Biblical Condemnations of Human Sacrifice
Michael Manos has asked a very good question in response to my fifth chapter (on human sacrifice in the Bible):
Certainly there are many who would cite other verses (perhaps most importantly Deuteronomy 12:31 and 18:10), which indicate that Yahweh did indeed prohibit Israel from making child sacrifices. What do we make of these verses?
In other words, if my argument is that certain texts in the Bible show that human sacrifice was sanctioned by Yahweh in certain periods, what about those texts where human sacrifice is clearly condemned. Mike has cited the two clear condemnations of human sacrifice from the Pentateuch. The answer to his question is very simple, and I really should have made the answer clearer in the book.
Most of Deuteronomy is dated by scholars to the period of King Josiah. The Deuteronomistic Historian was one who was writing to reinforce the interests of King Josiah. By the time he wrote, Jeremiah had already condemned child sacrifice; thus, the institution of human sacrifice had already begun to fall into disrepute. So when child sacrifice is condemned in Deuteronomy, that reflects a later time period than that of King Mesha or Micah, etc. I allude to this in footnote 8 on p. 93. I discuss King Josiah’s reforms briefly on pp. 147-49. I also discuss his reforms and their relationship to the Deuteronomistic Historian at greater length in my review of Douglas Earl’s book on Joshua. See also Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible, for a fuller explanation of the Deuteronomistic Historian’s opposition to the Israelite institution of human sacrifice. To anyone unfamiliar with JEDP, it may seem like scholars just cherry pick when they like to date what verses, but the dating of the Deuteronomistic Historian is set firmly to the Josianic period, with some minor revisions during the exile a few decades later, for reasons that have nothing to do with human sacrifice. For a very accessible introduction to the dating of the various pentateuchal sources, see Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
In short, human sacrifice is condemned in Deuteronomy because most of Deuteronomy was was written after human sacrifice fell into disrepute among the Judean elites in the seventh century BCE. But earlier sources show that human sacrifice was long considered to be an acceptable and noble part of Yahweh worship in Israel and Judea. This is another example of what I display in the first chapter of my bookânamely, that the Bible is comprised of a number of positions that are in direct contention with one another. The Bible is an argument with itself.
