The motif of Jacob’s face engraved on the Throne of
Glory has been an object of continued scholarly attention for the past several decades
and has been studied in a variety of literary contexts, from Second Temple and early
Christian to medieval.
More recently, two excellent contributions by Rachel Neis and
Ra’anan Boustan have done a lot to situate this motif specifically within its eastern Roman context by mapping out the motif’s place within the broader Byzantine discourse
on images and relics.
In this article, I expand on Neis’s and Boustan’s work by analyzing the place of Jacob’s image within the semiotics of late Roman and early Byzantine
liturgical performance.