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131 What Was at Stake in the Parting of the Ways between Judaism and Christianity? Richard L. Rubenstein In this chapter, I will explore the question of what was at stake culturally, religiously , and psychologically in the parting of the ways between Judaism and early Christianity. Since the issues involved are multifaceted, I have chosen to focus primarily on religious sacrifice. I believe that this issue exhibits simultaneously elements of both continuity and discontinuity between the two traditions. Let us begin with the narrative of the Aqedah in Scripture (Gen. 22:1-19). As is well known, on one of the holiest days of the Jewish religious calendar, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the reading from the Torah deals primarily with the Aqedah in which Abraham is unconditionally commanded, “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.” (Gen. 22:2) This is a story of an aborted infanticide demanded by God. According to the eminent Jewish scholar, the late Shalom Spiegel, “the primary purpose of the Akedah story may have been only this: to attach to a real pillar of the folk and a revered reputation the new norm—abolish human sacrifice, substitute animals instead.”1 It would appear that most, but by no means all, modern Jewish scholars agree with Spiegel. There is, however, a minority opinion persuasively expressed by Harvard’s Jon Levenson that “Gen. 22:1-19 is frighteningly unequivocal about YHVH’s ordering a father to offer up his son as a sacrifice.” 2 I share that opinion. Although Shalom Spiegel was my teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I must respectfully disagree with him. 132 rIcharD l. ruBEnSTEIn An important reason for this difference of opinion is that there are verses in Scripture in which the divine command to sacrifice the firstborn male appears to be unconditional. For example, Exodus 13:1-2 stipulates: “The Lord spoke further to Moses, saying, “Consecrate to Me every first-born; man and beast, the first issue of every womb among the Israelites is Mine.” Exodus 22:28-29 reads, “You shall not put off the skimming of the first yield of your vats. You shall give Me the first-born among your sons. You shall do the same with your cattle and your flocks: seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to Me.” In neither verse do we find a mitigating qualification. Elsewhere in Exodus, Scripture does call for a surrogate offering to take the place of and redeem the male child: “And when the Lord has brought you into the land of the Canaanites . . . you shall set apart for the Lord every first issue of the womb: every male firstling that your cattle drop shall be the Lord’s. But every firstling ass you shall redeem with a sheep; if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck. And you must redeem every firstborn male among your children.” (Exod. 13:11-13) There is also evidence in Scripture that child sacrifice was not only practiced in Israel, perhaps as late as 500 BCE, but that it may very well have been part of the official cultus rather than a pagan intrusion. The most intriguing hint that such might indeed have been the case occurs in the words of the Prophet Ezekiel who depicts YHVH as mounting a crescendo of accusations against “Jerusalem ” that culminates in the following condemnation: “You even took the sons and daughters that you bore to Me and sacrificed them to those [images] as food.—as if your harlotries were not enough, you slaughtered My children and presented them as offerings to them” (Ezek. 16:20-21). Moreover, there is a very strange passage in Ezekiel in which the prophet apparently admits that the rituals he abhors were actually practiced by men and women who regarded them as an authentic expression of Yahvism: “I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live: When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their very gifts—that I might render them desolate, that they might know that I am the Lord (Ezek. 20:25-26). Ed Noort, a Dutch scholar, has called this passage “the most peculiar sentence on the role of torah...

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