Catholic Dude:
The only thing close to what the OP said that is true is that all through the OT the Jews had many Idols.
Why they kept going back to Idols in the OT has always bothered me.
Why do people rely on lucky rabbit’s feet or on other “lucky” objects ?
After the preservation of Jerusalem from Sennacherib, there came to be a popular “dogma” that Zion was inviolable: JHWH had chosen Zion for His house to be built there, He “owed it to” Himself not to let His House be sacked, He had made an unbreakable covenant with David. So, no matter what happened, Jerusalem would never be sacked, there would always be a king of David’s line to reign in Jerusalem, Judah would always be safe.
This is what Jeremiah was up against, especially in the last years of the kingdom. He did not agree with this easy optimism, because it ignored the righteousness of God, and the moral duties which flowed from this. It was, in fact, superstitious. He had a very difficult time, because he also had to answer to those who worshipped the “queen of heaven” (possibly a goddess thought of as a consort of JHWH ?) - why she was worshipped, can be found from Jer. 7 & 44.
In Israel & Judah’s own setting, there are several reasons for “idolatry”:
Judah before the Exile - in about 650 or so - was under Assyrian overlordship: this seems to be why Manasseh of Judah introduced a new altar into the Temple: that was one example of alien religion.
Again, marriages with foreign princesses meant that their gods were imported - they had chapels of their own (the Solomonic Temple was essentially a royal chapel): Solomon & Ahab both did this.
The idol Nehushtan burnt by Hezekiah was probably worshipped as in some sense a representative of JHWH: it had not begun as an idol.
The Baalim were difficult to get the better of, because they could easily be regarded as manifestations of JHWH, who was in many respects the same sort of god as “Baal” (which is a title, not a proper name - it probably refers to the Canaanite god of fertility & rain, who is well-known from extra-Biblical texts)
Ethical monotheism (the adjective is of great importance) is clearly witnessed to by Second Isaiah after 538 or so - the earlier texts point to various stages in Israel’s notion of God: and these are important both for their own sake and because they give us a setting for the various reactions to those worships of gods which were regarded as defective by the Biblical writers. The problem with the OT texts is that they are one-sided: which is fine for the moralist and preacher, but not quite so helpful for the student of ancient religions - so we have only one set of impressions about non-Israelite worships: if there were redeeming features in them, we don’t find them in the Bible, but have to use evidence from outside it.
If we want more information about Baal - about what worship of him involved, or what gods were honoured with him, say - then the extra-Biblical evidence will give some of the answers that the OT, which is after all not
intended to be an impartial survey of religion in the Ancient Near East, does not attempt or profess to give. The OT authors were not
interested in (say) Canaanite or Assyrian religion - except in so far as these affected their own loyalty to Israel’s God. Just as Christian writers don’t tell us that various Baals came to be worshipped in Imperial Rome - that is discovered from other sorts of evidence: Christian writers of the two hundreds were not historians of Imperial or Roman religion, any more than their Jewish forebears were historians of ANE religion ##
