# Idolatry (1992) [[Moshe Halbertal]] and [[Avishai Margalit]]'s study of the biblical prohibition on idolatry, translated from the Hebrew by Naomi Goldblum and published by Harvard University Press in 1992 (paperback 1998, 312 pages). It is the source text for [[Political Idolatry]]. ## The question What, exactly, does the prohibition prohibit? The book identifies two answers that the tradition never fully separates, and that come apart under analysis. **Idolatry as error** — a mistake about what exists. The idol is "the product of men's hands"; worshipping it is a category confusion. This is the rationalist line running through [[Maimonides]], and it makes idolatry a cognitive failure. **Idolatry as betrayal** — a violation of relationship. The Hebrew Bible's governing metaphor is not confusion but infidelity: "whoring after false gods," a marriage broken. On this reading the wrong is the misdirection of ultimate loyalty, not a factual mistake. The distinction matters because only the second survives secularization. Once you no longer believe there are false gods to be confused about, the error reading has nowhere to go — but the betrayal reading names a live pathology with no religious premises required. ## Range The authors work primarily in Jewish sources — biblical and Talmudic material, medieval philosophy and Kabbalah — while treating Christianity and Islam comparatively, and they carry the analysis forward to [[Karl Marx]] (commodity fetishism as a form of idolatry: a human product acquiring apparent independent power over its makers), [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], and G. E. Moore. The secular extension is the authors' own, not a later reader's. Along the way the book becomes a study of religious intolerance and pluralism, since idolatry is the category through which religions have historically constructed arguments against one another — which makes it relevant to how contemporary movements construct their heretics. ## Why it earns a page here It supplies the vault with a precise name for a structure otherwise described loosely as cultism or fanaticism: ultimate loyalty given to a contingent thing, with criticism reclassified as betrayal. That structure is developed for political use at [[Political Idolatry]], and it completes the Halbertal sequence — [[Self-Transcendence]] is the capacity, idolatry is the misdirection, [[Sacrifice and Political Violence]] is what the misdirection licenses. ## See also [[Political Idolatry]] · [[Moshe Halbertal]] · [[Avishai Margalit]] · [[On Sacrifice]] · [[Works Hub]]