Mayday Notes Sacrificing your Son According to George Frazer in The Golden Bough (1922): 'Among the Semites of Western Asia the king, in a time of national danger, sometimes gave his own son to die as a sacrifice for his people. He quotes Philo of Byblus, in his work on the Jews, as saying: ‘It was an ancient custom in a crisis of great danger that the ruler of a city or nation should give his beloved son to die for the whole people, as a ransom offered to the avenging demons; and the children thus offered were slain with mystic rites. So Cronus, whom the Phoenicians call Israel, being king of the land and having an onlybegotten son called Jeoud (for in the Phoenician tongue Jeoud signifies ‘only begotten’), dressed him in royal robes and sacrificed him upon an altar in a time of war, when the country was in great danger from the enemy.’ In 2 Kings 3 we have the story of the king of Moab, who sacrificed his son to stave off defeat in battle by Israel and it worked. ‘Now Mesha King of Moab was a sheep breeder and he had to deliver annually to the king of Israel a hundred thousand lambs, and the wool of a hundred thousand rams.’ When Moab rebels against this heavy tribute, King Jehoram of Israel, together with Jehosaphat of Judah and the king of Edom, march against him. At the end of the story: ‘When the king of Moab saw that the battle was going against him, he took with him seven hundred swordsmen to break through, opposite the king of Edom, but they could not. Then he took his eldest son who was to reign in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there came great wrath upon Israel; and they withdrew from him and returned to their own land.’ By sacrificing his son, the king saved his people.
Children as Property ‘Some fathers cannot recognise their children other than as extensions of themselves,’ Deborah Orr writes in a report on child-murder-father-suicide cases (Independent, July 16 2002). She quotes a string of cases in which men have killed themselves and their children. One father left a note for his estranged wife: ‘I am taking mine with me.’ Child-murderparental-suicide cases almost always involve the father.
Sometimes, she says, it happens because when the father becomes suicidal, he cannot bear to leave his children, and his bleak world view leads him to believe the world is too hostile a place for them. Sometimes he kills his children as an act of vengeance on his wife.
Other fathers kill themselves and their children when they get into financial difficulties. Then they are driven by ‘an inverted wish to protect them’ and their desire to be old-fashioned breadwinners. They are victims of their own exacting expectations of what a father should do for his family. Their attachment to their children reaches the point where they don’t understand where their own identities end and their children’s identities begin. Orr concludes: ‘There is huge insecurity and confusion among fathers in the late-capitalist, postfeminist West about what it is to be a man.’ Men Muck in More On the other hand, writing in the Daily Telegraph in June 2008, Richard Savill reports that modern fathers are older, more often unmarried and more domesticated than they were thirty years ago. In 1978 fathers spent an average of 46 minutes a week doing housework and cooked two meals a week. Now the average father spends four hours and 13 minutes per week on housework and cooks four nights out of seven. Today only half of fathers get married before having their first child, whereas 78% were married in the 1970s. In 1978 men’s average age at marriage was: 23; age at having first baby: 24. In 2008 men’s average age at marriage was: 26; age at having first baby: 27.
Savill reports: ‘A spokesman for Debenhams, which carried out the poll, said: “Despite having children later in life, men seem to muck in more nowadays by cooking, cleaning and helping out around the home.
It is also now quite the norm to become a dad out of wedlock too. The trend has obviously been sparked by more couples choosing to live together before marriage as well the rising cost of weddings.