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[Dominator]

I credit this idea to Robert Price's scholarly yet tongue-in-cheek podcast, "The Human Bible." Here is my backdrop. I will set my argument in bold text below if you want to skip this part.

While I love Price's scholarly approach to Scripture that's not fettered by things needing to uphold particular doctrines, I do disagree with what he does with the subsequent disillusionment that comes from actually studying Scripture. Like most atheists/agnostics from fundamentalist backgrounds, he throws the baby out with the bathwater in favor of a much more grounded skeptic's worldview fueled by reason and empiricism (if you are on this road, then continue onward, good sir/ma'am! You are noble in my eyes).

I think this is unfortunate, because I do believe that humanity is, on the whole, living aberrantly, and in need of some sort of salvation. And I do see the Bible (among other things, granted) as a worthy guidebook. But the current mainstream Christian approach and the dogmas of the church are at best perpetual training wheels and at worst completely worthless shackles to spiritual infancy.

One of the fundamental problems I see is the doctrine of inerrancy. Various demonitations and branches apply this in different ways. It's as extreme as "I do nothing without confirmation from Scripture" which is nearly autoscribed via its authors by God God's self (I intentionally avoid gender pronouns for God as they would be misleading if there were actually a God) to "I take inerrancy as far as the doctrines go then I start chucking the parts that don't resonate with the Spirit in me." I applaud the latter extreme and should let you know that if you hover around this pole, I am not directing this at you. But for those of you soldiers out there, this Bud's for you.

Allowing the Spirit in you to confirm or deny the teachings of the Scripture admittedly erodes the very foundation of what the spiritually infantile need for their soul's current state: the need for external parameters because the heart is not trustworthy. We are totally depraved, morally bankrupt spiritual thieves without the rulebook. So homosexuality? Defer to the book, because it's icky and doesn't mesh with blue boys and pink girls worldviews. Slavery? Defer to the book, but it's never mandated, so God was showing a silly people how to work within their silly erroneous ways (at best). Murdering every man, woman, child, and beast of a neighboring tribe? Getting harder, but, defer to the book because at least God doesn't tell us to do that anymore (except when Evangelical pastors use these passages to create an ethically tenuous just-war theory to support the post-9-11 invasion of Iraq, Geneva Conventions be damned because they are man's law!).

I think the more of these you are willing to swallow, the more you are confused by why churches are being abandoned as Western culture takes a hard right turn away from it's nominal Chrisitan beliefs (praise God!).

But here we go. Here is something so appalling, so reprehensible, that I hope and pray it snaps you out of your fanatic loyalty to a rule book and into a new spiritual journey of viewing salvation as a daily struggle (Philippians 2:12) of conformity to heart attitudes and actions that yield qualitative fruit of Spirit.

My argument:

In Exodus 22:29-30 God commands the Israelites to give all firstborn males - including humans - as a sacrfice to God. This is very reminiscent of early practices at that time as a fertility rite to ensure a fruitful womb.

Exodus 13:11-16 seems to realize that this is pretty harsh and allows the Israelites to substitute sheep for donkeys (a man's still gotta farm, after all) and children (because to do otherwise is pretty insane).

Most scholars date Chapter 22 prior to Chapter 13. I'll let you dive into that on your own, but it doesn't really diminish my point much: YHWH demands child sacrifices.

Later OT authors seem to realize that this is, in fact, bad and called it accordingly. So as opposed to ignore it, they offer a rather terrifying retcon that has vile implications. Ezekiel 20:21-26 makes the claim that God intentionally gave the Israelites "statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live." Why did YHWH intentionally mislead the people, commanding them to offer infant sacrifices? Why, "in order that [YHWH] might horrify them".

I'm horrified.

To those who see the supernatural being that created Adam and the God on the throne on the sea of glass in Revelation as one contiguous entity, how do you account for the fact that at one time this God demanded child sacrifices as an attempt to intentionally mislead God's people for the sake of horrifying them into submission?

Bonus question: how do you know you're not getting another round of bad commands? I'm pretty horrified at the Evangelical church's treatment of the queer community, and the fact that they were willing to either support or overlook Trump's treatment of every type of person Jesus told them to take care of and vote in the biggest joke our country has ever seen and will probably never recover from. So if this what your God is commanding, I'd say the fruit of this church zeitgeist is pretty horrifying and thus the commands must be, too, if they truly lead you there.

