Child Sacrifice in Hebrew Myth and Sabaic Law: New epigraphic data on the origins of the Akedah

• In Event: Law, Culture and the Bible

Abstract

In a modern supersessionist myth, the story of the binding of Isaac (Gen 22) describes how "the Canaanite practices of child sacrifice to Moloch are forever left behind by the descendants of Abraham," (Wiesel 2014) with the ancestor of the Jews as the first to receive the new divine revelation, that killing children for God is wrong. By contrast, scholars such as Mark S. Smith and Jon Levenson point to biblical texts including Exodus 22:28 (countermanded in Ex 34:19-20), Jeremiah 32:32-35, 1 Kings 11:7 and 2 Kings 23:10 that represent child sacrifice as divinely commanded or a ritual norm, at least for Judahite rulers, and Raleigh Heth and Tyler Kelley have recently contextualized the Hebrew narrative as part of an ancient cross-mediterranean supercessionist pattern shared in the miraculous rescues of "Isaac and Iphigenia: Portrayals of Child Sacrifice in Israelite and Greek Literature" (Biblical 2021).

What has apparently never been previously noted is that divine sanction against the killing of children is documented before written literary Hebrew itself, in a small corpus of Sabaic legal inscriptions from the early Iron Age (datable as early as the 10th century BCE). Additionally, both cultures share the concept of divinely mandated ritual killing (ḥrm, in the causative) in the context of conquest, a verbal root that the Sabic texts also apply to the divine sanction of child-killing. This paper will consider the implications of this prohibition for cultural contact between West Semitic-speaking cultures in the Iron Age in light of other fundamental shared patterns including kinship with a dynastic god. What god first banned child-killing and what did the continuing myths and accusations around it mean to an ancient Hebrew audience?

Author

• Seth Larkin Sanders, Dalhousie University