The 9th Commandment: Moral Panic, Human Sacrifice, and the Evil Within Us All

In this article, I explore the poisonous and ubiquitous spirit of the false witness. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” Exodus 20:16. YHWH’s Law provides protection from false witnesses. First, it takes two or three witnesses to accuse a person. One witness is not sufficient in a court of Biblical Law. Second, if a witness is found to be a false accuser, then his punishment is the same as the punishment he wished to mete out to his neighbor. Nevertheless, the problem of false accusations has always been a common one, as evidenced by history, and the number of words devoted to it in the Bible. Why is the false witness such a pervasive problem?

In many cases, a false accuser has something personal to gain by bearing false witness. Greed for gain is generally easy to discern. In other instances, the false accusation is driven by fear. This is usually a bit trickier to deal with because it is often not subject to rational thought. It is the combination of rational greed and irrational fear which makes the spirit of the false witness so dangerous. This spirit is especially dangerous to free and independent people, who have much to lose. But it can also be used to torment less fortunate people, and keep them from progressing to higher levels of freedom.

Moral Panic

The Wikipedia article, as of August 18, on “Moral Panic” defines it as: “a reaction by a group of people based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society.”

The most notable historical moral panics were the infamous witch hunts. Up to 50,000 people were accused, convicted, and executed with little or no evidence, often only a forced confession (and often not even that). Accusations were fanciful. People were accused of flying around on broomsticks. Most victims were women, though men met their fate as well.

Political purges might be grouped with moral panics as well. The Great Purge of Stalinism claimed up to two million victims. They were largely suspected of being Anti-Communists, conspiring with the Western Capitalists. Of course, the Western Capitalists had their own purges. The McCarthy era in America persecuted thousands of suspected communists. According to this CNN article, the South Korean government in Seoul executed up to 100,000 suspected communists or communist sympathizers around the time of the Korean War. Another famous political purge was the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, which claimed up to 40,000 victims.

Another important moral panic with various rationales including political, was the Nazi Holocaust (which has its share of revisionists and conspiracy theorists). Up to 11,000,000 Jews, Slavs, Roma, disabled or mentally ill, gay men, freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political activists, and prisoners of war lost their lives.

A more recent moral panic was based on the proposition that Satanists were kidnapping, torturing, and sexually abusing women and children in their rituals. Satanic Ritual Abuse has been generally discredited. Some of the current victims of the latest moral panic are accused pedophiles and child molesters. At times, they seem to be jumping out from behind every tree and from every dark corner. Also in the last few years in the United States there has been widespread fear of terrorists.

Of course, if you kill or imprison thousands or millions of people, you are bound to snag a few who actually deserved it. The problem is that casting a wide net endangers thousands or millions who are innocent (often the vast majority).

In most of the historical panics and purges, there have been no shortage of false witnesses. Often there are at least the two or three required by the Law. And in many of the cases, these false witnesses were not malicious. They were simply scared silly about the prospect of undesirables in their midst.

Sacrificial Offerings

YHWH’s Law prescribes animal sacrifices in a variety of circumstances. The reasons for this are numerous. They prepared the Israelites minds (or were supposed to) for the ultimate sacrifice that Yashuah would make on their behalf. They provided the food allowance for the priests who kept the oracles of YHWH. They also provided a sort of “economy” for lesser sins. The greater sins, which brought the death penalty, were equal opportunity sins. You could only commit the sin once. That was it. Then you were dead. It didn’t matter whether you were rich or poor, strong or weak. Everyone got the same one chance. On the other hand, lesser sins which did not bring the death penalty, could be committed more frequently by wealthier people who could afford to make more sacrifices for their sins.

This brings to mind an old joke about the person who visited the seedy side of town and learned that the wages of sin was… about $50. I don’t want to suggest that any sin is good. YHWH forbid. But in economic terminology, many sins would be called a “superior good.” That simply means that as incomes go up, the demand for sins goes up proportionately. Other sins would be called “inferior goods.” That means that as incomes go up, the demand for these sins goes down. An example of a “superior good” sin would be greed and covetousness. In modern criminal terminology, we might think of “white-collar crime.” An example of an “inferior good” sin would be burglary. As income goes down, people might steal from their neighbors to make up the difference. Another would be drunkenness. Low incomes can bring depression leading to drinking alcohol (which can be made at home fairly inexpensively). As the Scripture says, a little wine for the poor person to forget his poverty. But a little wine sometimes becomes a barrel.

