Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Banyai AT t-online.de (Michael Banyai)]

Hallo Peter,

I don´t know how you perceive this but it is for my sensibilty a quite 
obscene detail to sit on a camel´s saddle onatop of the teraphim. Except one 
was representing a riding scene and a saddle would make peculiar sense. The 
judean variant made out of this a camel´s saddle.

And why does Genesis treat this scene should this have been some unimportant 
teraphim arriving with Rachel - so unimportantr that they had no religious 
consequence. Well I suppose, that such an antique reminiscence/memory would 
exist only if it was a rather memorial event. The arrival of THE cult image 
itself. The proto-icon of those images proliferating later in Israel.


I don´t beleave that any in Genesis is only for gossip.

> The very good reason why the teraphim (not ephods, no suggestion that 
> they were calves, no one knows) were hidden under a saddle is that there 
> was already a saddle on the camel and that is what Rachel would be 
> expected to sit on.
> 
Best regards,

Bányai Michael
Stuttgart