Dt. 12: House Rules; Meat

Deuteronomy 12:2 "Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains and on the hills and under every spreading tree where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods."

Deuteronomy 12 recounts God's commands to destroy idols, and completely demolish any previous religious systems, idols and temples, with extreme prejudice. There is absolutely no room for any other faiths. Consistent with God's commandments not to have any other gods before Him. Not only was Israel not to have other gods, other nations were not to have other gods. Israel was not to have these other nation's gods. It's all pretty explicit here, and the command to destroy other forms of worship cements God's singularity as the subject of worship.

There is also a review of the sacrificial system, and the rules therein, unless someone forgot. They were not to just slaughter and sacrifice and tithe wherever they pleased. There was a specific, exacting commanded location where this was to take place. It was orderly. There was God's command to follow His commands, and then there was the practical sense that the Israelites didn't have burned corpses aflame all over the place. There was a certain dwelling place of God, and there were the Israelites required to come to Him.

I had some confusion when I read Numbers 31, after the massacre of the Midianites as to what exactly God thought about human sacrifice. That question is answered pretty clearly here in Deuteronomy 12:31. In cautioning the Israelites not to bother to learn about other nation's religious practices, which included human sacrifice, God reveals that human sacrifice is detestable to Him. It is part of a religious system God would reach out and destroy using the Israelites.