Episode 282: Jon D. Levenson - Child Sacrifice in the Bible (Part 1)
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared are joined by Jon D. Levenson to discuss the complex and ancient practice of child sacrifice, focusing on biblical and ancient Near Eastern contexts. Together they explore the historical, theological, and cultural significance of these sacrifices, particularly in relation to divine favor, gift-giving, and the transformation of such practices in Judaism and Christianity. You can get part two of this conversation by becoming a member of the Society of Normal People at www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join. Join them as they ask the following questions:
What was the purpose of child sacrifice in ancient cultures, especially in Israel?
Why would people think to offer their children, particularly their firstborn, as a sacrifice to God?
Was child sacrifice a common practice in the ancient Near Eastern world, or was it rare?
What were the conceptions of the divine that made people think God or gods would accept child sacrifice?
Is there evidence of child sacrifice in the archaeological record, especially in Israel?
Were biblical characters like Abraham, Jephthah, and King Mesha involved in child sacrifice?
What does the story of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) say about child sacrifice?
Why did the story of King Mesha sacrificing his son (2 Kings 3) result in Israel withdrawing from battle?
What role does the concept of gift-giving play in sacrifices in the Bible, particularly child sacrifice?
How do texts like Exodus 22 suggest an older tradition of child sacrifice that was later replaced by redemption rituals?
How do prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel reflect a shift in attitudes toward child sacrifice?
Was there a historical point where the practice of child sacrifice was explicitly condemned in Israel?
What is the significance of substitutionary rituals (like the Paschal Lamb) in relation to child sacrifice?
What does Ezekiel 20 mean when it says God gave Israel "bad laws" that included offering their firstborn?
Is there a royal dimension to child sacrifice, given that kings like Mesha and high-status figures like Abraham are involved in such narratives?
Quotables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
"One main purpose [of child sacrifice] would be to induce divine favor, to induce goodwill in the deity, by offering a present. If you give someone a gift, especially a gift that's something that's very meaningful to you, and that you really treasure, maybe even love—then in fact, you secure the favor of the god.” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“Gift giving is important in all sacrifice, but especially where you seek to induce favor and goodwill on the part of the deity.” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“Even if you have a loving God, which you certainly do have in spades in the Hebrew Bible—nonetheless, all love relationships involve gift giving, involve acts of generosity. It's hard to sustain any relationship where there isn't some sense of mutual gift giving. Any gift, even a gift from a loving God, does come with some expectation that there will be some reciprocity, something given back.” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“You don't have prophets denouncing and legislators forbidding something that nobody does. To read books like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, you would think child sacrifice was very common in the biblical world.” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“I don't think there's ever been a culture in which fathers routinely sacrificed their children, or even sacrificed their firstborn sons, or sacrificed some subcategory of their children. I think a culture that did that probably wouldn't have a very long shelf life. And I also think they'd have trouble retaining the loyalty of the next generation. So, I don't think it was a routine thing that everybody was running around doing, but it certainly existed in the ancient Near Eastern world.” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“I have to make a distinction here that often is not made when people talk about this issue of child sacrifice. The distinction is that what seems to be commanded in the Hebrew Bible, where there seems to be some commandment to offer up a child, is not the indiscriminate sacrifice of children.” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“I don't know any place where there is anything that could possibly be construed in the Hebrew Bible as a commandment to offer one's children. There's seems to be a commandment or text that had been interpreted to mean ‘offer your firstborn son’, or in the case of Jephthah, who has no son, your only daughter. So that's an important distinction that one has to make.” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“Abraham is rewarded with this very extravagant blessing precisely because he has not withheld the son, he's been willing to offer him.” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“In a society that just assumes [there is] nothing more disgusting than sacrificing your son, it's hard to know why God would order that in the first place and reward Abraham for his willingness to do it in the second place. So that would be another text that to me suggests that matters were more ambiguous or murkier than just the idea, ‘Oh, God has always hated child sacrifice.’” — Jon D. Levenson @theb4np
“[In] Ezekiel 20:25-26, God [admits he] gave [the people] laws that were not good. Here the assumption is when they offered their firstborn, they weren't following some pagan rite, as Jeremiah says. Here, it's very clearly their own God they're offering to, at his command, but it was a bad law, which the assumption is he's now revoking, or now revealing to have been bad all along. That suggests to me some turning point, some pivot in the way this thing is being thought about. ‘From now on, it'll be the most disgusting pagan rite possible, and we're 100 percent against it.’ But the text I've been talking about suggests that there was another side to the story. Older and obsolete, but this may be the text where you see it becoming obsolete.” — Jon D. Levenson
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: September Class “Get a Grip on the Context: New Testament Beginnings and Background” taught by Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Books: By Jon D. Levenson
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
[Intro music plays]
Pete: Hey folks, today we're talking about child sacrifice in the Bible with Jon D. Levenson. Jon is professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School, and he's been teaching there since 1998, which is the same year Jared went to high school. He's the author of many wonderful books, including one that's the basis for this podcast episode, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity.