So the “economy” of sin offerings tells us that some sins are worse than others, because they require more expensive sacrifices. In this economy, poor people don’t commit any sins because they can’t afford to. Rich people commit their sins of choice, paying a toll each time. Eventually, they become poor from making so many offerings, then they can’t afford to sin any more either. The general lesson is simple. Sin will make you poor. You can pontificate from a pulpit till you are blue in the face trying to make people stop sinning. But if you really want to stop them, then put a tax on it. This is what the law of sacrificial offerings is largely about.

YHWH also prescribed thank offerings and tithes. These were to show our appreciation for the fact that everything we have comes from YHWH, and nothing exists in the earth but what He created.

Human Sacrifice

Human sacrifice generally refers to the ritual killing of a human being in order to appease some chosen deity. Historically, human sacrifice was often motivated by fear. The gods were angry. They would cause grief if they were not pacified through the offering of sacrifices. The purer and more innocent the sacrifice, the more powerful was its expected effect.

Human sacrifices served a secondary purpose. They were a way of eliminating undesirable people from the society. Much as a horticulturalist would pull out all plants not meeting his standards, the priests and judges of society would pull out all the people who did not live up to the community standards, and offer them as sacrifices to their gods. Thus they could get rid of criminals, war prisoners, extra slaves, and anyone else they were tired of.

You can think of this like grading on a curve. If the leaders decided they wanted to sacrifice 1% of their population, they might look for the 1% that is performing most poorly by some chosen criteria. If you didn’t want to be the one sacrificed, then you’d best point out some other sucker who is just a little bit worse than you are. Don’t outrun the bear. Outrun the other person. Once the decision to eliminate a percentage of the population has been made, it is easy for moral panic to set in as people scramble to decide who will be sacrificed and why, and try to make sure that it is not themselves in the hot seat.

Analogs to Human Sacrifice

Human sacrifices were generally offerings made to the gods in a quid pro quo transaction to obtain some type of favor from the gods. Often they were made to avert natural disasters, thought to be caused by the anger of the gods.

Capital punishment often has an ostensibly more secular motive, and indeed the stated purpose is often to remove people from society who are a dangerous threat to their neighbors. But sometimes motivating these executions is a theory of eugenics which supposes that executing criminals will prevent their genes from being passed on and thereby, hopefully, gradually, removing the criminal genes from the population. This is an unpopular thing to state publicly, and so it often goes unsaid. Finally, capital punishment acts as a deterrent to other people who might be thinking of committing similar crimes. In all cases however, an underlying motive is the desire to increase the quality of life in the society by sacrificing people who might disturb that desired quality.

Incarceration in the modern world is viewed as a softer alternative to capital punishment, but with many of the same goals and motivations. The undesirables are removed from society, generally not allowed to breed, and the society goes on blissfully without them. Some are kept in prison for life, others are kept a short while and given another chance. Incarceration has been referred to as “civil death,” especially for felony crimes. The prisoner loses all of his civil rights and becomes little more than a slave in terms of freedoms. Again we see the prisoner “sacrificed” for the good of the society.

Another form of “sacrificial death” is the assignment of a stigma, a pariah status, to an individual or group of people. Labeling people “sex offenders,” for instance, makes them vagabonds in their own land. In many cases they would be better off dead than living as society’s “untouchables.”

Sacrificed Groups in History

In ancient Egypt and at other times and places, retainer sacrifices provided an important deceased person with companions in the afterlife. Servants and wives of kings or high officials were sacrificed and buried with their masters.

In Phoenicia and other ancient nations, children and infants were sacrificed to gain favor from the gods. On the one hand, children being innocent would be a highly valued offering. On the other hand, children being dependent were perhaps considered an expendable sacrifice whose absence would not inconvenience the society and who could be replaced (more easily than a king, for instance).

In Ancient Rome and other places, prisoners of war, especially high-ranking prisoners, were sacrificed to the war god. Executing prisoners of war made sense, as they were likely to be a serious security risk if they were allowed to live. The same was true of convicted criminals. Like every other part of life at the time, the executions were cloaked in religious ritual.

The secular sacrificial practice of capital punishment provides more examples. Groups commonly sacrificed include political dissenters and criminals. These include murderers, traitors, spies, rapists, adulterers, sodomites, apostates, drug and human traffickers, as well as cowards and mutineers. By sacrificing these members of society, the remaining society is believed to be made stronger and better. For examples of capital punishment in the Bible, see this article.

