“Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum...” In this post I want explore how in the earliest strata of Israelite religion, it was understood that the
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Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world. William Blake, “The Flight of Moloch” (1809). WikiMedia “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum…” 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 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. Similarly, early Christians too were falsely accused of participating in infanticidal and cannibalistic rites. A 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: The supposed torture and human sacrifice alleged in the blood libels run contrary to the teachings of Judaism. According to the Bible, God commanded Abraham in the Binding of Isaac to sacrifice his son, but ultimately provided a ram as a substitute. 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. 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 I would urge readers, however, to resist the impulse to automatically reject child sacrifice as a part of early Jewish religion. First, the kneejerk reaction that this is “inherently implausible” in this instance often comes merely from privileging one’s own religious heritage—and Jews and Christians obviously share the same heritage here—as being somehow radically different from other more “primitive” traditions: traditions in which it’s uncontroversial that human sacrifice was practiced in various forms.⁵ Second—and most important—the presence of child sacrifice (as religiously prescribed⁶ᵃ) in early Israelite religion should be considered because this is the consensus of academic scholars of early Judaism on the issue.⁶ᵇ Of course, as with most other consensuses, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t dissenters; but at the end of the day, we’ll find that the the evidence clearly weighs in favor of the consensus. The smoking gun for child sacrifice having been religiously prescriptive in at least one stratum of Israelite religion can be found in Ezekiel 20:25-26; and in some sense this can guide the interpretation of other “data,” too. The wider context here is an oracle of God given to Ezekiel in the seventh year of the exile—or 591 BCE. The oracle proper begins in verse 5, prefaced with “Thus says Adonai LORD,” and continues with a sort of retrospective of the Israelites’ original enslavement in Egypt. Beginning at v. 10, the exodus is mentioned, followed by the sojourn in the wilderness. Following this, verses 11-13 read I gave them my statutes and showed them my ordinances, by whose observance everyone shall live. Moreover I gave them my sabbaths, as a sign between me and them, so that they might know that I the LORD sanctify them. But the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness; they did not observe my statutes but rejected my ordinances, by whose observance everyone shall live; and my sabbaths they greatly profaned. The next verses repeat, several times, the Israelites’ disobedience and subsequent punishment (for example being denied entrance to the “promised land” of Canaan), until we arrive at the very interesting lines of 20:25-26: Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts — in their having caused all of those who “(first) open the womb” to “pass over/through” [בְּהַעֲבִיר כָּל־פֶּטֶר רָחַם] — in order that I might horrify/desolate them, so that they might know that I am the LORD. The reference to “statutes” and “ordinances” throughout the chapter is clearly to Mosaic Law: the laws given to the Israelites via Moses on Mount Sinai, including the Ten Commandments, and enumerated throughout the books of Exodus-Deuteronomy. Yet in Ezekiel 20:25-26, we appear to have something like the negative counterparts to the positive laws mentioned earlier. These are similarly described as “statutes” and “ordinances”; and yet unlike the other ones—the ones “by whose observance everyone shall live” (20:11, 13, 21)—these are called laws “by which they could not live.” As for the other language in Ezekiel 20:26 here, there are several hints that it is sacrificial, and particularly concerned with children. Those who “open the womb” clearly refers to firstborn—though that this specifically suggests human firstborn here needs to be supported. Further, the word translated as “pass over/through” is elsewhere associated with ritual child sacrifice. For example, just a few verses later in Ezek 20:31, it’s used in a condemnation of those who “make [their] children pass through the fire.” (That this word can itself suffice to denote actual sacrifice, separate from more explicit contextual clues, is uncertain; though really it’s a moot point, because these clues are in fact always provided, as they are in Ezek 20:25-26.