Russian to English Art/Literary Other Religion, mythology

As used by everybody and his brother, from Heracles, John the Baptist and Jesus to Lenin, Uncle Joe and Barak Obama. If you need a visual aid, look here:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=iyt&...

Now, in Russian the meaning of the gesture is crystal clear and lends itself to ironic use very well. How about English? I did some research and found the following.

1) Multitran offers "Metatron" which is totally off since this is in fact the name of some angel in the old Jewish scriptures. Those of you who are more kosher than me will excuse my ignorance here;

2) There's an old Miss Marple novel by Agatha Christie called The Moving Finger, which has been translated into Russian as "Мисс Марпл: указующий перст". If one is to believe Wikipedia, the symbolism here alludes to verse 51 from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiat, where the "moving finger" has nothing to do with the prescriptive gesture we are concerned with here. If you ask me, the Russian title is a bad misnomer, at least on the surface of it.

3) There's an obscure novel by certain Iain Pears titled An Instant of the Fingerpost that has also been translated into Russian as "Указующий перст". The allusion to the original gesture here is also tangential at best.

) I found a learned Russian scholastic article according to which the gesture itself goes all the way back to ancient Egyptians. This is all nice and good, but even if it's true it doesn't help us with the translation much. For those of you who are curious, the article itself may be found here:

http://andrew-vk.narod.ru/public/Herakles/Herakles.htm

5) Finally, there's the plain old forefinger - but can't we do better than that?

Any other ideas?

Many thanks, as always.