Prohibitions against the production and worship of images representing one's own or other deities (oft en referred to in the singular as 'image ban' or Bilderverbot)-as much as their seeming corollary, the so-called aniconic worship of a single supreme deityare commonly held to be distinctive characteristics of ancient Israelite and Judahite, Jewish and Islamic religion. Th e two aspects (the normative rejection of a given ritual practice and the realization of its opposite as alternative practice) are oft en considered as two faces of a coin. Yet the relation between the two is much more complicated. Th e terms image ban and aniconism are problematic and both certainly need to be properly defi ned and qualifi ed. 1 Scholars such as Tryggve Mettinger (1995 , 2006), Brian Doak (2015), Milette Gaifman (2012) and others have recently off ered important contributions to that end, focusing on fi rst-millennium-bce Israel, Phoenicia and Greece. Th e present chapter aims at continuing this conversation while putting it into a wider horizon, both disciplinary and theoretical. Neither programmatic prohibitions of cultic images nor de facto abstention from producing and using them in cultic rituals or imageless rituals are exclusive to early West Semitic traditions, Judaism and Islam (see the essays collected in Gaifman and Aktor 2017); 2 however, they distinguish these traditions from many others past and present. Moreover, both scholars and the wider public associate these traditions with the concept of monotheism. To be sure, none of the traditions studied by Mettinger, Gaifman and Doak should be considered monotheistic in any way. But the history of Western Asiatic and Mediterranean religion\s since late antiquity seems indeed to privilege an elective affi nity of sorts between the belief in a single, invisible, transcendent deity on the one hand ('monotheism') and the injunction not to represent that deity in a cultic image on the other hand. Monotheistic theologies have

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Recent scholarship has applied elements of Mikhail Bakhtin's criticism and philosophy to the Book of Job. This paper attempts to identify specific elements of Dostoyevsky's poetics (as described by Bakhtin) in Job.

Gydas vei 4, N-0363 Oslo 3, Norway I 'What is Genesis 2-3 about?' Derek Beattie was neither first nor last to pose that question.' In fact his note intermediated between two decades in which this theological puzzle was answered in a more prolific way than ever before. In addition to traditional investigations of sources and symbols of the story, we have seen attempts to read Genesis 2-3 as a diachronic record of the redactional history of the Pentateuch, as J's comment upon the politics of his contemporaries, as a reflection of Hebrew wisdom traditions, of king ideology, land ideology or temple ideology. We have read new religio-historical, social, psychoanalytical and feminist approaches, and several 'structuralist' and semiotic approaches. Despite this host of attempts at answers, the 1. D.R.G. Beattie, 'What is Genesis 2-3 about?', ExpTim 92 (1980-81), pp. 8-10. 2. I offer some recent examples only. Redaction history: J. Vermeylen, 'Le récit du paradis et la question des origines du pentateuque', Bijdragen Tijdschrift voor Downloaded from 4question is far from closed, which is of course partly due to the richness of the story-and to the astounding reception it has experienced throughout the Jewish and Christian ages. I believe Beattie himself pointed out an important additional reason for the diversity of interpretation, when, some years after his first note, he argued that there has been too much derash and too little peslzat in the modem interpretation of Genesis 2-3.' If that is the case, then we need a new close