this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
756 points (99.1% liked)
Political Memes
7936 readers
2494 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, I would say that all of the stories in which god tells the Israelites to slaughter the inhabitants of a land is a form of blood sacrifice.
Especially the ones where God is really angry apparently and instead of telling them to rape the women and children; he instead commands that they all be killed as well.
Again. Obviously god doesn't do this. It's just humans killing other humans and using their god to justify it. Not unique to the bible and no reason to call out a specific religion (though the three Abrahamic ones all believe the old testament in some way or another).
I guess I don’t see slaughter in war as comparable to ritualistic human sacrifice - ie your statement
I guess there’s something different between
and a formalized ritual sacrifice. Again, there is evidence that the ancient Israelites practiced some forms of child sacrifice - I think the precedent of Isaac and some cultural memory/shame/repression is something a little different and more complicated (and more interesting) than “the Bible condones being bloodthirsty in war and this can be read as a form of human sacrifice.” I’m looking for frames/interpretations that enhance my understanding of the text - not stop at “these were bad people” - and I think there are very interesting parallels and connections to be made between the three demonstrated explorations of ritualistic human sacrifice in the Bible.
From my understanding there is debate among even biblical (religious or otherwise) scholars on the level of ceremonial human sacrifice that the stories of Moses and Joshua's time partook in. There are laws against human sacrifice in the old testament. But there are also laws against most of what god commanded be done to non Hebrews. Most agree that the laws of the old testament primarily applied to the Hebrews only.
You can definitely read the early bible as "oh it was just war". But you can't really when there are specific stipulations on which women to kill or to "save for yourself"
They specifically are told to kill women that have "known men by lying with them". How they determined this is not clear. Likely through rape.
Numbers 31 is basically explaining a lot of the after battle events. "Cleansing themselves" etc. It definitely seems to be an organized part of handling the spoils of war.
I'd say finding a women after the war, raping her, and then killing her if she doesn't bleed sufficiently enough (likely how they determined this 'known a man') and doing this because it was commanded by your god is not necessarily "human sacrifice" in the ritualistic sense. But, I'd say it's not something I'd care to distinguish if we're talking about dehumanizing other people and killing them.
Which was my point to begin with. The bible is filled with these absolutely awful things being normalized to out groups. Whether they played drums and slit someone's throat at an alter like a movie scene is not really the requirement for "human sacrifice" that I'd require.
Human sacrifice can just be killing innocents in the name of your god. Which the bible is absolutely filled with. Ceremonial or not is not really important to me. The ritualistic part of it can absolutely be the aftermath of a battle. Which is when this slaughter of innocents primarily took place.