Idol curiosity: the problem with the golden calf isn't so much the calf. It's just that we might forget that God can be a mother hen, too.

ENTER THE CATHOLIC ZONE, AND WHAT DO YOU SEE? Images of every kind, from statues and stained glass windows to hanging crucifixes and Stations of the Cross. My unofficial poll indicates the average Catholic home has between five and 10 religious images, and many exceed that count. My own house is so choked with religious art that the more secular neighbors are hesitant to come past the threshold. The 4-foot-high San Damiano cross near the door tips them off that this place is dangerously Catholic.

I don't mind living in an almost creepily religious environment. It actually feels a little like heaven in here. All are welcome, but frankly not everybody wants to hang around with the communion of saints. More's the pity.

One of the distinguishing features of Catholic Christianity is our comfort with and preference for sacred images. It perplexes some of our Protestant sisters and brothers that we seem to make this choice in direct defiance of the first commandment. To be clear, the injunction against graven images is actually the second commandment for Jewish, Anglican, Greek, and most Reformed traditions, who count our first commandment as two and make up the difference by counting our last two "coveting" commandments as one. Lutherans alone side with Roman Catholics on the enumeration of the Decalogue.

The Bible does not number the commandments in the two places they appear (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5), so it's up for grabs. Even something written in stone is not as definite as you might think.

But if the numbering isn't obvious, surely the meaning of the injunction is. If God doesn't want us to make images, why do we make them? The prohibition against graven images is more precisely about the obligations of true worship, not about the creative pursuit of the arts. In Chaim Potok's wonderful novel My Name Is Asher Lev (Anchor), a Jewish boy discovers, to his horror, that he has an artist's heart trapped in his Orthodox body. He is constrained to choose between serving the God of his religious training, who forbids image-making, and expressing his true vocation. It's a tragic situation for those who interpret the law in its most literal sense.

Most modern scripture scholars of every tradition have taken a broader view. They interpret the commandment as forbidding not graven images themselves but rather the worship of false gods. I'm deliberately not using the word idols here. We tend to use the term in a way that makes the citizens of the ancient world sound like fools: How could these people carve an inert figure and then proceed to worship it as if it had divine powers? In the Near East, where graven images were widely used for religious purposes, there is no evidence the average person was so deceived. Let's say, at least, that the average person was no more deceived then than now--I'll allow that some folk may identify their statues or icons too closely with those whom they represent and forget their mediating purpose. But the majority, then as now, employed religious images to help them focus on and relate to the one represented.

We make the same use of photographs of the people we love. We may kiss someone's image or even weep over it, but we never make the mistake of thinking the photograph is the loved one. From the Orthodox tradition's use of iconostasis to the Roman Catholic personal devotion to the image of the Divine Mercy of Jesus or of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the idea is never to invest sacred authority in the image itself. It is a window for prayer and reflection--a passage rather than a destination.

So the commandment's prohibition was aimed not at those who worshiped statues but at those who declared allegiance to other gods, period. Graven images were not the problem; it was the orientation toward divine spirits instead of the one true God of Israel. Loyalty to a variety of household gods, tribal deities, and local spirits was attractive and widely accepted in biblical times--even Rachel nabs her father's household gods when her husband Jacob decides to leave town (Genesis 31). Before God leads Israel to the land of promise, this particular inclination is to be nipped in the bud. "No gods before me" means just that.

But does this mean that images of the God of Israel were also forbidden? Technically speaking, worshiping before such an image would not be idolatry or anything like it. The object would simply be a mediating focal point, not unlike the Ark of the Covenant, which God specifically approves. So why would God be sore about a graven image of his one true Self?

THE ROOT OF THE ISSUE IS EXPOSED IN THE QUESTION: THAT when it comes to God, there is no "his" or "her," no image to speak of at all. God may choose to appear in gardens or on mountains, in burning bushes or in angelic form. You may call God a rock, a fortress, an eagle, or a mother hen, as the Bible variously does. But the God of Israel is not any of these things and cannot be defined by any of these ideas. The minute you carve an image of God as "like" something, you automatically limit your imagination's ability to consider what else God might be.

This impulse was the great sin of Israel in the desert, which unhappily coincided with the giving of the commandment regarding graven images. The golden calf incident, while maybe not the greatest failure recounted in the Hebrew scriptures, is certainly a candidate for the Sinner's Hall of Fame. The people, weary of waiting for Moses to take them farther from Egypt and its dangers, decide to fashion a more reliable leader. In a sense, the calf was more a stand-in for Moses than it was for God. They meant to follow it out of the desert rather than the man who had led them this far. And it was not an idol, strictly speaking, since the people are quick to proclaim before it: "This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!" (Exod. 32:4). Aaron, the high priest, announces a festival of the Lord in its presence. The nation does not intend to forsake God so much as the leadership of Moses.

And yes, the people danced before it and made sacrifice; so, too, King David danced before the Ark of the Covenant and all Israel would later sacrifice in the Jerusalem temple. These were orthodox religious procedures. You sort of have to delete those Cecile B. DeMille images of orgies at the base of Sinai from your mind in order to grasp that nothing Israel did in relation to the calf was technically ritually wrong. It was the calf itself that posed a danger: The longer people looked at the golden image, the more they would associate God with nothing else.

Idolatry is not the offense here: It's the freedom of God that's at risk. God is so much more than anything we can say or imagine about an infinite being. The God whose name is "I am" must be allowed to be what that expansiveness suggests and determines to be.

WE MUST CONSIDER THIS, TOO: BIBLICALLY SPEAKING, THE only thing that ever bears the likeness of God with God's expressed permission is humanity. That likeness is not in eyes and ears, arms and legs, but in self-determination--in our free will. We bear the divine likeness in our freedom to choose what we will be, how our own "I am" is expressed in moral decision-making. The more we align our will with the divine will, the more perfectly the likeness of God is revealed in us. Maybe this is the main reason God prefers not to have the divine picture taken. Little by little, God's hidden face comes to light in yours and mine. If we are looking for another image, we might miss it.

By Alice Camille, author of Animals in the Bible from A to Z (ACTA), illustrated by Sarah Evelyn Showalter, and other titles available at www.alicecamille.com.