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Old July 31st, 2013 #1
Karl Radl
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Default Jews and Human Sacrifice in the Jewish Bible

Jews and Human Sacrifice in the Jewish Bible


In a previous article I have commented on the text of the Torah in relation to both human sacrifice as well as because the Torah has a generally positive attitude to human sacrifice then it was quite it was plausible that this positivity could be read by jews in perceived or real high-stress situations in the medieval era and beyond to be a theological mandate and rationalization for human sacrifice. (1)

I further pointed out that the prohibitions about human sacrifice in the Torah are not; as usually assumed (for obvious the theological reasons), general in nature, but are actually very specific. They are intended to prohibit the followers of Yahweh from performing human sacrifices to other gods (being extensions of the command in the decalogue that the Israelites should worship no other god); usually Moloch or Ba'al, but they do not specify; or even suggest, that the practice of human sacrifice should not be performed at Yahweh's altars.

Now having analysed the comments about human sacrifice in the Torah it is important to extend that analysis to the comments in the rest of the Tanakh; or the jewish bible, as it more commonly known.

Lets begin with the book of Joshua where we are told:

'The Lord said to Joshua, “Arise, why have you thus fallen upon your face? Israel has sinned; they have transgressed my covenant which I have commanded them; they have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen, and lied, and put them among their own stuff. Therefore the sons of Israel cannot stand before their enemies, because they have become a thing for destruction. I will be with you no more, unless you destroy the devoted things from among you. Up, sanctify the people, and say, “Sanctify yourselves for tomorrow; for thus says the Lord, God of Israel, “There are devoted things in the midst of you, O Israel; you cannot stand before your enemies, until you take away the devoted things from among you.” In the morning therefore you shall be brought near by your tribes,; and the tribe which the Lord takes shall near by families; and the family which the Lord takes shall come near by households; and the household the Lord takes shall come near man by man. And he who is taken with the devoted things shall be devoted with fire, he and all that he has, because he has transgressed the covenant of the Lord, and because he has done a shameful thing in Israel.' (2)

Now in the above we can clearly see that Joshua is being commanded to make a human sacrifice of those men who are judged to have sinned against Yahweh. The text also; as before suggested, makes it very clear that the method of said human sacrifice is the same as that used in relation to non-human and non-living sacrifices such as rams and oil.

The point that the text is making is that some of the Israelites have been unfaithful to Yahweh by taking some of the 'blessed things', but it is difficult to discern exactly what the 'blessed things' are. The context of the sack of Jericho suggests one of two eventualities: either things that are to have been dedicated to Yahweh but have not been (i.e. have been kept back for personal gain) or they are idols of other gods, which the Israelites have taken in secret and have been paying homage to.

Both of these are plausible, but the former seems more likely given the term 'blessed' is used rather than 'cursed': however in this eventually it is difficult to see precisely how the Israelites concerned have broken the covenant other than possibly by not rendering full obedience to Yahweh.

In either eventuality however it is clear that Yahweh is ordering Joshua to perform a human sacrifice.

A passage which is also a clear endorsement of the practice of human sacrifice is found in the book of Judges.

To wit:

'Then the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manas'seh, and passed on to Mizpah of Gilead, and from Mizpah of Gilead he passed on to the Am'monites. And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, and said, “If you will give the Am'monites into my hand, then whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Am'monites, shall be the Lord's, and I will offer him up for a burnt offering. “ So Jephthah crossed over to the Am'monites to fight against them; and the Lord gave them into his hand. And he struck them from Aro'er to the neighbourhood of Minnith, twenty cities, and as far as A'bel-ker'amim, with a very great slaughter. So the Am'monites were subdued before the sons of Israel.

Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah; and behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances; she was his only child; beside her he had neither son or daughter. And when he saw her, he tore his clothes, and said, “Alas my daughter! You have brought me very low, and you have become the cause of great trouble to me; for I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.” And she said to him, “My father, if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what has gone forth from your mouth, now that the Lord has avenged you on your enemies, on the Am'monites.” And she said to her father, “Let his thing be done for me; let me alone two months, and I may go and wander on the mountains and bewail my virginity, I and my companions.” And he said, “Go.” And he sent her away for two months; and she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. And at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had made. She had never known a man. And it became a custom in Israel that the daughters of Israel went year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year.' (3)

Now; much like that from the book of Joshua, this passage is very clear in its mention of human sacrifice; once again to take the form of the burnt offering, as Jephthah explicitly vows to make of the first person; who he believes will certainly be male, that comes forth to great him after victory against the Ammonites into a burnt sacrifice to Yahweh.