Jared: And we're doing something different with this topic. It's going to be a two part episode, but the second part is only going to be available to members of our online community, The Society of Normal People. So you might want to get a head start and sign up at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join. But everyone gets to hear part one and I'm excited about that. Why, you might ask, would you be excited about child sacrifice? Well, this topic might seem obscure, but Jon is such an immense biblical scholar that if you listen closely, you'll see it has a lot of implications for what the Bible is and how we read it. So let's dive in.
[Music plays over teaser clip of Jon speaking]
Jon: “God at some point in the past gave them bad laws. Moreover, ‘I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through the gifts in their offering up all their firstborn. In order that I might horrify them, or I might desolate them, in order that they would understand my power and my sovereignty.’ That suggests to me some turning point, some pivot in the way this thing is being thought about. From now on, it will be the most disgusting rite possible. We are 100 percent against it.”
Pete: Jon, welcome back to the podcast.
Jon: It's a pleasure to be here, Pete. Thank you so much for having me.
Pete: Have you been counting the years until you came back?
Jon: No, I can't go that high. I was never that good in math. [Laughing] And I was never that good in math. Basically, for three reasons, at least I know why, three reasons: lack of innate talent and poor teaching. [All laughing]
Pete: Yes, exactly.
Jared: That's good.
Pete: Oh, gosh. Well, you picked the right profession, then, talking about the Bible and things like that, so.
Jon: Oh, yeah.
Pete: So, what are we talking about today? Child sacrifice in the Bible and all that sort of stuff. So, let me just start with a good basic question to get everybody oriented. It was practiced, apparently, in many ancient cultures, including those in and around the land of Israel, and what was the purpose of it, for heaven's sake? I mean, why would people ever dream up the idea, I think I'll kill my child? Why would people do that?
Jon: That's a very good question. I think it's hard to know what purposes are. I think the main purpose probably was, or one main purpose would be, to induce divine favor, to induce goodwill in the deity, by offering a present. If you offer someone a present, you give someone a gift, especially a gift that's something that's very meaningful to you, and that you really treasure, maybe even love, then in fact, uh, you, uh, secure the favor of the god. Gift giving is important in all sacrifice, but especially where you seek to induce the favor and goodwill on the part of the deity.
So Jephthah, In Judges 11, he makes a vow that whatever comes out of his house, the first thing that comes out of his house, the verb is yotzeh, he will offer up if God grants him, the God of Israel grants him, victory over the Ammonites. I don't think he expects it to be his daughter, we can talk about this later. I think he thinks it's going to be a sheep or goat milling around at the bottom level of the house, or in the yard. But it turns out to be his daughter, and he has to sacrifice her, tragically. King Mesha, in 2 Kings 3, is losing a battle. And he tries to break out of the siege, and he fails. So, what does he do?
He takes, it says, his son, who would be king after him, his firstborn son who would be king after him, and offers him as a sacrifice. And that seems to work. That does seem to break the siege. So, one reason would be, one purpose would be, induce divine favor, goodwill, by offering a kind of present of something valuable to the God.
Another I can think of is this: Offering the first fruits to God as a sign that all bounty comes from Him, and in gratitude for having that bounty. In other words, in the Bible, the first fruits of crops, of herds, of flocks, of olive oil, and so forth, is offered to the deity as a matter of law. We are not responsible for the bounty, the good luck we've had, the fortune, good fortune we've had. The fact there hasn't been a drought or a blight. We're not responsible. We are very dependent on God and he gets the first claim on it, so to speak.
So what about the first born of the son? What about the first born son? I think that is a major factor. Uh, offering the first fruits as a sign of, of gratitude for the, the bounty. We don't really own what we have, what we've been given. It really is a gift. That becomes very important in Genesis 22, the so-called sacrifice of Isaac, which Jews call the Akedah Yitzchak, the binding of Isaac, the Akedah, or of the Paschal story, the Passover story, where the Paschal Lamb takes the place of the firstborn. Although there, it's also apotropaic, it also wards off disaster.