To view the various vignettes of God throughout the Scipture as one contiguous whole worthy of worship and following is morally bankrupt and spiritually dishonest, even contradicting the more nobler images.

A soldier's belief in inerrancy is untenable.

[jimwalton]

The first problem with your premise is the definition and outworking of inerrancy. It's a term (in definition and development) that cannot completely represent the fullness of Scripture's authority. It's not that it's a bad idea, it's just that it's inadequate for the task at hand. Scripture is primarily God's revelation of Himself through covenant terminology. It's the contract between God and humanity. In the process we learn who God is, who we are, what God promises to do and what we are expected to do in return. We find out what happens when we comply with the contract and what happens when we defy it. It gives a boatload of examples. But is it inerrant? Wrong term. It does what it intends to do with precision and authority.

Walton and Sandy say, "Inspiration is tied to locutions—they have their source in God; illocutions define the necessary path to meaning, which is characterized by authority and inerrancy. Inerrancy and authority are related to the illocution; accommodation and genre attach to the locution. Therefore inerrancy and authority cannot be undermined, compromised, or jeopardized by genre or accommodation. While genre labels may be misleading, genre itself cannot be true or false, errant or inerrant, authoritative or nonauthoritative.

"Some attach inerrancy and authority to the locution, and therefore have trouble seeing the cultural aspects of the text.

"We propose instead that our doctrinal affirmations about Scripture (authority, inerrancy, infallibility, etc.) attach to the illocution of the human communicator. This is not to say that we therefore believe everything he did (he did believe that the sun moved across the sky), but we express our commitment to his communicative act. Since his locutionary framework is grounded in his language and culture, it is important to differentiate between what the communicator can be inferred to believe and his illocutionary focus. So, for example, it is no surprise that ancient Israel believed in a solid sky, and God accommodated his locution to that model in his communication to them. But since the illocution is not to assert the true shape of cosmic geography, we can safely set those details aside as incidental without jeopardizing authority or inerrancy."

Enough of that. I don't want to get sidetracked, but inerrancy is a very complex and deep discussion.

On to your horror and the true discussion at hand. Ex. 22.29-30. You're right that the sacrifice of the firstborn was associated with fertility rites, but Israelite religion forbade human sacrifice, so an animal was substituted in place of the child (Num. 3.12-13), as you have mentioned. The exact means by which the "giving" was to be done on Ex. 22 is not explained. Ex. 13.2 speaks of consecration; Num. 13 speaks of substitution. Very consistently in the Bible child sacrifice is an abomination, so we are remiss to interpret anything in the Bible as God demanding infant sacrifice, especially for the sheer purpose of causing fear in followers. It is a horrid thought, and not part of biblical teaching.

As far as the Ezekiel reference, a comment from Walton, Matthews & Chavalas (The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament) might help: "The Hebrew terms used here are extremely important to a proper understanding of Ezekiel’s controversial statement. This is not a reference to the Law given at Sinai, and the word Torah is not used. The word NIV translates as “statutes” is the same word that in v. 24 was translated “decrees” except that there it is feminine (as usual) rather than masculine (as here). The word NIV translates “laws” is the word for God’s judicial decisions. The consequence of Israel’s unfaithfulness, then, was that God decreed events that were not in their favor, and he made judicial decisions that threatened their survival. This resulted in God’s use of forces that 'devastate' Israel such as war, famine, plague, foreign armies."

And, from the same source on v. 26: "Following Ezekiel's theme of the indisputable power of God to command creation, the decree to sacrifice the firstborn here plays off of the statement in Ex. 13:2 that all firstborns, human and animal, belong to God. This is demonstrated by the 10th plague in Egypt (Ex 13:14-16), but is mitigated or 'redeemed' through sacrifice (Ex 34:20) and by the sacrificial act of circumcision (Gen 17:9-14; Ex 22:29). Within Phoenician and Canaanite religion, however, the sacrifice of the firstborn is a common practice (see "passing children through fire" as part of Molech worship in Deut. 18:10). Closer to Ezekiel’s time, kings Ahaz and Manasseh are both accused of child sacrifice (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6). Since these men as descendants of David and participants in the 'everlasting covenant' with YHWH (2 Sam 23:5) were the guardians of the law and the enforcers of divine and civil decree, their detestable actions in this regard could easily fit the image of 'bad laws' in Ezek. 20:25."

