When I was a kid we celebrated the “Battle of Jericho” when “the walls come a’tumblin’ down” as a great victory of God that shows how he will bring victory to those who are faithful to him. I don’t think we thought for a moment what it must have been like for the people in the city itself who were slaughtered to a person (man, woman, and child) so that the Israelites could take possession of the place.
And I doubt if we ever heard at all the story of “Jephthah’s daughter” – it’s a little bit harder to make a nice Sunday School song out of someone who literally sacrifices his own child to show his faithfulness of God. Even today many people don’t know the story (and those who do usually try to explain it away). If you yourself don’t, read on.
For both I provide side-boxes on my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press).
If you need a refresher on what happened in the battle of Jericho, it’s a great story – you can find it in Joshua 6. The story of Jephthah is found in Judges 11, but since it’s not as well known, I’ll give a summary before explaining it.
But first Joshua and the battle of Jericho:
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These are demented and primitive religious belief systems.
Is there a sense that what you have been doing with your work is kicking the “crap” out of the Judeo-Christian belief system and saving and leaving the good stuff?
It kind of looks that way from the outside, and from my vantage point.
I’m not quite sure what you mean about what I’m doing!
I just saying that you’re taking the bad stuff out of the Christian religion and keeping the good. At least that’s what it looks like, even though you are not yourself a believer.
Taking the “crap” out and leaving what is good.
If not, you’re enabling others to do it.
Most readers who comment to me about it say that I only talk about the bad! I try to talk about both!
Maybe that would make a good podcast, occasional podcast segment, or post. What you actually like about Christianity and or the bible. But it looks like often times enough you are already doing that, and showing the ideas you like as compared to the ones you don’t and the ones that are not so hot.
I think it’s as much about what are good ideas as it is about who wrote it or where it is written.
Thanks for reading
See Micah 6:6-8. Though the prophet concludes that good behavior is better than sacrifice, on the sacrificial scale, human sacrifice is at the top (versus calves and rams).
On the effectiveness of human sacrifice (even when made to the “wrong” god!), see 2 Kings 3:26-27.
Regarding “The Walls of Jericho” and admitting I’m no subject matter expert, far from it, the thought that comes to me is it is a metaphor of some type. If it started as an oral tradition isn’t it reasonable that “something” happened? Respectfully
There is a ton of scholarship based both on literary analysis and archaeological finds to determine what really happened, lying behing the stories of Joshua. But almost certainly the walls of Jericho did not come tumbling down because they have shown it was a sparsely inhabited spot that had not walls at the time.
Accounts of people sacrificing their children to gods or rulers can also be found in Asia. Chinese historical writings, for example, tell of a cook named Yi Ya who killed and cooked his own son to please Duke Huan of Qi (Guanzi, “Xiao Cheng”; see also Sima Qian, Shiji [Records of the Grand Historian],“Qi Taigong Shijia”). Why do you think such horrifying practices appeared in so many parts of the world?
I have heard that in antiquity only about one in four children survived to the age of fifteen, though I am not sure how reliable or broadly applicable that figure is. Could high childhood mortality have affected how children were valued and treated? Were children sometimes treated with less care because so many were expected to die anyway? Or would it be a mistake to infer that frequent loss made parents value their children less?
This also makes me wonder about the saying attributed to Jesus that we must “become like little children.” If children occupied a very different place in ancient society, should we understand those words differently from the way modern readers tend to understand them? What associations might they have evoked for his original audience?
I would think high childhood mortality would work *against* an inclination to child sacrifice. Ancient societies needed population growth to survive. My guess is that there was a widespread sense that the gods sometimes required extreme acts of devotion to convince them to help a commjnity and need. And qhat could be more extreme?
Re: Jesus — it is usually thought that the saying has to be put in the context of ancient power structures and understandings of dominion, where women were inferior to men and to be dominated by them, and children were inferior to adults and to be dominated. Wives and children were to serve the head of household. Jesus reverses it. To be great you have to have no obvoius power or authority and should serve rather than be served.
I hear people justify the slaughter of the Canaanites because they were doing terrible things, but I respond, What’s more terrible than slaughtering women and children and then claiming God told you to do it? The Israelites also practiced child sacrifice: it’s just that they sacrificed other people’s children, not their own.
“How good it is that times have changed.” Aren’t the thousands of honor killings that occur every year just as bad human sacrifice?
They are equally horrible.
Since it’s extremely unlikely that any of those events happened, don’t you think their moral prescriptive value falls to near zero? Just like Noah’s Flood or the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, nobody was punished or died for alleged misdeeds. They are just stories and nothing more. Even attempts to please or appease a deity fall short with success having only limited esoteric worth.
Stories, of course, can teach important moral lessons. That’s why I read so many novels. (Well, one of the reasons)
Bart, two off topic questions, might make good Friday Q&A fodder. This past weekend I found myself thinking of you in two very different settings.
On Friday evening, I was at Wheaton College for a presentation by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (famous Muslim apostate and public intellectual) and Darrel Bock of DTS.
He quoted a verse, Matthew 28:19, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
I thought of you because I thought I learned on on this blog that the only reference to the trinity in the NT was in one of the John epistles. Is this usage here not sufficiently trinitarian to scholars?
