Saturday, February 14, 2026
POSTSCRIPT TO CHILD SACRIFICE, CREATION, AND COSMOLOGY: THE STORY OF THE EPST&!N FILES AS A MT. MORIAH MOMENT
Professor and friend David Fitch read Part 1 of 2 of my blog series here and responded as follows: “Hey bro … this is thick bro … can you do this for me? Can you give me an abstract? One paragraph summarizing the thesis of the post? And three points substantiating it??"
I responded by explaining a few things I'm doing and addressing in my short blog series without being explicit. I figured explaining them to him, in particular, would probably be helpful, as he is an academic. The reason said explanations are here collectively named a “Postscript” should become clear through the course of reading them:
1. Inside / outside. I'm attempting to climb inside the story rather than observe it from outside and above. To actually move through the story of Gen. 22 through the course of reading the blog post / series. Hence imagery in the blog post that intentionally places the reader, and the characters in the story, inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven rather than in a transcendent position above the fray.
Obvious difficulties here:
A. As moderns, we're outsiders to the ANE [Ancient Near East] world, and to the ANE practice of ritual child sacrifice. Reliance on scholarly sources comes in here. In my blog series, I generally minimized that and relegated it to the endnotes.
B. To get inside the story is to give a taste and sense of it. That was my intention in the blog post(s). I gave an intro. But I can't explain the revelation from the jump (as I would in a thesis statement), the key on which the whole story turns. Because, from inside the story, the characters in it don't know the revelation before it happens. That's part of the point of the story - that revelation is required to renounce the world of "our" Babylonian ancestors and to enter into a new world (as articulated in Part 2, here). But that much I did say in the intro.
For clarity, the original intro of Part 1 jumped straight into the news story of collaboration between Steve Bannon and Epst&!n on a film production to clear Epst&!n’s name, followed by a quick summary of three reasons for the importance of framing our public story of the Epst&!n files as one of child sacrifice, three reasons I intended to articulate further in the rest of the coming two blog posts. What the reader would go back and read now is an added and edited intro that came about as a result of being spurred on by Fitch in this conversation with him – said new intro into the difficulty in facing reality followed by its necessity and inevitability if we want to experience life’s goodness, beauty, and truth.
2. My blog post is meant to be for the church rather than for academia. But everything I just said about the inside and outside of a story and its journey had loads of meta, academic mumbo jumbo attached to it, or in the background. And I can't say everything in a blog post.
A. Example - throughout my blog post, I hinted at the modern individual as our idolatrous fantasy as a contextualized extension of the figure of the ancient hero into the modern world. Language in Part 1 of my series that pointed towards the modern individual and his or her territory as a fantasy included “our choices aren't as free as we imagine,” and “we aren't in control of the globe as we imagine.” In Part 1, I also gestured towards the modern individual itself being imaged after Baal / Marduk in the first place.
B. Another example - the figure of the Tower of Babel. Fantastical reaching to and/or descending from the heavens is key here. Again, I can't say everything in a blog post or series, but I definitely hinted at this. I did so primarily with the art and with storied references to or associations with it. The referenced art was William Christenberry’s Dream Building Ensemble and his Portrait, which, taken together, articulate the Babylonian Tower and the modern person as one image taken up into the interwoven modern practices of capitalism, individualism, and racism (the sexism of the sex cult of child sacrifice was around long before modernity). These indicative artistic references, in and of themselves, are related to the goal of "entering inside," of imaging a character inside a story set inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven. With reference to the figure of the Tower of Babel, the image of identifying with life inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven is intended to be compared to having transcended from and above, and having mastered the globe. This is to say that “entering inside” the story is, in my blog post and series, meant to be compared to having reached the top of the Tower, as though having presumed to have completed said Tower. Obviously, that’s not how the script of Gen. 11 goes.
Taking these two sets of images in these two examples together, I'm addressing the modern individual as such. And I'm tying that image of the modern individual to the ancient figure of the Babylonian Tower. To have taken up modern identity itself is to have presumed that the Tower was completed, and that it not only reached the heavens but obtained a vantage point outside them. To be modern is to be meta, to have entered the post-script, to have taken up what Arendt, in The Human Condition describes as an "Archimedean point" outside the globe, with a view of it which is that of its Maker.[1]
3. Because it sounds like it would be helpful to academics, and because I think readers who would care about the content of this postscript already sense or know this, and so for me to say it here is not to kill or ruin it…
The point I'm driving at is that the story of Gen. 22 is told from the vantage point of the ear of Abraham rather than that of the eye of God...
