One more curious trait must be noted in the worship of Jahweh. Not only did he rejoice in human sacrifices, but he also demanded especially an offering of the firstborn, and he required a singular and significant ransom from every man-child whom he permitted to live among his peculiar votaries. On the fact of human sacrifices I need hardly insist: they were an integral part of all Semitic worship, and their occurrence in the cult of Jahweh has been universally allowed by all unprejudiced scholars. The cases of Agag, whom Samuel hewed to pieces before the face of Jahweh, and of Jephthah’s daughter, whom her father offered up as a thank-offering for his victory, though not of course strictly historical from a critical point of view, are quite sufficient evidence to show the temper and the habit of the Jahweh-worshippers who described them. So with the legend of the offering of Isaac, who is merely rescued at the last moment in order that the god of generation may make him the father of many thousands. Again, David seeks to pacify the anger of Jahweh by a sacrifice of seven of the sons of Saul. And the prophet Micah asks, “Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”--a passage { 200}which undoubtedly implies that in Micah’s time such a sacrifice of the eldest child was a common incident of current Jahweh-worship.
From human sacrifice to circumcision the transition is less violent than would at first sight appear. An intermediate type is found in the dedication of the first-born, where Jahweh seems to claim for himself, not as a victim, but as a slave and devotee, the first fruits of that increase which it is his peculiar function to ensure. In various laws, Jahweh lays claim to the first-born of man and beast,--sometimes to all, sometimes only to the male first-born. The animals were sacrificed; the sons, in later ages at least, were either made over as Nazarites or redeemed with an offering or a money-ransom. But we cannot doubt that in the earliest times the first-born child was slain before Jahweh. In the curious legend of Moses and Zipporah we get a strange folk-tale connecting this custom indirectly with the practice of circumcision. Jahweh seeks to kill Moses, apparently because he has not offered up his child: but Zipporah his wife takes a stone knife, circumcises her son, and flings the bloody offering at Jahweh’s feet, who thereupon lets her husband go. This, rather than the later account of its institution by Abraham, seems the true old explanatory legend of the origin of circumcision--a legend analogous to those which we find in Roman and other early history as embodying or explaining certain ancient customs or legal formulae. Circumcision, in fact, appears to be a bloody sacrifice to Jahweh, as the god of generation: a sacrifice essentially of the nature of a ransom, and therefore comparable to all those other bodily mutilations whose origin Mr. Herbert Spencer has so well shown in the _Ceremonial Institutions_.