The Bible is very concerned with idolatry.  “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” is the very first commandment given directly by God to the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai after He gives His bone fides as “the Lord, your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” (Ex. 20:2).  Yet, despite its clear primacy as God’s number one no-no, the Children of Israel waste almost no time casting their valuable gold into a molten image of a calf and do so while still encamped at the base of the mountain where—just days before—they received the undeniable revelation of God and His laws.  Nor does the violation of the covenant stop there:  the biblical narrative recounts the Jews committing the sin of idolatry over and over again throughout their history, resulting in this prohibition being among the most frequently repeated injunctions in the text of the Torah.

What’s the draw?  Did people really believe that a wooden statue was a god that would bless them or curse them depending on how thorough they were in their adoration?  Is worshipping a stone representation of a deity really that gratifying of an experience that our ancestors were compelled by its allure again and again?  And if idolatry is so addicting, why did it fall out of practice?  Did it fall out of practice?

These questions about idolatry arise because of a misunderstanding of what idolatry is and what it is not.  Idolatry is not the belief that a human-made object possesses divine power.  That’s fetishism.  Fetishism can be a component of idolatry and idolatry often manifests itself as fetishism, but fetishism is not the core of what defines idolatry.  Idolatry is the compartmentalization of the various constructs that characterize the human condition into separate spheres of influence and the elevation of one distinct sphere as the particular principle around which the idolator structures his or her life.  For the Greeks, Aphrodite was the goddess of love whereas Apollo was the god of knowledge.  Each god had its own cult of followers who exalted that god’s attribute above all others.  False gods are false not because they are not God, but rather because they are “gods of”.

This is why idolatry is so seductive: it’s simple.  While the monotheistic God may be singular, He is also omni-faceted and complex.   The God of Compassion is the God of Justice: He is one God of seemingly conflicting values.  Not everyone is up to the difficult task of wrestling with the notion of a contradictory God.  It is much easier to split off each of God’s attributes into an independent idol and not have to reconcile them with each other:  just choose one driving force for your life and abide by that cause.

This contrast between idolatry as a conviction that demands little in terms of thought or effort on the part of the idolator and monotheism as a devotion to grappling with a multitude of ostensibly incompatible ideals has many commonalities with the differences discovered by Jonathan Haidt in his studies of people’s political leanings through the lens of Moral Foundations Theory as explored in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.  Haidt’s research suggests that there are at least six ethical frameworks that are—to varying degrees—innate to all human beings and that these frameworks have evolved in response to various social and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)