Human Sacrifice - God's Command?

Once upon a time, I was a Christian. A believer. That has not been true of me for over 15 years. When I tell people that nowadays I get all sorts of reactions. The ones I get that most perplex me are also the ones I get most frequently from Christians. Something along the lines of, “Were you really a believer?”

I’m never quite sure how to respond to that. “Um, I believe I believed. Do you at least believe I believe that I believed?”

All I can say is that I took it all very seriously, Christianity, that is. But being the inquiring mind that I am, I was always was looking for the deeper truths of the faith. It’s a hard thing to describe, but I thought of the revelation of scripture to be more than just what you get on a plain reading, but there was subtext there that only The Holy Spirit could guide me to via revelation.

If that doesn’t make any sense, don’t worry, it didn’t make any sense. I just believed it. I wasn’t alone, lots of people I knew felt the same way. We would have bible studies and pull these obscure passages out of the bible, mostly Old Testament sort of stuff, and parse them out and see what they meant for us, in today’s world. If God himself, after all, really inspired the scriptures, then he knew we’d be reading it thousands of years later, also looking for meaning in them. So when God is being quoted in the bible and going on for page after page about grain offerings, and how to slaughter a ram, and murdering those damned Amalakites, (or Canaanites, or Moabites, or Edomites, or whomever) he was really giving some coded message to us in the modern world to quit masturbating all the time.

When I realized later that I’d been bonkers, of course I felt it was my duty to try to share with people all the reasons why this way of thinking is nonsense. It’s not revelation, it’s, well, I’m not sure what word to use. Delusion? Fantasy?

When I did come to my senses, I would still read the bible, partly because I still found it interesting, I mean, people still read Herodotus, or Plato, even if they don’t hold up their works as scripture. 

But the other part is that, honestly, I felt the need to justify myself to the people I could feel judging me for my apostasy. “He’s leaving because he wants to sin,” or “he is too proud to submit to God’s authority.”

I left because I realized I’d been wrong. It was important to me that I be able to explain my thought process. I’d been so blinded by the rhetoric I’d heard about the bible being 100% perfectly in accord with history, science, philosophy or whatever area it stumbled into, that I was entirely unafraid when I started reading actual the works of Dawkins, Sagan or Bertrand Russell. I was unprepared for cogent arguments and evidentially based beliefs. I crumbled almost immediately (actually my conversion is super long and complicated, but what I stated above is still true). I thought I’d be able to spot their errors so easily. Instead, they exposed mine.

All that brings me to the whole point of this particular post, which I’m clearly in no hurry to get to. The bible is full of subtext (or context, if you will) that I’d been entirely unaware of. 

God, as described in the bible, demands human sacrifice. 

I’ll repeat that, the God of the bible is a god that wants his followers to sacrifice other human beings to him. Like, murder them on an alter for his pleasure. 

That probably requires something more from me than a mere assertion. This could get really long. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a rather long letter (seriously, it was like, 12k words) to a family member outlining why I cannot accept their faith as I understand it.  My thoughts were off the cuff, and sometimes I get details wrong when I talk, or write, that way. So while double checking my assertions before sending my email, I sort of stumbled onto some stuff that I’d not really thought of before. 

I’ll probably have to do a whole series of posts about how modern critical scholarship views the Old Testament. But based partly on the bible itself, and also on archeological discoveries, a picture is painted of the Jewish people’s concept of God didn’t solidify into what we’d recognize it today until near the time of Alexander the Great - certainly not before they returned from their Babylonian captivity. 

Before that time, there was widespread disagreements over what God was in Hebrew culture, what he wanted, and what his rules were. He was part of a pantheon, he had a wife (named Asherah), and he demanded, among other things, human sacrifice. 

But a civil war of sorts was raged in ancient Israel, or at least in ancient Judah, over who Yahweh was and what he wanted, and at the end of the day the group that believed Yahweh alone was God won (I’m not going to get into detail on that today either - accept to say I think this was probably settled during the captivity). As a result, the Old Testament we all have today is the result of a conscious effort to purge the recently deemed heresy from scripture. To reflect this new view. Old stories, often pretty contradictory, had already been cobbled together from old word of mouth legends and were heavily edited to portray a more consistent view of what God was. 

A clue of this is Josiah, if you recall, his priests “found” a lost book of Moses that no one alive new existed (apparently, it was just lying around in a broom closet in the temple) and it had all this stuff in it about sacrifices and rules for living, etc.

While not impossible, it's pretty convenient. 

Regardless of all that, what got chopped out of the existing religion? Well, Asherah was, for sure, but so was most of the human sacrifice stuff, which we know was part of their culture (Don’t believe me? 2 Kings 16:3, 17:17, 21:6). Possibly Baal, Molech, and maybe other gods of the pantheon were retconned into being pagan gods. Now, all the former kings that worshiped those gods were wicked. 

