Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the Lord. -Ezekiel 20:25

This week’s Sunday School lesson is supposed to cover 2 Kings 16–25. I have been somewhat following along this year with Come, Follow Me. My wife is teaching a Sunday School class that week. She asked if I wanted to help teach. I don’t have a problem teaching, but I definitely understand the Bible differently than most people in the ward.

Usually when I pick up the scriptures I find something interesting in a few verses and go down a rabbit hole. This week was the same. I made it four verses into 2 Kings 16 before spending the rest of the week pouring over this subject.

Chapter 16 begins by telling us King Ahaz becomes king of Judah at twenty. He was not a righteous king:

…did not that which was right in the sight of the Lord his God, like David his father.

But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, yea, and made his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen, whom the Lord cast out from before the children of Israel.

And he sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree.

—2 Kings 16:2–4

There is a lot to unpack here.

On the first point I have a hard time understanding how this happens. Or at least: does Ahaz even know what he is doing is wrong? When did Israel start this practice? When did they stop — if they stopped — or was it continuous?

We do see in 1 Kings 11 Solomon potentially initiating related practices. He built high places for the gods of his “strange wives.” Verse 7 mentions Molech, which is closely associated with child sacrifice. After Solomon we get the divided kingdom. Was Israel practicing these rituals from then on?

Solomon built the high places near Jerusalem, so the northern kingdom would have needed new ones if they continued. Based on many other texts, prophets and biblical authors point to these behaviors as a reason for Israel’s destruction. I just don’t see a strong reason in the narrative to think they ever permanently stopped.

They may have. The text doesn’t really discuss intermittent reform in the north on this specific point. That creates a problem either way. If they practiced it the entire time, why do prophets like Elijah and Elisha — who come out of the northern kingdom — not discuss it much? That silence could be the best evidence that the practice stopped for periods, or that the later historians are projecting.

Either way, the northern kingdom evidently starts sacrificing children at some point. Then King Ahaz follows suit just before Assyria conquers Israel.

The next oddity is that they are also condemned for sacrifices and burnt offerings outside the temple at Jerusalem. In Deuteronomy 12 God tells Israel to destroy Canaanite places of worship and sacrifice — overthrow and burn them. Israel is then to worship only at the place the Lord chooses to put his name, bringing sacrifices, tithes, and offerings there. That place becomes the temple in Jerusalem (see Psalm 78:68–69; 1 Kings 8; 2 Chronicles 6).

This is odd to me. The northern kingdom would have needed to travel to Jerusalem for “temple” ordinances if Deuteronomy’s centralization is absolute. If that’s true, how do we get Elijah and the priests of Baal? In 1 Kings 18 Elijah repairs an altar and performs a sacrifice in the name of the Lord. The Lord seemingly accepts it — fire from heaven.

So maybe Deuteronomy is idealized later, and the lived religion allowed high places where the Lord’s name was invoked. In that case 2 Kings 16 may be less about geography and more about wrong gods and invalid sacrifices.

If so, Ahaz is allowing worship of other gods. Which leads to another oddity. The church currently urges members to fast for religious freedom around the world (First Presidency invitation, Church Newsroom). Ancient Israel — and the God of Deuteronomy 12 — are not into religious freedom for rival worship. They command Israel to burn and destroy other religious houses of worship.

There is no religious freedom in that version of ancient Israel.

A sidenote on Isaiah 7, because Ahaz is the king who starts this rabbit hole.

Syria and Israel ally against Judah. Ahaz panics. Isaiah tells him to be quiet and believe, or he will not be established (Isaiah 7:2–9). God offers him a sign. Ahaz refuses — “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord” (Isaiah 7:12) — which is what church culture usually teaches. Here Isaiah treats the refusal as wearying God, and God gives the sign anyway: a child whose early years mark when the two enemy kings will be gone (Isaiah 7:14–16). That near-term claim tracks with Kings and Chronicles; Assyria conquers both. (The Immanuel text later becomes major Christian proof-texting for reasons I discuss elsewhere.)

