Child Sacrifice, Abortion and Morality

The post I did a while back on “Human Sacrifice in Ancient Canaan,” which focused primarily upon the theory that child sacrifice was practiced, resulted in a number of reactions. Allow me to describe the two most prevalent.

The first was simply folks pointing out that while most scholars accept evidence of child sacrifice in Carthage and other Phoenician settlements, a strong minority debate those conclusions. The alternative hypothesis is that the consecrated child remains in areas dedicated to Tanite and Baal-Hammon actually represent cemeteries reserved for miscarriages and young children that died of natural causes.

After reading the arguments of both sides, I’d say that the minority position has significant merit. Unfortunately the biblical passages, which I am treating as history and not scripture, aren’t completely explained away. The most the minority position can say is that they are misinterpretations of biblical text. Perhaps, but there are a fairly large number of passages, expressed a number of different ways, that would have to be misinterpreted. I guess the primary question is whether the phrase “pass through the fire” should be consider equivalent to “sacrifice” or whether it refers to some sort of non-fatal religious right of passage.

The primary reason I am hesitant to accept that this phrase describes some sort of religious rite of passage, is that it appears to be applied equally to sons and daughters. Given the culture of the time, I find it hard to believe that anyone would bother with a rite of passage for females.

I never actually accused the Carthaginians in my previous post of child sacrifice, but I will admit that scholarly conclusions about the “Tophet” discovered in North Africa did influence me to more readily accept the conclusion that child sacrifice was prevalent in Canaan. While I find the arguments against Carthaginian child sacrifice rather compelling, it’s unclear to me that if the practice didn’t exist in Carthage, or if it died out as Carthage rose to prominence, then the practice didn’t exist among the Canaanite civilizations. However I have to admit that I’ve been shifted toward “uncertain.”

The second reaction equated child sacrifice to abortion and went through, often lengthy and lurid, explanations related to the parallels between the two practices. The implication of course being that if I condemned one, as I was clearly doing in the Canaan post, then I was being at least inconsistent, and more likely hypocritical, by not also condemning the other.

There’s only one problem, I don’t ever recall actually saying that I didn’t condemn abortion. I consider the practice detestable. However, and this is the big however, I recognize that placing the mother’s physical or mental health in jeopardy is equally detestable. How then does one balance two detestable choices? I have no right to do that for someone else nor do I have the right to decide when in fact those ARE the choices. Neither does anyone else, other than the woman, her family and her advisors, have that right.

The issue is not whether abortion is a good thing, its not, it’s a very bad thing. The issue is whether anyone has the right to enforce an abstract moral theory upon everyone else, especially when all the specific detailed variations of future situations cannot possibly be known.

I believe that the answer to that question has got to be no.