Saturday, August 16, 2014

Human Sacrifice Among Canaanites

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                        

                                                      Moses

If I were the leading Palestinians, I'd quit saying I was a descendant of the Canaanites.  First of all, none of them exist anymore.  They were done for when Joshua and the Israelites entered Canaan and had a battle over the land which started in 1271 BCE  That was 3,285 years ago.  The Israelites won and the few Canaanites that were  left alive were soon taken into the population through marriage.  Any Canaanite genes that were passed on are in the Jews of today in very small quantity if indeed they've lasted that long.

G-d explained his plan in that it wasn't because the Israelites were so pure and perfect that they were to have the land but that the Canaanites were so evil.  G-d had also promised the Patriarchs of the Israelites that he would lead them there.  The Canaanite religion was immoral and inhumane.  They practiced every abomination imaginable.
                                                                             
They sacrificed people and that included their sons and the killing of their aged parents.  Akiba (40-137 AC) cited a particularly loathsome instance of such a murder, which he himself had witnessed.  He was Rabbi Akiba or Akiva ben Joseph.  Many of the comments in the Babylonian Talmud are written by him.  He taught Judaism in his travels and because he did that was tortured by the Romans.  They flayed his skin with iron combs.

Human sacrifice was the practice among the primeval Greeks and Romans, Celts, Slavs, and Scandinavians.  It was used among the Germans down to late Roman times.  This was also widespread among the ancient Semites, especially in times of national danger or disaster.  Excavations in Israel  at Gezer, Taanach, and Megiddo have revealed regular cemeteries around the heathen altars in which skeletons of scores of babies have been found, showing traces of slaughter and partial consumption by sacrificial fire.  "According to Pliny the Elder, human sacrifice in Ancient Rome was abolished by a senatorial decree in 97 BCE, although by this time the practice had already become so rare that the decree was mostly a symbolic act."

Israel's fight against this hideous aberration of the religious sense began with the story of the sacrifice of Isaac and was continued throughout the centuries.   Many cultures show traces of prehistoric human sacrifice in their mythologies and religious texts, but ceased the practice before the onset of historical records. Some see the story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22) as an example of anetiological myth explaining the abolition of human sacrifice.

 It is an irony of history that the one People, Jews,  who for a thousand years fought this horror of eating blood have suffered from the libellous accusation of ritual murder and the use of human blood for religious purposes, such as with the Damascus Affair in 1840 , an accusation of Jews using blood in matzos and such.

"Deut 18:10 explicitly states "Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire". Jer 7:31 states that sacrificing a child by fire, even to Him, had never been commanded nor entered God's mind."

Even in the 20th Century, this horrible and Satanic lie was officially levelled against Israel in the Beilis trial at Kieff in 1913; and then it was broadcast by Nazi leaders in their campaign of ruin against the Jewish population of Germany.  In regard to the Nazi resurrection of the fable of ritual murder, it is well to recall that in 1912 no less than 215 non-Jewish leaders in German public life, learning, literature, theology, science, and the arts, issued a protest against this cruel and utterly baseless libel on Judaism.  They wrote:  "this unscrupulous fiction, spread among the people, has from the Middle Ages until recent times led to terrible consequences.  It has incited the ignorant masses to outrage and massacre, and has driven his-guided crowds to pollute themselves with the innocent blood of their Jewish fellow-men.  And yet not a shadow of proof has ever been adduced to justify this crazy belief."

Deuteronomy XII, 23-28 warns against using or eating blood.  This law is mentioned as early as Genesis IX,4 and is repeated in Lev. XVII, 11.13; XIX, 26.  The Jewish method of slaughter and the salting of meat have as one of their main purposes the draining away of the blood so as man could not ingest any of it.

Another practice in primitive man was to eat a limb torn from a living animal, and that became a law Jews couldn't  do.  Blood was looked up as the life.  The law said that "though shall not eat the life with the flesh."  Even the blood that remains in an animal after the flow of blood has ceased is prohibited.  Another commentator, Ibn Ezra, suggested that the use of blood would have a demoralizing effect upon the moral and physical nature, and pass on a hereditary taint to future generations.  Blood was to poured out upon the earth as water.  "Thou shalt not eat it.

It was very scary for the Israelites who had been walking for 40 years to come to their goal and be told they had to fight for the land in 1271 BCE.  Deuteronomy's advice in VII 17 was: "If thou  shalt say in thy heart;  "These nations are more than I;  how can I dispossess them?  thou shalt not be afraid of them;  thou shalt well remember what the Lord thy G-d  did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt;  the great trials which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm, whereby the Lord thy G-d brought thee out;  so shall the Lord thy G-d do unto all the peoples of whom thou art afraid."  The victory belonged to G-d, not to Israel.

While working in Montana with children who had been abused, I found out that some of them had belonged to some sort of Devil's Cult and had experienced or seen infant sacrifice.  This is happening today.

Resource: Pentateuch and Haftorahs II, edited by Dr. J.H. Hertz, chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Volume II Numbers, Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy XII, 31
Cecil Roth, The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew, London, 1935
A Book of Jewish Thoughts, Oxford edition, p. 181.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akiva_ben_Joseph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/112059/jewish/The-Wisdom-of-Rabbi-Akiba.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair

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