Verse 5
Instead, this is what you must do to them: You must tear down their altars, shatter their sacred pillars, cut down their sacred Asherah poles, and burn up their idols.
Referenced Verses
- Exod 23:24 : 24 “You must not bow down to their gods; you must not serve them or do according to their practices. Instead you must completely overthrow them and smash their standing stones to pieces.
- Exod 34:13 : 13 Rather you must destroy their altars, smash their images, and cut down their Asherah poles.
- Deut 12:2-3 : 2 You must by all means destroy all the places where the nations you are about to dispossess worship their gods– on the high mountains and hills and under every leafy tree. 3 You must tear down their altars, shatter their sacred pillars, burn up their sacred Asherah poles, and cut down the images of their gods; you must eliminate their very memory from that place.
- Deut 7:25 : 25 You must burn the images of their gods, but do not covet the silver and gold that covers them so much that you take it for yourself and thus become ensnared by it; for it is abhorrent to the LORD your God.
- Deut 9:21 : 21 As for your sinful thing that you had made, the calf, I took it, melted it down, ground it up until it was as fine as dust, and tossed the dust into the stream that flows down the mountain.
- Deut 16:22 : 22 You must not erect a sacred pillar, a thing the LORD your God detests.
- Judg 6:25-26 : 25 Gideon Destroys the Altar That night the LORD said to him,“Take the bull from your father’s herd, as well as a second bull, one that is seven years old. Pull down your father’s Baal altar and cut down the nearby Asherah pole. 26 Then build an altar for the LORD your God on the top of this stronghold according to the proper pattern. Take the second bull and offer it as a burnt sacrifice on the wood from the Asherah pole that you cut down.”
- 2 Kgs 23:6-9 : 6 He removed the Asherah pole from the LORD’s temple and took it outside Jerusalem to the Kidron Valley, where he burned it. He smashed it to dust and then threw the dust in the public graveyard. 7 He tore down the quarters of the male cultic prostitutes in the LORD’s temple, where women were weaving shrines for Asherah. 8 He brought all the priests from the cities of Judah and ruined the high places where the priests had offered sacrifices, from Geba to Beer Sheba. He tore down the high place of the goat idols situated at the entrance of the gate of Joshua, the city official, on the left side of the city gate. 9 (Now the priests of the high places did not go up to the altar of the LORD in Jerusalem, but they did eat unleavened cakes among their fellow priests.) 10 The king ruined Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom so that no one could pass his son or his daughter through the fire to Molech. 11 He removed from the entrance to the LORD’s temple the statues of horses that the kings of Judah had placed there in honor of the sun god.(They were kept near the room of Nathan Melech the eunuch, which was situated among the courtyards.) He burned up the chariots devoted to the sun god. 12 The king tore down the altars the kings of Judah had set up on the roof of Ahaz’s upper room, as well as the altars Manasseh had set up in the two courtyards of the LORD’s temple. He crushed them up and threw the dust in the Kidron Valley. 13 The king ruined the high places east of Jerusalem, south of the Mount of Destruction, that King Solomon of Israel had built for the detestable Sidonian goddess Astarte, the detestable Moabite god Chemosh, and the horrible Ammonite god Milcom. 14 He smashed the sacred pillars to bits, cut down the Asherah poles, and filled those shrines with human bones.
- Lev 26:1 : 1 Exhortation to Obedience“‘You must not make for yourselves idols, so you must not set up for yourselves a carved image or a pillar, and you must not place a sculpted stone in your land to bow down before it, for I am the LORD your God.
- Exod 32:20 : 20 He took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire, ground it to powder, poured it out on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.