Child sacrifice

Molech is often described as the deity that the Israelites often fall into traps and start following Molech, where the ultimate sacrifice that's given to Molech is usually a child.

It's always child sacrifice.

Now, I can't tell you and I can't understand how people walk away from our God after they saw the wonders, the majesty, the miracles that God did for those people throughout the time.

And they're not too distant ancestors when we're talking here in Isaiah.

Um, and, and again, again, maybe the answer will be similar.

Um, but this one seems to have to do with the treatment of women, and then, um, and then I wanna get into one with h- uh, child sacrifice.

So just hang tight, everybody.

Um, so Deuteronomy 21:11-13, uh, when they capture a, a group, um, "And you see among, among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, you shall shave her head and pare her nails," cut her nails, I guess.

And there came great wrath against Israel, and they withdrew from him and returned to their own land." And so-

What's the problem, Tyler?

[laughs] So this, again, seemingly this passage is saying that through the child sacrifice that this wicked king offers-

Yeah

And so if resources are very scarce and violence is the norm, then all sickly children, all unwell children, all small children, all children with deformities, all children who seem to be slow, who aren't responding, are gonna need to be sacrificed because the society does not have any excess resources with which to keep people alive who are not contributing more than they consume.

So child sacrifice tends to be the norm in very violent societies where scarcity is the norm.

You can't afford, you can't afford any, any of this stuff, right? So that's one aspect.

The other aspect, of course, is that violent societies require unfathomable levels of conformity.

But listen, for those of us in the West, I say the European West and the North American West, human sacrifice has always been anathema.

Child sacrifice has always been pagan.

And the reason why that's true is because wherever the Judeo-Christian worldview has gone from the Bible, wherever the Jews have gone and wherever Christians have gone, there's been a decrease in pagan child sacrifice all around the world.

And for 2,000 years, with the advent of the gospel of the Jews being preached, you heard me right, the gospel of the Jews, Jesus Christ said regarding the gospel, it's first to be given to the Jews and then to the Gentiles.

The Jews were supposed to be the trumpeter of the gospel.

And so the apostles turned to the Gentiles and preached the gospel, and here we are today.

But don't worry, the tribulation period, the Jews will have their chance to proclaim the gospel, and they will, according to the Bible.

But wherever Judaism, Old Testament, and Christianity, New Testament, have gone, there's been a radical decrease and or ending of child sacrifice, and light has come into that darkness.

Greek writers like Aristotle considered this kind of system as fair as any they knew, and it was later compared favorably with the Constitution of the Roman Republic.

Along with their forms of government, the Carthaginians are singled out in our classical sources for practicing child sacrifice, just as the Bible condemns their Canaanite cousins for passing children over the fire, or to Molech at places it calls Tophets.

Though the Bible takes-

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the term Molech to be the name of a god, modern archaeological research suggests that it actually referred to a type of sacrifice that could include either animals or human beings.

Excavations in Carthage have suggested that the practice of child sacrifice was declining until the city began to suffer defeat at the hands of Rome, when it picked up once again.

The Romans themselves expressed horror at this tradition and banned it entirely once Carthage became a province.

I just had a crazy idea, a crazy thought.

Because it's all child sacrifice, it seems, right? Right.

And I'm thinking back biblically.

So it seems like the Nephilim and the fallen love child sacrifices, right? But in the Bible, there's a point where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son, right? And he's like, he's ready to do it.

And God's like, yo, chill.

Chill.

They needed their own citizens and the wider world to believe that Carthage never belonged there in the first place in order to morally justify their own genocidal actions.

And the darkest, most persistent piece of this propaganda was the accusation that Carthage engaged in systemic child sacrifice.

OK, hold on.

I need to push back on this a bit, because if we are calling this ancient fake news, how do we explain the physical evidence? Archaeologists actually dug up a site in Carthage called the Tufet, right?