The biblical narrative of Isaac’s sacrifice is unsettling from any point of view. God commands Abraham to kill his own son, Isaac. Without questioning, Abraham obeys. He rises early, prepares the fire, carries the wood, and leads his son to the designated place. Only at the very last moment, as Abraham’s hand is raised with the knife over his son, does a divine voice stop him. A ram appears, caught in the thicket, provided by providence as a substitute.
Traditionally, this intervention has been interpreted as the successful passing of a test: God did not truly desire the actual sacrifice, only the demonstration of obedience. But this reading raises a disturbing paradox. For God, who would later command ‘thou shalt not kill’, here demands exactly that.
The answer might lie in the fact that the killing of children is more acceptable than that of peers, let alone parents. Like domesticated animals, children occupy a subordinate place within the group. The ram thus emerges as a figure that condenses in itself the fate of the child, occupying the same place, the same sacrificial role. The story, covertly but eloquently, is telling us that indeed, parents sacrifice their children just as they sacrifice domesticated animals — precisely because we ourselves are domesticated animals.
The story also reveals a deep ethical conflict. It does not erase the violence of the sacrifice, but rather dramatizes it to process it culturally. It shows us how humanity began to recognise the immorality of child sacrifice. It is, in a certain sense, a moral advance. The tale does not deny that the sacrifice existed, but it begins to signal it as a problem, as something that must be overcome, whilst also seeking to absolve the obedient father. The myth, as so often, speaks the truth in disguise: it keeps the practice alive in cultural memory, yet masked under the form of a moral lesson that allows society to move forward.
Marriage Disguised as Sacrifice
The story of Iphigenia in Greek mythology exposes this same logic with even greater transparency. Agamemnon, to appease Artemis’s wrath and allow the winds to carry his fleet to Troy, must sacrifice his daughter. But instead of facing the horror of the act directly, he employs a stratagem: he deceives his wife Clytemnestra and Iphigenia herself by telling them the young girl is to marry Achilles.
Thus, the marriage rite — a ceremony that, in itself, entails the father giving away his daughter — overlaps with the act of sacrifice. Here, the parallel is stark: the daughter is offered as the property of the father, transferred to another authority (a husband, a goddess), under the justification of duty and honour. What appears to be a social act of continuity (marriage) conceals its sacrificial underside: the absolute surrender of the daughter’s body and life to patriarchal order. Both stories, the biblical and the Greek, point to a common undercurrent: the real and symbolic possibility of sacrificing one’s own children in the name of a higher order.
An Ancestral Practice: Sacrificing the Children
Throughout human history, the real sacrifice of children has been practised as an extreme form of offering or ritual. The examples span millennia.
Around 800,000 years ago at Gran Dolina (Atapuerca), there is clear evidence of human cannibalism, including remains of children with systematic defleshing marks. In Gough’s Cave (England, ~15,000 years ago), children’s bones show signs of being butchered and even turned into ritual containers. At Herxheim (Germany, ~7,000 years ago), bodies of adults and children were dismembered during collective ceremonies. Later, in historical civilisations such as Carthage, the Mexica, or the Inca Empire, child sacrifices were institutionalised to appease agricultural gods or to promote the fertility of the land.
These examples confirm that the instrumentalisation of children as resources — as lives belonging to the group — is not merely a mythical construct, but a material reality of our evolutionary and cultural history.
As orally transmitted myths, the stories of Isaac and Iphigenia draw from much older currents stemming from the ritual sacrifices of the Bronze Age, when the actual practice of human sacrifice began to decline and become taboo. In this sense, it is not so much the precise date of these narratives that matters, but the awareness they reflect: the passage from a bloody and real practice to a dramatized, mythical representation, and finally to symbolic or sublimated forms. These tales thus mirror a particular stage in our species’ moral evolution: the transition from the acceptance of human sacrifice to the cultural search for ways to process its ethical weight.
This process culminates, within the very Abrahamic tradition, with the figure of Jesus Christ, who not only embodies the son destined for sacrifice but voluntarily embraces that fate, entirely shifting the burden of sacrifice onto himself. Jesus is like a new Isaac, but one who walks of his own will to the altar. Moreover, he takes the sublimation of sacrifice to its ultimate symbolic extreme, offering his own flesh and blood to others so that they might quite literally feed on him. It is the height of symbolic transposition, almost sarcastic: the son becomes not only the food but also the feeder, evidencing the self-domestication I have discussed.
The Child as a Domesticated Animal
Many anthropologists have puzzled over this seemingly aberrant practice, but from my point of view, it is entirely understandable. In previous entries on this blog (beginning here), I have proposed that the human species arose through intentional self-domestication. This is no mere metaphor: just as we domesticate animals and plants to gain their cooperation and productivity, we have applied the same logic to our offspring. Domestication means control: control of reproduction, of growth, of autonomy, and of life itself.
As with non-human animals, this implies a profound emotional ambivalence. We love our children as we love our pets, precisely because they depend on us. Their dependence is a source of genuine affection, but also of exploitation. Through this bond — ambivalent, yes, but also deeply compassionate — we have cooperated and built a more complex and, in many ways, better world. Yet we cannot ignore the other side of this coin: we want our children to carry on our projects, to integrate into the system we have built. The child thus becomes a living resource, valuable yet subordinated, serving the continuity of lineage or community.
It is no coincidence that the great narratives of child sacrifice coincide historically with the rise of animal husbandry and domestication. As agricultural societies learned to raise and exploit animals, they also developed a keen awareness that their own children were being treated under similar principles. The tales of sacrifice, like those of Isaac and Iphigenia, are not mere legends or poetic metaphors: they are the direct expression of a real, structural tension within our species.