"You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Exodus 20:4-6
Two further points must be noted here. One is the recognition the Bible makes in scathing irony (such as in Psalm 115:4ff and elsewhere) of the emptiness and futility and mockery of idol worship, and its consciousness that such idol mockery can be taken up and used by dark powers so that idols of wood and stone can be invested with the demonic, and lead their worshippers from mere ignorance into dark and terrible bondage to the devil. The other point relates to 5b and 6. If the visitation of the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation is difficult to understand or accept, we should remember two things: one is the fact of the solidarity of mankind. No man lives unto himself, we are members one of another in a solidarity that comes from our connection with Adam, the father of the human race; the other is that the moral structure of the universe makes this 'visitation' inevitable. This is how things are in human life. On the other hand, the entail of good is incomparably more powerful than that of evil (6), and can lay the foundations of many generations (Isaiah 58:12).