Yahweh is clearly not displeased by this as he grants Jephthah the gift of victory against the Ammonites and when Jephthah returns he is horrified that a great personal price is to be paid in the sacrifice of his only daughter as a burnt offering to Yahweh. Jephthah then honours this promise and does not remonstrate with Yahweh suggesting by implication; of both his original offer of such a sacrifice and by the fact that he did not shirk from performing it, that the practice of human sacrifice to his god was not unknown or without previous precedent to him. It is also worth pointing out that Jephthah's displeasure is not at the concept of human sacrifice to Yahweh, but rather that the human sacrifice is to be his only daughter as opposed to another individual.

This once again is a positive reference to the fact that human sacrifices to Yahweh were believed by the Israelites to be a potent way of gaining his favour as well as preventing his vengeance. I would argue that it is next to impossible to read both this passage and that in Joshua; as well as most of those in the Torah, any other way than as a positive endorsement of human sacrifice in relation to the worship of Yahweh specifically.

We find a similar; if slightly veiled, reference to human sacrifice in a different context in the first book of Samuel.

To wit:

'But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal.

And Samuel said, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and stubbornness and idolatry. Because you have rejected the world of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.”' (4)

This then leads to the follow event:

'Then Samuel said, “Bring here to me A'gag, the king of the Amal'ekites.” And Agag came to him cheerfully. A'gag said, “Surely the bitterness of death is psst.” And Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.” And Samuel hewed A'gag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.' (5)

Now in the above sequence of events we are being told about Yahweh's command to the Prophet Samuel and King Saul to exterminate the people of the Amalekites root and branch (as well as all their animals). The Israelites then fail to do this and spare the king of the Amalekites; Agag, as well as the best of the animals belonging to the Amalekites, which they then bring before Yahweh in Gilgal. They then practice an orgy of sacrifice killing all the animals of the Amalekites as burnt offerings to appease Yahweh.

He is however displeased because they have failed to kill Agag; the last of the Amalekites, and causes Samuel to threaten to depose Saul if he does not kill Agag as he was commanded. Samuel then kills Agag in fairly horrific detail in that he hacks him to pieces and this pleases Yahweh. I would draw attention however to the wording in that Samuel hacks Yahweh to pieces 'before Yahweh'.

It is difficult to see this as anything other than a deviant (in terms of method) form of human sacrifice as we are told that Yahweh's principal altar is in Gilgal and the Israelites have just been making a large amount of large sacrifices upon it. It also makes sense of the otherwise inexplicable detail of why the Israelites killed every Amalekite other than their king and brought that king to Yahweh's altar with the animals to be sacrificed.

This means that when Samuel hews Agag 'before the Lord' it seems more than likely he was killing him on or before Yahweh's altar. This accordingly tells us that we are looking here at a slightly unorthodox human sacrifice by the jews and most importantly of the king of the people who the jews came to associate with any opposition to jews.

In other words reading this passage from the first book of Samuel as a human sacrifice begins to make sense of some of the logic probably used by jews in perceived or real high-stress situations conducting ritual murders (i.e. human sacrifices) of those they perceived to be the descendants of Agag and Amalek (i.e. the local Christians or the Christians of Europe more broadly). (6)

Another mention of human sacrifice among the jews is found in the first book of Kings.

To wit:

'And behold, a man of God came out of Judah by the word of the Lord to Bethel. Jerobo'am was standing by the altar to burn incense. And the man cried against the altar by the word of the Lord, and said, “O altar, altar, thus says the Lord: “Behold, a son shall be born to the house of David, Josi'ah by name; and he shall sacrifice upon you the priests of the high places who burn incense upon you, and men's bones shall burned upon you.' (7)

In the text above it is not immediately clear what is going on, but we are told by the verses before this that Jeroboam had moved the altar of Yahweh to Bethel from Jerusalem with the consent of the king of the Israelites. Essentially Jeroboam and the 'priests of the high places' believed they were good and faithful jews, but it was judged by Yahweh that they not as they had moved his altar to a new location and had been sacrificing burnt offerings upon it.

Thus in vengeance Yahweh has decided to send a new king called Josiah who then proceeds as to carry his will out in the second book of Kings. Thus we are told:

'And all the shrines also of the high places that were in the cities of Samar'ia, which kings of Israel had made, provoking the Lord to anger, Josi'ah removed; he did to them according to all that he had done at Bethel. And he slew all the priests of the high laces who were there, upon the altars, and burned the bones of men upon them.' (8)

If we combine the two passages together with what Josiah was told by Yahweh to do in Bethel and what he then did across both Judea and Samaria: then it is clear that he was killing the priests who differed to him in their interpretation of the will of Yahweh and was offering them on altars of Yahweh in different parts of the country as burnt offerings to his god in order to assuage his wrath.

