GEN1139 Spiegel, The Last Trial, New York: Schocken 1967 and most scholars read Genesis 22 as a condemnation of human offerings since, dramatically, Abraham’s hand is staid…, but does the text condemn human sacrifice or do we want to read it that way? … No etiology is found such as “Hence we do not offer our children in sacrifice…,” no commentary directs this tale in a direction critical of child sacrifice. Rather, life is God’s to give and take.   He may on occasion demand the most valuable sacrifice a person can offer, a human who is his own child. Abraham’s son is redeemed, a ram is substituted, as the Israelites’ first-born are spared in the tale of Exodus, the blood on the doorpost being an adequate token substitute (or were the Egyptian children adequate to satiate the Destroyer’s appetite?). Redemption and sacrifice are the two options, but the deity is imagined not always to redeem. Even when he redeems, something else is offering instead. The banned person is a sort of human sacrifice that cannot be redeemed, but if someone should dare to withhold God’s herem, he himself may become the unwilling substitute as in the prophet’s interpretation of the Syrian king Ben-Hadad’s escape from death (1 Kings 20). As the tradition of human sacrifice is a recurring theme in Judaism, so the ban-as-sacrifice tradition is an ongoing thread in ancient Israelite religion. The ideology of the ban is thus not an ancient or primitive view of war that is later totally rejected, for Isaiah 34 testifies to its presence in a quite late poetic text, the symbols still intact. So Spigel shows how the notion of divine forgiveness through the death of a child surfaces in the 11th-century reflections on the crusade. NIDITCH 46