⁷) Here we have bizarre concatenation of ideas: that God gave the Israelites certain laws that, in their following, would itself end in a sort of punishment for them—a punishment that’s presumably meted out because of their disobedience in the wilderness, as it is elsewhere in ch. 20. As mentioned above, the “statutes” and “ordinances” here almost certainly refer to the Mosaic Law—the Torah. Which laws from this, then, does Ezekiel refer to?⁷ᵇ Two laws in particular are universally singled out here, both from the book of Exodus: The LORD said to Moses: “Consecrate to me all the firstborn; whatever is the first to ‘open the womb’ among the Israelites, of human beings and animals, is mine.” (Exodus 13:1-2) and You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. 30 You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep: seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me. (Exod 22:29-30) To this we might also add Exodus 13:12, “you shall set apart to the LORD all that ‘open the womb’, and all the firstborn of your livestock that are males shall be the LORD’s,” with a close parallel in Exodus 34:19. With the exception of the final verse (Exod 13:12)—where the verses following this attempt to modify this law—here we see little distinction between humans and animals, both grouped together in what’s otherwise a sacrificial context. (For eighth day sacrifice, see also Leviticus 22:27.) Before getting further into those, however, we make take a second to assess the academic landscape, and the dissent about early Israelite child sacrifice that I mentioned earlier—and particularly how this might relate to the Ezekiel passage under discussion. One of the most forceful arguments against the existence of early Israelite child sacrifice has come by way of Jacob Milgrom’s essay “Were the Firstborn Sacrificed to YHWH? To Molek? Popular Practice or Divine Demand?” Discussing the Ezekiel passage, Milgrom notes that “[r]ather than denying that God ever sanctioned human sacrifice as does his older contemporary Jeremiah (Jer 7:31; 19:5; 32:35), Ezekiel uniquely takes the tack that God deliberately gave such a law in order to desolate them.”⁸ Milgrom continues, that The only way to justify Ezekiel’s theodicy is that the people misinterpreted either Exod 22:28b (de Vaux 1964: 72) or Exod 13:1-2 . . . or that God deliberately misled them to punish them (Greenberg 1983, 368-70; Hals 1989: 141), on the analogy of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart or Israel’s heart (52)⁹ It should be noted here that while I haven’t offered the best corroborating evidence that the Ezekiel passage really does concern child sacrifice yet (something that, we’ll see, has been disputed, though not persuasively so), there’s little ambiguity—even for Milgrom, who, again, is otherwise highly critical of the idea of a positive attitude toward child sacrifice in official Israelite religion¹⁰—that Ezekiel 20:25-26 refers to some law in the Torah for which God had some direct agency in terms of influencing the Israelites to follow, with the result that they would practice child sacrifice (in order to punish them, or perhaps bring punishment on themselves). The question of dispute for Milgrom, with regard to Ezekiel 20:25-26, is simply whether 1) this passage suggests that God misled the Israelites by (somehow) influencing them to misinterpret the Torah laws as condoning or demanding child sacrifice, whereas the laws were not originally formulated/given with this intention; or else that 2) these laws really did condone/demand child sacrifice originally, and the Israelites would be “punished” merely through their straightforward (and correct) interpretation and practice of them. Milgrom’s discussion of Ezekiel 20:25-26 itself is very short, though even here it’s unusually shortsighted. First, it should be said that there’s no support for the interpretation that Ezekiel 20:25-26 suggests that the Israelites misinterpreted the Torah laws as condoning/demanding child sacrifice. Rather, the laws themselves are called “not good.” Yet Milgrom puzzlingly suggests that Ezekiel does not contradict Jeremiah’s view that the people were mistaken in believing that God demanded human sacrifice; he supports it by the example of the firstborn males, whom the people sacrifice because they erroneously assumed it was God’s will (or because they did not realize it was God’s condign punishment). (53) I’ve already suggested that there’s no warrant for the interpretation that Ezekiel thought that adherents of the laws “erroneously assumed it was God’s will.” Further though, whether God instituted the practice as something that was intended to have a positive or negative outcome