HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does the Wisdom of Solomon attest the giant-cult's human sacrifice and cannibalism?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the proof-text genuinely forges De Young's chain: a single Second Temple Jewish book, the Wisdom of Solomon, characterizes the Canaanite ("old inhabitants of thy holy land") cult as at once idolatry, child-sacrifice, and cannibalism, and does so in one breath at Wisdom 12:3–6 ("merciless murderers of children… devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood"). The one precision to flag is a citation point, not a defeater: the man-eating clause is specifically 12:5, not the better-known 14:23 idolatry-list (which supplies child-sacrifice and "secret ceremonies" but not cannibalism) · advanced by Fr. Stephen De Young

Related arguments: the dead giants' spirits — see also the unclean spirits as the dead Nephilim, and 1 Peter 3:19 — the "spirits in prison".

Here the sub-claim is a proof-text: De Young rests his picture of the giant-clans' "ongoing ritual life" — human sacrifice that shades into cannibalism — on "the book of Wisdom, the Wisdom of Solomon." The question is narrow and checkable: does the text say what he says it says, and where exactly? (The Wisdom of Solomon also appears on the timeline in its own right as a Second Temple witness to the giants and the cult of the dead; this page weighs only De Young's use of it for the sacrifice-and-cannibalism chain.)

The claim

In the Tucker Carlson interview De Young argues that a people is constituted not by genetics but by ritual — "participating in their initiation rituals" and "the ongoing ritual life of the community" — and that for the pagan giant-clans that ongoing ritual life is the damning part. His scriptural anchor for it is the Wisdom of Solomon:

according to the book of wisdom — or the Wisdom of Solomon … makes this explicit. Other texts outside of the scriptures make this explicit, that the ongoing ritual life of these people involved human sacrifice, and human sacrifice involved cannibalism.

— Fr. Stephen De Young, Tucker Carlson Show, "Young giants," 2026.¹ The asserted chain has three links — idolatrous worship → human (child) sacrifice → cannibalism — and the whole of it is said to be "explicit" in the Wisdom of Solomon. That is the claim this page tests.

Who advances it

The proponent here is De Young, but the reading is not idiosyncratic: that the Hellenistic-Jewish idolatry-polemic of Wisdom 11–15 paints the Canaanites as practitioners of child-sacrifice and ritual man-eating is the plain sense of the text and the standard reading of the passage. De Young's own move is simply to enlist it as the Second Temple witness to his "giant-clans' ongoing ritual life," distinct from the 1 Enoch 7 strand (the giants who "devoured mankind") that he cites elsewhere on his page for the same motif from a different source.²

The evidence for — and the text says it, in one breath

The decisive passage is the apostrophe to God over "those old inhabitants of thy holy land" — the Canaanites — in Wisdom 12. It stacks the three links into a single indictment:

For it was thy will to destroy by the hands of our fathers both those old inhabitants of thy holy land, whom thou hatedst for doing most odious works of witchcrafts, and wicked sacrifices; and also those merciless murderers of children, and devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood, with their priests out of the midst of their idolatrous crew… (Wisdom 12:4–6, KJV/Apocrypha)

— Wisdom of Solomon 12:3–6.³ This is as direct a proof-text as De Young's chain could want: in one sentence the Canaanite cult is "wicked sacrifices" (idolatrous worship), "merciless murderers of children" (child-sacrifice), and "devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood" (cannibalism) — exactly the idolatry-that-is-at-once-child-killing-and- man-eating he describes, and named of the very inhabitants of Canaan whom the conquest targets.

The book's great idolatry-discourse repeats the middle link a chapter later, in the list of what idolaters do:

For whilst they slew their children in sacrifices, or used secret ceremonies, or made revellings of strange rites; … they kept neither lives nor marriages any longer undefiled… (Wisdom 14:23–24, KJV/Apocrypha)

— Wisdom of Solomon 14:23, in the discourse that frames idol-worship as "the beginning, the cause, and the end, of all evil" (14:27).⁴ So the "idolatry → child-sacrifice" link is doubly attested (12:5 and 14:23), and idolatry is explicitly made the root of the whole complex.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The reference holds, and unusually directly. Most "the Bible says X" proof-texts need a chain of inference; this one does not. Wisdom 12:3–6 forges all three of De Young's links in a single sentence, predicated of the Canaanites by name, and 14:23/14:27 independently confirms the idolatry→child-sacrifice spine. The cannibalism link in particular — usually the hardest to source — is present in so many words ("devourers of man's flesh… feasts of blood"). As a Second Temple Jewish witness to how the tradition construed the pagan cult's "ongoing ritual life," the text bears the weight he puts on it.

What is imprecise — one citation point. The cannibalism clause is specifically Wisdom 12:5, not the more frequently cited 14:23 list. The 14:23 catalogue gives child-sacrifice and "secret ceremonies" but not man-eating; so the full idolatry→sacrifice→cannibalism chain rests on chapter 12, and a reader sent only to 14:23 would not find the cannibalism. De Young gestures at "the Wisdom of Solomon" as a whole rather than to 12:5, which is why the precise locus is worth pinning. This is a sharpening of the citation, not a correction of the claim.

What to bear in mind — genre. Wisdom 11–15 is a Hellenistic-Jewish polemic against idolatry, not a forensic ethnography; it characterizes the Canaanite cult from the standpoint of its Jewish condemners. That is, in fact, exactly what De Young's argument needs — his point is about the tradition's reading of the pagan ritual life, and Wisdom is a witness to that reading — so the genre is no objection to his use. (It bears noting only that the independent historicity of Canaanite/Phoenician child-sacrifice is itself well-supported archaeologically — the Carthaginian tophet, the mlk offerings — whereas ritual cannibalism is the more polemically colored element; but that is a question about the underlying history, not about whether Wisdom says what De Young says it says.)⁵

Assessment

Sound. De Young's proof-text is real and to the point. The Wisdom of Solomon does forge his chain — naming the Canaanites' "wicked sacrifices," their being "merciless murderers of children," and their being "devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood" in one breath at 12:3–6, with the idolatry→child-sacrifice spine restated at 14:23 and idolatry declared the root of all evil at 14:27. The lone qualification is a matter of precision rather than substance: the cannibalism element rests specifically on Wisdom 12:5, not the 14:23 idolatry-list, so the citation should point to chapter 12 for the man-eating. The text is a Second Temple polemical characterization, which is precisely the kind of witness his argument invokes (to the tradition's view of the cult, not a neutral history); stated as "the Wisdom of Solomon attests that the Canaanite cult's ongoing ritual life joined idolatry, child-sacrifice, and cannibalism," the claim is true and well-sourced. Independent of De Young, this is also the Wisdom of Solomon's own contribution on the timeline as a witness to the giants and the cult of the dead.

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