"King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities" by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

This forum primarily exists to discuss a secret war between Q and an entity which Q refers to as "them". We are left with the obvious question: who is "them"?

Wild speculation on the identity of "them" (sometimes referred to as "The Cabal") pervade the community of followers of Q. Q's statements about "them" suggest that "them" is a secret and old (how old?) group identifiable by several practices, one of which being various forms of child sacrifice (rape, cannibalism, etc.). Various contradictory speculations about "them", abound, including of the age of "them". We find suggestions that (1) "them" is fairly recent in history, perhaps a banking cabal from the last few centuries, or (2) that "them" is older, perhaps being integrated into the Catholic Church from Roman times, or (3) that "them" is even older still. Q is vague on this point.

On the nature of time and human culture:

• Do ancient organizations live now?: One question I would like the reader to consider: we know that there were terrible societies/organization/religions/practices in ancient times (BCE), but what happened to them? Did they just "die out"? Can we be sure that they all "died out"? If so, how would you be so sure?

• Humans behavior is cultural: I would like to suggest that people who assume that such ancient terrible practices died out are making an unwarranted assumption about the nature of time and human beings. Most animals largely operate on instinct, but humans are different: humans learn. The behavior of humans is largely due to their learned practices, not their inherent biology (which is quite similar across the world, despite superficial appearances). Therefore, to best predict the behavior of humans, we should look at what they have learned; over the scale of large numbers of people, this is called their culture.

• Cultural practices are largely timeless: In other words, when we look at the past and how people behaved, if we want to know if people still behave that way, we should not look at how much calendar time has passed, we should instead look at if they retain the same culture. Culture can change but it often stabilizes and then does not change at all, and then changes suddenly in a cultural discontinuity.

• Therefore cultural time is fundamentally different from calendar time: I therefore suggest that measuring time in boundaries of cultural discontinuities is a much better way to make a map of human behavior than just looking at what year it was then and what year it is now.

An example: in the 1937 the Japanese government conducted a terrible rape of the city of Nanjing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre and around 1960 the Chinese government conducted the "Great Leap Forward" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward . Each action killed many innocent people.

• We may conclude that the Japanese and Chinese governments are therefore bad. Why then would we today be allies of the Japanese and not of the Chinese?

• Well the Japanese government underwent a cultural discontinuity, they lost WWII, whereas the Chinese government did not, they are still the same Chinese Communist Party as they were then. As we can see, even though similar amounts of calendar time has passed, in the government of China cultural time has not passed, whereas in the government of Japan, it has.

Conjecturing that such a terrible organization as the "them" of which Q speaks could arise today may seem implausible, and so many doubt it. But we know for a fact from historical record that many such terrible practices were part of the cultures of the long calendar-time past. Could "them" be an ancient culture for which still lives in ancient cultural-time? For which culture-time has not passed?

I suggest for your consideration the writings of a real researcher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Stavrakopoulou : "Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter. The main focus of her research is on the Hebrew Bible, and on Israelite and Judahite history and religion." In particular, I think it is important to note that "Stavrakopoulou was brought up in no particular religion and is a self-described atheist." In other words, her scholarship is not inclined to be distorted by identifying personally with the subject matter.

I think this work of hers is of particular relevance:

Stavrakopoulou, Francesca (2004). King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities. Berlin, GER: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-017994-6.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110899641/html

The Hebrew Bible portrays King Manasseh and child sacrifice as the most reprehensible person and the most objectionable practice within the story of 'Israel'. This monograph suggests that historically, neither were as deviant as the Hebrew Bible appears to insist. Through careful historical reconstruction, it is argued that Manasseh was one of Judah's most successful monarchs, and child sacrifice played a central role in ancient Judahite religious practice. The biblical writers, motivated by ideological concerns, have thus deliberately distorted the truth about Manasseh and child sacrifice.

Further, from the book:

Indeed, a closer examination of the Hebrew Bible suggests that the offering of the firstborn to YHWH may well have included the sacrifice of human babies along with the offering of animals and crops. In spite of these text, the debate appears to have come full circle within modern scholarship with the relatively recent defence of the biblical concept of "Molek" as a foreign god of child sacrifice. However, contrary to this view, this study will argue that the identification of child sacrifice as a foreign element within Judahite religious practice is based on the distortion of the historical reality of child sacrifice within the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, it will be argued that the academic acceptance of this biblical distortion as a historical probability reflects a persistent and unself-critical ideological bias within modern scholarship. Unlike most other areas of academic enquiry, the subject of child sacrifice is particularly susceptible to misrepresentation within modern scholarship because of its sensitive nature. The historical reality of child sacrifice in ancient (and indeed modern) civilizations is an unpleasant reality, particularly, as van der Horst comments, if such a practice is attested within a culture that has played some role in the formation of one's personal world-view. This may well account in part of the apparent reluctance within biblical scholarship to apply the perspectives of ideological criticism to the examination of the subject of child sacrifice and the Hebrew Bible. As Bergmann suggests:

"We have a particular difficultly in understanding this phenomenon because the Judeo-Christian tradition has accustomed us to regard God as an ego-ideal. Therefore how could God tolerate human sacrifices?"

As observed above, ideological criticism suggest that ideology generally exists within a dynamic context of opposition. In seeking to distinguish between the biblical portrayal of child sacrifice and the historical reality of this practice, this discussion will argue that the biblical material concerning child sacrifice is generally opposed o the historical reality that children were sacrificed to Yhwh, and that an "ideology of separateness" governs the biblical insistence that child sacrifice was a Canaanite practice. Moreover, it will be argued that child sacrifice played an important role within the royal Judahite cult, and that "Molek" is best understood as a biblical character making the historical reality of the sacrifice of children to Yhwh.