The point for this chapter: God still gives Ahaz a working prophecy. If he were only a pagan apostate who had abandoned Israel’s God, why meet Isaiah at all? Isaiah in chapter 7 cares about Ahaz’s faith, not about the child-sacrifice charge from Kings. If that practice were already the supreme abomination, I would have expected it to dominate the confrontation. Isaiah does rail against child-slaying in Isaiah 57:3–13, and he uses Topheth imagery in Isaiah 30:27–33 — a Valley of Hinnom site “ordained of old,” here prepared for Assyria. To understand that image you have to know what Topheth was. It’s a little odd.

Genesis 22:1–19

The binding of Isaac is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where God directly commands a father to offer his son.

Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

—Genesis 22:2

Abraham goes. He builds the altar. He binds Isaac. He takes the knife. The angel stops him. A ram is substituted. The story ends in blessing.

For centuries of Jewish and Christian interpretation, this is the great repudiation of human sacrifice: God tests obedience, then provides the animal. Faith is proved; the child lives. Hebrews 11 later reads it that way — Abraham offered Isaac by faith, trusting resurrection.

That reading is not wrong. It is also not the only reading the text invites.

Reading A (repudiation): God allowed the command only to abolish it — to draw a line Israel must not cross again.

Reading B (transformation narrative): The story was written or shaped by people who already knew redemption and substitution were the rule. The near-sacrifice dramatizes how close Israel came to a world where fathers offer sons — and how God redirects that logic toward a ram.

Reading C (command memory): At the level of the story itself, before the angel speaks, God commands child sacrifice. Abraham obeys without protest. Isaac cooperates. No one in the narrative treats the command as a category error. If this is a founding story of Israel’s relationship with God, it preserves the memory that offering a son to God was not nonsense. It was obedience — stopped only by divine intervention.

I lean toward B and C together. The interruption matters. So does the fact that an interruption was needed. Whatever later editors intended, the oldest layer of the story is not “God would never ask for a child.” It is “God asked — and Abraham was right to go.”

Notice what has to be true for the story to work dramatically: Abraham does not treat the command as insane. The young men are left behind; father and son walk on together with wood and fire. When Isaac asks where the lamb is, Abraham says God will provide — but he still raises the knife.

In the modern context we assume Abraham was heartbroken or hesitant, then finally decided to obey. The church videos and cartoons I grew up with portrayed him racked with guilt. The text itself does not show that. Verses 2–3 read:

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

—Genesis 22:2–3

A few chapters earlier (Genesis 18:24–25) Abraham argues or bargains with God to spare Sodom. The author includes that conflict. Here there is none.

We can speculate about what Abraham felt. We are far removed from that culture. Based on the text he seems ready and willing — with one caveat. Once the altar is ready, Isaac asks:

Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

—Genesis 22:7

Abraham replies:

My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.

—Genesis 22:8

Abraham appears unwilling to tell his son what the real sacrifice is. That can be read as remorse or hesitation. The text does not give us his thoughts.

Exodus 11:4–5

Before we get to Israel’s law, we get Egypt’s catastrophe.

About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt: And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts.

—Exodus 11:4–5

The Passover story is not child sacrifice in the cultic sense. It does show a willingness, in the story, for God to have children killed for his plan.

That is problematic in the modern LDS sense. We teach that God loves everyone, especially little children — God of all people. The Old Testament is often Israel first. From Israel’s perspective this is a story of God’s love and deliverance. From Egypt’s, it is a slaughtered generation.

To soften that we invent justifications that aren’t in the text — for example, that Egyptians only needed to kill a lamb and put blood on the door, and that failing to do so means they chose their firstborns’ deaths.

Official Latter-day Saint teaching presents the Passover as a symbol of Christ’s Atonement: the death of the firstborn leads to Israel’s release, while Christ’s death brings release from spiritual bondage (Old Testament Student Manual: Exodus 11–19).

Exodus 13:2; 13:11–13

Israel’s firstborn are claimed too — but with a different outcome.

Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast: it is mine.

—Exodus 13:2

When Israel enters the land:

All the firstborn of man among thy children shalt thou redeem.

—Exodus 13:13

Humans belong to God. Humans are bought back. The animal can be sacrificed; the child is redeemed.

That is the system as it finally stabilizes in the text.

Reading A: Redemption was always the plan — God’s claim on the firstborn was symbolic from the start.