Then at Catholic Mass on the Sunday the priest parsed the Philippians Christological hymn and said the word translated as “grasped” can, in the Greek, also mean “held on to”. Naturally this would be the received reading in the Church, but wondering if you agree. I asked the priest about his mastery and he confirmed he personally only had elementary Greek. [I didn’t challenge his reading, nice guy].
Is his understanding of that word correct? Would allow significantly different interpretations.
Ah, right. Matt 28:19 does name the Father, Son, and Spirit, but that’s not the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine is not their existence but how they *relate* to each other. In the end it is the view that they are all *equally* God — fully God, of the same substance, co-eternal, co-powerful, etc.; AND that they are three distinct persons; AND that there is only One God. Matthew doesn’t say any of that. Lots of non-trinitarians agree there are three, but their relationship is inquestion.
And yes, ther term can either mean “hold on to” something you already have or “snatch something you don’t have.” It’s only by the context that you can tell which it means, and in this case, since God does not give his name to Christ so that all creation will bow before him until after the resurrection, it means he did not have equality before that. It’s much debated, especially by theologians who want to hold to the trinitarian view that Christ was always equal with God. But then they can’t explain the “hyper”exaltation at the end.
Thank you for a very interesting post, Dr Ehrman. There is a Greek myth which is virtually identical to the Jephthah story – King Idomeneus of Crete, who promised the god of the sea, Poseidon, that he would sacrifice the first person he sees on returning from a stormy sea voyage – which turns out to be his son. The only difference is that the gods ultimately object to the sacrifice.
PS. I think there is a reference to Jephthah in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet.
Yup, and Iphthegenia, etc.
Shakespeare also references Jephthah in the play, Henry VI, part 3:
“Perhaps thou wilt object my holy oath:
To keep that oath were more impiety
Than Jephthah’s, when he sacrificed his daughter.”
The Phoenician city of Carthage was famously charged with the practice of sacrificing infants to Moloch. But doubt has been cast on that in Eve MacDonald’s “Carthage: A New History” (p. 38), though she does not cite a source.
I’ve been thinking about the terminology used to describe God in Genesis – and I’ve certainly heard the viewpoint that it speaks of “they” and “us” because human gender doesn’t apply to God who is above it. However, we also know that early Jews were polytheist and only worshiped one of the many gods they believed existed. We know that YHWH came from the Mesopotamian pantheon, replaced by Ba’al, and that the creation myth came from older Mesopotamian stories.
So, why an insistence among scholars that it speaks only of YHWH? It seems that many gods created mankind and YHWH wasn’t the god of all mankind – YHWH adopted just the Jews as his chosen people. Up until Exodus, couldn’t it be speaking of many gods acting and speaking while, come Exodus, only YHWH becomes relevant?
Most Hebrew Bible scholars acknowledge both that Israel was surrounded by polythestic cultures; that the biblical view(s) of God, and even teh names (not YHWH itself, but El, e.g.) come from other cultures; that early Israel was henotheist rather than monotheist (they believed there were other gods but, in theory, refused to worship them); and that the religion of Israel did indeed evolve over time. But the view that emerged was that YHWH alone was God and that this view then shaped later writers who claimed it for all Israelites in the earlier periods when it simply was not true. If that helps.
Religion has always been an aspect of politics… stories told to affect an attitude among the governed. We can hardly imagine the context of bronze age people, But, we still do it today. Look at WWII demeaning poster caricatures of Hitler, Mussolini and monkey like Tojo and Hirohito; patriotic posters of Rosie the riveter . Cartoon “short” stories to steer attitudes during war.
I have heard compelling argument that Ex 22:29 is part of the older, Covenant Code, layer of the laws and commands the sacrifice of first-born sons. (Just as with first born oxen and sheep in the next verse.)
I know that later passages renegotiate that to either consecrating them to the priesthood or redeeming them with other offerings, but I’d love to hear your assessment of the original meaning there?
I don’t really know. It’s hard to say. Outside the covenant code Exod. 13 explicates that firstborn animals are to be sacrificed to God but firstborn male children are to be “redeemed” (presumably through a substitute sacrifice). The problem with 22:29 is that it doesn’t explain what it means!
Thanks for the post! Regarding your discussion of human sacrifice and Molech, I was under the impression that scholarship had shifted to view Molech as a type of sacrifice rather than a specific deity. Is that correct or am I misremembering?
I don’t know! Or rather “not to my knowledge.” Not sure how they would get there, but it’s possible.
One problem of course is that if a certain scholar or group of scholars claims something that doesn’t mean “scholarship has shifted”; it just means “others have advanced another view” — which ain’t the same thing. But in this case, I really don’t know.
Child sacrifice is the centrepiece of Christian belief. The deity sacrifices its child to appease itself with a blood sacrifice. Adherents commemorate this act by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the sacrificial victim.
Ancient beliefs surviving into modern times, so familiar to everyone that most people don’t even notice how bizarre the whole thing is.
It disturbs me that YouTube has so many videos, specifically directed at kids, showing Joshua as a wonderful person for leading the slaughter of the population of Jericho. I occasionally report the videos, but it doesn’t do any good.
Jephthah is my favorite Bible story! AND… in the New Testament when Paul is mentioning men of faith, he lists Jephthah as one of them.