Nadene Goldfoot
Abraham of the 2nd millennium BCE, born in about 1948 BCE, over 4,000 years ago, believed in human sacrifice. He is known to have made the attempt to sacrifice his son, Isaac, so dear to Isaac's mother, Sarah and Abraham. The story is told in order to relate that this act was the last try allowing human sacrifice. It was not to be practiced thereafter. For Abraham's descendants, that may have been true, but not for the rest of the world.
The practice continued in Israel as they took in people from other cultures. Foreign wives would bring the practice with them in Israel. A Phoenician princess who worships Baal, the pagan god of fertility,The practice, seemingly coming from a genetically induced thought, (fear and overcoming it) continued to be practiced. This took place after Abram and Sarah had left Ur for good. The Hebrew Bible mentions human sacrifice being carried out by Israelites several times; however, researchers do not agree on how often the practice occurred or whether it took place at all. Prophets fought against the practice constantly. As to the Temple, sacrifice continued but only with animals, meal offerings, and libations; never people.
When Moses (1391-1271 BCE) sent his spies out to view Canaan, they were also searching for answers: belief in what gods and were they human being sacrificers...at least that's what Moses wanted to know; and they were. Evidence of this was not mentioned.
Ur, Abraham's city of birth, The Great Death Pit at the ancient city of Ur, in modern-day Iraq, contains the remains of 68 women and six men, many of which appear to have been sacrificed. Dating back about 4,600 years, a variety of fantastic treasures, including a statuette known as the Ram in the Thicket, which is made of silver, shell, gold, lapis lazuli and carnelian, were found in the death pit. Archaeologists believe that the pit was used to bury Ur's rulers. (Sir Woolley's finds)
Canaanites and Human Sacrifice:
Canaanite belief in the god, Moloch included human sacrifice, especially of 1st born children to Moloch, through a passage of fire. (Lev.18:21; and 20:3-5) but persisted in the northern kingdom and even in Jerusalem in a period where altars were built at Topheth in the valley of Hinnom. Seems as if the whole world was under the cloud of sacrificing humans, wherever one went, and would not die out.The Aztecs of Central America much later on were known to practice human sacrifice on a large scale. The rationale for Aztec human sacrifice was, first and foremost, a matter of survival. According to Aztec cosmology, the sun god Huitzilopochtli was waging a constant war against darkness, and if the darkness won, the world would end. The keep the sun moving across the sky and preserve their very lives, the Aztecs had to feed Huitzilopochtli with human hearts and blood. So was from the fear that the workings of the cosmos would come to an end. They realized their dependency on the sun for life. When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor. They practiced such sacrificing only 500 years ago. While most pre-Columbian historians believe that ritual cannibalism took place in the context of human sacrifices, they do not support Harris' thesis that human flesh was ever a significant portion of the Aztec diet.
A Native American sacrifice was going on 1,000 years ago. A 10-foot (3 meters) mound called Mound 72 by modern-day archaeologists holds the remains of 272 people, many of them sacrificed. It is located at Cahokia, a city located near modern-day St. Louis, Missouri that flourished from A.D. 1050 to 1200. The archaeology of the mound is complex, but it appears as if people were sacrificed gradually in a series of episodes. In one episode, 52 malnourished women ages 18 to 23, along with a woman in her 30s, were sacrificed at the same time. In another episode, it appears that 39 men and women were clubbed to death. The mound also holds the remains of two individuals who were buried with 20,000 shell beads. It's possible that some or all of the sacrifices were dedicated to the two individuals. (Seems that the original reasoning of human sacrifice can evolve to suit a different reasoning).
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