Reading B: Redemption is a relief from an older, sharper claim — the way you buy back what earlier law said belonged to God in a fuller sense (compare Exodus 22:29).

I lean B. The priestly system in Numbers 18:15 makes redemption mandatory for humans — as though the default had to be explicitly undone.

Numbers 18:15

Here we get further into the laws. The priestly version is explicit:

The firstborn of man shalt thou surely redeem, and the firstling of unclean beasts shalt thou redeem.

—Numbers 18:15

Redemption is not a footnote. It is the rule that keeps the firstborn law from ending at the altar.

Exodus 22:28–30

And here is the pressure point.

Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me. Likewise shalt thou do with thine oxen, and with thy sheep: seven days it shall be with his dam; on the eighth day thou shalt give it me.

—Exodus 22:29–30

Read that without Exodus 13 in your head.

The firstborn of sons is listed in the same breath as firstfruits and livestock. There is no redemption clause in this verse. The readings split again:

Reading A (dedication only): “Give unto me” means consecrate, set apart, acknowledge God’s ownership — parallel to firstfruits, not necessarily kill.

Reading B (livestock parallel): On the eighth day you give the lamb to God. The son is in the same sentence. The natural parallel is uncomfortable.

Reading C (legal patch): Exodus 13 and Numbers 18 retroactively clarify what Exodus 22 meant once redemption replaced an older practice. The son was God’s by command; later law bought him back because the original command was no longer tolerable.

I find C persuasive. Not because I want it to be true. Because the text itself looks patched. One verse demands the son. Another chapter buys him back. That is what legal systems look like when practice changes and scripture gets updated to match — and when a community can no longer live with what it once believed God required.

Sidebar: firstfruits language

Two passages in my notes are not about fire or Molech, but they belong in the same mental folder — honor God with the first increase.

Proverbs 3:9–10:

Honour the Lord with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.

—Proverbs 3:9–10

2 Kings 4:42:

There came a man from Baal-shalisha, and brought the man of God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley, and full ears of corn in the husk thereof. And he said, Give unto the people, that they may eat.

—2 Kings 4:42

These are not child sacrifice. They show how normal it was, in this world, to treat the first of what you had — grain, bread, livestock, sons — as belonging to God in a special way. The question is what “give unto me” meant before redemption became the standard answer.

Here is where interpreters part ways most sharply.

One side says the Molech and fire laws are preventive — God reveals his standard before Israel enters Canaan so they will not pick up local customs. Prohibition proves God’s character, not Israel’s history.

Another side says laws this specific, with penalties this severe, usually respond to live practice — something people were already doing or tempted to do.

A third side says the ban targets a foreign deity (Molech) and therefore does not imply Israelites thought Yahweh wanted children in fire — only that some worshipped wrongly.

I think all three can be partly true. I also think the third reading is too tidy. Deuteronomy 18 bans passing children through fire without naming Molech at all. Jephthah vows to the Lord in Judges 11. Ezekiel 20 speaks of God’s own statutes and firstborn fire. The foreign-idol frame is real in the text. It is not the whole text.

Leviticus 18:21

Thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord.

—Leviticus 18:21

This is the first explicit Molech prohibition in the canon. It sits in a chapter about sexual and cultic abominations. The child is “your seed.” The rite involves fire. The name Molech appears.

One long scholarly fight concerns the Hebrew לַמֹּלֶךְ (lammōlekh): does it mean “to/for Molech” as a deity, or “as a molk-offering” as a sacrificial term? Brill’s Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible lays out both options (entry: Molech; see also the companion caution on Milcom). I am not qualified to settle that debate. Either reading assumes a real rite — a way of handing over children in fire that required a legal ban.

Leviticus 18:21 does not say “burn.” It says “pass through.” Some interpreters have used that gap to argue for a milder rite — initiation, lustration, something short of killing. I will come back to that. The rest of the Bible does not stay mild.

Leviticus 20:2–5

The penalty text escalates.

Whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone him with stones.

—Leviticus 20:2

And if the community looks away:

I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from among their people.

