Together they bend low and kneel down; they are unable to rescue the images; ¹  they themselves ²  head off into captivity. ³ 

“When they return to it, they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations.

Am I saying that idols or food sacrificed to them amount to anything?

and to put on the new man who has been created in God’s image ¹  – in righteousness and holiness that comes from truth. ² 

They abandoned the Lord and worshiped Baal and the Ashtars. ¹ 

They worshiped ¹  their idols, which became a snare to them. ² 

The worthless idols will be completely eliminated. ¹ 

With the rest of it he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships it. He prays to it, saying, ‘Rescue me, for you are my god!’

For the king of Babylon stands at the fork ¹  in the road at the head of the two routes. He looks for omens: ²  He shakes arrows, he consults idols, ³  he examines ⁴  animal livers. ⁵ 

Israel was a fertile vine that yielded fruit. As his fruit multiplied, he multiplied altars to Baal. ¹  As his land prospered, they adorned the fertility pillars.

While Laban had gone to shear his sheep, ¹  Rachel stole the household idols ²  that belonged to her father.

I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars, ¹  and I will stack your dead bodies on top of the lifeless bodies of your idols. ²  I will abhor you. ³ 

He removed the pagan altars ¹  and the high places, smashed the sacred pillars, and cut down the Asherah poles. ² 

even when they made a cast image of a calf for themselves and said, ‘This is your God who brought you up from Egypt,’ or when they committed atrocious ¹  blasphemies.

For the Israelites ¹  must live many days without a king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred fertility pillar, without ephod or idols.

Josiah also got rid of ¹  the ritual pits used to conjure up spirits, ²  the magicians, personal idols, disgusting images, ³  and all the detestable idols that had appeared in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem. In this way he carried out the terms of the law ⁴  recorded on the scroll that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the Lord’s temple.

Then the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were broken in pieces without distinction ¹  and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors that the wind carries away. Not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a large mountain that filled the entire earth.

Now if you are ready, when you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, trigon, harp, pipes, and all kinds of music, you must bow down and pay homage to the statue that I had made. If you don’t pay homage to it, you will immediately be thrown into the midst of the furnace of blazing fire. Now, who is that god who can rescue you from my power?” ¹ 

(Now Rachel had taken the idols and put them inside her camel’s saddle ¹  and sat on them.) ²  Laban searched the whole tent, but did not find them. ³ 

He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he set up altars for the Baals and made Asherah poles. He bowed down to all the stars in the sky ¹  and worshiped ²  them.