Child sacrifice was a custom among several of the Semitic tribes. The Phoenicians were a coalition of city states that formed a sort of ancient Hansa trading organization and were the major power on the Mediterranean coast of the Levant. They were ethnically, religiously, and linguistically close to the Israelites and just one of tribal formations that had their own Highest God who demanded child sacrifice.
The Israelites did it, too. In the Bible, Yahweh condemns it most of the time, but it was at times effective in getting your God to intervene on your side. (2 Kings 3:27) Ezekiel 20:25–26 shows that it was in the past commanded by Yahweh also:
“So I gave them statutes that were not good and laws by which they could not live. I defiled them through their gifts, the sacrifice of every firstborn, that I might horrify them so they would know that I am the LORD.”
So it was a custom that was well known and at times adhered to by the Israelites. Abraham did not do anything that seemed incompatible with the nature of his god. (At that time known as El Elyon, not Yahweh.)
You've expressed it all better than most scholars would in a comment box, and the Ezekiel passage is the one that really unsettles people, since it has Yahweh owning the command rather than just condemning the practice. The El Elyon point is the crucial one, too, since Abraham was operating within a religious world where a high god demanding your firstborn was just how these deities were understood to operate, with little shock value.
I was 6 years old in my first year at school and this story was dramatically told with all the bells and whistles (all the blodd and glory) to us in our bible class at school. As a child I felt very sorry for the ram. I never understood the whole sacrifice idea. But as a boy I was much to scared 😱 to ask or question anything.
Among the Abrahamic religions, sacrifice makes the most practical, social sense in Islam's version, rooted in the economics of 7th-century Arabia. The animal doesn't just die for symbolism.
During the annual festival of Eid al-Adha, a third goes to feed your own household, a third to family and friends, and a third to the poor. (Today, of course, Muslim-majority countries turn this into a bloodbath once a year, streets and slaughterhouses alike overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it.)
When the sacrifice is made simply to thank God for a blessing received, outside the festival, the entire animal goes to the poor. Either way, slaughter becomes a wealth-redistribution mechanism.
That might sound like a footnote to modern ears, but in a subsistence economy where meat was a luxury few could afford, it was a very big deal.
This brings to mind an interesting idea. I've always maintained that it is ridiculous to conflate the OT and NT into a single religion, since they're so opposed to each other. The Torah is all about tribal survival and conquest while the Gospels are all about spirituality.
But then maybe there's an intentional symbolism of the contrast between sparing the son to save the tribe and the sacrifice of the Son to save our souls.
You're in good company with that instinct. Marcion of Sinope made exactly this argument in the second century, that the God of the Torah and the Father of Jesus couldn't possibly be the same being, and he built an entire church around the idea. The proto-orthodox declared him a heretic, but they never really answered his question. They just kept both testaments and papered over the tension with typology.
Which is where your second point comes in, because typology is exactly what you're describing. Early Christian writers read the binding of Isaac as a deliberate foreshadowing of the crucifixion: the beloved son, the wood carried up the mountain, the substitute sacrifice. The catch is that this symbolism runs entirely one direction. It only exists if you read Genesis backward through Christian eyes. The original authors of the Akedah had no crucified messiah in mind. They were writing about obedience, covenant, and (probably) a polemic against actual child sacrifice in the ancient Near East.
Now how can we have a good bible story when you're taking them apart with context and facts? Seems you have no end yet of interesting biblical conundrums to shed light on, and thank you for that. A recent encounter I had with the situation of child sacrifice was in one of the early chapters of Michener's "The Source", Of Death and Life. Imagining as a novelist will the emotional impact of a mother being forced to sacrifice her infant, on whose beliefs? My first exposure also to the early gods of the Middle East and their apparent relationship to the god of Judaism. I appreciate your approach to the subject..
The scholarship can tell you that child sacrifice existed across the Levant and probably shows up in early Israelite practice too before later editors worked to distance Yahweh from it. What it can't do is make you feel the mother in the room. That's the novelist's job, and Michener clearly did his homework before he did it.
On the "early gods of the Middle East" question, Yahweh shows up in the earliest texts as one god among a divine council, likely a son of the Canaanite high god El, later taking over El's titles and epithets, and eventually consuming his rivals like Baal on the way to becoming the only god left standing.
Child sacrifice was tangled up in that same Canaanite religious world, most associated with Molech, and a good chunk of the Torah's fiercest polemics are aimed at rooting that specific practice out of Israelite religion. So the story read was standing right in the middle of the mess Israelite religion emerged from.
