Exodus 22:29, 'The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me,' immediately follows instructions to offer the produce of harvest and press without delay; Exodus 13:2, 'Consecrate to me all the firstborn; whatever is the first to open the womb among the Israelites, of human beings and animals, is mine,' groups human and animal firstborn under one formula. Taken together, these are read as Yahweh literally demanding the sacrifice of firstborn sons alongside firstborn animals and crops.

This objection requires reading Exodus 22:29 in isolation from its own legal corpus, and the moment it is read in context the case collapses -- not into ambiguity, but into an explicit anti-child-sacrifice provision. The same book, in the same firstborn legislation, mandates redemption (Hebrew *padah*) rather than death: Exodus 13:13, 'Every firstborn donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every firstborn male among your children you shall redeem.' Exodus 34:20 repeats this verbatim later in the same corpus. Exodus 13:15 supplies the rationale explicitly: because the LORD killed the firstborn of Egypt at the Exodus, 'therefore I sacrifice to the LORD every male that first opens the womb, but every firstborn of my sons I redeem' -- tying the whole institution to the Passover memorial of Israel's firstborn being *spared*, not offered. The verb in Exodus 13:2 and 22:29 for the human firstborn is *qadash* ('consecrate,' a status-transfer/ownership term) or the bare *natan* ('give'), never the technical sacrificial vocabulary used of animals elsewhere in Torah (*zabach*, 'slaughter-sacrifice'; *olah*, 'burnt offering'; *hiqrib*, 'bring near/offer'). Torah legal style routinely states a general principle tersely in one place (Exod 22:29) and specifies its operative procedure elsewhere in the same collection (Exod 13; cf. Walter Kaiser's discussion of this pattern in *Hard Sayings of the Old Testament*) -- this is standard ANE and biblical casuistic legal composition, not evidence of contradiction or evolution from a harsher original. The concrete institutional outcome is spelled out later: firstborn Israelite sons were nationally redeemed by the substitution of the tribe of Levi for cultic service (Num 3:11-13, 40-51), with any numerical surplus redeemed by a five-shekel payment (Num 3:46-51; cf. Num 18:16). So 'give to me' cashes out, within the very legislation being cited, as entering divine service through redemption or substitution -- the opposite of literal killing. Cassuto's and Sarna's Exodus commentaries both treat the redemption requirement as intrinsic to, not a later patch on, the firstborn law.

The Torah's firstborn legislation builds mandatory substitution into its very architecture: a lamb for a donkey, a payment or a Levite for a son. This is the Bible's first systematized redemption economy, and it sets the pattern the whole canon later develops -- a ram instead of Isaac (Gen 22:13), a lamb's blood over the Israelite doorposts instead of the firstborn's life (Exod 12), and ultimately Christ as the true firstborn (Col 1:15; Heb 1:6) given for humanity rather than humanity being required to give its firstborn to death. Far from harboring a suppressed child-sacrifice demand, Exodus 13 and 22 are the legal seedbed of substitutionary redemption as a controlling biblical category.