Verse 8
8. The stock, etc. Rather, the teaching of idols is wood. They themselves are wood, and nothing can proceed from them better than what is in them. The special point of this sentence, at once so keenly satirical and so truly philosophical, is this: Their shaping, polishing, decking, and plating would seem to be for the purpose of getting something more precious than wood. As they look upon their finished god, decked out with his trappings of gold and silver, they forget his genesis, and think of him as something else than he really is. And so the prophet condenses all the possibilities of the case into a single sentence; and then, as if in the way of individual justification, he hastily runs over the process of the manufacture of idols.
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