Israel is a luxuriant vine that puts forth his fruit. According to the abundance of his fruit he has multiplied his altars. As their land has prospered, they have adorned their sacred stones.
"Multiplied his altars ... made goodly pillars ..." The sinfulness of the multiple altars lay in the fact that God had provided one altar only, that in Jerusalem, and in the further fact that these serf-authorized altars were Staffed and serviced with a bastard, illegitimate priesthood without regard to the tribe of Levi, and in the still more horrible corruption of the worship associated with them by the adoption of the gross rites of the old Canaanite pagans.  The "goodly pillars" were Israel's device for getting around the prohibition against idols.  They merely set up a pillar which, normally, would have been the pedestal for some idol god; but, in their case, they merely left the idol off, attributed sanctity to the pillar itself, and worshipped it!  God commanded the destruction of such things.  "In Canaanite religion it was identified with deity (especially male deity), an object of veneration, and therefore forbidden to the Israelites."[3]  The pillar became, in practice, a phallic symbol! "The Israelites were told to destroy all they found  (Exodus 23:24;  Deuteronomy 16:22)."[4]