So your conclusion: "How do you account for the fact that at one time this God demanded child sacrifices as an attempt to intentionally mislead God's people for the sake of horrifying them into submission?" is off the mark. God never demanded child sacrifices, never intentionally misled his people, and never horrified them into submission.

[Common language]

Walton is simply wrong here. There's simply nothing special about the terminology used there that would make one interpret these not as Torah laws. (I've talked about this in much more detail http://www.patheos.com/blogs/atheology/2016/01/god-and-child-sacrifice-ezekiel-2025-26-the-last-pieces-of-the-puzzle/ -- especially beginning "When we take a closer look at the exact terminology...")

[jimwalton]

Thank you. That's a LOOOOONG post on the link. You obviously know that many through history have struggled with this text and have arrived at a variety of analyses and conclusions. While I (and others) may find points of disagreement with your linguistic conclusions, the terminology combined with the context still make a case against the perspective of the original poster.

1. There is no other context or verse where God gives bad laws. To make a rash judgment on this single term is unwarranted without further weight.

2. There is no biblical warrant for considering early laws as good and later laws as no good.

3. God consistently throughout the entire OT regards child sacrifice as an abomination. They represent a contradiction to every fundamental law He issued. Again, we are rash to rush to this conclusion based on one verse.

Instead, we find more clarity in Ezekiel's thesis and premises: Israel's obstinate and continuing sin has put them in a position where God has removed his protective shield around them and has allowed them to pursue their sin to their own destructive ends (very similar to Rom. 1.18-32). It has been a pattern of the nation's from the onset, but they have accumulated enough rebellion to warrant their destruction. With rhetorical language Ezekiel drives his point home that God has given them up to their own devices. In that way it's similar to God's "hardening" of Pharaoh's heart, i.e., letting Pharaoh dig his own grave. This same thought appears in Isa. 6.9ff., 63.17; 1 Ki. 18.36, along with Exodus and here.

As far as the juxtaposition of this text with Ex. 22 and 13, as the original poster has aligned, Moshe Greenberg in the Anchor Bible Commentary states, "Outside of our passage no evidence for such an interpretation of these laws, or for such a practice, exists; indeed it is intrinsically improbable." He adds that the polemic against child sacrifice in Dt. 12.29ff., Jer. 7.31; 19.5; 32.35 indicates that at least from the time of the last kings of Judah it was popularly (and mistakenly) believed that YHWH accepted, perhaps even commanded, child sacrifice. Ezekiel writes shortly after that era. Taking Ezekiel as a whole, along with the rest of the OT, child sacrifice was not a command of the Lord, but an abomination perpetrated by those who distorted the commands of the firstborn with pagan rituals, syncretistically blending the two into an abominable Yahwistic contortion. Eventually, God releases them to continue their debacle, and for that His judgment will be released against them.

[Dominator]

I'm glad you see child sacrifice as a bad thing! Let's go one step at a time:

Exodus 22 asks Israelites to offer their firstborn children as human sacrifices. You cannot get around it. It's a part of the Covenant Code which was the earliest part of the laws and possibly independant from the others. But the language is unmistakeable: v29 says not to delay to make offerings. And the verb for give is applied to human children and animal alike. This part demands sacrifice.

Any attempt to deny this is simply at attempt to preserve a discrepancy with other later portions. Exodus 13 demands sacrifices.

[jimwalton]

I can get around it. Outside of that interpretation of this text, no evidence exists to interpret Ex. 22.29 as child sacrifice, nor for such a practice in Israel. It is an explicit contradiction to everything else in the canon. It is intrinsically improbable and unwarranted to interpret this one text as YHWH demanding something that he not only never demands anywhere else, but explicitly and consistently regards it as one of the most sinful practices imaginable. Israelite religion categorically forbade child sacrifice.

[Common language]

> While I (and others) may find points of disagreement with your linguistic conclusions, the terminology...

If you have an argument against it, I'd like to hear it, not just see its inadequacy assumed.

> There is no other context or verse where God gives bad laws.

Is there any reason we'd expect for such a unique (and disturbing) idea to be attested more widely?

That being said, I've compared Ezekiel 20:25-26 to things like Jeremiah 7:22, 31 and 19:5, etc., as attesting to similar strategies for mitigating what were thought to be highly problematic commands or laws of God. In the best critical analysis available to us, Jeremiah 7:22 is simply plainly contradictory to what God indeed says/commands in the Torah. (The post I linked to you was simply the last in a series of posts I wrote on ancient Israelite and Canaanite child sacrifice, the first of which can be found here.)

