Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac Painting

This is a wall painting from the Dura-Europos synagogue of the Biblical foundational character Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac — you can see his soul going up to heaven (mid third-century CE). But wait — everyone knows that in the Bible (Genesis 22), God prevented Abraham at the last minute from killing his beloved son, right? So what the heck?

Turns out the story of child sacrifice in the Ancient Near East is a lot more fraught than not, with scholars debating the interpretation of this Biblical passage in many ways. Although some have argued that an extra-Biblical tradition exists where Abraham actually went through with the sacrifice (as suggested by this image), more have claimed that the passage was written to show that Yahweh did not want Jewish people to sacrifice children.

Recent work by Heath D. Dewrell attempts to put the whole story in context. The Western Semitic peoples (which included Canaanites and their Phonecian descendants as well as Yahwistic followers) had practiced child sacrifice at one point in their past. Indeed, the Phonecians (some of whom settled in North Africa and had become known as the Carthaginians) continued the practice until Roman times. The Jewish people broke with this tradition, however, perhaps by claiming that the practice had been a “foreign import” (even though it wasn’t).

One potential end to child sacrifice may have come during the reign of the influential Jewish King Josiah (d. 609 BCE), who undertook many reforms and tried to unify Jewish practices. In the near-contemporary Biblical Book of Jeremiah, Yahweh declares that child sacrifice is something that “I did not command, nor did it arise in my mind” (Jer 7:31).

Omri Boehm goes further, claiming that the Genesis passage where the Angel of God flies in at the last minute to stop Abraham from killing his son is actually a later interpretation, because the original passage had Abraham deciding to disobey God’s divine command on his own responsibility as an ethical stand. Wishful thinking on Boehm’s part? Perhaps, but that’s my favorite ending.