This then once again clearly suggests that human sacrifices to Yahweh are actually endorsed as well as that these human sacrifices would be performed to prevent the wrath of Yahweh descending on the jews. It is also noteworthy that in these verses we see human sacrifice to Yahweh presented not only in a positive light, but as an act of cleansing abominations (as a cross or crucifix is often referred to by jews historically and currently) in that in order to purify the people then a human sacrifice of the evil-doers must be performed.

We can thus continue to see the thread that human sacrifice is an acceptable form of worship to Yahweh and further that it is particularly effective at cleansing sin (hence suggesting the truth of von Leers' proposal that a ritual murder scenario might see a human as more powerful sin offering than a cockerel vis-a-vis the festival of kapparot [also hinted at references to sacrificial practices and sin offerings in Psalm 40:6 and the Wisdom of Solomon 3:5-6]) from the jews. This when considered with the fact that jews viewed later persecutions of/attacks on them as meaning that Yahweh was displeased with them directly suggest that a human sacrifice scenario; vis-a-vis jewish ritual murder cases, is not only theologically possible, but historically probable.

We see human sacrifice further endorsed in the second book of Kings when we read:

'When the king of Moab saw that the battle was going against him, he took with him seven hundred swordsmen to break through, opposite the king of E'dom; but they could not. Then he took his eldest son who was to reign in his stead, and offer him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there came great wrath upon Israel; and they withdrew from him and returned to their own land.' (9)

In this passage we see the king of Moab using the power of a human sacrifice to Yahweh; as the Moabites also worshipped Yahweh at this time, in the tradition of Jephthah by offering his eldest son; like Jephthah offered his only daughter, up as a human sacrifice; taking the form of a burnt offering, if Yahweh would grant him victory over the Israelites who had displeased their god.

In other words we can see here once again the use of a human sacrifice to Yahweh to assuage his anger and to rally him to a specific cause. This once again clearly demonstrates the positive way that human sacrifice is portrayed in the Tanakh and further suggests that such practices were not confined merely to the early part of the Torah, but reach far further forward in jewish history close to the time of the first report of the practice of jewish ritual murder by Posidonius and Apollonius Molon.

However we should once again note that this positive attitude to human sacrifice is highly specific in that such a sacrifice can only be made to Yahweh if it is to be considered as righteous as another passage from the second book of Kings demonstrates.

To wit:

'Manas'seh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and he reigned fifty-five years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Heph'zibah. And he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to the abominable practices of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel. For he rebuilt the high places which Hezeki'ah his father had destroyed; and he erected altars for Ba'al, and made an Ashe'rah, as A'hab king of Israel had done, and worshipped all the host of heaven and served them. And he built altars in the house of the Lord, of which the Lord said, “In Jerusalem will I put my name.” And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord. And he burnt his son as an offering, and practised soothsaying and augury, and dealt with mediums and with wizards.' (10)

Now; to explain briefly, Manasseh here is putting up shrines to traditional Canaanite deities; such as Ba'al and Asherah, and this is considered an abomination by Yahweh. This is held by the second book of Kings to be a violation of the commandment in the book of Deuteronomy, which held that:

'When you come into the land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord; and because of these abominable practices the Lord your God is driving them out before for you. You shall be blameless before the Lord your God. For these nations, which you are about to dispossess, give heed to soothsayers and to diviners; but as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you so to do.' (11)

However you will notice that in spite of all these violations of the commandment in the book of Deuteronomy that Yahweh doesn't actually condemn the practice of human sacrifice generally, but rather he is angry with Manasseh and the Israelites because they are worshipping gods other than him (thus violating the explicit instruction of the decalogue). Yahweh is angry because Manasseh sacrificed his eldest son to other gods and not to him: the stress is important here, because Yahweh isn't being general in his opposition to such sacrifice (hence the inclusion of the practice as being forbidden) but rather very specific about it.

This is also demonstrated by the book of Jeremiah, which tells us that:

'For the sons of Judah have done evil in my sight, says the Lord; they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to defile it. And they have built the high place of To'pheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hin'nom, to burn their sons and daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come to my mind. Therefore, behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when it will no more be called To'pheth, or the valley of the son of Hin'nom, but the valley of Slaughter: for they will bury in To'pheht, because there is no room elsewhere. And the dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds of the air, and for the beasts of the earth; and none will frighten them away.' (12)

Once again we can see that Yahweh is not displeased by the practice of human sacrifice per se, but rather the object that the sacrifice is venerating. This is made clear by the references to the 'abominations in the house which is called by my name' (i.e. shrines to other gods in Yahweh's temple) and the fact that the Israelites are conducting rites common to these deities at To'pheth (i.e. ritual child sacrifice using the method of the burnt offering), which Yahweh wants to destroy as a place and also to exterminate the jewish worshippers of rival deities.

