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According to hadith and the majority of Islamic scholars, two goats are sacrificed for a boy and one for a girl. [3] [4] If one cannot slaughter on the seventh day, someone may slaughter on the fourteenth day or on the twenty-first day. If one is not capable of doing so, then a person may slaughter any time before the puberty of the child.
''Offering to Molech'' in Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us, by Charles Foster, 1897.The drawing is a typical depiction of child sacrifice. Child sacrifice is the ritualistic killing of children in order to please or appease a deity, supernatural beings, or sacred social order, tribal, group or national loyalties in order to achieve a desired result.
Animal sacrifice is practiced in the states of Assam, Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Tripura in Eastern India, as well as in the nation of Nepal. The sacrifice involves slaying of goats, chickens, pigeons and male Water buffaloes. [27] For example, one of the largest animal sacrifice in Nepal occurs over the three-day-long Gadhimai festival.
This ties up with the archaeological evidence that most sacrifices were of young adults or children. The Phoenicians of Carthage were reputed to practise child sacrifice, and though the scale of sacrifices may have been exaggerated by ancient authors for political or religious reasons, there is archaeological evidence of large numbers of ...
This type of worship has sometimes been said to have originated from the goat's increased sex drive. One male goat was capable of fertilizing 150 females. [37] The Greek god Pan was depicted as having goat characteristics, such as hooves, horns, and a beard. Along with Pan, the goat was closely related to Dionysus during the Roman era. [37]
The lexicographer Gesenius takes azazel to mean "averter", which he theorized was the name of a deity, to be appeased with the sacrifice of the goat. [ 4 ] [ page needed ] Alternatively, broadly contemporary with the Septuagint, the pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch may preserve Azazel as the name of a fallen angel .
Ancient Phoenicia saw "a special sacrifice at the season of the harvest, to reawaken the spirit of the vine"; while the winter fertility rite to restore "the spirit of the withering vine" included as sacrifice "cooking a kid in the milk of its mother, a Canaanite custom which Mosaic law condemned and formally forbade".
Various Greek and Roman sources describe and criticize the Carthaginians as engaging in the practice of sacrificing children by burning. [12] Classical writers describing some version of child sacrifice to "Cronos" (Baal Hammon) include the Greek historians Diodorus Siculus and Cleitarchus, as well as the Christian apologists Tertullian and ...