ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have told that image-worship was preceded by an earlier stage in which the material objects treated with religious regard by man were aniconic, rocks and trees, springs and rivers, not things shaped by men's hands to resemble any living thing. It believe that the drawings of animals in caves by men of the Early Stone Age had magical significance, because it was supposed that the picture of an animal gave men power over living animals of that species. Some aniconic objects continued, because they had attached to them the associations of an immemorial tradition, to receive worship in the Graeco-Roman world through the most advanced phases of the ancient civilization. The attack on idolatry in the Old Testament is on two lines according as it is pagan idolatry, the worship of false gods, or the worship of the true God, of Jehovah, by means of images, which is attacked.
