Did Adam offer sacrifices

Answer 1

A:It seems that human sacrifices were indeed offerred to God in pre-Exilic times, at least in the belief that he would accept them. A passage beginning at Judges 11:31, that tells how Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to God. 1 Kings 16:34 tells how Hiel the Bethelite, the builder of the new Israelite city of Jericho sacrificed his two sons for the success of the project, according to the word of the Lord as spoken to Joshua. Another example is King Ahaz of Judah being criticised in 2 Chronicles 28:1-3 because he sacrificed his children. Abraham's promise to sacrifice Isaac was not an isolated incident where God was merely testing Abraham, but part of an established Hebrew tradition.

Some biblical references insist that the Israelites only made human sacrifices for Baal, whom we know to have been one of the pre-Exilic Hebrew gods, but this insistence was probably a late attempt to move Yahweh (God) out of the frame. The Book of Jeremiah denies that child sacrifices were performed in God's name, but Mark S. Smith (The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel) suggests that the vehemence and frequency of the book's protests really indicate that Jeremiah knew such sacrifices were occurring and was trying to bring them to an end. Smith says that Ezekiel 20:25-26 provides evidence that the Jewish people believed that God had made the Jews to perform child sacrifices through fire, to appease his anger: "Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD."