For a while my father received frequent visits from Jehovah's witnesses. Often he wouldn't answer — he claimed he had learned to recognize the way they rang the bell — but sometimes he would invite them in, offer them tea, and chat with them about the Bible. One story he often brought up was the sacrifice of Isaac. "I cannot — I cannot believe in a God who makes such a monstrous request. If God came to me and told me to sacrifice my daughter to him I would tell him to get lost!" My mother often enough makes the obvious point that God is merely testing Abraham's faith, which does not assuage my father. But he was intrigued by the explanation that the Jehovah's witnesses offered: God had promised to multiply Abraham's seed, so Abraham had to know that God was bluffing. (Of course this explanation doesn't take Ishmael into account.)

I've always been interested in myths about the end of human sacrifice (for example, Iphigenia in Tauris). This is one I read today:

Jupiter demands human sacrifice from Numa Pompilius, Romulus's successor as king of Rome. Specifically, he wants a human head. Numa is shocked and dismayed by the unspeakable request. He thinks long and hard about what he should do. The day for the ceremony comes. The city (or more likely: village of mud huts) is all decked out, the ritual reaches its climax, and Numa offers Jupiter — an enormous onion. Jupiter's reaction? He laughs. He claps Numa on the back. He likes the joke.

James Wood writes, in The Irresponsible Self, that the laughter of the gods is crude and cruel, viz. they laugh at limping Hephaestus, they laugh at Ares and Aphrodite caught in a net in adulterous embrace. Jupiter's laugh in this Roman myth seems a good counterexample with its mixture of shame, appreciation, and forgiveness.