HUMAN SACRIFICE
A MOLOCH TRADITION.
IT is incontestable that the ancient "Semites" manifested a peculiar leaning towards the practice of bloody sacrifices to their gods.
Typical is the Jewish story of Abraham offering to slay with a knife his first-born, Isaac, as an offering to Yahweh who had commanded him so to do. More typical still is the Semitic idea that his god would require such a murder to be done. He was not that far removed from Moloch and idolators. His own father fabricated idols.
In Excavations at Gezer, R. A. S. Macalister tells us that the bodies of sacrificed young children were found in all semitic strata; this work describes the remains of these victims of which pictures are given.
Isaiah charges the idolators with "enflaming themselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clifts of the rocks" (lvii, 5). There are many other Old Testament references to the practice of sacrificing children to Moloch.
Says the Rev. J. Kitto in the Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature 1895, "their altars smoked with human blood from before the time of Abraham to the ascension of Moses who put an end to it until the people reverted to the practices of Moloch worship which contributed to the fall of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel."
G. A. Dorsey writes in Civilization (Hamish Hamilton): "Historically their temples throughout the Middle East , like an Aztec temple, were shambles--one sacrifice after another."
"The fact, therefore, now generally accepted by critical scholars, is that in the last days of the kingdom human sacrifices were offered to Moloch as King or Counsellor of the Nation and that the Prophets disapproved of it ...."
"Moloch worship was but an unfolding of evil, the full and swelling stream of corrupt doctrines, views and practices, of which the rivulets stretch back to the days of of Ezra until they are lost in the fountain-head, the Religious Philosophy of a debased culture."
.The trail of the tradition, then, is complete and leads to Moloch worship
A MOLOCH TRADITION.
IT is incontestable that the ancient "Semites" manifested a peculiar leaning towards the practice of bloody sacrifices to their gods.
Typical is the Jewish story of Abraham offering to slay with a knife his first-born, Isaac, as an offering to Yahweh who had commanded him so to do. More typical still is the Semitic idea that his god would require such a murder to be done. He was not that far removed from Moloch and idolators. His own father fabricated idols.
In Excavations at Gezer, R. A. S. Macalister tells us that the bodies of sacrificed young children were found in all semitic strata; this work describes the remains of these victims of which pictures are given.
Isaiah charges the idolators with "enflaming themselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clifts of the rocks" (lvii, 5). There are many other Old Testament references to the practice of sacrificing children to Moloch.
Says the Rev. J. Kitto in the Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature 1895, "their altars smoked with human blood from before the time of Abraham to the ascension of Moses who put an end to it until the people reverted to the practices of Moloch worship which contributed to the fall of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel."
G. A. Dorsey writes in Civilization (Hamish Hamilton): "Historically their temples throughout the Middle East , like an Aztec temple, were shambles--one sacrifice after another."
"The fact, therefore, now generally accepted by critical scholars, is that in the last days of the kingdom human sacrifices were offered to Moloch as King or Counsellor of the Nation and that the Prophets disapproved of it ...."
"Moloch worship was but an unfolding of evil, the full and swelling stream of corrupt doctrines, views and practices, of which the rivulets stretch back to the days of of Ezra until they are lost in the fountain-head, the Religious Philosophy of a debased culture."
.The trail of the tradition, then, is complete and leads to Moloch worship