And the third thing that occurs to me in terms of a purpose for this would be substituting one's heir for oneself. In other words, in a sense, I offer myself through, especially my firstborn son, especially if I'm a king or anybody, any father, offering his firstborn son, his prime heir.
In the 13th century CE, in Provence, a Jewish commentator called RaDak, Rabbi David Kimhi, said about Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, that he actually would have preferred to sacrifice himself. It would have been easier for him if God had asked him to sacrifice himself, rather than Isaac, who is the son whom he loves. So, it could be that when Mesha offers his firstborn son, who will be king after him, it has a similar sort of feel to it. I'm so subordinating myself to the deity. I'm so accepting the sovereignty of the deity and his claim on everything that I have, that I'm prepared to offer myself, except that's not feasible. It's not really practical. So I offer my firstborn son in place of myself.
Pete: Okay. Well, we want to get into, you mentioned some of the passages that I think are very important to look at for this. I want to just take a half a step back and ask you, What is it about the conceptions of the divine that would make people think, I mean, this is probably an unanswerable question, but you know, it's almost like you have to induce favor and to do that is to sacrifice something.
And that's a particular conception of God or the gods or the divine realm or whatever. And it just, it seems rather harsh, I think, at least to modern people. That's one of these maybe unanswerable questions, but do you have any thoughts about just maybe where those kinds of conceptions of God would come from? Why not just a loving God that cares for you? Why is it a God that demands or would benefit from you slitting the throat of your oldest son?
Jon: I don't know that the god benefits from it, and I don't know that people have to offer the firstborn son. It after all is a pretty rare thing in the Bible. We could talk about, I'd like, I should like to talk about how common it may have been or may not have been in the ancient Near Eastern world more generally. But I think if you, even if you have a loving God, which you certainly do have in spades in the Hebrew Bible—nonetheless, all love relationships involve gift giving, involve acts of generosity. It's hard to sustain any relationship where there isn't some sense of mutual gift giving. Any gift, even a gift from a loving God, does come with some expectation that there will be some reciprocity, something given back.
It's not just purely a free gift such that the person has no moral obligation as a result of having received it. So I think in this case, there is, I prefer to think of it more along the lines of gift giving in certain places, like King Mesha in 2 King 3, or Jephthah in Judges 11, it is intended to secure a particular benefit.
But in other cases, like the Akedah, Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, I don't see that it's offered in order to secure a benefit. Or Abraham. I think Abraham receives a benefit afterwards, unexpectedly. I don't think it's exactly such a quid pro quo as your question presupposes. I prefer to put it and put sacrifice generally in the Hebrew Bible into the category of gift giving, especially if it falls into the category of the firstfruits.
So what sort of God are we dealing with? We're dealing with a generous God who enters into relationship? And relationship doesn't necessarily involve elements of mutuality, reciprocity, and mutual gift giving. That would be the concept. But can I say something about how general this was or was not in the Ancient Near East?
Pete: Yeah, actually, that was my next question. Please do that. Yeah.
Jon: This depends on when and where. It's very dangerous to generalize, particularly dangerous to use a term like, a very common term like “pagan.” Usually the word pagan, in my opinion, is overblown, overgeneralized, apologetic. I mean, I'll name a few pagans for you: Aristotle was a pagan. The Buddha was a pagan. Confucius was a pagan. Seneca was a pagan. And none of these people, to my knowledge, went around sacrificing their children, or engaging in various deviant sexual practices, which also is often said to be typical of pagans. Nor do they go around worshiping rocks and carved wood and imagine that that was a deity.
So, I like to use the word pagan, simply to refer to somebody in the ancient world who was not an Israelite, or a Jew, or a Samaritan, or a Christian. And don't make fun of the Samaritans. There's some good Samaritans. There's not many of them left, but there are some good Samaritans.
So, in the so-called pagan world, outside of ancient Israel, there's considerable evidence for it in the Punic culture. There's the culture in North Africa. The Punic colonies were colonies of Phoenicians, the people from the northwest Semitic world, basically from the same world as ancient Israel came from, and speaking of, very closely related language to biblical Hebrew. Their most famous town was, of course, Carthage, which is simply Punic, Phoenician for New City, like Newtown or Naples, Neapolis, those various towns that mean Newtown.
And there's a lot of archaeological evidence for a lot of child sacrifice there. Child sacrifice for basically babies up to about a year old. There are also urns that have the remains of a lamb offered in place of the child who was offered. And that is very reminiscent of this Passover story in the Bible, and very reminiscent of the binding of Isaac, in which a ram takes the place of the son who was supposed to be sacrificed. So, there it seems pretty general. I don't know of archaeological evidence for it in the Hebrew Bible among the ancient Israelites. However, you don't have prophets denouncing something and legislators forbidding something, forbidding something that nobody does. To read books like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, you would think child sacrifice was very common in the biblical world.
