Child Sacrifice in the Old Testament

[Mudhammam]

There are sporadic references forbidding the Hebrews from sacrificing their sons and daughters as burnt offerings to the god Baal, but interestingly, sacrifice to Yahweh seems perfectly acceptable:

"Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day." (Exodus 22:29-30).

What exactly did the Hebrews do with their cattle and sheep and firstborn children?

The word is:
נָתַן:nathan
I means to dedicate, give over, pledge..

It has nothing to do with a sacrifice.

Here are some examples of how the Hebrews treated sheep and cattle as offerings before Yahweh:

not even close. What God is commanding is an offering of the first fruits. Meaning the OT Jews had to offer the first of everything? The priest decided what they could use. The offerings of first fruits were burn or killed they were used to help widows and orphans. Offering the first born sons was a kin to pledging the service of the boy to the temple/as a priest or temple benevolence if the community needed help.
Numbers 3:12-13 explains this

11 The Lord also said to Moses, 12-13 “I destroyed all the firstborn in Egypt. At that time I chose all the firstborn from every family in Israel to be mine in a special way. That included all the firstborn men and animals. But now I am choosing the Levites to take their place. Now they will be my special servants. I, the Lord, give this command!”

"But I did obey the Lord,” Saul said. “I went on the mission the Lord assigned me. I completely destroyed the Amalekites and brought back Agag their king. The soldiers took sheep and cattle from the plunder, the best of what was devoted to God, in order to sacrifice them to the Lord your God at Gilgal.” But Samuel replied: “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams. For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king.” (1 Samuel 15:20-23)

Here Yahweh rejects the burnt offering sacrifices because his specific instructions to Saul were not obeyed, as Yahweh did in other instances when children were sacrificed to Baal. Another example:

"Solomon offered a sacrifice of fellowship offerings to the Lord: twenty-two thousand cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. So the king and all the Israelites dedicated the temple of the Lord. On that same day the king consecrated the middle part of the courtyard in front of the temple of the Lord, and there he offered burnt offerings, grain offerings and the fat of the fellowship offerings, because the bronze altar that stood before the Lord was too small to hold the burnt offerings, the grain offerings and the fat of the fellowship offerings." (1 Kings 8:63-64)

All those poor sheep and cattle... slaughtered and burned as sacrifices to Yahweh. Remember, "You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep."

Anyone who doubts that Yahweh was calling for Hebrew children to be slaughtered, doubt no more! Ezekiel explicitly records a very angry Yahweh admitting: "Also with uplifted hand I swore to them in the wilderness that I would disperse them among the nations and scatter them through the countries, because they had not obeyed my laws but had rejected my decrees and desecrated my Sabbaths, and their eyes lusted after their parents’ idols. So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord." (Ezekiel 20:23-26)

Ah, no.

"With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" - Micah 6:6-7

Oh yes, offering his firstborn, Micah pondered, as "the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul," was only meant "figuratively" as a "dedication," having nothing to do with sacrifice... I'm sure Drich doesn't read the story of Abraham and Isaac as a command from God for a "real sacrifice" either, just a "dedication" (albeit one involving an alter, rope, and a large knife). Sure.