—Leviticus 20:5

This is not a law against a hypothetical foreign custom. It is a law against a practice contagious enough to require collective enforcement — and divine rage against bystanders who tolerate it.

Deuteronomy 12:31

Deuteronomy sharpens the polemic:

Thou shalt not do so unto the Lord thy God: for every abomination to the Lord, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.

—Deuteronomy 12:31

Here the children are burnt. The frame is imitation: do not worship the way the nations worship. That only works if someone could imagine Israelites worshipping that way.

Deuteronomy 18:10

The ban appears again in a list of forbidden divination practices:

There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.

—Deuteronomy 18:10

No Molech name here. Just the fire. By the time Deuteronomy crystallizes, “pass through the fire” is a known category of wrong worship.

Sidebar: covenant curse

Not every child-death passage in my collection is cultic sacrifice. Two belong together as a different kind of horror.

Leviticus 26:29 — a covenant curse. God pronounces consequences for not following the law. One of them:

Ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.

—Leviticus 26:29

2 Kings 6:28–29 — Samaria under siege. We see something like a fulfillment:

This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him.

—2 Kings 6:28–29

That is cannibalism in famine, not Topheth. I include it because the canon treats the death of children as something that can happen within Israel’s moral universe when the world breaks. In this frame Israel doesn’t follow God; one of the punishments is that they will eat their children.

Judges 11:30–40

Jephthah makes a vow before battle:

Whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.

—Judges 11:30–31

He wins. His daughter comes out dancing — his only child. He tears his clothes. She accepts the vow. After two months to mourn her virginity on the mountains, the text says:

Her father did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: and she knew no man. And it was a custom in Israel, that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year.

—Judges 11:39–40

Reading A (virgin dedication): Jephthah dedicated his daughter to lifelong service; “burnt offering” is hyperbolic vow language; she mourned virginity, not death.

Reading B (human sacrifice): He vowed a burnt offering; he did according to the vow; Israel institutionalized four days of annual lament. Majority scholarly view.

Reading C (theological embarrassment): The story survives because it is old and famous, but later editors leave the reader horrified — a rash vow to God gone lethal.

I think B is the plain reading. What matters for this chapter is C’s implication: Jephthah is not worshipping Molech in a valley. He is fulfilling a vow to Yahweh with burnt-offering language. Whatever else that means, child killing was not fenced off as “only what pagans do.” It was something an Israelite leader could place on God’s altar and call obedience.

And notice: this is not a foreign king. This is a judge of Israel, vowing to the Lord. The text presents it as a vow God does not interrupt the way he interrupts Abraham. No angel stops the knife.

There is also strong parallel between this story and the Abraham and Isaac story. However in this case God does not intervene.

The type of sacrifice seems to be somewhat different between the two. In Abraham God comes to him and commands the sacrifice. Here Jephthah makes the vow with the Lord. Why does God save Isaac and not Jephthah daughter? Does that mean that man cannot break his vows, but God can change his mind or lie/deceive?

2 Kings 3:26–27

Mesha, king of Moab, is losing a war.

He took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there was great indignation against Israel: and they departed from him, and returned to their own land.

—2 Kings 3:27

Foreign. Not Molech. Not Yahweh. Still the same world: when the crisis is bad enough, a king can put his heir on the altar and the narrative treats it as a thing that happens — terrible, effective, not unthinkable.

And here is the detail I will come back to later: it works.

It’s unclear what exactly happens, but whatever happens causes Israel’s armies to leave. The author at least leaves room to read the sacrifice as efficacious. Mesha would not have been offering to YHWH. He would have been sacrificing to Moab’s deity, Chemosh. Either way it is strange. Did a god other than YHWH intervene for Moab, or did YHWH turn against Israel? Why would the sacrifice do anything? If the God of Israel saw it as abhorrent evil, why no intervention against Moab?

Maybe God doesn’t involve himself in human affairs and this is a misunderstanding of what happened — Moab would have won anyway. If that’s the case, why does God intervene in some stories and not others?

The divided-kingdom period is where the textual map converges on a real place.

2 Kings 16:3

Ahaz of Judah is condemned for walking in the ways of the kings of Israel:

Yea, and made his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen, whom the Lord cast out from before the children of Israel.