My point is that human sacrifice was part of the religion Yahweh came out of. The Hebrews in ancient times would burn their children as a sacrifice to him. But the editors had a lot of stuff to purge - and they didn’t get it all. You can find clues peppered all through the Old Testament about what really happened. 

So check out this passage in Exodus 22:29 & 30 (NASB):

“You shall not delay the offering from your harvest and your vintage. The firstborn of YOUR SONS you shall give to me.
You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep. It shall be with its mother seven days; on the eighth day you shall give it to me.”

For a little context, this is just after the ten commandments are given. One of the first things Moses shared with his people after coming down the mountain. He said your firstborn sons are to be given to God. 

Now, I’m sure that the immediate thought you may have is that this means something along the lines of promising your son to the priesthood or something, but that’s reading something into the passage that isn’t there. In fact, if you jump forward to Ezekiel this passage is put in context.* 

Ezekiel chap 20 is mostly about what assholes the Israelites were, and God, being all knowing, knew they were assholes before he brought them out of Egypt. So when they were given the law of Moses God was really messing with them (starting at v 25 - stuff in parentheses is from me):

“I also gave them statutes that were NOT GOOD and ordinances by which they could not live; and pronounced them unclean because of their gifts (that means sacrifices) in that they caused ALL OF THEIR FIRSTBORN to pass through the fire (that means burnt offering) so that I might make them desolate, in order to know that I am the Lord.”

I’ll rephrase that in case you missed it: I COMMANDED you to murder your firstborn sons as a sacrifice to me in the law of Moses even though it was wrong so I would have a reason to hate you all. You’re assholes.

At face value that is monstrous. It makes God a monster for commanding it, and all those that did it monsters for not defying God. Of course, God promises all sorts of suffering for not obeying everything he said (Dt 27:26) and I promise you, the bible is filled with God punishing the shit out of people that obeyed him when he commanded them to do something stupid. I’ll post on that at some point in the future too.

I’m in danger of going into two different directions at this point, but I feel like I need to focus on the human sacrifice thing so I'll point out there are other statements that indicate human sacrifice was part of orthodox worship of Yahweh. Leviticus 27:28 & 29:

“… Anything which a man sets apart to the Lord out of all that he has, of man, or animal or of the fields of his own property, shall not be sold or redeemed.* Anything devoted to destruction is most holy to the Lord.
“No one who may have been set apart among men shall be ransomed; HE SHALL SURELY BE PUT TO DEATH.”

The above puts the story of Jephthah’s daughter in perspective. In case you don’t know that one. Jephthah was the ninth judge of Israel, and in a moment when the spirit of God was upon him, he vowed to sacrifice the very first thing that came out of his house to greet him when he returned home.

In typical biblical fashion, it was his young virgin daughter that came out to see him when he returned home. He cried a lot. But he also murdered the shit out her because God expected it (read Judges 11:29-40).

I’ve heard it argued that he (Jephthah) meant his vow to be for a goat or something, but that’s monumentally stupid. If I’m coming home after a very long time away, I expect a family member or at least a servant to greet me at my front door, not a goat or other sacrificial animal. Maybe he hoped it would be his wife, or one of his many servants. The point being, the Leviticus passage makes sense when seen through what Jephthah did. It’s clear the God sorta expected this sort of thing.

His action in murdering his only child was good enough to get him listed in Hebrews (11:32) as an example of faith for you to follow. 

Of course, in the book of Numbers (31:25-47), in one of the most difficult to read passages for me personally (thankfully, there is no chance it really happened - this is all myth, people), the Israelites have just slaughtered the daylights out of the Midianites and kept the young virgins for themselves (in case you’re wondering, Moses makes it clear that this is straight out of God’s mouth, and God wants those young virgins divvied up and passed out amongst the men) but when collecting all the booty (not just the virgins) there is a very very small portion of all of the girls, sheep, cattle, and whatnot that was set aside directly to give to God (not to be confused with what went to the priests, they got a larger share, I’m guessing 320, since they got 1/50 of the 16,000 virgins that were captured). So God’s portion was 32 young girls. They were given to Eleazar the priest to,  you know, give to God. I guess.

It is not stated outright, but an honest reading of the passage implies they were sacrificed.  

It’s ugly. I find it really hard to believe I could ever read that and somehow not be disgusted. I suppose it may have bugged me when I was a believer somewhat, but you know, he’s mysterious and all that, so it was all for the greater good.

Of course, as time went on, the people in the Levant started to think human sacrifice was a bit tough to swallow. We see the softening of God throughout the bible from a bloodthirsty psychopath to what the writer of the epistle of James was talking about when he described Yahweh this way: “God is love.” 

the Ezekiel passage I quoted earlier is a reflection of this softening. I think he’s simply acknowledging that God did accept human sacrifice in the past, even commanded it, but since it’s such an awful deed, in common prophetic fashion, he shifted the blame so that God is still the good guy, and said all that nonsense about Yahweh giving them evil laws on purpose because he sees the future and knows how much they’ll suck and somehow this proves he’s really God. 

