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Actually, "graven" is a very loaded translation which we should learn to reject. The original Hebrew word is akin to "molten." What the people in Palestine did was this: After a war, they gathered all the enemy's trasures and melted them down, then cast them into statues. This forced them to preserve their precious metals for future times of war, when the statues could be melt down again, and fashionned into weapons, so the people literally would believe that they were fighting with their Gods.

What YHWH thus hated, was the materialism, being perpetually readied for war, and the worship of false Gods. This is plainly not what is going on here.

... in fact, read further in the bible, about how God commanded the Israelites to make statues of seraphim and serpents, and how he healed them of snakebites through the serpentine statues. Read how he commanded them to bow before the ark, adorned as it was with Cherubim.