Sefer HaChinuch ספר החינוך

To not bow down to idolatry: To not bow down to idolatry — and idolatry is anything that is worshiped besides God, blessed be He — as it is stated (Exodus 20:5), “You shall not bow down to them or serve them.” And the explanation of the verse is not “do not bow down to them with the intention of worship,” [so] that we would learn that bowing down, by itself — without the intention of worship — would not be forbidden. As behold, in another place, it is stated in the Torah (Exodus 34:14), “For you must not bow down to another god,” which forbade bowing down by itself, from any angle. Rather, [the reason] it made “or serve them” adjacent, [is] to say that bowing down is one of the ways of worship. And we learn from here, with the assistance of other verses, that there are four worships about which the Torah is insistent with any idolatry in the world — and even if it is not the way of its worship, we are liable for it. And one of [these four] is bowing down.

The root of this commandment is known. The laws of the commandment — for example, what is [considered] bowing down, if it is the spreading out of hands and feet or if it is from the time he puts his face to the ground (Horayot 4a); the distancing of the matter, as for example, what they said (Avodah Zarah 12a) that if a thorn is stuck in his foot or his coins scattered in front of idolatry, he is not permitted to bend over to get them because it appears like bowing down; and the rest of its details — are elucidated in Tractate Avodah Zarah.

And [it] is practiced in every place and at all times by males and females. And one who transgresses it and bows down to any idolatry in the world — or sacrifices, or gives incense, or pours or sprinkles [libations] — volitionally is liable for excision. And [if it is] in front of witnesses, he is stoned; and inadvertently, he is liable for a sin-offering. And the elucidation of the statutes of the punishments are in the seventh chapter of Sanhedrin.