The Israelites were one Canaanite people among others. The reason they are the main characters in our history books is because of survivorship bias. Other people had just as elaborate myths and legend (and a lot of material were shared among many groups) but their material was lost to history. The Israelites and proto-Israelites that existed around 1000 BC were most likely also sacrificing children to the god Moloch. The story of how Abraham almost sacrificed his son and other hints in the Old Testament indicates as much. The practice of child sacrifice went out of fashion over the centuries and the Israelites revised their holy texts, eventually outlawing child sacrifice. The impetus for the theological change may have been greater contact with cultures that would have been seen as more sophisticated, such as the Greeks and the Achaemenids, whose gods did not require that extreme sacrifices.
>The Israelites and proto-Israelites that existed around 1000 BC were most likely also sacrificing children to the god Moloch. The story of how Abraham almost sacrificed his son and other hints in the Old Testament indicates as much.
In fact, even as late as the Talmud it was explicitly recorded that the whole damn point of the Binding of Isaac story is to give a mythic impetus to the newly-formed Judaic religion to outlaw human sacrifice. Which, yeah, sorta indicates that it wasn't so unthinkable that nobody had to forbid it.