That’s beyond stupid as far as rationale goes, but when you absolutely believe your God is the ultimate mighty power of the cosmos, and you, his chose people, who he’s sworn to defend, are getting your ass kicked by virtually every military power in the region, then you sort of have some explaining to do. 

The only possibility is that YOU are the one that’s screwed up. You’ve been worshiping wrong, either the wrong god altogether, or the right god in the wrong way. Or, as Ezekiel figures, you were worshiping the right god exactly how he told you to… but you’re so awful that he gave you worship rules that he found disgusting because he hates you, remember? He wants you to be punished. You have it coming. After all, you’ve been killing your kids in ritual sacrifices.

But this civil war I mentioned earlier, I think you can also see lots of signs of it in the bible as later generations struggled over how to accept their history and explain their present. 

Jeremiah seems to think the Mosaic law is nonesense. There are numerous places in Jeremiah where he (speaking for God) talks about his people sacrificing their children on the alter (Jer 7:31, 19:5 & 32:35) to other gods (or maybe part of the pantheon Yahweh was the head of) and that God really did not want that at all… that he never asked for that at all. 

At one point, Jeremiah says that God never gave ANY instructions regarding burnt offerings or sacrifices after leading them out of Egypt (read Jer 7:22).** So the whole sacrificial system they are using is a huge mistake. That’s a better solution, in my mind, than the one Ezekiel came up with. But that would mean tossing out a good chunk of the Torah - which I think would not be so palatable to most of the people (It’s like telling a fundamentalist Christian that they can still believe in Christ - but the gospels are mostly bullshit - it’s a hard sale) of the time. But Jeremiah is special because he was one of the only prophets of the time that wasn’t promising the Babylonians were going to be defeated. He prophesied the 70 years of captivity when everyone else at the time (like, whatshisname, Hanniah(?) and Jeremiah were having dueling prophecies - it ended with Jeremiah winning and Hanniah and all his family being murdered by God… yesh). 

Point being - the man had a lot of respect. The 70 years ended up being more like 49, but still, good enough. The man was a legit prophet, so he gets a pass on blasphemy. 

Micah, way over in chap 6 (of Micah - he has his own book too) is doing the typical prophet thing as well, and speaking on God’s behalf, and is agreeing, more or less, with Jeremiah. His take (read v 5-8) is that you could murder your children as a sacrifice to Yahweh, but really, he’d rather you just be humble and just. So, not exactly forbidden, but certainly unnecessary. 

Point being with all that is that really, the bible is all over the place when it comes to all sorts of topics, as to be expected in a book assembled piecemeal the way it was. But that people can look to it as a paragon of moral guidance defies belief. A strong case can be made that God, as presented in the Old Testament, did require human sacrifice - and that it was the revisionist theology of later generations that moved the interpretation of the Old Testament into the rabbinical Judiasm that we have today. 

Oh. There is one more thing. Something an earlier draft of this post had (yes, there was an earlier version of this rambly, stream of consciousness post that was even more rambly-er and stream of consciousnessy-er) that had the story of the king of Moab - but I’m so unsure of what the point of the story was that I couldn’t including it in the main body of my post. But I figured I could pop this in here at the end. 

The Israelites were murdering the Moabites (2 Kings 3:24-27) and the King of the Moabites, desperate to survive, sacrificed his son (presumably to his own god) and there was “great indignation against Israel” and so the Israelite army went home. 

Um, what? I think this is saying that the god of the Moabites accepted the sacrifice of the King’s son and drove Israel out. Or maybe he sacrificed his son to Yahweh and so God turned on the Israelites… either way, the lesson here is that murdering your children as a sacrifice to a god will definitely work. 

Seriously, the bible is so weird.

* Exodus chap 13 is another chapter long passage on offering your firstborn up to Yahweh as sacrifice. Except in this case, there is a little addendum about how you can purchase your kid out of this deal if you really want to. Bible scholar Robert M Price (in episode 2 of his Human Bible podcast, from around 2012) said this is most likely a later editor inserting a passage to soften the command to kill your children. The language here for doing this is called “redeemed.” Here I feel it’s important to point out that the Leviticus passage forbids ’redeeming’ something dedicated to God, as opposed to simply being a firstborn child. 

** If you read in the NIV, there is a subtle change to this passage - it reads as, “I did not JUST give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices,” blah blah blah. I don’t read ancient Hebrew, but James McGrath said that the word “just” is inserted there for purely theological reasons. It’s not there in the Hebrew. Low-handed tactic if you ask me.