Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Nabataean
1st-millennium BCE, 1st-century
Eilat, Israel: Eilat Mountains Reserve
86%
Beit-El. 4th century BCE-1st century CE
Toward the center of a small hill that is more of a pile of boulders, called Yocheved Hill, at the periphery of the ancient copper mines of Timna, you can find an engraving chiseled into one of the stones. It is about 20 inches tall and 12 inches wide. You can be right next to it without knowing it is there — even when you know it is there and are looking for it, it is hard to notice. To the contemporary viewer, it looks like the geometric façade of a house. To its Nabatean makers, it was an eye-god idol: a schematic depiction of a face with two rectangular eyes. This kind of icon was prevalent throughout the Nabatean world, including in the city of Petra and across Wadi Rum. The story told in today’s touristic Petra is that these carved deities were given eyes so that they could enjoy the sight of the offerings which worshipers would lay before them. In the Hellenistic world, such sacred stones were called baetyls, a word derived from the Semitic compound Beit-El: Beit meaning "house" and El meaning "god." In Genesis 28, which recounts Jacob's dream, Jacob took the stone that had been under his head while he slept, poured oil on it, and called it Beit-El. In light of this semantic duality, this carving's visual duality of a façade and a schematic visage becomes especially meaningful, implying an ontological complexity: there is a slippage at play here between being and representing. In the story of Genesis, the Jewish God creates the world through language — through naming. The image engraved on this boulder could be understood as a representation of a god. But in the practice of ancient stone worship, the baetyls were actual embodiments of the deity: they were gods themselves. This is not a house of god as a metaphor; it is the actual deity. Perhaps this was a very early theological predecessor of the much later Catholic idea of transubstantiation. Both Jewish and Catholic Christian traditions embed a magic of creation and transformation in language. Even today, magicians retain popular secret spells: hocus-pocus and abracadabra are derivatives of sacred language. Abracadabra comes from the Hebrew/Aramaic evra ke-divra — “I will create as I speak.” Hocus-pocus echoes the Latin sacramental phrase hoc est corpus — “this is my body.” The secularization of these transformative practices set the stage for the ready-made art object and conceptual art of the 20th century. (AE, 2026)