During the middle ages, apostates were sacrificed by the Catholic Church. After the Protestant Reformation, the Catholics sacrificed Protestants. And vise versa. Wars are a way to protect the society from the influences of other societies. In the 20th century, capitalists were sacrificed in communist countries, and communists were sacrificed (at least symbolically through imprisonment), in the capitalist United States. Groups sacrificed by incarceration or shunning have included racial groups, religious groups, drug users and dealers, pedophiles, and child abusers.

The False Witness Revisited: The Evil Within Us All

Throughout history, societies have “sacrificed” certain percentages of their population (and enemy populations) in an effort to improve the luck of the remaining population. Each society chooses what it considers to be an “optimal” level of sacrifice. Perhaps societies with greater daily uncertainty adopt higher levels, while societies with more stability accept lower levels. At the extremes, a stable society may have a zero percent rate of sacrifice, while an unstable society may end up sacrificing nearly 100% of their population. The limit changes if the society favors incarceration over execution. The free population has a finite ability to financially support a population of prisoners. The United States has the highest reported rate of incarceration with about 0.75% of the population in prison, and another 2.3% on probation or parole. Sacrificing significantly higher numbers of people than this would require either execution (to reduce the tax demand) or higher taxation (to increase the tax supply).

Whether the prison system actually benefits the nation is a subject of violent controversy and debate. There is no provision in Biblical Law for prisons. Crimes are dealt with swiftly– either by payment of money, or corporal punishment, or capital punishment. There is nothing in the Law comparable to criminal punishments lasting for years. Nevertheless, putting more people behind bars, and putting them there for longer periods of time, has been a winning strategy for politicians for decades. Why is this?

Insecure people experiencing instability who don’t want to take responsibility for their own circumstances, will seek to blame others for their misfortune. Conspiracy theorists will blame international cabals for their own inability to excel in life. Average people experiencing moral panic will take a few stories of kidnap, murder, and rape, even if those stories come from thousands of miles away, as explanation for their own feelings of insecurity and instability. If only those bad people weren’t out there, walking on our streets, we could all be safe. They say.

What is the result of this fear and panic? It is wagging fingers at the people we fear. And when you point a finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you. I am a reputable local vendor of tuxedo and suit rentals. Surely I am not as bad as the serial killer stalking prostitutes in his spare time. But wait. I might have rented him the suit that he wore to his job interview, helping him to get the job where he earned the money that he used to buy the car that he picked up the prostitutes in. Sound absurd? Try this one. Through a seemingly innocuous act of gossip, I may inadvertently damage the reputation of a person, who then becomes so distraught that he kills himself. Closer to home? None of us is perfect, according to Scripture. It is true that some sins carry heavier penalties under the Law. But even lesser sins can have heavy consequences for someone else, and we may never know what those consequences are. So pointing our fingers at “grievous sinners” and patting ourselves on the back for only committing “minor sins” is not only hypocritical, it is potentially dangerous to ourselves and society.

When we witness someone committing a sin requiring punishment, it is our duty to bear true witness against that person. With two or three witnesses, a matter is established, and justice is done. But in a society suffering from moral panic, many people adopt a “better safe than sorry” approach, and on the whole would rather lock up or execute innocent people, than to risk letting guilty people go free. Some people take this so far, that they bear false witness. Sometimes they aren’t even aware that their witness is false. Either they fully believe it to be true, or they suspect it so strongly that they blur the distinction between what they suspect and what they actually see. They may even believe that they saw a woman flying over a field riding on a broom.

Conclusion

When a society decides to sacrifice a certain percentage of its population, it will grade its citizens on a curve. It will take a certain number of the most undesirable people, and eliminate them. In the United States, we rely on the willingness of people to report their neighbors for real or imagined transgressions, in order to fulfill this elimination process. When we are afraid of awful consequences, either natural or supernatural, for allowing unclean people in our midst, we become willing to turn in our neighbors based on mere suspicion (better safe than sorry). And finally, if we know that a certain number of people are going to be sacrificed, then in order to secure our own place in the world, we have to ensure that someone else gets chosen rather than ourselves. We do this by nominating them before they have a chance to nominate us. This is the evil within all of us. The twin evils of fear and greed. Depending on your persuasion, it is not the corrupt police state, or the corrupt child protective services, or the drug enforcement agency, that is your true enemy. It is the evil within, that causes people to nominate their neighbors to be sacrificed.