Slaughter of the Innocents

When we see how the entire nation reacted to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, it begs a question today.

Today, because today the Church holds the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The Gospel reading (Matthew 2:13-18) is:

When the magi had departed, behold,
the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said,
"Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt,
and stay there until I tell you.
Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him."
Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night
and departed for Egypt.
He stayed there until the death of Herod,
that what the Lord had said through the prophet might be fulfilled,
Out of Egypt I called my son.

When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi,
he became furious.
He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity
two years old and under,
in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi.
Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the prophet:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loud lamentation;
Rachel weeping for her children,
and she would not be consoled,
since they were no more.

Thus the question is,

"When we see the outcry at the death

of children today, how could there

not have been an outcry against

Herod in Bethlehem?"

Short Answer: "A change in our values."

Abraham took his son Isaac to be sacrificed to God (Genesis 22:1-19). But before the sacrifice the angel of the Lord stopped him and a Ram was substituted for the sacrifice of his son.

"Far more than we moderns generally realize, human sacrifice was a fact of life among the peoples of the ancient Near  East in tension with whom Israel first achieved cultural self-definition. Israel's renunciation of the practice of human sacrifice took place over a long period of time, during which intermittent reversions to it recurred." (Gil Bailie in Violence Unveiled.)

So while we might presume that after Abraham stopped the human sacrifice of Isaac, people would know not to sacrifice humans. But, as Bailie notes, it continued to occur. For example in 1 Kings 16:3-4 Hiel rebuilds the city of Jericho with his son Abiram sacrificed as he laid the foundation and his youngest son Segub sacrificed at it's gates.

The euphemism of "walk through fire" was standard in the ancient world for child sacrifice. In 2 Kings 16:3-4 Ahaz caused his son to walk through fire. Jeremiah decried the practise (Jer 19:5-6) saying that they ought not no spill the blood of the innocent. King Josiah was one of the bright lights who (2 Kings 23:10) desecrated these places "so that no one could make his son or daughter pass through the fire..."

Prevalent was the notion of the scapegoat where Moses (Leviticus 16:1-28) begins the practise of having one take away the sins of the people. The idea was that the one killed was not innocent, but the one who heroically made life for the others better.

It was into such a world that Jesus was born. It was in such a world that Herod was able to kill all of the male children two or younger.

But then the change came.

As St. Paul tells us, the cross changed everything. There we recognize that the one who died was innocent and we were the culprits who made it happen. With this understanding has come the sense that the death of any innocent is tragic. This is an understanding that, through Christianity, has so influenced the world that even the atheists consider the death of the innocent tragic.

It is in seeing how, in time, the world has been changed so that the death of innocent children is universally decried that we have hope that one day the same universal outcry will apply to the aborted.