The Generation of Enosh: the Beginning of Idolatry

The Torah gives this turn half a verse: "then it was begun to call upon the Name". The tradition reads it as a catastrophe, and Maimonides expands it into a full reconstruction of how idolatry could grow out of monotheism.

The error, he writes, was not denial of the Creator but a logic of honour. People reasoned: God set the sun, moon and stars to serve the world and gave them rank—so it is fitting to honour them, as one honours a king's ministers, and the king is pleased. They built temples, offered sacrifices, bowed. The next generation no longer remembered the reasoning: for them the temple and the statue were religion itself. Then came men who claimed a star had spoken to them and wrote down its rites. Within a few more generations the Creator's name had vanished from almost every mouth; wood and stone remained.

The point is not antiquarian. Idolatry here is not stupidity but drift, each step reasonable. The answer would come only seventeen centuries later, with Abraham.