And so, if the original command (in Gen. 22) was a "test" or "trail"...we have to ask whether:
A. the story is told from a transcendent vantage point, under the assumption that there is direct, unmediated relationship between the "command" that God spoke and, in turn, what Abraham heard?
Or rather -
B. the hearing of the command as we have it recorded and handed down to us was how it was heard in the ear of Abraham, who had come from a place where the Master from above is appeased with blood sacrifices of representatives of vanquished enemies in order to obtain divine blessings?
And thus -
B.b. God was bringing Abraham along on a journey from Babylon to another world, and accounting for where Abraham had been to get Abraham to somewhere closer to where God really is?
My implied answer to that question – implied by my very taking up the task of “entering inside” the story in the first place - is precisely why the revelation of the divinity Abraham had encountered as One "who sees and hears" and who also "is seen and heard" is so radical and implies an alternative creation story of a whole other world from the one created or brought into order by Ba'al / Marduk (or by “handmade” idolatry of and in attentive devotion to Ba’al / Marduk). Finnegans Wake is here simply an analogical meta example of such "entering inside," after modenrs had already “exited,” and as articulated and celebrated from inside our Western tradition.
I address all this much more explicitly in my (yet unpublished) book than in my blog post(s), but my book isn't about contextualizing the story of the Epst&!n files in particular. In the blog series, I'm more trying to open closed doors of those trained inside fundamentalism to greater curiosity and wonder. I’m interested in invitation towards asking questions fundamentalists might otherwise not, in movement towards seeing things they might otherwise not - sans too much explicitly academic language. But, from the vantage point of an academic, I'm also interested in doing work to contextualize the ancient story into a contemporary one with which we're all quite familiar.
Of course, all of this is partly to say that “entering inside” is, for us now, itself a difficulty into which we must entrust ourselves if we are to embrace what it means to be human. It not only can be but is likely inevitably a form of suffering endurance for us moderns. To begin to move in this direction is inevitably to make a holy sacrifice of our fantastical idols of transcendence to the one true God of Israel. In both the story of the Epst&!n files and of the sacrifice of Isaac, entrusting ourselves to movement way from fantasies and towards reality appears to us in all of its necessity, however, because the reality of being human is not having transcended but is living inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven. This is also to say, then, that Gen. 22’s story of what happens on Mt. Moriah is a guide whose climactic revelation that - not with any sense of frustrated incompletion but, instead, with wondrous awe - necessarily invites or “commands” us in this inevitable direction. And, in this movement to “inside,” revelation on Mt. Moriah points towards the Incarnation.
I responded by explaining a few things I'm doing and addressing in my short blog series without being explicit. I figured explaining them to him, in particular, would probably be helpful, as he is an academic. The reason said explanations are here collectively named a “Postscript” should become clear through the course of reading them:
1. Inside / outside. I'm attempting to climb inside the story rather than observe it from outside and above. To actually move through the story of Gen. 22 through the course of reading the blog post / series. Hence imagery in the blog post that intentionally places the reader, and the characters in the story, inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven rather than in a transcendent position above the fray.
Obvious difficulties here:
A. As moderns, we're outsiders to the ANE [Ancient Near East] world, and to the ANE practice of ritual child sacrifice. Reliance on scholarly sources comes in here. In my blog series, I generally minimized that and relegated it to the endnotes.
B. To get inside the story is to give a taste and sense of it. That was my intention in the blog post(s). I gave an intro. But I can't explain the revelation from the jump (as I would in a thesis statement), the key on which the whole story turns. Because, from inside the story, the characters in it don't know the revelation before it happens. That's part of the point of the story - that revelation is required to renounce the world of "our" Babylonian ancestors and to enter into a new world (as articulated in Part 2, here). But that much I did say in the intro.
For clarity, the original intro of Part 1 jumped straight into the news story of collaboration between Steve Bannon and Epst&!n on a film production to clear Epst&!n’s name, followed by a quick summary of three reasons for the importance of framing our public story of the Epst&!n files as one of child sacrifice, three reasons I intended to articulate further in the rest of the coming two blog posts. What the reader would go back and read now is an added and edited intro that came about as a result of being spurred on by Fitch in this conversation with him – said new intro into the difficulty in facing reality followed by its necessity and inevitability if we want to experience life’s goodness, beauty, and truth.
2. My blog post is meant to be for the church rather than for academia. But everything I just said about the inside and outside of a story and its journey had loads of meta, academic mumbo jumbo attached to it, or in the background. And I can't say everything in a blog post.
