Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

—HUMAN AND FISH SACRIFICES 383On the other hand, we possess, in historic and pre-historicAssyria, no trustworthy evidence of human sacrifice. Sayce,it is true, in 1875 published two texts, which, as he translated,demonstrated that human sacrifice did prevail. These, refutedby Ball, are not accepted as even a proper translation of thepassage, much less a proof of the practice.Jastrow has recently returned to the charge. He suggeststhat, " His eldest son shall he burn at the Khamm of Adad,"and other passages, establish that at one time children wereoffered in sacrifice, very much on the same lines as the laterJudaean immolation of their children to Moloch, as when KingAhaz (2 Kings xvi. " 3) made his son to pass through thefire " in the Tophet just outside the gates of Jerusalem. ButJastrow finds even less favour now than Sayce did forty yearsago.iCampbell Thompson, after remarking that the existence ofhuman sacrifice among either the Babylonian or Assyrian isnot easy of satisfactory proof, concludes, " The fact is thathuman sacrifice goes out in proportion as civilisation comes in,and probably by the time men are ready to commit theirreligious ritual to writing, human sacrifice has ceased to be aregular and periodic rite :civilised of all the Semites before our era,as the Assyrians were the highestso in all probabilityfewest traces of this custom exist in their records."A semi-religious practice, not dissimilar in object to that ofthe Scape-Goat, can be discerned, if not as a vehicle for carryingaway all the sins of the people, yet as a method of ridding theindividual by the agency of some beast or fish of the afflictionwhich lay upon him.In one of the so-called Penitential Psalms or incantations,which thetablets from the library of Asur-bani-pal bequeathus, the prayerful desire to be free of suffering finds utterancein :" Let me cast off my evil that the birds may fly up to Heavenwith it,That the fish may carry off my affliction."1 Op. cit., p. 358.