Condemnation of Idolatry

(Deuteronomy 4:15 - 4:40)
On the day at Horeb when Jehovah spoke to you from out of the fire you glimpsed not his form.  Therefore, take great care to ensure that you craft for yourselves no idol in the likeness of any figure, either male or female, any animal on earth, any bird that flies through the air, any creature that creeps along the ground, or any fish that swims in the seas below.  And when you look up into the sky and gaze at the sun, the moon, the stars, all the heavenly bodies, don't be tempted to worship and serve them, for Jehovah your god created them to benefit all the peoples under the heavens.  Remember that Jehovah rescued you and brought you out of the iron-smelting furnace, out of Egypt, to be the people that are his inheritors, as indeed you are now.

"Jehovah was angry with me because of you and vowed that I would not cross the Jordan and enter the land he is giving you as an inheritance.  I must die here in this land and not cross the Jordan.  But you are about to make the crossing and take possession of that fine land.  Be careful not to forget the pact that Jehovah your god made with you and craft an idol in the form of anything Jehovah your god has forbidden to you.  For Jehovah your god is a consuming fire, a jealous god.

"When you have fathered children and grandchildren and have grown old in the land, if you then become corrupt and make any kind of idol, doing evil in the eyes of Jehovah and arousing his ire, I call upon the earth and sky this day to be witnesses against you -- you will quickly disappear from the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess.  You will not live on it, but will be utterly destroyed.  Jehovah will then scatter you among other countries, where only a few of you will survive.  There you will worship gods made by men out of wood and stone, gods that cannot see or hear, eat or smell.  But from there you will still seek Jehovah your god, and if you search for him with all your heart and soul, you will find him.  When in times of trouble, after you have endured all these things, you will, in future times, come back to Jehovah your god and hearken to his voice.  Jehovah your god is a forgiving god; he will not abandon you or destroy you or forget the solemn pact made with your ancestors that he swore to honor.

"Search back in history, to the days before you were born, to the time that God created man on earth, search from one end of the heavens to another to see if an event as great as this has ever happened or if anything like it has ever been heard of.  Did any people ever hear the voice of their god speaking from the midst of a fire and remain alive?  Has any god dare to wrest one nation from the heart of another, by trials and tribulations, by miracles and wonders, by war and power and might and awesome acts of terror, all of which Jehovah your god did for you in Egypt -- right before your very eyes!

"You were shown these things so that you might know that Jehovah is God and that there is no other god save him.  He let you hear his voice from Heaven so that he might enlighten you.  On earth he showed you his great fire, and you heard his words from the midst of the fire.  Because he loved your ancestors and made their descendants his Chosen People, he brought you out of Egypt personally with a manifestation of his divine power.  He expelled nations stronger and more powerful than you so that he could give you their land as a possession, as it is today.

“Know this today and keep it firmly in mind: Jehovah is god of Heaven above and earth below.  There is no other.  Therefore, observe his statutes and decrees that I am giving you today, so it will go well with you and, after you, your children and that you may always find long life in the land that Jehovah your god has given you."

Notes
1. We gain the impression that the ancients found the temptation to create and worship idols irresistible and that to worship an invisible god without a tangible form necessitated rigorous self-sacrifice and discipline.  For the modern this is hard to understand, although it does seems much more fun to have statues and likenesses of the deity one worships.  The Orthodox Christians with their icons, the Catholics with their Christs on the cross and pictures of the Virgin Mary, obviously think so.  Even the Protestants cherish their idealized portraits of a Jesus looking like a long-haired Renaissance prince.

2. Worshiping heavenly bodies was common among primitive and ancient peoples.  They had no idea of how far away they were, what they consisted of, or how they moved across the sky.  The authors of the Bible knew only a flat earth covered by a dome (firmament) with all the heavenly bodies moving upon or below it.  

3. Among the numerous anachronisms in the Books of Moses is this reference to "iron-smelting furnace."  (Some translations say “iron furnace,” but it seems more likely that the furnace was not one made of iron, but one that would create iron; that is, a very hot one.)  Iron would have been unknown to Moses.  No matter where we put him chronologically, we have to put him in the Bronze Age.  An iron-smelting furnace would not exist for many centuries.  The authors of Deuteronomy, writing many hundreds of years after Moses, probably had very little knowledge of such history and assumed that people in the past lived in the same manner as people in the present -- a common error.  A sense of history is a relatively recent acquisition.  For example, the stories of King Arthur convert a post-Roman warlord of the Dark Ages into a chivalrous monarch of the high Medieval Ages.

4. Moses condemns idolatry because the images are only wood and stone and aren't real.  My, how literal (and obtusely modern) we are!  It is remarkable how he and/or the authors can miss the point of idolatry.  The idol, the statue, the carving, whatever, is never the god itself.  It is a representation of the god that furnishes the means by which to focus one's prayers, to communicate or perhaps achieve communion with the god.  Or it can be, like the statues in pagan temples, a receptacle to house the spirit of the god when it descends to earth (like the judgment seat in the Inner Sanctum of the Tabernacle or, later, the Temple.)

5. Moses pleads the superiority of Jehovah because he is so near to his people and personally fights for them.  The Greek gods seem to have been at call as well, at least in early times.  According to Homer's Iliad several of them participated in the Trojan War, fighting on both sides.  The Egyptian gods, though, seemed to have let their people down.  There were scarcely in evidence during the Exodus -- but then, might they have helped with all that pyramid building?

6. Jehovah is described as speaking from the middle of a fire.  This fire doesn't seem to consume anything or even to be hot.  Perhaps some other physical phenomenon unknown to the witnesses and the authors is being referred to.  Jehovah's fire is probable something other than an ordinary flame.

7. Moses asks his people to find an event more miraculous than the appearance of Jehovah and their liberation from Egypt.  The people he is speaking to were either children at the time they left Egypt, or else they were born during the 40 years of wandering.  How could these people have any knowledge of history or, what we would term, current events?  It is unlikely that any of the living Israelites save Moses would have been able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Moses probably hadn't taken a library of scrolls with him on the Exodus.  During the 40 years of wandering, the Israelites had minimal contact with other peoples and none of it of an intellectual nature.  Such an isolated, illiterate, generally ignorant people could only be acquainted with a little oral folk history, mostly concerning their own people; they would, therefore, be poor judges of the uniqueness of Jehovah's miracles nor would they have had any means by which they could compare them to events in other nations' histories.  (Maybe Moses was speaking rhetorically.)

8. In praising the reality of Jehovah, Moses claims that the god sees, hears, smells, and eats.  While spirit beings see and hear and perhaps smell, they certainly don't eat.  Moses is describing a human being, not the spirit we understand to be God.  While the Israelites did not see his form, there is no suggestion that he did not have one.  On one occasion, described in Exodus, Moses was permitted to glimpse Jehovah's back.  Jehovah was obviously humanoid, but since Jehovah seemed anxious to hide his visage, one could speculate that his face might not have been entirely human, or was deformed -- or merely ugly.

9. There is a continual confusion about who Jehovah is.  At times he is God, Elohim, the creator of earth and man, while, more often, he is simply a national god among many other national gods.  This contradiction remains, but the worshipers of Jehovah seemed content to leave it unresolved.  It is proclaimed here that Jehovah is the one and only god, and yet there are continual references to other gods, to their inferiority and inadequacy -- but not their non-existence.