Cosmology and religious culture in Jewish and Byzantine art

Abstract

Both Jewish and Christian exegetes understood the desert Tabernacle and its implements to have been designed according to the “pattern” of Creation, since Moses was instructed on Mount Sinai to build the Tabernacle “after their pattern, which is being shown thee on the Mount” (Exodus 25:9, 40; 26:8). The Christian Topography, a sixth-century Byzantine manuscript suggests a visual schema for this “pattern,” a rectangle topped with an arch to portray both the Tabernacle and the Cosmos. This schema is very similar to a Jewish visual symbol of the Temple found on the Bar Kokhba coins from 132–135 CE, in Jewish funerary art of the third and fourth centuries, in synagogue art of fourth to the seventh century, and in a fourteenth-century illustrated Spanish haggadah. According to the Christian Topography, the horizontal line separating the rectangular part of the schema from the arched dome alludes to both Creation and the Tabernacle. For the former it represents the firmament that was created on the Second Day to separate the Earth and the Heavens above. For the latter, it denotes the parochet—the curtain—that separated the Holy and the Holy of Holies. This chapter discusses Jewish and Christian visual compositions that show how cosmology and religion can interrelate.