The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (28 page)

We see exactly the same impulse at work in the opening pages of the Bible, where Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve, are inspired to make “an offering unto the Lord” in the form of fruit from Cain’s harvest and a sheep from Abel’s flock. Their spontaneous ritual of sacrifice is “the very first recorded act of worship,”
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and—rather ominously—God appears to prefer flesh (Gen. 4:3–5). His appetite whetted, God later makes a formal claim on the firstlings of the Chosen People. “Sanctify unto Me all the first-born,” God commands the Israelites in the Book of Exodus, “whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast, it is Mine” (Exod. 13:2).

Since children, no less than crops and livestock, were regarded as a gift of the gods, they were not exempt from sacrifice, at least in principle, in various places around the world and throughout history. In fact,
even though human sacrifice is condemned in the Holy Scriptures as an “abomination,” the Bible reports that children were the victims of ritual sacrifice in and around Canaan until relatively late in biblical history. “[E]ven their sons and their daughters do they burn in the fire to their gods,” says the biblical author known as the Deuteronomist about the Canaanites (Deut. 12:31). The biblical authors concede that some Israelites dared to engage in child sacrifice and other “enchantments” under the influence of their pagan neighbors in Canaan (2 Kings 17). At least two of the kings of Judah are said to have made their sons “pass through the fire, according to the abominations of heathen” (2 Kings 16:3, 21:6), and the biblical chronicler specifically blames the conquest and destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel on the persistence of child sacrifice among the Israelites: “And the Lord rejected all the seed of Israel, and afflicted them, and delivered them into the hands of spoilers” (2 Kings 17:20). The Bible seems to find corroboraron in recent archaeological evidence that “human sacrifice was more in vogue [in Canaan] than elsewhere” in the ancient Near East.
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In fact, the Bible appears to concede that human sacrifice, even if “abominable,” is still effective. When the king of Moab finds his walled city under siege by the armies of Israel, as recorded in Second Kings, he resorts to the desperate measure of sacrificing his eldest son “for a burnt offering” to the Moabite god called Chemosh on a parapet where the Israelites will be able to see the ritual. What happens next is rather puzzling, perhaps intentionally so: “And there came great wrath upon Israel, and they departed from him, and returned to their own land” (2 Kings 3:27). The traditional interpretation is that the pious Israelites were so sickened by the sight of human sacrifice that they withdrew in disgust, but literary scholar Northrop Frye ventured another reading: “The last sentence reads like a somewhat clumsy editorial effort,” he urged, “to conceal the fact that in the original story the maneuver worked and the Israelites were in fact driven off.”
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Still, the Israelites, like other peoples of the ancient world, came up with some ingenious ways to please a demanding god with a hunger for firstlings. God’s command to “sanctify” the firstborn as announced in Exodus, for example, was understood to mean only that a firstborn son must be dedicated to the priesthood, and a child could be redeemed from temple service by paying a bounty to the priests. More primitive peoples came up with cruder compromises: the hair of a newborn might
be cut and burned on the sacrificial altar instead of the child himself.
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Such rituals of surrogate sacrifice were so prevalent in ancient and primitive cultures that some historians question whether human sacrifice was
ever
a common practice in the ancient Near East. In any case, it appears that animals had mostly replaced human beings as sacrificial offerings by the time of the biblical patriarchs.
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But the most ingenious compromise between bloodthirsty gods and the ancient clans and tribes who worshipped them was one that permitted fathers and mothers to engage in the ritual of cutting human flesh and shedding human blood as an offering to the gods without actually taking the life of the sacrificial victim. Circumcision, an act of human sacrifice in miniature, probably replaced the actual sacrifice of children in many cultures around the world at some distant and unknowable point in human history. “Here, quite manifestly,” concludes one Bible scholar with a distinctly anthropological bent of mind, “we have the origin of the rite of circumcision.”
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The notion of circumcision as a surrogate for child sacrifice begins to explain even the most bizarre and baffling details of Exodus 4:24–26. An angry and vengeful Yahweh seeks to kill the father of a firstborn son—or perhaps the child himself—because Yahweh has been denied the offering of flesh and blood to which he is entitled by divine decree. When Zipporah cuts off the foreskin of her son, her firstling, she is safely mimicking the sacrifice of the child himself—she is “sanctifying” the baby who “opened the womb of Israel” precisely as God had commanded. Only through the mock sacrifice in the form of a circumcision is God appeased, and only then does he break off his attack.

Even the most grotesque aspect of the ritual that Zipporah performs—touching the “legs” (or, more likely, the genitals) of God, Moses, or Gershom with the bloody foreskin—makes sense only if we regard the circumcision of her son as a blood sacrifice. The smearing of blood is a dramatic and effective way of demonstrating that the sacrifice of a living creature has taken place. The Bible specifically instructs the Israelite priests who carry out the ritual sacrifice of animals to make a big show of dipping their fingers into the blood of the slaughtered beast and splashing it around the altar (Lev. 3:8). In fact God himself specifies that the anointing of body parts with sacrificial blood is to be the climax of the ceremony by which Aaron, the brother of Moses, and his sons are later consecrated as high priests of the Israelites:

Zipporah, daughter of a priest and wife of a prophet, is clearly a priestess and a prophetess in her own right. She appears to understand that Yahweh is angry because her Israelite husband has neglected the commandment of his own faith that his firstborn son must be “sanctified” unto the Almighty. She seems to know that God will be appeased only if the sacrificial knife touches human flesh and draws human blood. And so Zipporah uses the only tool at hand—a crude flint knife or perhaps just a flint stone—to circumcise her newborn son. To make sure that God sees what she has done, she uses the newly cut foreskin to anoint her husband’s or her son’s body (if not God’s!) with blood, just as the priests of Yahweh will later be instructed to do by the Almighty himself. God sees what Zipporah has done—and God is pleased.

