1: 23-24 - Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol in the form of anything the Lord your God has forbidden. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.

Moses' warning against idolatry here opens with the same formula, "watch yourselves . . . lest," as found in v 9 & 15. They are, of course, not unrelated as Moses' arguments in this unit will show. Here the manufacture and veneration of idols is understood starkly as forgetting Yahweh's covenant. While the covenant is defined as "the Ten Commandments" in v.13, the warning here is directed at a more specific aspect of that covenant, vis-a-vis, the Second Commandment: "do not make for yourselves an idol in the form of anything." Israel has been instructed about (not) making any idols in any form (v16-19); here she is simply reminded of it. The reason previously given for this prohibition followed the logic that since Israel saw no form of God, any depiction of him would be a distortion and diminution of the nature and glory of Yahweh that it seeks to depict. The crowning reason, given here, is "because Yahweh is a consuming fire, a jealous God," a reason reiterated from the Second Commandment (5:9), where the nature of Yahweh's jealousy will be elaborated. Just as his anger is not an explosion of uncontrollable emotions, so God's jealousy is not a greedy egotistic craving for attention but an assertion of who he is&mdashhe is God, therefore, he cannot share his glory with anyone/thing that is less than who or what he is. To share his glory with idols—mere pieces of wood or metal—is thus to deny the truth about himself. Those who would lower him to the level of idols thus deny him in all that he is, which is the acme, not only of unfaithfulness but of the ultimate insult.

You may want to read "the Jealous God" at this point.

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