—2 Kings 16:3

Kings gives us one son. Passing through fire. Imitation of the nations.

This was the initial story that led me to study this out. Note: the passage seems to concern his son — probably his firstborn.

2 Chronicles 28:2–3

The Chronicler tells the same story with the volume turned up:

He walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, and made also molten images for Baalim. Moreover he burnt incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom, and burnt his children in the fire, after the abominations of the heathen whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel.

—2 Chronicles 28:2–3

Same king. Now plural children. Now explicit burning in Hinnom. The Chronicler is later, more theological, and less subtle. That pattern will repeat. This valley is closely associated with Topheth.

Isaiah 57:5

Isaiah may belong here or float later with exile-period prophecy, depending on how one dates Isaiah 57:

Enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clifts of the rocks?

—Isaiah 57:5

Dating prophetic oracles is messy. I am not going to pretend certainty. Thematically this fits 8th-century Judah — the era of Ahaz and the cult politics that set up Hezekiah’s reforms. The prophet names child-slaying as part of illicit worship in high places and valleys. Not foreign legend. Present-tense accusation. It could also be later (often attributed to “Trito-Isaiah” and a post-exilic setting).

2 Kings 17:17

When the northern kingdom finally collapses, the historian gives a bill of indictment:

They caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger.

—2 Kings 17:17

Verse 18 follows with exile. The literary logic is hard to miss: this is not merely a sin on the list. It is part of why Israel fell.

You can read that two ways. Descriptively: the historian lists real cultic failures, including fire-rites, among the causes of exile. Editorially: after 722 BCE, someone needed sins heavy enough to explain why the northern kingdom died, and child sacrifice became one of the load-bearing beams.

I think both are operating. The practice was remembered. The causal weight may have been intensified after the fact. Before the collapse you get laws, stories, and royal examples; after the collapse, child sacrifice becomes an explanation — a sin weighty enough to carry national catastrophe, and a practice increasingly described as something God never authorized.

I also find this interesting in a simpler way. In 2 Kings 17 we get why Israel was destroyed. The Lord was angry because they didn’t sacrifice correctly — not that they merely stopped worshiping, but that they worshiped the host of heaven and practiced sacrifices he had a problem with, including offering children. I had always known “Israel sinned,” but not how specific the bill of indictment was.

Amos 5:26

Amos remembers wilderness worship:

But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.

—Amos 5:26 (KJV)

Or do they? The Masoretic Text has Sikkuth and Kiyyun — astral/idol language, not an obvious “Molech.” The Septuagint and Stephen in Acts read Moloch. Text criticism matters here: the New Testament’s only explicit Μολόχ reference (Acts 7:43) depends on a Greek tradition that may be interpretive rather than literal translation.

I still include it. Whatever the original Hebrew said, Israel’s scripture remembers a wilderness carrying-case for a god later identified with Moloch. I am no expert here and don’t have a settled feeling about the text-critical debate.

Micah 6:6–9

Micah asks a rhetorical question that only works if the audience can feel its weight:

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

—Micah 6:6–7

He is not recommending it. He is naming the outer bound of sacrificial logic — the most extreme gift a worshipper could imagine — before pivoting to justice, mercy, and humility.

Reading A: Pure rhetoric. Micah mentions the most shocking hypothetical in order to reject it.

Reading B: Audience recognition. You do not use that example unless people in the room have heard of offering a firstborn for sin — unless it was once thinkable as worship before the Lord, not only as Molech madness.

Micah’s question is addressed to how one comes before the Lord. That is the detail I cannot shrug off.

2 Kings 21:6

Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, becomes the villain again. He follows after Ahaz his grandfather:

He made his son pass through the fire, and observed times, and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards: he wrought much wickedness in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger.

—2 Kings 21:6

One son. Fire. The same formula as Ahaz.

2 Chronicles 33:4–7

Again, Chronicles intensifies:

He caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger.

—2 Chronicles 33:6

Plural children. Named valley. Altars in the temple. The Chronicler is building a prosecution brief.

2 Kings 23:10

Then Josiah — the reform king — acts:

He defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech.

—2 Kings 23:10

Read that slowly.

