EXOD369 The other peoples of the world, whom the biblical authors and the talmudic rabbis knew, were, by and large, not monotheists, but idolaters, whether Canaanite, Greek, or Roman. The Hebrew Bible is relentlessly opposed to idolatry, prominently enshrining the prohibitions against it in the Decalogue announced on Mount Sinai and repeating it as well in many other places in the Bible. (Exodus 20:3-6 and Deuteronomy 5:7-10. Examples of other places that mention this prohibition: Deuteronomy 4:15-19, 23-24, 28; 7:25; and 8:19). Moreover, according to the Torah, the reason God wants the Israelites to occupy the Land of Israel and displace the seven nations already there is precisely because of the natives’ idolatry and the immorality to which it led them. (Genesis 15:16 and Deuteronomy 9:4-5). The Bible speaks, for example, of the sacrifice of children to Molech and of sanctified acts of adultery and incest within the Canaanite cult. (See Leviticus 18; 2 Kings 21:3-7 and 23:4-12; Jeremiah 7:30-31). The Rabbis carried this further. They devoted an entire tractate of the Mishnah and Talmud -- Avodah Zarah -- to the subject of idolatry to define it clearly and to prevent Jews from getting too close to idolatry or idolaters lest they be tempted by such practices. In some passages, the Rabbis actually made fun of idolatry (e.g. B. Avodah Zarah 2ff), and they wrote liturgy that thanks God for enabling Jews to be part of those who spend their time in studying and practicing the Jewish tradition rather than being among those who waste their lives away following the emptiness and immorality of idolatry. (J. Berachot 7d). Another part of the Jewish rejection of idolatry is based on theological considerations. Worshipping the sun, moon, or stars amounts to making part of reality the whole of it, taking one of God's creatures as God Himself. That error is even more egregious if one makes an idol of a human artifact, for then one reduces God to what human beings can make. Thus idolatry involves both moral and theological errors that ultimately makes it impossible even to recognize God let alone to worship God properly. To accomplish their divinely ordained task, then, Israel had to remain separate and apart from the other nations that might lead them astray: “’You shall be holy’ [means that] even as I am holy, so you too should be holy; as I am separate [the prime meaning of the Hebrew word usually translated “holy”], so you too should be separate.” (Sifra, “Shemini 12:4 on Leviticus 11:45, p. 57b.) The Torah records that fraternization with the Moabites led the Israelites to both idolatry and immorality, (Numbers 25) and that early incident set the stage for the Jewish tradition's evaluation of non-Jews.