Charles Ellicott Commentary Jeremiah 10:5

"They are like a palm-tree, of turned work, and speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good." — Jeremiah 10:5 (ASV)

Upright as the palm tree.

Perhaps a better translation is, A pillar in a garden of gourds are they.

The Hebrew word translated “upright” has two very different, though not entirely unconnected, meanings:

1. First, “twisted, rounded, carved.” In this sense, it is commonly translated as “beaten work” (Exodus 25:18; Exodus 25:31; Exodus 25:36). If we accept this meaning, it is applied here to the twisted, palm-like columns of a temple. The stiff, formal figure of the idol—with arms pressed close to its side and none of the action found in Greek statues—is compared to these columns.
2. Second, the other meaning adopted by many commentators is “a garden of gourds or cucumbers,” and the word is rendered this way in Isaiah 1:8.

The comparison in the so-called “Epistle of Jeremy” in the apocryphal book of Baruch , where an idol is likened to “a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers,” shows that this latter meaning was the accepted one when that Epistle was written.

According to this view, the thought is that the idol the men of Judah were worshipping was like one of the “pillars” (the word for “palm tree” is translated this way in Song of Solomon 3:6 and Joel 2:30). These were like the Hermes or Priapus figures that Greeks and Romans placed in gardens and orchards as scarecrows.

Similar figures appear to have been used by the Phoenicians for the same purpose. This practice, like the related worship of the Asherah, seems to have been gaining ground even in Judah.