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Record W4406198007 · doi:10.1163/15700631-bja10098

Are Εἴδωλα Idols?

2025· article· en· W4406198007 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal for the Study of Judaism · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicHistorical and Linguistic Studies
Canadian institutionsCrandall University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPejorativeJudaismCultLexiconTorahJewish studiesLiteratureHistoryMeaning (existential)PhilosophyLinguisticsClassicsArtEpistemologyTheologyAncient history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract It has long been taken for granted that the use of εἴδωλον in the language of the Septuagint and its reception in early Jewish texts was unique within the history of postclassical Greek, imbued with pejorative meaning as a technical term of “Jewish Greek” that refers not to “images” but to “idols.” In this article, I interrogate the issues involved with this lexicographical commonplace and the translation practices it informs, and offer a critical reexamination of the literary and documentary evidence in which εἴδωλον occurs. I argue that the use of εἴδωλον in early Jewish Greek literature, from the Greek Pentateuch to Paul’s letters, was in fact remarkably unexceptional and readily recognisable as one lexical option among many in the diverse lexicon of cult images (e.g., ἄγαλμα , ἀνδριάς , ἀφίδρυμα , εἰκών , ἵδρυμα , ξόανον ), just as it was in postclassical Greek more broadly. I conclude that transliterating εἴδωλον as “idol,” rather than translating it as “image,” keeps the illusion of uniqueness alive by inviting negative associations that closely align with its later lexicographical legacy but that do not clearly correspond to any known use of εἴδωλον in its own time and place.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.370
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.071
GPT teacher head0.404
Teacher spread0.333 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it