The notion that God might demand the sacrifice of a child, even in a surrogate form, seems to contradict the fundamental teachings of the Hebrew Bible, which repeatedly and explicitly condemns the practice of human sacrifice by the Canaanites and the occasional renegade Israelite who falls under their evil influence. The prophet Jeremiah reports that God is angered and repulsed by the spilling of “the blood of innocents” in sacrifice to the Canaanite god known as Baal—a form of worship “which I commanded not, nor spoke it, neither came it into My mind” (Jer. 19:4–5). The prophet Micah ponders the question of child sacrifice—“Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”—and his answer to the rhetorical question sums up the credo that we have come to regard as the essential teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition:

Yet, long before Jeremiah and Micah, long before the tale of the Bridegroom of Blood, the Bible records an incident even more horrific than the night attack on Moses—an incident in which child sacrifice is precisely what God seeks of his Chosen People, and under the most appalling circumstances.

According to the Book of Genesis, God promises Abraham and Sarah that a son will be born to them in their extreme old age. “And I will bless [Sarah],” God says, “and moreover I will give thee a son of her” (Gen. 17:15), and he delivers on his promise by causing ninety-year-old Sarah to conceive and give birth to Isaac. Then, in a moment of divine perversity that has shocked Bible readers over the last couple of millennia, God abruptly orders Abraham to sacrifice young Isaac on an altar of fire. “Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac,” says God, as if to taunt Abraham with the full horror of what he is demanding, “and offer him … for a burnt-offering…” (Gen. 22:2).

Perhaps even more perversely, Abraham complies with the divine command to sacrifice his own son without a single word of protest. Abraham, we should not forget, is the same man who has boldly confronted God over his plan to destroy the vile and despicable Sodomites, the man who has haggled at length with the Almighty to spare the ten righteous ones who might be killed along with the sinners. But when it comes to the life of his own son, Abraham falls silent. Meekly and wordlessly, Abraham sets off toward the killing ground with his sweetly befuddled son in tow. “Behold the fire and the wood,” asks the unsuspecting Isaac, and his words tug at the heartstrings of any flesh-and-blood father, “but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?” (Gen. 22:7). Only at the very last possible moment—when Isaac is bound on the altar, the wood for the sacrificial fire is laid beneath him, and Abraham holds the slaughtering knife over his son’s throat—does God call the whole thing off.

“Lay not thy hand upon the lad,” says “an angel of the Lord” just in the nick of time, “for now I know that thou art a God-fearing man, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me” (Gen. 22:12).

The more apologetic theologians have struggled to explain away the Binding of Isaac, as the passage is known in Jewish tradition, as a test of faith by a compassionate and merciful God who never really intended to permit the sacrifice of a child at the hands of his own father God is praised by some apologists for miraculously providing a ram to replace Isaac on the altar at the last moment. “The story,” they insist, “opens the age-long warfare of Israel against the abominations of child sacrifice.”
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The terror visited upon Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac by the Almighty during the ordeal—and the prospect of what would have happened to Isaac if his father had
failed
the “test of faith” by refusing to slay his son—is mostly ignored in the more pious readings of the Binding of Isaac.

But the pious readings are neither convincing nor reassuring. What kind of sadist, we might ask, would miraculously bestow a child on a yearnful old couple, then demand that the child be slaughtered by his own father—and wait until the blade is about to draw blood before saying, as it were, “Just kidding”? And what kind of father would be willing to challenge the Almighty with great passion and audacity in defense of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities of evil and perversion, but remain silent and compliant when instructed to cut the throat and burn the body of his own innocent son? The Binding of Isaac, so heartrending and so perplexing, readily explains why one of the many names by which God is called in the Bible is “the Fear of Isaac” (Gen. 31:42).

“The whole of Jewish history might have turned out differently,” a young rabbi once told me, “if Abraham had just said ‘No.’”

The most troubling detail in the Binding of Isaac is often overlooked. God spares Isaac, but nowhere does the Almighty come out and say that human sacrifice is wrong or even that it is unnecessary. By his abject compliance with God’s bloodthirsty demand, Abraham neatly extricates himself from the Catch-2 2 in which God has placed him: precisely because Abraham is willing to slaughter his son, he is not called upon to actually do it. But God does not rule out the possibility that he might ask the same thing again of Abraham—or someone else. According to Islamic tradition, the beast that God provides to Abraham as a replacement for Isaac is the very same ram that Abel offered up in the first recorded ritual of sacrifice
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—and so we are reminded that God seems to savor flesh and blood.

“We cannot evade the fact that the core of the narrative actually seems to assume the possibility that God would demand human sacrifice,” Nahum Sarna, a distinguished commentator on Genesis, has written with uncommon candor. “God does not denounce human sacrifice as such.”
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God’s troubling indifference toward child sacrifice in the Binding of Isaac sheds an ominous light on the events of Exodus, including not only the night attack on Moses but the whole plan of liberation that God confides to Moses at their very first encounter. God tells Moses that nine of the ten plagues that he intends to send down on Egypt—frogs, vermin, boils, and so on—will not be enough to convince Pharaoh that he must let the Israelites go. Remarkably, God reveals that Pharaoh will defy the first nine plagues not because these “signs and wonders” are too puny to frighten him but rather because God himself will “harden his heart” (Exod. 4:21)1 Thanks to God’s rather mischievous meddling with Pharaoh’s mind and heart, a tenth plague will be needed to break the will of the Egyptian monarch: