THE PROPHETS, THE PRIESTHOOD, AND THE IMAGE Of GOD 337 tion of the use of the metaphor “rock” with the deity in the Psalms 62. In addition to implying strength and durability, the stone metaphors also reveal that God is unlike human beings and is something other to which we cannot entirely relate. Abstract thinking about God rein- forces the sanctity or holiness of the divine. In addition, shifting im- agery for the divine, what I think of as multiple imaging, dissuades the creation of, indeed the reduction of, the divine image in a human or in any other particular form. By so doing, the use of multiple images en- sures the sanctity of the deity and lays the foundation for resisting idolatry, which is essentially the stabilization of the divine image in one form. In Second Isaiah, when the deity was positively compared, the similarities all came from examples of human beings, but in both gen- ders, and so there was no fixation on one gender exclusively. A human comparative is found in Ezekiel, which is destabilized within its liter- ary context in at least two ways: (1) through the use of the extended comparative that distances the deity from a particular shape and in the choice of the more general term “human” (~da) rather than “man” (vya) as well as in the description of the figure which has a lower half of fire; and (2) through the use of other divine comparatives of form- less shapes like fire and the rainbow in the collection. In the Book of Hosea, the divine comparisons stem exclusively from outside the hu- man realm, from flora and fauna, from the animal kingdom, and from more vague ideas like dew, illness, and decay. These non-human im- ages stress the otherness of the deity, who remains unfathomable. All of the divine modelling similes in the prophetic literature are located in, or related to, concerns about idolatry 63. They represent incomparable divine comparability because they generate multiple divine images. No single image is found when God is described with the comparative k. Moreover, likening the divine image to something else generates new thoughts about the deity and even the divine form. The contexts in which the comparisons are made strongly suggest that they are used along with other rhetorical strategies (such as incompa- rability, the debasement of idols, etc.) to counteract the stabilization of the divine image. They function aniconistically and fulfil what Mark Brettler has suggested of the divine metaphors in Second Isaiah: 62 K. NIELSEN, “The Variety of Metaphors about God in the Psalter: Deconstruc- tion and Reconstruction?”, SJOT 16 (2002) 151-159. 63 See, also, MIDDLEMAS, “Divine Presence in Absence”, 184-195, where I connect the use of images in worship to the loss of yHWH’s abiding presence.