> There is no biblical warrant for considering early laws as good and later laws as no good.

I'm assuming you meant this the other way around (insofar as it's usually suggested that the early laws were the ones which weren't good, considering that later laws mitigate them)?

> God consistently throughout the entire OT regards child sacrifice as an abomination. They represent a contradiction to every fundamental law He issued. Again, we are rash to rush to this conclusion based on one verse.

There are any number of factors that might lead you to reconsider here. Perhaps first and foremost, the possibility -- indeed the certainty -- of some inner-Biblical contradiction is universally agreed upon by Biblical scholars. So it's perfectly possible for God to at one point appear to appear child sacrifice, while later expressing the opposite view.

Second, if it's the horribleness/unethical-ness of child sacrifice that seems so out of step with God's nature (or "a contradiction to every fundamental law He issued"), we could turn toward any number of disturbingly violent and seemingly rash actions ascribed to God throughout the Old Testament. And perhaps the most instructive of these here is Exodus 13, where God's command to hand over the firstborn of men and animals to him -- despite the presence of the redemption clauses in 13:2, 13:13 and 13:15b -- is clearly connected with actual violent slaughter:

14When in the future your child asks you, 'What does this mean?' you shall answer, 'By strength of hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery. 15When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the LORD killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from human firstborn to the firstborn of animals.

For that matter, the likelihood of an original positive (and indeed divinely-ordained) command for child sacrifice is made more plausible by the unambiguous presence of this in Canaanite/Phoenician religious practice, in tandem with the fact that the universal consensus of scholars of early Israel is that the Israelites themselves were an off-shoot of early Canaanite culture, and preserved many aspects thereof.

[jimwalton]

> If you have an argument against it, I'd like to hear it

The van consecutive is no particular problem. I would agree that v. 26 is conjoined to v. 25.

You say, "The most likely counterpart to the 'not good' things of v. 25 is not decrees of judgment—or, more accurately, we might say 'retributions' or punishments—but actual laws." But that's not at all the case if you take the text as I mentioned, a rhetorical device to explain why the people are being judged. Even the Leviticus set to which Ezekiel and you refer (Lev. 26) is about the punishment of defeat and exile for breaking the covenant. Consistent with Ezekiel's purpose and point, his reference to "no-good laws" is a rhetorical device of what God has ordained: the exile, invaders, plague, etc. As Walton said, God decreed events that were not in their favor, and he made judicial decisions that threatened their survival. Ezekiel has already made quite clear that God's decrees and laws are the way to life (Ezk. 20.11 & 13). It would be absurd to think he would turn around 12 verses later and contradict that thought.

This is not the only place in Ezekiel where the grammar and terminology lead to interpretive problems. It's still true that the masculine form of חֻקִּים contrasts with his use of the term in this chapter.

Ezekiel's reliance on and quoting of Leviticus is not a problem. Ezekiel was a priest, and one would expect him to know the Torah. Leviticus 26 is a reminder of the covenant blessings and punishments. The point there is also clearly that it is not God that has sinned by "commanding no-good laws," but the people by violation of it.

Though this is a difficult text variously interpreted through the ages, I see no necessary contradiction with the rest of Scripture. Those contradictions are one possible interpretation that put God in a horrible light and make His character disturbingly immoral—a stance the Bible never takes.

> the universal consensus of scholars of early Israel is that the Israelites themselves were an off-shoot of early Canaanite culture, and preserved many aspects thereof.

This is not so at all. There are many scholars who take Abraham to be of the Arameans settled in Chaldees, not of Canaanite extraction. While there is a camp that regards the Israelites as of Canaanite origin, that case is far from either solid or closed or "universal consensus."

[Common language]

> You say, "The most likely counterpart to the 'not good' things of v. 25 is not decrees of judgment—or, more accurately, we might say 'retributions' or punishments—but actual laws."
. . .
Ezekiel has already made quite clear that God's decrees and laws are the way to life (Ezk. 20.11 & 13). It would be absurd to think he would turn around 12 verses later and contradict that thought.

> Note the broader context in which my argument was made: "The most likely counterpart to the “not good” things of v. 25 is not decrees of judgment—or, more accurately, we might say “retributions” or punishments—but actual laws. Interestingly, although the most obvious and straightforward support for this comes from the second part of v. 25 (“…by which they would not live”) being an antithetical parallel to the laws “by which they would live” (Ezekiel 20:13, 21), there’s also an antithetical parallel in that there are other places in the OT where the laws are explicitly called good: for example, Nehemiah 9:13.⁵

By contrast, to my knowledge nowhere else are retributions or punishments specified as “not good”—which would seem redundant anyways.

