[5] Nevertheless, according to the Hebrew Bible the story of the people of Israel until the Babylonian Captivity includes the violation of this commandment as well as the one before it, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me".
[6] The Babylonian exile seems to have been a turning point after which the Jewish people as a whole were strongly monotheistic and willing to fight battles (such as the Maccabean Revolt) and face martyrdom before paying homage to any other god.
[7] According to the psalmist and the prophet Isaiah, those who worship inanimate idols will be like them, that is, unseeing, unfeeling, unable to hear the truth that God would communicate to them.
[8] Paul the Apostle identifies the worship of created things (rather than the Creator) as the cause of the disintegration of sexual and social morality in his letter to the Romans.
[12] Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
[15] For example, idols are referred to as "non-God",[16] "things of naught",[17] "vanity",[18] "iniquity",[19] "wind and confusion",[20] "the dead",[21] "carcasses",[22] and "a lie".
In addition to the spiritual aspect of their worship, peoples in the Ancient Near East took great care to physically maintain their cult idols and thought that the instructions for their manufacture and maintenance came from the spirit of the god.
So while scholars may debate the relative importance of belief in the physical object or the spirit it represented or housed, in practice the distinction was not easy to discern.
Sinai at the time the Ten Commandments were given, they saw no shape or form and this is stated as a reason why any physical representation of the divine is prohibited – no idols of humans, animals, or heavenly bodies were to be made.
[38] According to the Book of Genesis, image worship existed in the time of Jacob, from the account of Rachel taking teraphim along with her on leaving her father Laban's house.
[41] However, after repeated refusals to turn away from idols over time, God announced through the prophet Jeremiah that the covenant was broken beyond repair and the judgment (Babylonian Captivity) was sure to happen.
[42] The commandments in the Hebrew Bible against idolatry also forbade the adoption of the beliefs and practices of the nations who lived around the Israelites at the time, especially the religions of ancient Mesopotamia, and Egypt.
In dozens of passages, the Hebrew Bible refers to specific practices used to worship idols, including the offering of incense, prayers, food, drink, and blood offerings, singing and dancing, cutting one's flesh, bowing down to and kissing the idol, lewd behavior, passing one's children through the fire, cultic male and female prostitution, and human sacrifice, including child sacrifice.
[43] The ancient understanding apparently did not conflict with the artistic rendering of created things, and the Bible describes the Tabernacle, and later the Temple, as having tapestries and objects incorporating cherubim, flowers, fruits, trees, and animals.
[46] However, it was not to be an object of worship, and when the Israelites carried it into war like a cult idol, assuming it would guarantee victory, they were defeated, suffering 30,000 casualties, and the Ark was captured and taken to the temple of a foreign god.
"[53] Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea referred to Israel's worship of other gods as spiritual adultery:[54] "How I have been grieved by their adulterous hearts, which have turned away from me, and by their eyes, which have lusted after their idols".
[55] This led to a broken covenant between Yahweh and Israel and "divorce",[56] manifested as defeat by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon followed by exile, from which the northern kingdom never recovered.
They are described as being only the work of men's hands, unable to speak, see, hear, smell, eat, grasp, or feel, and powerless either to injure or to benefit.
[58] The Bible presents Daniel and his companions as distinct, positive examples of individuals refusing to pay homage to another god, even at the price of their lives.
"[59] After Antiochus IV Epiphanes recaptured Jerusalem in 167 BC, he forbade Torah and introduced worship of foreign gods into the Second Temple, and many Jews were martyred because they refused to acknowledge the claims of Seleucid deities.
[61] By the time the Talmud was written, the acceptance or rejection of idolatry was a litmus test for Jewish identity:[62] "Whosoever denies idols is called a Jew".
[65] In his works, Philo of Alexandria defended the Jewish view of God against both the emperor-worship of the Roman world and the idolatrous worship of animals by the Egyptians.
[68] This apparently originated in ancient times, as some of the several Hebrew words from the Tanakh translated as "idol" are pejorative and even deliberately contemptuous, such as elilim, "powerless ones", and gillulim, "pellets of dung".
[73] The language used by Paul in these passages is similar to the first two commandments in regular reference to the jealousy of God, sharp warnings against idolatry and idol images, and the identification of Yahweh as creator and the one who delivered the Israelites from Egypt.
He taught: Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man's design and skill.
The New Testament also uses the term "idol" in reference to conceptual constructs, as in Paul's letter to the church in Colosse: "Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed which is idolatry."
[79] The apostle James rebukes those who focus on material things, using language similar to that of Old Testament prophets: "When you ask [in prayer], you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
In his exposition of Psalm 96, Augustine of Hippo agreed with the psalmist's description of inanimate idols, and he recalled Paul's words to the Corinthians that sacrifices to such are offered to demons.
[88] John Calvin, a prolific and influential Reformation scholar, took a straightforward view of idolatry, patterned after the simplicity of the faith of the early apostles: In one word, their theology was in substance this—There is one God who created all the world, and declared His will to us by Moses and the prophets, and finally by Jesus Christ and His apostles; and we have one sole Redeemer, who purchased us by His blood, and by whose grace we hope to be saved: All the idols of the world are curst, and deserve execration.
"[90] He thought that John was not referring to idols of the religions around Israel, since through the Babylonian Captivity, a deep abhorrence of such was in the Jewish people and would have been understood by converts.