Commentaire sur La Genèse 35:4

האלה THE TEREBINTH — a kind of tree that bears no fruit.

AND JACOB HID THEM. An idol and the things that pertain to it are not in the category of objects that require burial and for which burial suffices, but instead they are to be crumbled up and scattered to the wind or thrown into the sea.¹⁸⁰Abodah Zarah 43b. And if so, why did Jacob bury the idols when they should have been destroyed? It appears to me that the sons of Jacob did not take the idols and the things that pertain to them from Shechem until they had been nullified and had thus become permissible to them, for a heathen can nullify an idol against its worshipper’s will,¹⁸¹Ibid., 52b. thus making it permissible to them. Jacob, however, for the sake of the purity of holy things, commanded that they remove it so that they should be fit to worship G-d and sacrifice before Him, just as He had commanded them concerning immersion and the changing of garments.¹⁸²Verse 2 here. Burial was thus sufficient for the idols, and therefore he hid them under the terebinth in a location which will neither be tilled nor sown.

ויטמון אותם יעקב, he buried them instead of destroying them. Seeing that they no longer had the halachic status of being idolatrous artifacts they did not need to be destroyed