he fire would be
their firstborn only, although in general ancient writers have failed to
indicate this limitation of the custom. For the Moabites, indeed, the
limitation is clearly indicated, if not expressly stated, when we read
that the king of Moab offered his eldest son, who should have reigned
after him, as a burnt sacrifice on the wall.(469) For the Phoenicians it
comes out less distinctly in the statement of Porphyry that the
Phoenicians used to sacrifice one of their dearest to Baal, and in the
legend recorded by Philo of Byblus that Cronus sacrificed his
only-begotten son.(470) We may suppose that the custom of sacrificing the
firstborn both of men and animals was a very ancient Semitic institution,
which many branches of the race kept up within historical times; but that
the Hebrews, while they maintained the custom in regard to domestic
cattle, were led by their loftier morality to discard it in respect of
children, and to replace it by a merciful law that firstborn children
should be ransomed instead of sacrificed.(471)

(M142) The conclusion that the Hebrew custom of redeeming the firstborn is
a modification of an older custom of sacrificing them has been mentioned
by some very distinguished scholars only to be rejected on the ground,
apparently, of its extreme improbability.(472) To me the converging lines
of evidence which point to this conclusion seem too numerous and too
distinct to be thus lightly brushed aside. And the argument from
improbability can easily be rebutted by pointing to other peoples who are
known to have practised or to be still practising a custom of the same
sort. In some tribes of New South Wales the firstborn child of every woman
was eaten by the tribe as part of a religious ceremony.(473) Among the
aborigines on the lower portions of the Paroo and Warrego rivers, which
join the Darling River in New South Wales, girls used to become wives when
they were mere children and to be mothers at fourteen, and the old custom
was to kill the firstborn child by strangulation.(474) Agai