That Jews are forbidden to worship idols is such a basic element of Judaism that the Talmud does not actually have much to say about it. After all, it's right there in the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” As we saw in Tractate Sanhedrin, any Jew who dared violate this rule was condemned to death. Why, then, do we need Tractate Avodah Zarah, the section of the Talmud devoted to idol worship? The answer, as Daf Yomi readers have seen over the last months, is that the Jews of the Talmudic period lived in societies where idol-worship was universal. This meant that Jews had to take care not just to avoid actual idolatry, but not to assist the idolatry of gentiles or to be complicit with it in any way. For instance, we have seen that Jews could not do business with an idol-worshipper in advance of one of his festivals, lest they give him a reason to give thanks to his god.
In Chapter Three of Tractate Avodah Zarah, the rabbis explore a new set of issues, having to do with the problem of avoiding even peripheral benefit from idols. That a Jew may not derive any benefit from an idol, even one unrelated to the idol's sacred purpose, is suggested by Deuteronomy 7:25: “The graven images of their gods you shall burn with fire; you shall not covet the silver or the gold that is in them, nor take it to you, lest you be snared by it.” Anything that has been implicated in idol-worship is contaminated and must be shunned. But in a society where you couldn't visit a bathhouse without seeing a statue of Aphrodite or scan the horizon without seeing a hill or a tree that was sacred to a pagan god, how could Jews follow this rule?
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