And my footnote here reads: [5] Conversely, it seems like it’s not just as an antithetical counterpart of Leviticus 18:5 that we have parallels to the idea of “not good” legislation: see Isaiah 10:1, “Woe to those who enact evil statutes, and to those who constantly record unjust decisions,” etc. (Also Psalm 94:20, and maybe even things like Iliad 16.388, too. I’m still on the hunt for a nice Near Eastern parallel, if anyone knows one.)
As for "Ezekiel's reliance on and quoting of Leviticus is not a problem. Ezekiel was a priest, and one would expect him to know the Torah."

I didn't set it up as a problem. In fact, quite the opposite. As I wrote at the end there,

One suggestion here, which I hinted at near the beginning of this discussion, is that the process behind Ezekiel’s shift to the masculine “decrees” in 20:25 is more or less parallel to that of the same shift in Leviticus. (I have some further comments on Leviticus 26:46 in a note.¹⁰) In sum, at various places the author of Ezekiel seems to have preferred specific language more uniquely associated with Leviticus or with Deuteronomy.¹⁰ᵇ

Finding the origin of Ezekiel's particularly terminology for the Law in Leviticus here alleviates us from having to come up with some implausible interpretation for חקים and משפטים not being legal terms but being judgmental/retributionary terms, as Walton et al. argue. Again, I think a more careful read of my argument will probably show that it's pretty decisive in this regard.

(I know it's a long read and that we're not supposed to link to things without summarizing them, etc.; I'm trying to do that as we go in.)

As for "There are many scholars who take Abraham to be of the Arameans settled in Chaldees, not of Canaanite extraction"...

Jesus Christ, "Chaldees"? Exactly which century are your claims re: the genesis of Israelite ethnicity coming from?

[jimwalton]

Yes, I read through your argument about Ezekiel and Exodus re: child sacrifice, but I don't find them compelling, as you do. Taking the thrust of the Bible as a whole, child sacrifice is a ubiquitous and unfluctuating abomination. Also, in the Bible, God doesn't give bad laws. Hermeneutically, we let Scripture interpret Scripture, and while I appreciate all the work that went into your analysis, I don't buy it. You've spent some much time on one tree that you've missed the forest, in my opinion. You've missed the character of God and the nature of his revelation. We could go back and forth 100 times, but I don't agree with you. The scholarship of Walton, Block, and Greenberg ring more true to me than your work.

As far as the Israelites being Aramean and not Canaanite, according to Genesis 10, the Canaanites were descendants of Ham, and Aram and Abraham of Shem. This is confirmed several times through the Bible (Dt. 26.5; Gn. 25.20; 28.2). Isaac was forbidden to marry a Canaanite (Gn. 28.2). There was a concerted effort in Genesis to make sure all readers knew that the Israelites were not of Canaanite descent.

As far as I know, we don't really know the origin of the Canaanites. While the Bible attributes them to Ham for theological reasons, they were Semites. In the ancient Near East the designation "Canaanite" was more a geographical description than a people group. Canaan was a region, and people groups from that region were known as Canaanites. They are mentioned as early as the Ebla tablets in about 2300 BC.

But Abraham hailed from "Ur of the Chaldeans" (Gn. 11.31). This was probably not the famous Ur discovered and identified by Wooley in the early 20th c., but a location in northern Syria or southern Turkey, relatively near Haran. This is probably why Abraham's family is always said to have its homeland in Paddan Adam or Adam Naharaim (both Aramean locales) rather than Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates. In any case, the Bible always clearly distinguishes between Israelites and Canaanites.

Now I know that archaeologists have proposed all sorts of theories as to the origin of the Israelites, but there are distinctive differences between the Canaanites and Israelites, especially according to the archaeologists studying the Conquest. There is no end to the scholarly opinions about the origin of the Israelites, but it is certainly not a settled issue as you portray.

1. Finkelstein's research shows nearly 300 new settlements in the central hill country of Canaan during Iron Age I, clearly distinct from Canaanite culture.

2. The Merneptah Stele (1205 BC) refers to Israel as a people group, probably located in the Transjordan.

3. Biblical writings tie the Israelites with the Arameans, not with the Canaanites, as I have said.