for the Israelites seems irrelevant for whether Ezekiel believed that God really did ordain it (and thus Ezekiel does contradict “Jeremiah’s view that the people were mistaken in believing that God demanded human sacrifice”). Indeed, there’s certain sense in which, no matter the case here, from its perspective the Israelites were “right” to follow it—if only in the sense that it would enact the punishment that God had ordained for them in so doing. Milgrom’s arguments against texts like Exodus 13:1-2 and 22:29-30 as originally condoning child sacrifice are also surprisingly weak. He notes that attention has been paid “particularly to Exod 22:[29-30]”; yet in attempting to countering intimations of child sacrifice here, he hardly engages with the strongest arguments for this. Rather, he begins by critiquing what might be best characterized as idiosyncratic “supplemental” arguments that (erroneously) try to make more out of these verses than there is—arguments presumably made in order to make the case more comprehensively, but I suppose here backfiring in a way—but as such Milgrom attacks something of a straw man, neglecting the stronger and more cautious arguments. A somewhat more sophisticated critique of the orthodoxy/orthopraxy of early Israelite child sacrifice can be found in Hahn and Bergsma’s article “What Laws were ‘Not Good’? A Canonical Approach to the Theological Problem of Ezekiel 20:25-26.” Hahn and Bergsma propose a rather convoluted scenario in which Ezekiel 20:25-26 was never intended to refer to child sacrifice at all, but rather only to animal sacrifice. They do this by reframing these verses as responsive to certain legal innovations regarding animal sacrifice that were introduced by the Deuteronomistic law code (Deut 12-26), and which contradicted several earlier laws as were formulated in Leviticus (“Priestly” laws, of which Ezekiel was a staunch proponent). Specifically, these innovations related to firstlings—firstborn animals and how they were to be sacrificed. There are several problematic ways, however, in which Hahn and Bergsma construe Ezekiel 20:25-26 as referring specifically to animal sacrifice—as well as problems with the specific connections they make between Ezekiel 20:25-26 and the Deuteronomistic laws that it purportedly opposed. Recall, again, the original verses in Ezekiel under discussion here: Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts — in their having caused all of those who “(first) open the womb” to “pass over/through” — in order that I might horrify/desolate them… Hahn and Bergsma write that many scholars recognize that the phrase [כל־פטר רחם, “all who (first) open the womb,” in Ezek 20:26] is a reference to Exod 13:12, since Ezek 20:26 uses virtually the same diction. Notably, Exod 13 goes on to refer specifically to “every first-born (בכר) of man” (v. 13 RSV), only to exclude them from the consecrated “firstlings” mentioned in the previous verse. In other words, Exod 13:13 distinguishes human firstborn from “every opener of the womb” in order to exclude them from being offered. Thus, in the closest biblical parallel to Ezek 20:26a, the context makes clear that human sacrifice is not the referent. (212) Yet it’d be hasty to suggest that the phrase “all who (first) open the womb” must specifically be a “reference to Exod 13:12″—or, more still, that this clearly suggests that humans aren’t in view here. The same phrase, or a close variation, is used at a few different points in the Hebrew Bible, and in contexts where it clearly does suggest human children.¹¹ But, significantly, even if it did refer specifically to Exod 13:12, there’s nothing that says that this verse has to be read in light of the subsequent verses. (And in fact there’s some indication that texts like Exod 13:12 were originally formulated in isolation, with the subsequent verses being secondary additions.¹²ᵃ) There are other things to critique in Hahn and Bergsma’s paragraph, quoted above. There’s no indication that ‘Exod 13:13 distinguishes human firstborn from “every opener of the womb” in order to exclude them from being offered’; and it’s just as likely, as mentioned above, that “opener of the womb” could refer to—or at least include—human children.¹²ᵇ And one important thing that they neglect to discuss is the use of the word translated as “pass over/through” in Ezekiel 20:26, which I discussed earlier (see especially Note 7). Significantly, this a sort of “technical term” in sacrificial contexts, which can in fact be understood to refer exclusively to human sacrifice!¹³ As for Hahn and Bergsma’s proposal about the connection between Ezekiel 20:25-26 and (opposition to) the Deuteronomistic laws pertaining to firstlings: not … truncated (46,533 more characters in archive)