This verse in Jeremiah is often interpreted as a general condemnation of human sacrifice by Yahweh due to the statements that he did not command the burning of infants in the fire. This however is problematic precisely because in this context Yahweh has to be referring to a specific set of practices conducted in the cult of of other Canaanite gods as if it is taken as a general repudiation of human sacrifice then the passage itself makes no sense internally.

Yahweh is specifically condemning a part of the Israelites and those of Judea for worshipping other gods than him with their cult practices; which included ritual child sacrifice via the method of the burnt offering, and not the performance of similar practices within his own cult. In other words when he says he did not command such sacrifices then he is actually asserting that those who are engaging in these practices in the worship of other gods are behaving counter to his covenant and accordingly orders that those concerned are to be slaughtered without mercy in the last part of the text.

Such an interpretation is also supported by the book of Ezekiel, which tells us that the Israelites rebelled against Yahweh by having their 'eyes set on their father's idols' (13) and that they were offering 'by fire all their first-born'. (14) As well as that they had 'slaughtered their children in sacrifice to their idols, on the same day they came into my sanctuary to profane it.' (15)

Put another way the books of Ezekiel, Jeremiah and second Kings are describing the struggle between Yahweh and other gods as to who the human sacrifices will go to and Yahweh's pronouncements on the matter clearly indicate that he is being very specific in his condemnation of those venerating other gods with human sacrifices not that human sacrifices in his cult are forbidden.

This is neatly summarized by the book of Micah, which asks the simple question:

'Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?

Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?' (16)

In other words the book of Micah is asking the simple question; in relation to burnt sacrifices, (17) as to whether Yahweh would be satisfied with thousands of rams and/or tens of thousands of rivers of oil. However if he is not then the book of Micah asks whether the Israelites should offer their first-born as a burnt offering to sooth the wrath of Yahweh.

This then conclusively demonstrates that both the Torah; and its larger self the Tanakh or jewish bible, do not condemn human sacrifice when it is carried out in the name of Yahweh, but they do condemn it in the strongest terms when it is used in the worship of other gods by the Israelites or the jews.

We have also seen how the text of the Tanakh lends itself to an interpretation of the sacrifice of a human being a sin offering (vis-a-vis the festival of kapparot) and that this is to only undertaken at such time as the need to placate the vengeful wrath of Yahweh is held to be dire.

Further this provides us with a reasonable starting point; which I will in time develop, to cogently argue that the practice of jewish ritual murder and the cases that are related to it are actually extremely likely to be partially true (although they still have to be considered micro-historically [i.e. on a case-by-case basis]): since; as I have demonstrated above, the Torah and Tanakh can be very easily read as supporting human sacrifice; as well as the use of a non-jewish sacrificial victim, as a replacement sin offering and/or as a direct means for stilling Yahweh's vengeance in the form of anti-jewish riots, killings, laws, trials and so on.

In other words the Torah and Tanakh internally validate the historicity of the charge of jewish ritual murder.


References


(1) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...h-part-i.html; http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...orah-part.html
(2) Josh. 7: 10-15
(3) Judg. 11: 29-40
(4) 1 Sam. 15: 21-23
(5) Ibid. 15: 32-33
(6) On this see Elliot Horowitz, 2007, 'Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence', 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton.
(7) 1 Kings 13: 1-2
(8) 2 Kings 23: 19-20; repeated in 2 Chron. 34: 1-5
(9) Ibid. 3: 26-27
(10) Ibid. 21: 1-6
(11) Deut. 18:9-14
(12) Jer. 7: 30-33
(13) Ezek. 20: 24
(14) Ibid. 20: 26
(15) Ibid. 23: 39
(16) Mic. 6: 7
(17) For confirmation see Ibid. 6: 6


-----------------------------------------


This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...ish-bible.html
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Old November 29th, 2016 #2
RickHolland
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I see people saying these pedophiles worship Satan (christians?) but it looks like who they really worship is the Jewish god Moloch.

If you look to the #Pizzagate, pics from James Alefantis instagram account the word "Moloch" apears in this video at 4:20 while the word "Satan" never shows up.


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Last edited by RickHolland; November 30th, 2016 at 09:12 AM.
 
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