Because they could. The writer of the story can do or say anything he very well damn pleases

There you go thinking again. It's not good to actually try and make sense out of these fables.

it's interesting, archaeological evidence does support the worship of idols by Israelites, since they have been found in Israelite homes. this was, however, after they had settled in Canaan, so this would have been after the time of Moses and the exodus and those associated miracles. however, what is even more interesting in the archaeological record, is that these idols completely disappeared from existance after the Babylonian exile. some theorize that it was in the Babylonian exile that the Torah was compiled completely (and that the Israelites repented - the exile was punishment for worshipping idols). there are several theories as to why there was idol worship. some believe that the Israelites, for the most part, did not come from Egypt and where Canaanites already, in which case they would have been polytheists. others believe that the Israelites, while in Egypt, actively participated in the Egyptian religion, which as we know is polytheistic. either way, it would there had been a strong influence of polytheism in their early history.

They had been thoroughly assimilated into other cultures and had picked up the worship associated with those cultures. They had been all over Palestine before the famine that took them to Egypt and had been exposed to the idols of those cultures. They left Egypt carrying away items of gold and silver, which God had told them to ask of their neighbors and their neighbors had given them. I would imagine that if a household in Egypt had items of gold or silver they probably had something to do with Egyptian gods. So they had those idols right there in their packs. And when they went in to occupy Canaan, they were again exposed to the worship of those cultures. Also, remember that the OT covers several thousand years. So while the Israelites who came out of Egypt had a close experience of God, later generations did not. After the divided kingdom, the kingdom of the ten tribes in the North no longer had access to Jerusalem and the temple. Jeroboam immediately set up a golden calf in Bethel to worship after he took over the northern tribes. When your king tells you to worship a golden calf, it would take a fair bit of moxie to disobey and by the second or third generation the memory of God and His miracles would pretty much die out. As for the southern tribes under the unbroken leadership of the line of King David, they did a little better, but pockets of idolatry broke out every generation or two and when the king was in that pocket of idolatry, it tended to spread. In Bible study last night, our leader was saying that archaeological evidence bears out that idolatry died out after the exile to Babylon and the reestablishment of Jerusalem and the Temple. Unfortunately, humans are pretty hard-headed. We tend to learn better from the school of hard knocks than any other way.

Because it was the way of their ancestors. It was tradition.

the israelites had been warned to stay away from the neighboring nations. these nations worshipped false gods, to the point of even sacrificing their children to these blood thirsty deities. sadly even after all the miracles that Jehovah God had performed on their behalf, the israelites turned to worshipping false gods. this is because they allowed themselves to be influenced by the people who did not worship the true God of israel, ignoring the warning given to them in the mosaic law.