מלכים ב, פרק כ״א, פסוק ט׳

A nation's moral collapse rarely happens overnight; it begins when the people stop paying attention to their core values. During the reign of King Manasseh, a profound failure to heed God's warnings and the teachings of the Torah paved the way for widespread national sin. Manasseh actively caused the Israelites to stray from the right path [מצודת ציון]. However, his ability to mislead them so easily was a direct result of their own failure to listen. Because the people had already stopped following the Torah, they were highly vulnerable to the king's influence [מלבי״ם].

Had the Israelites remained faithful to the teachings of Moses, they would have rebelled against the king and prevented him from placing an idol in the Temple. The Temple belongs to all the tribes of Israel, not to the king alone. By failing to stop him, the placement of the idol became a collective sin of the entire nation rather than just the personal wrongdoing of Manasseh.

The tragic result of this deception was a level of corruption that surpassed mere imitation. Under Manasseh's influence, the wicked acts of the Israelites grew far worse than the terrible practices of the local Canaanite nations whom God had originally destroyed and driven out of the land [מלבי״ם, מצודת דוד, ביאור שטיינזלץ].