So I think one has to assume, based on the textual evidence, Abraham, the Paschal story, the story of Mesha, Micah 6, where the worshiper says, “Shall I offer my firstborn?” All these places, I think you have to say such a thing did, in fact, go on. Was it general in the ancient Near East? No, I don't think so. I don't think there's ever been a culture in which fathers routinely sacrificed their children, or even sacrificed their firstborn sons, or sacrificed some subcategory of their children. I think a culture that did that probably wouldn't have a very long shelf life. And I also think they'd have trouble retaining the loyalty of the next generation. So, I don't think it was a routine thing that everybody was running around doing, but it certainly existed in the ancient Near Eastern world.
Various forms of human sacrifice, but especially child sacrifice, as we see in the prophets, in places where it's forbidden in the Bible, and in the archaeological remains, especially from Carthage and those other Punic towns from North Africa. As late as like, the second, late second, early third century CE, a common era, the church father Tertullian is saying, you know, those people still do that in occulto, secretly, they're still practicing this. The Romans aborted it. I think they made it illegal. I think the Persians probably aborted it. But nonetheless, he says there are still people that are doing this sort of thing. That means it's around, but I don't think it was ever general.
But I have to make a distinction here that often is not made when people talk about this issue of child sacrifice. The distinction is that between, let's put it this way, what seems to be commanded in the Hebrew Bible, where it seems, there seems to be some commandment to offer up a child, is not the indiscriminate sacrifice of children. It's the offering of the firstborn son. In the case of the Judge Jephthah in Judges 11, he has only one child, who is a daughter. So, she takes the place of the firstborn son. That's the most precious thing he has, and so he vows, he offers it. But in fact, what he vowed to offer was simply whatever came out of his house, which I think he thought was going to be an animal. So—
Pete: Well, he should have thought that through first, don't you think?
Jon: No, well, that's exactly what it says in the Talmud. It says the Talmud says that shows the danger of a sloppily formulated vow. If you're gonna make a vow, you should get your lawyer to give you a set form that includes all the contingencies. So it's very, very clear what you're referring to. There's a reason people have this boring legal language in contracts and so forth, because you don't want anything slippery there.
And once, once he's vowed that, and she's the first thing coming out, you know, singing his praises after his victory over the Ammonites, well, he's got to offer. He doesn't want to. But she insists, you have to fulfill your vow, there's no way out of it. And she becomes actually rather heroic in that case.
So the point I'm trying to make is, I don't know any place where there is anything that could possibly be construed in the Hebrew Bible as a commandment to offer one's children. There's a commandment, seems to be a commandment or text, that had been interpreted to mean offer your firstborn son, or in the case of Jephthah, who has no son, your only daughter. So that's an important distinction that one has to make.
[Ad break]
Jared: That turns us to this next question because, you know, we have an ulterior motive here of talking about child sacrifice because it does show some dynamism in the Hebrew text. There's more than meets the eye. So, you talked about sacrifice as a concept. I think for our listeners, it's easy to understand how prominent it is in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible.
But child sacrifice is often forbidden, and yet, when we go through some of these texts, it seems to be that the Hebrew Bible preserves indicators of child sacrifice having been practiced in Israel's past. And I think that is going to be interesting when we get to the specific texts to show that there may be some dynamism, some change over time in this understanding, and we can maybe see some of that in the text. So, can you start us down that road of this forbiddenness in the Hebrew Bible, but how there might be more to it than just that?
Jon: Well, among the prophets, it's certainly forbidden. I'll give examples later where the prophets and also the Torah itself, the Pentateuch, in places like Leviticus, especially Leviticus 20 and Deuteronomy, it's forbidden.
But there are also texts that people like me, especially in my the book on the subject, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, indicates some, has some indication that at one point it may have been commanded, and it also texts in which it's commanded, but there's a substitution. You could offer that korban pesach, that paschal lamb instead.
Abraham could offer that ram instead, only because he's willing actually to do the sacrifice of Isaac. There's a place where the firstborn has to be bought back from the priest, as you pay money to the priest. You pay five shekels of silver to the priest, to the Kohen, for the father to retain and not have to sacrifice the son who rightly belongs to the god, rightly belongs to the temple.
