4:15-18 - You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air, or like any creature that moves along the ground or any fish in the waters below.

Here Moses spells out the first of two implications of having seen no form of Yahweh in the fire. They are in each case introduced by the conjunction "lest" (pen ). Here he warns Israel against the peril of becoming "corrupt" that would lead her to "make for yourselves an idol, the form (temuna) of any image" (v.16). While no deity is specified, the cause-effect relationship of v.15 & 16 suggests that it is an icon of Yahweh that Moses has in mind here. If Israel saw no form of Yahweh, any attempt to make a form of any kind to represent Yahweh can only be a distortion of who and what Yahweh is. So grave is the danger of this misrepresentation that the rigour of this prohibition is emphasized by including the full array of creation—listed here in the reverse order of their creation (from humans to the birds and fish vs. birds and fish to humans in Gen.1:20-27)—in its range of possible representations.1 This is further stressed by the five-fold repetition of kol ("all," "any") + tavnit ("structure," "shape") in vv16b-18. The importance of this injunction against making any image of Yahweh cannot be overstated. We only need to remember, as GenB no doubt would, that, if Sinai/Horeb was the place where Israel saw no form of God, it was also there, amidst the blaze of the fire on the mountain, that Israel crafted a golden calf to bow down to it (Exo.32).2 It is easy for us to underestimate the weight of this temptation on Israel. Her experience in Egypt would have exposed and acclimatized her to a way of life in which iconic representation of deities was the norm. And she would discover, upon settling in Canaan that this too was the way of life of her neighbours.3 Idolatry was as sticky to the Israelites as Youtube videos are to us. If we are chary about letting our neighbour view our Internet-history, we can understand better the temptation they faced.