Pictures are an easy way to help an illiterate story teller to remember a story, so I wonder if they'd be part of early versions of the Torah.
Well, not a sefer Torah since those are subject to extremely strict ritual requirements. The existence of early illustrated Hebrew bibles is basically impossible to know since our knowledge of classical book illustration is very scant but we do know of at least one Jewish narrative fresco cycle from the Dura-Europos Synagogue and it's possible that there were more works of that sort now lost.