There are places, like in the case of Hannah, where there's a vow to, in fact, donate the child to cultic service to Temple service in exchange for the miraculous fertility that's given to her. So those texts themselves are just substitutions being at a deep level. The idea is still there. In that book, the subtitle is The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism.
But in fact, what it really is, what I originally wanted to call it, was The Sublimation of Child Sacrifice. And my editor at that time said, You know, sublimation is so Freudian, Freudian connotations, probably you don't want to get into that. Which, he was right. So I call it the transformation of child sacrifice.
But at some level, it's still there in those substitution rituals. But even apart from the substitution rituals, I'm thinking of a text like Exodus 22, verses 28 to 29. which read like this. This is from the NRSV, the new Revised Standard Version: “You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest or from the outflow of your presses.”
All right, that's offerings that you give in exchange for having received this bounty. Then it goes on to say, “The firstborn of your sons you shall give me.” That ends verse 29. The firstborn of your sons you shall give me. Now, how do you give them to God? Verse 30, “You shall do the same with your oxen and your sheep. Seven days it shall remain with its mother, on the eighth day you shall give it to me.”
Well, how do you give it to God? If you harmonize this with other texts in the Torah, in the Pentateuch, and with the prophets and so on, you say, well, you do it through these substitution rituals. You buy the firstborn back from the priest, a ritual that's still practiced to this day in Judaism called Pidyon ha Ben, the redemption of the firstborn. Or you offer the Paschal Lamb, or you offer some other animal in place of the firstborn son.
But this text, in Exodus 22:28-29, never says that. It just says, “The firstborn of my sons you should give me, the same as you do with the animal, with the ox and the sheep. It stays there for seven days. On the eighth day, you give it to me.” In a text like that, I think you'd have to say that that goes back to a period where there was some expectation of the sacrifice of the firstborn. Maybe everybody didn't have to do it. Maybe a lot of people ignored it. Who knows what the overall context was. We really don't know what was practiced. But that certainly can be read as authorizing, in God's name, child sacrifice.
And then, of course, there's the great case of Genesis 22.
Jared: Hold on a second.
Jon: Yep.
Jared: Can we go back?
Jon: Sure.
Jared: Because I just want to make sure that people are tracking with what you're saying before we move on. And then, yeah, let's move on to another text to kind of layer. I'm really glad you started with Exodus 22, because I think it does highlight kind of what we're saying, so I'm going to reframe it and tell me if I'm getting it right.
But what we have in this text is we're looking behind the curtain a little bit where a lot of texts seem to have substituted, “you can buy back”, right? There's a redemption element now, which presupposes that the firstborn belongs to the God of Israel in some sense. And whenever it is redemption based or substitution based, it sort of has a, uh, there's a way out, so to speak. But whenever we look at Exodus 22, it's missing that part, which seems to indicate maybe an older tradition where you would sacrifice a child in the same way you sacrifice animals, which does indicate a killing rather than a substitute or rather than a redemption where you can buy it back, um, in some sense.
So, it, again, is not foolproof, but it seems to indicate this tradition that later was able to be changed where there are these redemption practices. But here's an indication where we kind of pull back the curtain and say, well, that one's that's missing in Exodus 22. Is that what you're saying?
Jon: That's exactly right. That's probably better put than I put it. It's conspicuous for its absence in 22 and other places like 34 and the story of Passover and so forth. It's very conspicuous. And Numbers 3, Numbers 8, where you have that redemption of the firstborn. Yes, it's there. Here it's not there. Now, of course, when you are the heir to reading the entire Bible, the entire five books of Moses, you have to harmonize, and you have to come up with a consistent practice.
And so these historically diverse elements are woven together, redacted, and make one unitary, synchronic statement, which would mean you don't sacrifice, you, uh, buy back, or you redeem, and redeem, or you find a substitute. But, uh, I think not alone, Exodus 22 does point to the possibility of such an actual practice. We don't know. It's not foolproof, as you say. But I think that's likely.
And if I go on to Genesis 22, well, God rewards Abraham precisely for his willingness to offer his son. And this is the argument I make in that book, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son. I make it again in the whole chapter on the Akedah and the binding of Isaac in another book I wrote called Inheriting Abraham. So I've written at length, at least twice, on the binding of Isaac. You see, you might call it, say, I'm in a kind of double bind here. [Pete chuckles in the background]
But the, uh, in Genesis 22, the angel calls to Abraham a second time from heaven. This is what it says. “The angel called the Lord a second time from heaven” just after the angel has called it off. And why did he call it off? Because I now see that you fear God. I see you're willing to do it. Therefore, I'm calling it off. And he calls out, he calls out a second time, this is Genesis 22:15-18, “called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, ‘By myself I have sworn,’” which is what you have to do when you're God, by the way, “‘By myself I have sworn,’ says the Lord, ‘because you have done this, and you have not withheld your son, your only one, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and as the sand that is on the seashore, and your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies. And by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed thy voice.’”
