Sexual immorality and eating things sacrificed to idols were part and parcel of pagan idolatry.
“The special enticements to idolatry as offered by these various cults were found in their deification of natural forces and their appeal to primitive human desires, especially the sexual … Baal and Astarte worship, which was especially attractive, was closely associated with fornication and drunkenness (Amos 2:7 , Amos 2:8; compare 1 Kings 14:23 f), and also appealed greatly to magic and soothsaying (e.g. Isaiah 2:6; Isaiah 3:2; Isaiah 8:19 ).”
“Idolatry,” International Standard Bible Encyclopedia.
“It seems strange to a modern reader that with these ceremonial prohibitions [against idolatry] should be connected the strictly moral prohibition of fornication. … no heathen moralist, not even Socrates, or Plato, or Cicero, condemned fornication absolutely. It was sanctioned by the worship of Aphrodite at Corinth and Paphos, and practiced to her honor by a host of harlot-priestesses! … Hence the author of the Apocalypse also closely connects the eating of meat offered to idols with fornication, and denounces them together.”
Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 1, pp. 294.
“Ancient Near Eastern societies … featured many shrines and temples or ‘houses of heaven’ dedicated to various deities. According to the 5th-century BC historian Herodotus, the rites performed at these temples included … what scholars later called sacred prostitution. … The Hebrew Bible uses two different words for prostitute, zonah (זנה) and kedeshah (or qedesha) (קדשה). The word zonah simply meant an ordinary prostitute or ‘loose woman’. But the word kedeshah literally means ‘consecrated’ (feminine form), from the Semitic root q-d-sh (קדש) meaning ‘holy’ or ‘set apart’. Whatever the cultic significance of a kedeshah to a follower of the Canaanite religion, the Hebrew Bible makes it clear that cultic prostitution had no place in Judaism. Thus the Hebrew version of Deuteronomy 23:17-18 tells followers: ‘None of the daughters of Israel shall be a kedeshah, nor shall any of the sons of Israel be a kadesh. You shall not bring the hire of a prostitute (zonah) or the wages of a dog (kelev) into the house of the Lord your God to pay a vow, for both of these are an abomination to the Lord your God.’ Stephen O. Murray writes that biblical passages ban qdeshim and link them with gods and ‘forms of worship detested by orthodox followers of Yahweh’.”
“Sacred Prostitution,” Wikipedia.
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