Isaac and Iphigenia: horror does not date a custom
In the earliest legends we have, such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods.
Both stories support the claim about a terrible demand more readily than the claim about a new institution. Genesis 22 explicitly frames Abraham's ordeal as a test. Isaac expects an animal offering; the divine messenger stops Abraham, and a ram replaces the boy (22:1, 7–13). In the King James Version, first published in 1611 and inspected here through Project Gutenberg's text, nothing says that this was humanity's first proposed human sacrifice. The passage concerns this father's obedience and this child's deliverance. Genesis 22.
Aeschylus's Agamemnon, first performed in 458 BCE, supplies especially strong evidence for the other half of Chesterton's reading. Its chorus recounts Agamemnon's anguish at the demand for his daughter's blood, then condemns the resolve that makes him kill her. The inspected witness is E. D. A. Morshead's English translation in the Internet Classics Archive; see the opening choral ode, especially Greek lines 184–247. Yet a drama's portrayal of a sacrifice as abhorrent does not establish that the practice was historically unprecedented. Chesterton moves from the moral meaning of surviving stories to a chronology of religion that these stories alone cannot settle. Agamemnon.
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