In other words, Abraham is rewarded with this very extravagant blessing precisely because he has not withheld the son, he's been willing to offer him. But certainly he's rewarded in the text as it stands for not withholding his son. So people say, “Oh, the idea is God doesn't want human sacrifice, he doesn't want child sacrifice, he just wants animal sacrifice.” Well, first of all, the people that say that usually don't have a high opinion of animal sacrifice either.
But second, the text doesn't say any such thing. It says those promises you were given of great nation and blessing and wealth and land that you were given in Genesis 12, Abraham, when you first started on your trek, those are now re-founded, re-grounded, given a new validation on the basis of your obedience. You're fearing the Lord in the sense of obeying the divine command and being willing to offer your son. You did not withhold your son. So in a society that just assumes nothing even more disgusting than sacrificing your son, it's hard to know why God would order that in the first place and reward Abraham for his willingness to do it in the second place.
So that would be another text that to me suggests that matters were more ambiguous or murkier than just the idea, “Oh, God has always hated child sacrifice.”
[Ad break]
Pete: Jon, could you tie one more passage into this? Because I think it's so fascinating. Uh, 2 Kings 3, you mentioned that before, Mesha’s sacrifice of his son on the walls of the city. And what that might suggest, at least in our minds, about that child sacrifice is actually a thing, you know, even for the writer of 2 Kings.
Jon: Yeah, that's a very good case. Well, he's involved, as I said, in a siege, and he's losing the siege, so he can't break out of it. What's he going to do? What does he do? It says, I'm reading here from 2 Kings 3:26: “When the king of Moab,” that's Mesha, “saw that the battle was going against him, he took with him seven hundred swordsmen to break through opposite the king of Eden, but they couldn't do it. Then he took his firstborn son, who was to succeed him,” I would say it was to be king after him, “and offered him as a burnt offering,” which is what Abraham is supposed to offer in Genesis 22, “offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And a great wrath came upon Israel,” which is besieging him, “so they withdrew from him and returned to their own land.”
Now, one of the ways people try to get out of this is they, those Israelites besieging him were so grossed out at this horrible scene [Pete chuckles] that they just got the heck out of there, and they just, they just, they just turned their stomach. I doubt that ancient warriors were so squeamish. And I suspect it cuts up the great wrath that came upon Israel. I think the notion is that whatever god he sacrificed his son to, and it doesn't actually say that, was so impressed with this that he granted his wish and sent Israel into a panic. And they withdrew.
Pete: And no explanation is given.
Jon: No explanation is given. Maybe—
Pete: It's just they move on with the next story.
Jon: Yeah, exactly.
Pete: Thank you very much, Bible writers. That's not helping us at all.
Jon: Well, I think they probably didn't want to say, number one, that his god Kamosh was real and rewarded him for the sacrifice. Or that their God, Hashem, the Lord, the God indicated by the four letter name of God, was positively impressed by this. And so they just, they don't give any explanation. Even that term “wrath came upon Israel” is very unclear what that's all about.
Pete: But why even include the story? So this always has made me curious. Why include that story? I mean, this is edited all over the place. They didn't include everything, you know, why, why make a mention of this—
Jared: That requires such a workaround in some ways.
Pete: Yeah. And, and that sort of makes it seem like Kamosh defeated the God of Israel or at least bested him at that moment.
Jon: Yeah, it does look that way. Well, there are other places where the enemy wins, or where the good guys, so to speak, lose, or the righteous are not rewarded, or the race is not to the swift, as Goeleth puts it. And they're working with some sort of historical record, who knows how accurate, some sort of historical record. We know, independently on epigraphic evidence, that there was a King Mesha of Moab, there’s this famous Mesha stone and so forth. So I don't know why, why they didn't edit it out. It could be they didn't edit it out because they really weren't particularly bothered by this idea of child sacrifice.
Or maybe they, and maybe at some level they admired the absolute dedication of Mesha, which is kind of Abraham-like. If we, I don't know if they know the story of Abraham, but Abraham-like, as we would say it. There actually is a place in the Midrash, in rabbinic exegesis, where Mesha is imagined to have said, “Well, Abraham was willing to offer his son, he got a lot of blessing and so forth with that, so I think I'll do it.”