Thought for the day. When the US bombed and killed the children at school in Iran recently,was this a sacrifice to a nationalistic Christian God? When mass school killings are committed is it in response to sacrifice the innocent ? What runs through the minds behind these atrocitys ? Have any atheists ever committed these kinds of acts ? Just asking out of curiosity.
I hear what you're saying. The leaders behind those actions are, more often than not, exploiting religion rather than acting as devout Christians or Muslims dutifully carrying out what their faith dictates. For all we know, the Trumps may or may not be atheists themselves.
The Vietnam war certainly encouraged the country to slaughter its sons to the image of monolithic communism. The military realized the substitution of volunteers for draftees works better.
Abraham was a man who circumcised himself because the voices in his head told him to. Why should we be surprised that he would sick a knife in his son when the same voices told him to do that as well?
If you read the received text carefully, you see an anomaly. Abraham, Isaac and two men go up the mountain for the sacrifice. At some point the two men are told to wait. Abraham and Isaac continue to the altar. A miracle occurs. Abraham comes down the mountain.
Where's Isaac?
It looks like the miracle story was added to the original story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, but the scribe didn't change the surrounding text.
Since Abraham is mythical, changing the myth counts as fair use. But this raises the question of why change the myth, since myth supplies meaning. Isaac gives us Jacob/Israel and Esau as brothers. That relates the Sons of Israel and the Edomites, two tribes in Canaan. This story is written in the block Hebrew alphabet that came out of Persia. It serves to justify the return of the Babylonian captives; that is, it makes claims of property rights. The Samaritans reacted by writing their own version of the Torah with some changes. The Samaritans used the old script that was invented by the Phoenicians (although it is called paleo-Hebrew in Israeli contexts). Surprise, surprise, the Samaritans and the Judeans didn't get along. I believe that when Jesus said "Love your enemies", he was talking to the Judeans about the Samaritans, not the Romans.
Child sacrifice was a custom among several of the Semitic tribes. The Phoenicians were a coalition of city states that formed a sort of ancient Hansa trading organization and were the major power on the Mediterranean coast of the Levant. They were ethnically, religiously, and linguistically close to the Israelites and just one of tribal formations that had their own Highest God who demanded child sacrifice.
The Israelites did it, too. In the Bible, Yahweh condemns it most of the time, but it was at times effective in getting your God to intervene on your side. (2 Kings 3:27) Ezekiel 20:25–26 shows that it was in the past commanded by Yahweh also:
“So I gave them statutes that were not good and laws by which they could not live. I defiled them through their gifts, the sacrifice of every firstborn, that I might horrify them so they would know that I am the LORD.”
So it was a custom that was well known and at times adhered to by the Israelites. Abraham did not do anything that seemed incompatible with the nature of his god. (At that time known as El Elyon, not Yahweh.)
You've expressed it all better than most scholars would in a comment box, and the Ezekiel passage is the one that really unsettles people, since it has Yahweh owning the command rather than just condemning the practice. The El Elyon point is the crucial one, too, since Abraham was operating within a religious world where a high god demanding your firstborn was just how these deities were understood to operate, with little shock value.
I was 6 years old in my first year at school and this story was dramatically told with all the bells and whistles (all the blodd and glory) to us in our bible class at school. As a child I felt very sorry for the ram. I never understood the whole sacrifice idea. But as a boy I was much to scared 😱 to ask or question anything.
You were a smart kid.
Among the Abrahamic religions, sacrifice makes the most practical, social sense in Islam's version, rooted in the economics of 7th-century Arabia. The animal doesn't just die for symbolism.
During the annual festival of Eid al-Adha, a third goes to feed your own household, a third to family and friends, and a third to the poor. (Today, of course, Muslim-majority countries turn this into a bloodbath once a year, streets and slaughterhouses alike overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it.)
When the sacrifice is made simply to thank God for a blessing received, outside the festival, the entire animal goes to the poor. Either way, slaughter becomes a wealth-redistribution mechanism.
That might sound like a footnote to modern ears, but in a subsistence economy where meat was a luxury few could afford, it was a very big deal.
Probably good you didn't. Kids that ask questions about things like that usually got in trouble. Ask me how I know. 🙄
definitely should be discussed more in churches than just accepted. It's the 21st century and religion still isnt questioned in many circles.
Agreed, and the frustrating part is that the questions aren't even hostile.
Tanner— you should know by now that in many if not most churches, all questions that are not expressly formulated within the catechism are hostile.
