(1) When the Lord your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and dislodges many nations before you—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations much larger than you— (2) and the Lord your God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to destruction: grant them no terms and give them no quarter.

(5) Instead, this is what you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred posts, and consign their images to the fire.

(4)Proclus ben Philosophus once asked Rabban Gamliel inAkko when he was bathing in the bathhouse ofAphrodite. Proclus said to him: It is written in your Torah: “And nothing of the proscribed items shall cleave to your hand” (Deuteronomy 13:18). For what reason do you bathe before an idol in the bathhouse of Aphrodite?

He replied to him: One may not answer questions related to Torah in the bathhouse. And when he left,he said to him: I did not come into its domain; it came into my domain. Furthermore, people do not say: Let us make a bathhouse as an adornment for Aphrodite; rather, they say: Let us make a statue of Aphrodite as an adornment for the bathhouse.Alternatively, there is another answer: Even if people would give you a lot of money, you would not enter before your object of idol worship naked, or as one who experienced a seminal emission, nor would you urinate before it. This statue stands upon the sewage pipe and all the people urinate before it. There is no prohibition in this case, as it is stated in the verse only: “Their gods” (see Deuteronomy 12:2), which indicates that a statue that people treat as a deity is forbidden, but one that people do not treat with the respect that is due to a deity is permitted.

The Sages taught: When Rabbi Eliezer was arrested and charged with heresy by Roman authorities, they brought him up to a tribunal to be judged. A certain judicial officer [hegemon] said to him: Why should an elder like you engage in these frivolous matters of heresy? Rabbi Eliezer said to him: The Judge is trusted by me to rule correctly. That officer thought that Rabbi Eliezer was speaking about him; but in fact he said this only in reference to his Father in Heaven.

The officer said to him: Since you put your trust in me, you are acquitted [dimos]; you are exempt.

When Rabbi Eliezer came home, his students entered to console him, and he did not accept their words of consolation. Rabbi Akiva said to him: My teacher, allow me to say one matter from all of that which you taught me. Rabbi Eliezer said to him: Speak. Rabbi Akiva said to him: My teacher, perhaps some statement of heresy came before you and you derived pleasure from it, and because of this you were held responsible.

Rabbi Eliezer said to him: Akiva,you remind me that once I was walking in the upper marketplace of Tzippori, and I found a man who was one of the students of Jesus the Nazarene, and his name was Ya’akov of Kefar Sekhanya. He said to me: It is written in your Torah: “You shall not bring the payment to a prostitute, or the price of a dog, into the house of the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 23:19). What is the halakha: Is it permitted to make from the payment to a prostitute for services rendered a bathroom for a High Priest in the Temple? And I said nothing to him in response. He said to me: Jesus the Nazarene taught me the following: It is permitted, as derived from the verse: “For of the payment to a prostitute she has gathered them, and to the payment to a prostitute they shall return” (Micah 1:7). Since the coins came from a place of filth, let them go to a place of filth. And I derived pleasure from the statement, and due to this, I was arrested for heresy by the authorities, because I transgressed that which is written in the Torah: “Remove your way far from her, and do not come near the entrance of her house” (Proverbs 5:8). “Remove your way far from her,” this is a reference to heresy; “and do not come near the entrance of her house,” this is a reference to the ruling authority.