And God, following, Senator Lloyd Benson, uh, riffing on Senator Lloyd Benson says, uh, Mesha, you're no Abraham. I know Abraham. I can tell you about Abraham. You don’t know Abraham. It doesn't automatically work. It does depend on the grace of God. It's not magic. It's not a technique. You can just, can’t expect automatic results. So that's a, that's a good text.
But, but can I say something about Judges 11 in this context also?
Jared: Yeah.
Jon: Again, back to Jephthah for the third or fourth time, I mentioned that he's very pained. He doesn't want to sacrifice her. I think clearly, to me, it's obvious that some people dispute it. He never thought it was going to be his daughter that was going to come out of his house when he came back victorious.
And so he says, when he saw her, this is Judges 11:35, “When he saw her, he tore his clothes.” That's a sign of mourning and extreme distress, “and said, Alas, my daughter, you've brought me very low. You've become the cause of great trouble to me, for I've opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.” which is true.
There's no way he can get out of this vow. There is in rabbinic culture, in Talmudic law, there's no way of getting out of a vow in biblical law. If a man makes a vow like that, you've got to do it. But the fascinating thing to me in this story is what she says. This is verse 36. “She said to him, ‘My father, if you've opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what has come out of your mouth, now that the Lord has given you vengeance against your enemies, the Ammonites.’”
In other words, God came through for you on the basis of this vow. So you've got to do it. She's not traumatized. She's not saying, “Oh, no, no, no, don't, whatever you do, don't do it” or, or running off or saying you're, you're crazy or reporting him to some sort of a child and family services, uh, social worker. She is, uh, she says, you've got to do it. And much, much later in the biblical antiquities of Pseudo Philo, from maybe the first century of the common era, something like that, text that survives in Latin, she, uh, actually is given the name Scylla, and she actually makes, as I recall, an explicit connection with Isaac and says, well, wait a minute, Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, you've got to be willing to sacrifice me.
So, clearly, this indicates that sacrifice, although painful, and it wouldn't be a sacrifice if it weren't painful, if you want to get rid of this thing, this person, it's not a sacrifice for you to give it up, although painful is still not condemned in a text like that.
Jared: Right, and I think that's the larger, the larger portrait that you're painting here is that there are parts of the Hebrew Bible that don't seem to be as against child sacrifice as other passages. And so, maybe we can turn our attention to those because there's a tension here between the texts maybe that we've just gone through and some other texts, particularly in the prophets, as you mentioned earlier. So, can you just outline what these texts say about child sacrifice?
Jon: There are the ones critical of child sacrifice, denouncing it. Well, Leviticus 20 talks about this. It talks about giving your offspring to Molech, and there's a debate that's been going on for a long time, and it's still going on. Is Molech the name of a god, or is Molech the name of a rite, a sacrificial procedure? And there's evidence for both of those. We don't need to go into that now, but it's quite clear that these are people who are offering their offspring to Molech, or as part of the Molech rite. And that's, uh, in Leviticus 22 through 4, that is a capital offense. That's actually a capital offense. And it even goes so far as to say, in verse 4, uh, Leviticus 20:4, “If the people of the land should ever close their eyes to the people who are doing this, when they give of their offspring to Molech and do not put them to death, I myself will set my face against them and against their family, and I will cut them off from among the people, them and all who follow them, in prostrating themselves to Moloch.” In other words, you better enforce this. I'm not going to tolerate this.
And then, of course, another famous text is Jeremiah 19, which talks about the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, the Valley Ge Ben Hinnom, which is the origin of the English word Ge or Gehenna as a place of the equivalent of hell. Jeremiah is told to go over there in chapter 19 and say he's going to bring disaster upon this place because people did this. They offered up to the gods they have not known, they have offered up what he calls the blood of the innocent. This is 19:5. And God on building the high places of Ba’al, the alternative god Ba’al or Ba’al, to burn the children in the fire as burnt offerings to Ba’al. Which I, as the God of Israel speaking, did not command or decree, nor did it ever enter my mind. Well, of course, the God of Israel never decreed that they should offer their children to Baal. I suspect they weren't offering them to Baal, or some were, but they're probably offering to Him. And He goes out of His way and says, nor did it enter my mind. Asher lo tzeviti, which I never commanded, v'lo dibarti, and I never said it, v'lo alta al libi, and it never came up onto my mind, never even came to mind.
