The love and jealousy of God do not begin with the Israelite nation, but date back to the time before creation. The Torah does not tell us why God chose to create the universe (the sages note that reverence for God prohibits one from inquiring into such matters¹⁰). Yet the reason may be deduced from God’s subsequent actions: God, it appears, created the world because of his solitude and need for love. The sages articulate this idea in the following Midrash: “What is meant by ‘the first day’? Since the first day God created the world, he desired to dwell with his creatures in the terrestrial world.”¹¹ In the Middle Ages, this notion was systematized, its psychological aspects softened, in explanations that maintained that God created the world because “there is no king without a people”¹² or “the nature of good is to do good.”¹³ It took the great sixteenth-century kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero to restore the sexual motif of love-jealousy to its former prominence. According to Cordovero, at first God engaged in sha’ashua (play), an autoerotic movement that resulted in the engraving of the Torah into God’s essence. Consequently, entities and worlds were engraved into God’s essence as well; they grew increasingly distant from their origin, until they were able to satisfy the divine love’s desire for the existence of an other. Once separate, the “other” must employ mystical techniques in order to merge again with the Godhead (largely by means of the Torah, engraved as it is in both God and man). This completes the purpose of creation, which is, in essence, a love that can be satisfied only by a dialectic process of ratzo vashov (back and forth), both creating its object and consuming it by turns.

Let us return to the biblical account of creation. Was God pleased with his world? Ostensibly he was. The description of the six days, after all, concludes with the verse “Then God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.”¹⁴ The sages, however, saw in this verse an allusion to the angel of death.¹⁵ Their ironic reading is confirmed, I believe, by the following passage describing the Sabbath, which conveys something of the arduous and excessive toil of the preceding six days: “Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it he rested from all his work that God had created and made.”¹⁶ Even more telling is the parallel verse: “And on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.”¹⁷ The expression “and was refreshed” (vayinafash) seems to imply that God sighed and exhaled (nashaf) in relief at having completed a difficult and burdensome task.

Of particular difficulty is the story of man. Presumably God created man for companionship and love, yet from the very first moment he constantly plagues humankind with his jealousy and hatred. This is the crux of the entire biblical narrative, both in its literal sense and according to the exegetical readings of the sages, which developed this theme even further. They go so far as to find jealousy and rivalry in the most benevolent of God’s deeds. When God creates woman, he says, “It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helpmeet.”¹⁸ We might have thought God was concerned about man and sought to relieve him of the solitude he himself had felt prior to creation. Rashi, however, offers another interpretation: “So that they should not say that there are two authorities: God, who is unique in the higher realms and has no mate, and this one [man], who is unique in the lower realms and has no mate.”¹⁹ The helpmeet (ezer kenegdo), then, was created much more as an opponent to man (kenegdo) than as a helper (ezer). Rashi’s explanation is derived from the Midrash in which divine jealousy is roused by the possibility of man imitating God and creating an artificial creature (a golem).²⁰ The idea of rivalry between the creator of an artificial being and God can be found in several medieval sources concerning the golem.²¹ The fear of this rivalry often resulted in an absolute rejection, or at least significant restriction, of such practices: If man is to create a golem, he can never do so alone.

Either way, the biblical text itself informs us that it was jealousy that prompted God to impose the prohibition on eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. So claims the serpent, when he tries to entice the woman into eating the fruit, “You will not surely die. For God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”²² This seemingly irreverent statement is confirmed by God himself, who, seeing that his command has been violated, says, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.”²³ According to the sages, the serpent was referring to the professional jealousy between artisans, since by his eating the forbidden fruit man also became capable of creating worlds.²⁴ This reading, too, suggests that the serpent could have been telling the truth, if not in the sense of the creation of a golem, then in the sense of the engendering of a flesh-and-blood child. Indeed, woman’s role of childbearing—“In pain you shall bring forth children”²⁵—is mentioned only as a consequence of eating the fruits of the tree of knowledge. In other words: Although with sorrow, you shall nevertheless bear children.²⁶

The expulsion from the Garden of Eden was only the beginning of the struggle between God and man. A mere few generations later, God declared, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”²⁷ Still, God retained an object for his love, as is written in the following verse: “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”²⁸ Shortly afterward, the strife was rekindled by the generation of the Tower of Babel, which aroused God’s jealousy by saying: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”²⁹ God explicitly stated his concern: “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.”³⁰ Hence, God foiled humanity’s plan in its early stages.

