and they were telling this story. It suddenly dawned on me they were telling little children that it was okay for their parents to kill them. I prefer to think that God would never ask that of any parent, even if he supposedly pulled back at the last minute. Even as a test. And yes, I think everyone goes to heaven.

In that one, Jephthah asks God to help him win a battle, and promises God that if he wins, he will sacrifice whatever first comes out of his house to welcome him home, when he returns. He won. Turns out it wasn't a slave like he must have expected, but his only child who ran out to see him first. God didn't step in to save her like he did with Isaac, and she was murdered. But her father was really really sad about it.

The Abrahamic god is a monster. There really is no getting around that.

That story has always disturbed me, even when I learned it as a child. What kind of sadistic asshole would torture a parent like that? Insane.

From Spuddie in reply to SuperTroll three days ago (today being 9/08/2017)...

I have heard interpretations that put the whole story in the context of prior idolatrous religions.

I think the story loses a lot of context and for centuries people getting precisely the opposite message from the story as intended. Christians and Muslims get the story completely wrong because they divorce it from the culture it came from.

Think of it in terms of child sacrifice being a standard practice for idol worshiping faiths.

Abraham, the son of an idol maker and first monotheist was being tested and failed miserably. God was asking him to do what was expected of all other gods he had known of and heard of. So Abraham wasn't going through any kind of special act of courage to try to sacrifice his hard won and only child. He was doing what all others had done before. God stops him from killing his son. Essentially telling Abraham, "I am not like those other gods who demand child sacrifice. I am different from them and the true one". You failed the test, there is more for you to learn.

This sort of reading also gives the story a much clearer moral message. Congratulating Abraham for being willing to kill on God's command is a repugnant idea. It points to the celebration of a complete lack of moral thinking and moral subordination to authority. But admonishing him for following along, God messing with Abraham to teach him a lesson about mercy and moral thinking is a more socially redeeming way to read it.

This is no endorsement of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism as they are practiced today in so many mainstream institutions these days (or the last couple thousand years now that I think about it). I think context is essential in any cultural teachings. The three modern-day Abrahamic religions make some serious mistakes by going for the literal interpretations of scripture.

of sacred texts, as is their right. And many believers as well focus on a literal interpretation, as is their right.

Those kind of literalists?

kthxbai.

Although I'd suggest Amenhotep IV really qualifies as the first monotheist, it's an interesting data point.

utter nonsense to explain the horrible shit in the Bible.

I've never been asked to sacrifice my children by cultural tradition, heavenly bodies bursting through clouds, or authoritarian voices in my head. But there certainly was something about this Abraham character back then that has made a significant impact on the world and this particular story has survived to this day as a pivotal turning point in his life.

Our modern culture sees a lot of past practices as abhorrent and absurd. However, we are not that much better. We've just gotten more sophisticated at sacrificing our children - for example, exploitation of the world's natural resources at the expense of future generations, trashing the air and land and waters for quick economic gains, non-forgivable student loans (or just plain student loans) through repulsive financial rules, poor educational opportunities, etc., to name a few. Hard to say if 3000 years into the future if any explanation can justify our current practices. We still kill our children, just more slowly or we just kill their spirits and fill their minds with the absurdity of materialism.

That the Bible comes to us through translations of translations by way of men and organizations with only self-interest at heart gives me no confidence in any particular interpretation. But a more sensible interpretation certainly seems more welcome than the currently accepted one. You don't have to believe it to find it interesting and worth consideration if you have an interest in biblical history. Another option is to drop the Bible entirely and look at other sources of history and mythology to understand the origins of the human mind. I wouldn't mind at all but Abrahamic traditions rage on still to this day.

I have to go back on what I said at the beginning. I have been asked to sacrifice my children for cultural traditions. It comes in the form of, "I'm sorry, honey, daddy has to work." Gotta sacrifice our limited time to our god Money. Surely that's better than bludgeoning our children over a stone alter but it's still a blow to the heart. And I'm considered a better man for it in this modern world. Lucky me.

Shared above?

The binding of Isaac can easily be seen this way, but there's another story that mirrors it, but the ending is different, and the only difference between the two is between son and daughter. Going by your interpretation, this has very sinister undertones, and holds true to a theme consistent throughout the Bible.

Have you ever read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces? It tells of myths coming out of past cultures that are just as insane, if not moreso, as the story of Jephthah. That so many people take biblical stories as historical fact certainly says a lot about modern humans. Maybe humans in general.

Just like our view of the universe is like a fish-eye lense back through time, our stories out of the long-lost past only reach us in the present through the telling of them through a multitude of interpretations coming out of a field of constantly changing cultural norms.

The true origins of these stories are not available to us anymore. So why some people insist on the Bible stories being literally true makes no sense to me except that it probably makes them feel more secure in the world for thinking that way... a direct connection to their family traditions for some, maybe. At some point we have to break out of that rigidity. Easy for me to say, I was adopted and raised by parents who weren't particularly religious. So my rejection of literal interpretations of the Bible is not quite as heroic as others.

In the story, God told Abraham to kill his son, after he had made all kinds of promises about Isaac's future. Jephthah came up with the plan to kill some member of his household for God on his own. The story reads as though Jephthah was grieved only because the victim he promised turned out to be his own daughter. Would the story even have been written down if was about him killing a slave? Probably not.