Leviticus 26:1
Leviticus 26:11“You must not make idols for yourselves or set up a carved image or sacred pillar; you must not place a sculpted stone in your land to bow down to it. For I am the LORD your God.
Reasoning From the Scriptures (pp. 183-187) cites this verse alongside and to argue that all religious imagery is forbidden — not only worshipped idols but any image of Christian content. Crosses, nativity scenes, paintings of Jesus, and stained-glass windows are read as violations of the same prohibition Moses delivered to Israel. The argument leans heavily on the breadth of the categories named in the verse — "worthless gods," "carved image," "sacred pillar," "stone figure" — read as a sweeping ban on representational art in a worship setting.
Read the verse with its purpose clause attached: "you must not put a stone figure in your land in order to bow down toward it." The forbidden activity is bowing — cultic devotion. The same Torah that gives this command also commands Moses to make a bronze serpent () and Solomon to carve cherubim, palm trees, and oxen throughout the temple (, 7:25). The bronze serpent stood for seven hundred years without being destroyed — Hezekiah crushed it only when Israel began burning incense to it (). The Watchtower's own Insight on the Scriptures admits that Hezekiah destroyed it "because the people had made an idol of it." The principle is worship, not representation. A cross on a wall that nobody bows to is not what forbids; an idol receiving incense is.
The NWT expands the prohibition's vocabulary in ways that load it for argumentative use. Hebrew elilim becomes "worthless gods" (consensus: "idols"); matzevah becomes "sacred pillar" (consensus: "pillar" or "standing stone"); maskit becomes "stone figure" (ESV: "figured stone"; NASB: "carved stone"). The expansion is not strictly mistranslation — each rendering is defensible — but the cumulative effect of stronger English vocabulary is a verse that reads more like a sweeping image-ban than the cultic-bowing prohibition the Hebrew specifies. When read in the rs argument the NWT's choice does measurable work.