Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Art History and Visual Culture

Department

Art

First Advisor

W. Travis McMaken

Second Advisor

James Hutson

Third Advisor

Nadia McDonald

Abstract

This thesis investigates the Ark of the Covenant as a paradoxical visual and theological artifact within early Israelite religious art. While the Israelite tradition has long been characterized as aniconic (eschewing anthropomorphic representations of the divine) the Ark occupied a central role in ritual, worship, and religious identity. Prior scholarship has focused either on the Ark’s narrative function in biblical texts or its formal attributes as a cultic object. However, limited attention has been given to how the Ark embodies divine presence through the visual strategy of absence. This study argues that the Ark does not merely avoid figural representation but instead offers a sophisticated visual theology in which sacred space and material form mediate divine encounter without depiction. By integrating art historical analysis with cognitive theory and comparative Near Eastern iconography, this thesis positions the Ark as both an object of sensory engagement and a theological assertion of God’s unrepresentability. It thus proposes that the Ark served as a cognitive anchor for early Israelite conceptualizations of the divine—bridging visual culture and theological abstraction in ways that redefined the “image of God” in early Israelite religious art as something encountered rather than seen.

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