I would urge readers, however, to resist the impulse to automatically reject child sacrifice as a part of early Jewish religion. To be sure, there is polemic against child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible.³ But the Bible is a collection of texts from many different eras of Israel’s history, and of different theological perspectives and sometimes what’s condemned in one text is in fact condoned, or even demanded, in another.⁴ This reflects the common idea that the narrative of Genesis 22 is directed against the practice of child sacrifice, often associated with early Israel’s regional neighbors. According to the Bible, God commanded Abraham in the Binding of Isaac to sacrifice his son, but ultimately provided a ram as a substitute. The supposed torture and human sacrifice alleged in the blood libels run contrary to the teachings of Judaism. Similarly, early Christians too were falsely accused of participating in infanticidal and cannibalistic rites.Ī sort of blanket incredulity that human sacrifice was ever a part of “official” Jewish religion might even be detected in the Wikipedia entry for blood libel itself: This idea is sometimes thought to be so inherently implausible that it’s often assumed (erroneously) to be a fringe theory by non-academic audiences.² In this particular case, it also doesn’t help that the charge of the practice of child sacrifice in Jewish religion really has been part of the fabric of (genuine) legend: see the blood libel, a staple of medieval anti-Jewish polemic. In this post I want explore how in the earliest strata of Israelite religion, it was understood that the Jewish god, YHWH/Elohim, commanded ritual sacrifice of the firstborn child from his followers-and that this was not originally considered a heterodox rite, but indeed what we’d call an “orthodox” or official part of the Jewish religion of the time.¹
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