A. Example - throughout my blog post, I hinted at the modern individual as our idolatrous fantasy as a contextualized extension of the figure of the ancient hero into the modern world. Language in Part 1 of my series that pointed towards the modern individual and his or her territory as a fantasy included “our choices aren't as free as we imagine,” and “we aren't in control of the globe as we imagine.” In Part 1, I also gestured towards the modern individual itself being imaged after Baal / Marduk in the first place.
B. Another example - the figure of the Tower of Babel. Fantastical reaching to and/or descending from the heavens is key here. Again, I can't say everything in a blog post or series, but I definitely hinted at this. I did so primarily with the art and with storied references to or associations with it. The referenced art was William Christenberry’s Dream Building Ensemble and his Portrait, which, taken together, articulate the Babylonian Tower and the modern person as one image taken up into the interwoven modern practices of capitalism, individualism, and racism (the sexism of the sex cult of child sacrifice was around long before modernity). These indicative artistic references, in and of themselves, are related to the goal of "entering inside," of imaging a character inside a story set inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven. With reference to the figure of the Tower of Babel, the image of identifying with life inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven is intended to be compared to having transcended from and above, and having mastered the globe. This is to say that “entering inside” the story is, in my blog post and series, meant to be compared to having reached the top of the Tower, as though having presumed to have completed said Tower. Obviously, that’s not how the script of Gen. 11 goes.
Taking these two sets of images in these two examples together, I'm addressing the modern individual as such. And I'm tying that image of the modern individual to the ancient figure of the Babylonian Tower. To have taken up modern identity itself is to have presumed that the Tower was completed, and that it not only reached the heavens but obtained a vantage point outside them. To be modern is to be meta, to have entered the post-script, to have taken up what Arendt, in The Human Condition describes as an "Archimedean point" outside the globe, with a view of it which is that of its Maker.[1]
3. Because it sounds like it would be helpful to academics, and because I think readers who would care about the content of this postscript already sense or know this, and so for me to say it here is not to kill or ruin it…
The point I'm driving at is that the story of Gen. 22 is told from the vantage point of the ear of Abraham rather than that of the eye of God...
And so, if the original command (in Gen. 22) was a "test" or "trail"...we have to ask whether:
A. the story is told from a transcendent vantage point, under the assumption that there is direct, unmediated relationship between the "command" that God spoke and, in turn, what Abraham heard?
Or rather -
B. the hearing of the command as we have it recorded and handed down to us was how it was heard in the ear of Abraham, who had come from a place where the Master from above is appeased with blood sacrifices of representatives of vanquished enemies in order to obtain divine blessings?
And thus -
B.b. God was bringing Abraham along on a journey from Babylon to another world, and accounting for where Abraham had been to get Abraham to somewhere closer to where God really is?
My implied answer to that question – implied by my very taking up the task of “entering inside” the story in the first place - is precisely why the revelation of the divinity Abraham had encountered as One "who sees and hears" and who also "is seen and heard" is so radical and implies an alternative creation story of a whole other world from the one created or brought into order by Ba'al / Marduk (or by “handmade” idolatry of and in attentive devotion to Ba’al / Marduk). Finnegans Wake is here simply an analogical meta example of such "entering inside," after modenrs had already “exited,” and as articulated and celebrated from inside our Western tradition.
I address all this much more explicitly in my (yet unpublished) book than in my blog post(s), but my book isn't about contextualizing the story of the Epst&!n files in particular. In the blog series, I'm more trying to open closed doors of those trained inside fundamentalism to greater curiosity and wonder. I’m interested in invitation towards asking questions fundamentalists might otherwise not, in movement towards seeing things they might otherwise not - sans too much explicitly academic language. But, from the vantage point of an academic, I'm also interested in doing work to contextualize the ancient story into a contemporary one with which we're all quite familiar.
Of course, all of this is partly to say that “entering inside” is, for us now, itself a difficulty into which we must entrust ourselves if we are to embrace what it means to be human. It not only can be but is likely inevitably a form of suffering endurance for us moderns. To begin to move in this direction is inevitably to make a holy sacrifice of our fantastical idols of transcendence to the one true God of Israel. In both the story of the Epst&!n files and of the sacrifice of Isaac, entrusting ourselves to movement way from fantasies and towards reality appears to us in all of its necessity, however, because the reality of being human is not having transcended but is living inside the horizon and under the domus of heaven. This is also to say, then, that Gen. 22’s story of what happens on Mt. Moriah is a guide whose climactic revelation that - not with any sense of frustrated incompletion but, instead, with wondrous awe - necessarily invites or “commands” us in this inevitable direction. And, in this movement to “inside,” revelation on Mt. Moriah points towards the Incarnation.
Endnotes
- Arendt, Hannah, 1998 (2nd Ed.), The Human Condition, pp. 11, 294-296.↩
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