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  • Not Sparing the Child: Human Sacrifice in the Ancient World and Beyond. Studies in Honor of Professor Paul G. Mosca ed. by Daphna Arbel et al.
  • David A. Bosworth
Not Sparing the Child: Human Sacrifice in the Ancient World and Beyond. Studies in Honor of Professor Paul G. Mosca. Edited by Daphna Arbel, Paul C. Burns, J. R. C. Cousland, Richard Menkis, and Dietmar Neufeld. London: T&T Clark, 2015. Pp. xx + 246. Paperback, $35.96. ISBN 978-0-567-66958-2.

Paul Mosca is well known for his work on the evidence pertaining to child sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean world. His 1975 dissertation Child Sacrifice in Canaanite and Israelite Religion: A Study in Mulk and ךלמ (Harvard) may be one of the most-cited and -discussed unpublished dissertations. An introduction by the editors celebrates Mosca's scholarship on his sixty-sixth birthday and retirement with a short biography.

The eleven essays are distributed into three parts. Part I, "History, Ritual and Archeology," consists of four essays. In "Child Sacrifice as the Extreme Case and Calculation," Mark S. Smith provides a survey of scholarship that has largely followed Mosca's dissertation in acknowledging that child sacrifice was an extreme solution sanctioned by tradition. He then discusses 2 Kings 16:3, 21:6; Genesis 22; and Judges 16 in light of this understanding. In "Human Sacrifice in Pre- and Early Dynastic Egypt: What Do You Want to Find?," Thomas Hikade and Jane Roy examine data from multiple tombs and note that sometimes retainers are found with their masters, but sometimes not. Consequently, they argue, it was not mandatory for servants to accompany their master to the afterlife. Instead, they propose that these servants were killed in an act of conspicuous consumption when they were selected to accompany their masters. In "God's Infanticide in the Night of Passover: Exodus 12 in the Light of Ancient Egyptian Rituals," Thomas Schneider draws on Egyptian magical texts comparable to the story of the death of the firstborn in Exodus 12. The Egyptian texts include rituals for averting plagues and protecting the Pharaoh at night. Schneider suggests that the Exodus story may appropriate Egyptian protective rituals to overthrow their protections and "bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt" (Exodus 12:20). In "A Late Punic Narrative about a Disrupted Sacrifice?: Hr. Medeine N 2," Philip C. Schmitz examines a fragmentary bilingual Punic-Latin text that appears to narrate a sacrifice disrupted by a panic among the ewes who had to be recovered and returned to their owners. He suggests that this disruption may have been interpreted as inauspicious.

Part II, "Textual, Cultural and Social Aspects," consists of three essays. In "Is the Language of Child Sacrifice Used Figuratively in Ezekiel 16?," Peggy Day examines how sacrificial language is used metaphorically in Isa 30:27–33, 34:5–7, and Ezek 39:17–20 and might therefore also be metaphorical in Ezek 16:20–21. Read as metaphorical, Yhwh accuses the leadership in Jerusalem of causing the deaths of defenseless Judahites who had already been defeated. As defenseless victims, they die like the Tophet victims. The language of "passing them over to them" may refer to deportation. In "Mocking Boys, Baldness, and Bears: Elisha's Deadly Honour (2Kings 2.23–24)," Dietmar Neufeld tackles a famously problematic text in which Elisha actuates God to have several children mauled to death by a bear because they mocked his baldness. He points out that his baldness contrasts with Elija's hairiness and therefore calls his legitimacy as Elija's successor into question. He argues from social scientific study of "honor-shame societies" and Greco-Roman evidence that Elisha "had no other recourse but to turn on the boys with a vengeance" (129). In "Death and the Maiden: Human Sacrifice in Euripides' [End Page 144] Andromeda," C. W. Marshall notes that in the plays of Euripides, two kinds of human sacrifice appear: willing self-sacrifices (e.g., Children of Heracles, Iphegenia at Aulis) and cases where an unwilling sacrificial victim is substituted (action preceding Iphegenia among the Taurians). In his analysis of Andromeda, he finds a third category of sacrifice averted, also discernible in the conclusion...

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