Topheth was real — at least according to the text. It was in use. Josiah does not preach against a rumor. He defiles a site so that no one can perform the rite to Molech anymore. Reform theology requires something to reform.

The fall of Jerusalem (586 BCE) and the exile are where the rhetoric shifts from “kings sinned” to “this is who we were.”

Jeremiah 7:30–32

Jeremiah preaches in the temple era before the final catastrophe:

They have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart. Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter.

—Jeremiah 7:31–32

There is the formula again: I did not command this. It never entered my mind.

Jeremiah says it three times across these passages. That repetition is doing theological work.

Reading A (clarification): God is stating eternal truth against popular error. The people were confused. The prophets correct the record.

Reading B (revocation): The language you use when you need to cancel a practice people were performing as worship — when “everyone knew” some version of it was legitimate until you said it out loud.

Reading C (my lean): If no Israelite had ever believed child sacrifice was divinely commanded, Jeremiah would not need the denial. You do not insist “I never imagined this” about a practice that only lunatics and foreigners attempted. You insist it when your own people thought it had a place in God’s economy — in the valley, at Topheth, under kings who saw themselves as religious actors.

The denial is evidence of the belief it tries to bury.

Jeremiah 19:2–6

Jeremiah performs a sign-act in the valley:

And go forth unto the valley of the son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the east gate, and proclaim there the words that I shall tell thee,

And say, Hear ye the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah, and inhabitants of Jerusalem; Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, the which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle.

Because they have forsaken me, and have estranged this place, and have burned incense in it unto other gods, whom neither they nor their fathers have known, nor the kings of Judah, and have filled this place with the blood of innocents;

They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind:

Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that this place shall no more be called Tophet, nor The valley of the son of Hinnom, but The valley of slaughter.

—Jeremiah 19:2–6

Burnt offerings. Baal. Innocent blood. The valley renamed slaughter.

Again: the command was never given, and the idea never entered God’s mind.

Jeremiah 32:34–35

Late in the book, looking back:

They built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.

—Jeremiah 32:35

Baal. Hinnom. Molech. All in one verse. The retrospective accusation compresses centuries of cult memory into a single abomination.

Ezekiel 16:20–21

Ezekiel’s allegory of Jerusalem as an unfaithful wife:

Thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters, whom thou hast borne unto me, and these hast thou sacrificed unto them to be devoured… That thou hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass through the fire for them?

—Ezekiel 16:20–21

The children are God’s children. Jerusalem slaughtered them for idols.

Ezekiel 20:25–26

This is the verse I would make you read if I could only choose one.

Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the Lord.

—Ezekiel 20:25–26

God says he gave bad statutes. He polluted them through gifts — specifically the passing through fire of everything that opens the womb.

Scholars fight about this, and the fight is worth laying out.

Reading A (ironic punishment): God “gave” bad statutes as judgment — not as original Torah, but as a way of describing how Israel corrupted legitimate law.

Reading B (firstborn polemic): Ezekiel re-describes older firstborn legislation — the tradition we saw in Exodus — as statutes “not good” because Israel literalized a metaphor God never intended as killing.

Reading C (command memory): God is said to have given the logic that produced fire for “all that openeth the womb.” That is not Molech imported from Phoenicia. That is the firstborn claim turned lethal — and attributed, in this verse, to divine statute.

Reading D (my lean): B and C are compatible. Ezekiel is an exilic voice saying, in effect: the practice you now call abomination grew out of commandments you once received. The problem lived inside Yahwistic religion, not only at its pagan edges.

Ezekiel has God take responsibility for statutes that led to fire. Someone in Israel had connected child offering to what God required. Ezekiel is processing that memory in the only language left after Jerusalem burned.

Ezekiel 23:37–39

The allegory splits into two sisters, Samaria and Jerusalem:

They have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands, and with their idols have they committed adultery, and have also caused their sons, whom they bare unto me, to pass for them through the fire, to devour them… For when they had slain their children to their idols, then they came the same day into my sanctuary to profane it.

—Ezekiel 23:37, 39

Slaughter the children. Enter the temple the same day. The horror is not only killing — it is the seamless switch between child sacrifice and YHWH worship.

