Buried Identities: The (Hidden) Polemic against Passing a Child through Fire

Abstract

Passages that reference passing children through fire have sparked intense debate. Were children being dedicated to a god, consecrated in some ritual fashion—or, worse yet, sacrificed? The possibility that passing a child through fire meant child sacrifice has been the consensus. But studies addressing the biblical fire texts were published at a time when there was still much to learn about Phoenician mortuary archaeology and at a time when research on children in the biblical world was still nascent. A reassessment of the fire texts is therefore needed. I propose that the biblical writer uses the fire texts to create a polemic, specifically a hidden polemic against un-Judahite burials, that sits under an explicit polemic against child sacrifice. My suggestion asks us to think about the possibility that the fire texts operate on multiple rhetorical levels. To unpack the hidden polemic, I place biblical scholarship on fire texts in conversation with the new research on children and Levantine mortuary archaeology to demonstrate how the hidden polemic uses the fire texts as code for cremation burials, which are associated with both “bad” burials and foreign burials.