Deuteronomy 18:10

Hebrew Bible

8 He must eat the same share they do, despite any profits he may gain from the sale of his family’s inheritance. 9 When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, you must not learn the abhorrent practices of those nations. 10 There must never be found among you anyone who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, anyone who practices divination, an omen reader, a soothsayer, a sorcerer, 11 one who casts spells, one who conjures up spirits, a practitioner of the occult, or a necromancer. 12 Whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord, and because of these detestable things the Lord your God is about to drive them out from before you.

2 Kings 16:3

Hebrew Bible

1 In the seventeenth year of the reign of Pekah son of Remaliah, Jotham’s son Ahaz became king over Judah. 2 Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned for sixteen years in Jerusalem. He did not do what pleased the Lord his God, in contrast to his ancestor David. 3 He followed in the footsteps of the kings of Israel. He passed his son through the fire, a horrible sin practiced by the nations whom the Lord drove out from before the Israelites. 4 He offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places, on the hills, and under every green tree. 5 At that time King Rezin of Syria and King Pekah son of Remaliah of Israel attacked Jerusalem. They besieged Ahaz, but were unable to conquer him.

 Notes and References

"... For Hezekiah’s purposes, it had been essential to amputate the ancestors, those responsible for the bestowal of rural property on their descendants: they, and they alone, consecrated the possession of land. They stood between Hezekiah and a population herded into fortresses: if Israelites failed to feed their ancestors, the ancestors were condemned to a diet of excrement, one likely to excite their displeasure: if the family left them, too, how could one be gathered to the ancestors, in the clan-sector tomb? The assault on ancestral practices, which survived the jetsam of Hezekiah’s other programs (Deuteronomy 14:1–2; 18:10–14; 26:14; Leviticus 19:31; 20:6), helped justify dissolving the clan sectors – spreading them thin in the systematic resettlement of Judah. It also issued in a proscription on child sacrifice (2 Kings 23:10), a rite quite logically associated with the ancestral cult in Josiah’s time, and possibly earlier (Leviticus 18:21; 20:2–8; Deuteronomy 18:10). Josiah’s suppression of ancestral worship (2 Kings 23, 16) reacts, thus, against the minimal retribalization of Judah under Manasseh and reflects a heightened stridency about deviation from the state cult, now defined as morally normative and radically analeptic rather than as a refinement of the traditional religion ..."

Halpern, Baruch, and Matthew J. Adams From Gods to God: The Dynamics of Iron Age Cosmologies (p. 407) Mohr Siebeck, 2009

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