Throughout all these generations, God seems to have been searching for a person on whom to bestow his love. First he singled out Enoch, who proved unable to live long under such love’s burden. Then God found a “lover” in Abraham.³¹ The trials and tribulations that God, in his love, conferred on Abraham were great. The sages enumerate ten ways in which God tested Abraham. Let us examine the last and greatest of these tests, the binding of Isaac. Why did God order Abraham to sacrifice his son? The answer seems to me to be implied by the divine command’s particular choice of words: “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.”³² Why the repetitive “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love?” Implicit in these words, I think, is the voice of a jealous lover. For a hundred years God was Abraham’s only beloved, and now that he has borne a son, God fears the rivalry. Thus he puts Abraham’s love to the ultimate test: the demand to sacrifice his child for the sake of God and his love.

 

Indeed, human sacrifice—and child sacrifice in particular—is the fitting response to such a fastidious love. We ought therefore to explore Judaism’s approach toward such rites. We have been taught to think of it as categorically negative, and a cursory reading of our texts would seem to concur. For example, when the Torah wants to illustrate the loathsome nature of the nations inhabiting the land before the Israelite conquest, it says, “You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way; for every abomination to the Lord which he hates they have done for their gods; for they burn even their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.”³³ On closer inspection, however, this approach turns out to be far more ambivalent and complex (its precise nature is the subject of debate among numerous scholars, each offering a different interpretation). This complexity, in my opinion, stems from the above-mentioned duality between the personal, spontaneous religion and its public, institutionalized expressions.

According to more than one Midrash, Abraham did in fact sacrifice Isaac, who was then resurrected. This is not, of course, a literal reading of the original text. Yet there are many other biblical passages that indicate that the custom of sacrificing the firstborn was indeed practiced by the Israelites, just as it was by the neighboring nations. The kings of Judea, Ahaz and Manasseh, are reported to have “made [their] son[s] pass through the fire.”³⁴ This ritual, abolished by King Josiah, is also mentioned in the Torah³⁵ and in the Prophets³⁶; admittedly, these sources mention child sacrifice only to condemn it, but presumably other sources sanctioning this custom were upheld by those who actually practiced it. That such sources, now lost, once existed may be ascertained from the claims of their critics. Jeremiah, for instance, said: “And they built the high places of Baal which are in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind.”³⁷ The emphasis “which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind” sounds polemical; it contends, no doubt, with other versions of the Torah where such a commandment was stated. Nor should we be misled by the terms “Baal” and “Molech.” These names, as many scholars have suggested, probably do not designate other deities, but rather refer to none other than God: “Baal” was an appellation for the God of Israel (a title that the biblical authors sought to obliterate), and the term “Molech” is actually a type of sacrificial offering, as may be inferred from Phoenician inscriptions (the original Hebrew phrase lemolech bears the same grammatical form as another sacrificial offering, leolah).

The ancient legal status of this custom may be deduced from the words of the prophet Micah, “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you? But to do it justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”³⁸ Micah clearly belongs to the faction that was opposed to ritual in general and sacrificial offerings in particular (“For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices”³⁹). What is important for our purposes, however, is the fact that Micah puts the sacrifice of the firstborn on par with animal offering, indicating that the two were probably mentioned in the same source and derived from the same religious logic. Even more interesting is the position taken by Ezekiel. The prophet could not abolish the custom of firstborn sacrifice, which probably appeared in a text he deemed authoritative. He thus admits that it is indeed a divine command, but one that is bad and given as a punishment: “Therefore I also gave them up to statutes that were not good, and judgments by which they could not live. And I pronounced them unclean because of their ritual gifts, in that they caused all their firstborn to pass through the fire, that I might make them desolate.”⁴⁰ In fact, something of this law has survived in our own version of the Torah: “No person under the ban, who may become doomed to destruction among men, shall be redeemed, but shall surely be put to death.”⁴¹

Perhaps most important in the context of our discussion are the individual cases of child sacrifice. These reveal not only the existence of the human practice, but also the divine attitude toward it. For example, when the king of Moab saw that the battle was “too fierce for him” he then “took his eldest son who would have reigned in his place, and offered him as a burnt offering upon the wall, and there was great indignation against Israel. So they departed from him and returned to their own land.”⁴² While it is difficult to determine which God was angered by this sacrifice—the God of Israel or the Moabite deity Chemosh (the Bible appears to have intentionally used the obscure passive tense)—in the case of Jephthah’s daughter, no such ambiguity exists.