Psalm 106:37–38

Psalm 106 retells Israel’s history from the exodus to the exile:

Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan: and the land was polluted with blood.

—Psalm 106:37–38

Post-exilic memory. Child sacrifice is not merely misguided worship. It is demon-directed bloodguilt.

Reading A: Psalm 106 accurately describes what Israelites always knew — child sacrifice was demonic idolatry.

Reading B: Exilic theology reclassifies a practice once thinkable in Israel’s own worship as something done “unto devils” and “the idols of Canaan” — outsourcing moral responsibility to the pagan category after the fact.

The land was polluted with blood either way. The question is whether that pollution was always understood as foreign, or whether Psalm 106 is part of the same retrofit Jeremiah performs with “I never commanded this.”

Acts 7:40–43

Stephen, in his sermon before martyrdom, quotes the Greek tradition of Amos:

Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.

—Acts 7:43

Wilderness idolatry. Moloch’s tent. Exile as judgment. Early Christianity inherits the post-collapse frame: child sacrifice belongs to the story of why Israel was carried away.

Hebrews 11:17–19

The New Testament domesticates Genesis 22 in a different key:

By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac… Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.

—Hebrews 11:17–19

Faith. Resurrection hope. The horror of the near-sacrifice becomes a template for trust.

The author of Hebrews implies Abraham had faith that even if he sacrificed his son, God would raise him from the dead. The pastoral lesson is that we may not understand God’s ways, but we must trust them.

That leads me to the oddity that fascinates me most. The Old Testament we have now is adamant that child sacrifice is evil and against God’s command. Jeremiah says the idea never entered his heart. Yet the central tenet of Christianity is that God sacrifices his Son for us:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

—John 3:16

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all…

—Romans 8:32

If we are to be like God, should we not do what he does? The question is exaggerated, and there are escapes — follow character, not every action; or say human sacrifice does nothing while Jesus’s sacrifice was uniquely necessary. Still worth asking why we think either Jesus’s death or ancient animal sacrifice does anything for a soul.

Christian and LDS theology then reads Christ back into the Old Testament: Abraham and Isaac as type; Israel as God’s firstborn (Exodus 4:22); scatterings and captivity as symbolic sacrifice; firstborn animals as foreshadowing. It all culminates in Christ.

The steelman for a believing member is roughly: Israel chased false gods and bastardized a true principle of sacrifice. God alone may sacrifice his Son; humans must not recreate that. They somehow knew sacrifice mattered, but would not listen to prophets against the human version.

If I were still believing, that’s where I would hang my hat.

I think it’s safe to say Israel practiced child sacrifice. I knew Molech existed as a Sunday School villain. I did not realize how often the texts bring this up. Dating start and stop is hard; it is fairly safe to say it stops with Josiah or after the Babylonian exile — about when many books were being finalized into something like the form we have.

Why do it at all? No one sacrifices children without a reason inside their worldview. One logic of sacrifice is that giving the first and best brings abundance. Abraham’s attempt ends with multiplied seed (Genesis 22:17). If the firstborn gift was thought to secure the rest, the practice can look rational — even noble when a king offers an heir for the nation. Mesha risks his most prized possession and, in the story, it works. An Israelite soldier who saw that retreat might conclude the rite could call on a god. Moab could write its own gospel sentence: for the king so loved us that he gave his only begotten son.

There may also be an earlier Abraham tradition in which Isaac actually dies, later sanitized with the ram. See Wojciech Kosior, “You Have Not Withheld Your Son…” (2013). The reconstruction is unprovable. The sacrifice-then-blessing logic still sits in the text either way.

I think they practiced it, and at certain points viewed the command as coming from YHWH. I don’t believe in the Christian or Mormon God anymore. If there is a God, I think he either can’t or doesn’t directly interfere in human lives — so the command was never from God in that sense. There is still enough evidence that they believed it was.

That is part of what I hear in Ezekiel:

Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb…

—Ezekiel 20:25–26

Ezekiel has God own the bad statutes — because they wouldn’t listen earlier — while still blaming the people. At least that author thinks the command-line ran through God.

In the end later authors and redactors needed reasons why God let his people fall. Child sacrifice becomes a load-bearing scapegoat for national ruin.