypt, in which are pictured the treasures brought by Thutmose III after sacking the Temple of Jerusalem.

For the ancient times, Bible disapproval has tended to derogate the role of the ancient Hebrews as an incomprehensible group.  Whose memories and influence are survived for the reason, that of their passionate devotion to a religious and spiritual idea. The time is here when serious art criticism should address itself to correcting another of which the memory of people influence was great in its own day in all phases of the human spirit.