ABSTRACT
I think that there can be little doubt about the fact that child sacrifi ce was practiced among various peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity, particularly among the Phoenicians but also among Israel’s other neighbours. And it is attested in early Greek tradition, as the story of Agamemnon’s sacrifi ce of his daughter Iphigenia suggests. It involved children of both sexes and was not limited to those of very early age. Whether it was restricted to just the fi rstborn child is not clear. Various explanations for this practice are suggested by the sources, often associated with an act of appeasement of an angry deity for the violation of a religious taboo, but it is not restricted to this.
