Hi, I am new to the blog but thought I would share something I believe is an issue with the God of the Old Testament and his view towards child sacrifice.
I believe the OT portrays a contradicting view of God and his willingness to accept child sacrifices. On the one hand, you have scriptures that mention how the God of the OT abhors child sacrifices (Lev:18:21, Deut:12:30,31 and 18:10). However, you have the allegedly same god accepting or demanding child sacrifices, like the cases of Jephthah and one I like to think of as essentially a child sacrifice which is the story of King David, where he had an affair with Bathsheba and impregnated her, and in for punishment of this, God had the child killed, which to me is another form of sacrificing a child for what the parents did. Just wanted to get everyone’s thoughts on this.
Tzemah Yoreh wrote a book “Why Abraham killed Isaac.” In it he ciphers out the earliest narrative (E) as Abraham actually killing Isaac as a punishment for his lack of faith when he told his host Abimelech that Sarah was his sister, not his wife. There seems to be some ambiguity even as to whether Isaac was even Abraham’s considering that Abimelech seeks out Abraham to make a peace pact among their offspring.
Yoreh has Abraham dying having sent off his firstborn, Ishmael, and killed Isaac.
The next time we see the E author is Jacob coming from the same town Abraham retired to. Completely different hero story in E.
Its credited to a later editor to make a bridge between Abraham and Jacob by keeping Isaac alive. This fits in well with the evolving nature of the religion in that child sacrifice was outlawed. Probably sometime between the time period Ezekiel is talking about, where God made “evil” commands, and into the Hellenistic age when Greeks finally realized Judeans existed and noted that they are constrained to raise their children.
This brings up another point. Child sacrifice seems to have been common in Canaan and it seems to be an anomaly to the Greeks that the Judeans did not abandon their babies or otherwise do away with unwanted children. So overall it seems child sacrifice makes it into the Bible because of its cultural prominence as a practice.
It was also useful to appease gods other than YHWH in the Bible. When a nearby king sacrifices his son to Chemosh, Chemosh turns the battle against the Israelites!!
Another item on the idea of child sacrifice. It seems to be in the Ugaritic texts down through the early Roman times that several incidents were written about where the ruler of a city under siege would sacrifice his own son on the city walls. The effect would be that the siege would end and those attacking would retreat.
I don’t know if its fictional or historical, but it seems a known tradition. It is found in 2 Kings 3 as Elisha is asked to help the three kings of Israel, Judah and Edom find water as they attack Mesha. Mesha is eventually surrounded in his city. After several attempts to escape he sacrifices his son on the city wall. The Israelites retreat.
See ** you do not have permission to see this link **. He shares the opinion of some that Molech is best interpreted not as a Canaanite deity but as a type of sacrifice. He also presents reasons to think that child sacrifices were made to Yahweh although the written traditions uniformly condemn the practice. Of course one doesn’t condemn practices that don’t occur!
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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