2 Kings 17:36, commentary and pictures

The command is to give exclusive fear, worship, and sacrifice to the LORD alone as the One who brought Israel up out of Egypt with great power and a stretched-out arm. It stands with the charge to observe His statutes, ordinances, laws, and commandment forever, to not forget His covenant, and to fear no other gods, with the promise that He would deliver them from their enemies. Yet they did not listen but kept their former manner of fearing the LORD while serving graven images, a practice continued by their children and their children's children.

The verse belongs to the history of divided Samaritan worship, in which those who separated from Israel through disobedience and sin were overcome and conquered by an idolatrous nation and mingled with idolaters. The Samaritans were a mixed race that sprang up through the intermarriage of heathen colonists from the provinces of Assyria with the remnant of the ten tribes left in Samaria and Galilee. Their religion violated the verse by mixing Jewish faith and customs and worship based on the ceremonies given to Moses with heathenism and idolatry. They retained reverence for the true God while representing Him with images of wood and stone and worshiping before them with reverence for images.

They claimed their idols were only to remind them of the living God, the Ruler of the universe, yet in heart and practice they were idolaters who were prone to and came to reverence graven images, so their worship remained mixed with idolatry. Their temple on Mount Gerizim stood in opposition to God's house in Jerusalem and became a source of lasting division and hostility. In a parable to the Jews the verse is held up as their own history, showing their future as the result of their course of action, that for thousands of years they forged fetters binding them in a bondage no human power could break.