This brings to mind an interesting idea. I've always maintained that it is ridiculous to conflate the OT and NT into a single religion, since they're so opposed to each other. The Torah is all about tribal survival and conquest while the Gospels are all about spirituality.
But then maybe there's an intentional symbolism of the contrast between sparing the son to save the tribe and the sacrifice of the Son to save our souls.
You're in good company with that instinct. Marcion of Sinope made exactly this argument in the second century, that the God of the Torah and the Father of Jesus couldn't possibly be the same being, and he built an entire church around the idea. The proto-orthodox declared him a heretic, but they never really answered his question. They just kept both testaments and papered over the tension with typology.
Which is where your second point comes in, because typology is exactly what you're describing. Early Christian writers read the binding of Isaac as a deliberate foreshadowing of the crucifixion: the beloved son, the wood carried up the mountain, the substitute sacrifice. The catch is that this symbolism runs entirely one direction. It only exists if you read Genesis backward through Christian eyes. The original authors of the Akedah had no crucified messiah in mind. They were writing about obedience, covenant, and (probably) a polemic against actual child sacrifice in the ancient Near East.
yeah that's true it's quite a stretch to retroactively interpret Genesis that way, but then so is a lot of their typology.
Now how can we have a good bible story when you're taking them apart with context and facts? Seems you have no end yet of interesting biblical conundrums to shed light on, and thank you for that. A recent encounter I had with the situation of child sacrifice was in one of the early chapters of Michener's "The Source", Of Death and Life. Imagining as a novelist will the emotional impact of a mother being forced to sacrifice her infant, on whose beliefs? My first exposure also to the early gods of the Middle East and their apparent relationship to the god of Judaism. I appreciate your approach to the subject..
Thanks for your kind words; that means a lot.
The scholarship can tell you that child sacrifice existed across the Levant and probably shows up in early Israelite practice too before later editors worked to distance Yahweh from it. What it can't do is make you feel the mother in the room. That's the novelist's job, and Michener clearly did his homework before he did it.
On the "early gods of the Middle East" question, Yahweh shows up in the earliest texts as one god among a divine council, likely a son of the Canaanite high god El, later taking over El's titles and epithets, and eventually consuming his rivals like Baal on the way to becoming the only god left standing.
Child sacrifice was tangled up in that same Canaanite religious world, most associated with Molech, and a good chunk of the Torah's fiercest polemics are aimed at rooting that specific practice out of Israelite religion. So the story read was standing right in the middle of the mess Israelite religion emerged from.
This article should be read in all Christian churches this Sunday.
Very flattering, thanks. But that might be the quickest way to clear out a few pews.
Thought for the day. When the US bombed and killed the children at school in Iran recently,was this a sacrifice to a nationalistic Christian God? When mass school killings are committed is it in response to sacrifice the innocent ? What runs through the minds behind these atrocitys ? Have any atheists ever committed these kinds of acts ? Just asking out of curiosity.
I hear what you're saying. The leaders behind those actions are, more often than not, exploiting religion rather than acting as devout Christians or Muslims dutifully carrying out what their faith dictates. For all we know, the Trumps may or may not be atheists themselves.
The Vietnam war certainly encouraged the country to slaughter its sons to the image of monolithic communism. The military realized the substitution of volunteers for draftees works better.
Abraham was a man who circumcised himself because the voices in his head told him to. Why should we be surprised that he would sick a knife in his son when the same voices told him to do that as well?
If you read the received text carefully, you see an anomaly. Abraham, Isaac and two men go up the mountain for the sacrifice. At some point the two men are told to wait. Abraham and Isaac continue to the altar. A miracle occurs. Abraham comes down the mountain.
Where's Isaac?
It looks like the miracle story was added to the original story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, but the scribe didn't change the surrounding text.
Since Abraham is mythical, changing the myth counts as fair use. But this raises the question of why change the myth, since myth supplies meaning. Isaac gives us Jacob/Israel and Esau as brothers. That relates the Sons of Israel and the Edomites, two tribes in Canaan. This story is written in the block Hebrew alphabet that came out of Persia. It serves to justify the return of the Babylonian captives; that is, it makes claims of property rights. The Samaritans reacted by writing their own version of the Torah with some changes. The Samaritans used the old script that was invented by the Phoenicians (although it is called paleo-Hebrew in Israeli contexts). Surprise, surprise, the Samaritans and the Judeans didn't get along. I believe that when Jesus said "Love your enemies", he was talking to the Judeans about the Samaritans, not the Romans.