I suspect that alta, that verb alta, is a pun on—or a play, I want to call it a play on the name of the sacrifice, ola, the burnt offering, the totally burnt offering, which is what Abraham is, for example, commanded to do in Genesis 22 and what Jephthah does in in Judges 11. So then he says, “‘Surely the days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘but this place shall no longer be called Topheth.’” That seems to be where it was, although I don't think there's any archaeological evidence for this in Topheth that survived. Or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, Geben, Hinnom, Gehenna. But it'll be called the Valley of Slaughter. We're going to call it the Valley of Haregah, of Slaughter, putting people to death.
It's just going to be seen as a secular killing. He's going to, uh, punish them very, uh, uh, severely, for this is how, “Make them eat the flesh of the sons, the flesh of the daughters, and all shall eat the flesh of their neighbors in the siege.” That's how bad the siege of Jerusalem is going to be. The people are going to be resorting to cannibalism, and the distress with which their enemy, which their enemies, those who seek their life afflict them.
So in Jeremiah 19, it's condemned unequivocally, but it's funny. God says, “Well, I never even thought of commanding anything like that.” Which suggests to me maybe he protests too much. Maybe there was a tradition to the fact that he had commanded it.
And that brings me to my last text in answering your very fine question. Ezekiel 20:25-26. God is condemning the people, and He says, “Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live.” [Reads Hebrew]
God, at some point in the past, gave them bad laws. This is amazing. “I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the Lord.” I had to bring them down to rock bottom in order that they would understand my power and my sovereignty, very much like the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh in the plagues narrative in Exodus.
I offered them, I gave them laws that were not good. Here the assumption is when they offered their firstborn, they weren't following some pagan rite, as Jeremiah says. Here, it's very clearly their own God they're offering to, at his command, but it was a bad law, which the assumption is he's now revoking, or now revealing to have been bad all along.
That suggests to me some turning point, some pivot in the way this thing is being thought about. From now on, it'll be the most disgusting pagan (in the negative sense) rite possible, and we're 100 percent against it. But the text I've been talking about suggests that there was a, uh, another side to the story. Older. And, uh, obsolete, but, uh, this may be the text where you see it becoming obsolete.
Pete: So you see, then, in Ezekiel 20, a possible time period when we might be seeing that decided shift from either the practice of child sacrifice, or just like, it's whatever, it's just something you do, to it's being denounced. Right? So, I mean, can we pinpoint a little bit historically when that shift, it seems like a really simplistic question as I hear myself asking it, but whether there was a point in time where we could see that shift happening. Ezekiel is around the time of the exile. Is this what's happening or do you think of other factors that might be contributing to this?
Jon: It's not a simplistic question at all. It's a very good question. I would guess since it seems to me most dominant, these denunciations seem to be most dominant in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Which are late monarchy, late 7th century into the early 6th century, I tend to think that's probably when the shift occurred.
Of course, there may have been segments of society that always objected to it, as far back as you can go. Again, we don't have archaeological or other evidence that people were generally practicing this. So, who knows what the average person thought. Who knows whether people took some of these statements, like in Exodus 22, as statements of the ideal that the firstborn, including your firstborn son, belongs to God, but they didn't actually think you really sacrificed them. Who knows what they thought? Who knows how long these substitution rituals and redemption procedures were around before they achieved legislative status, before we have an actual text commanding that. And saying you don't sacrifice your, your child. Then all this is hard to say.
But I think the simplest answer to your question, uh, Pete, would be the text would suggest late monarchy, 7th, 6th century. So the figures like Ahaz and Manasseh are condemned for having done this. But you wonder, did the circles around them think they did some horrible abuse, or was that a more acceptable procedure?
It's interesting, you've got to wonder about kings doing it, whether it was a high status thing. Abraham is certainly a high status person, Jephthah is a high status person, and certainly Meshna was a king. You wonder if it had some royal dimension to it. And people critical of the monarchy, as Jeremiah certainly was, and Ezekiel in a different way, would have seen this procedure as just totally disgusting, partly for that reason.
Jared: Well, I want to, maybe if we can, wind us down with part one and maybe open up the conversation again with a part two and maybe we'll we'll keep the conversation going there.
Jon: Well, thank you for having me, even for part one. I appreciate very much the invitation and your excellent questions.
[Outro]
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Outro: You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don't forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O'Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
[Beep signals start of bloopers]
Pete: Did you have a sense that I was a total fake?
Jon: Uh, no, I thought you were an earnest young fundamentalist. [Pete and Jared laugh heartily]
Jared: Nailed it. Yeah, nailed it.
Pete: Was I earnest?
Jon: Highly, highly intelligent, thoughtful, learned, hardworking young fundamentalist. Now you're neither young nor a fundamentalist.
Pete: Yeah.
[Beep signals end of bloopers]
