Modern Judeachristianity is clearly opposed to human sacrifice. However, the case is less clear for the ancient Hebrews. A few bits of text in the bible seems to point to an approval for human sacrifice among the early Hebrews. Most clear is 2 Samuel 21. Let me quote a few relevant bits:
21:8 But the king took the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bare unto Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth; and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite:
21:9 And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the LORD: and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley harvest.
21:13 And he brought up from thence the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son; and they gathered the bones of them that were hanged.
21:14 And the bones of Saul and Jonathan his son buried they in the country of Benjamin in Zelah, in the sepulchre of Kish his father: and they performed all that the king commanded. And after that God was intreated for the land.
Now there's not necessarily archeological evidence for David existing as described in the bible and this specific event didn't necessarily happen. But the attitude of the early Hebrews might have been that human sacrifice was acceptable in some circumstances. Regardless, I don't feel the bible gives enough evidence to decide one way or another. It has been too heavily edited over years and is not necessarily reliable.
I was wondering is there any archeological evidence for human sacrifice among the early Hebrews or the Canaanites?
You may want to check out AskHistorians Podcast 074 - Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East with /u/koine_lingua. It came out a little under a month ago and touched on this topic along with sacrifice in general. I can't remember too much detail unfortunately, but the Binding of Isaac was brought up as potentially having gone through different versions over time.
So, a few quick things:
First, that's not really a passage people associate with child sacrifice as far as the Bible is concerned. You'll want things like Genesis 22 or Micah 6 along with the pertinent legal codes and stuff from Ezekiel.
EDIT: So, I definitely would have liked to have seen more specificity on the biblical stuff (and, really, the Levantine stuff more broadly) in the second half of the cast. As a specialist, I was able to follow along and fill in a lot of the gaps that were left open over the course of those last 25 minutes or so. For someone not versed in that material, I think it would have been difficult to follow. I've never really heard of Genesis 22 being interpreted as the origin of animal instead of human sacrifice, so I'm not sure where /u/koine_lingua got that from. I'd be happy to see some secondary lit on that, though. I should note, however, that I'm very skeptical about interpreting the Aqedah (pronounced ah-kay-DAH) in that manner. Later interpreters that I've read (Targums, Syriac, etc.) don't read the text like that and, instead, ask questions about where the ram comes from, where the thicket comes from where Abraham saw the ram, many of them connect it to Jesus, of course.
Micah 6:6-8 is indispensable in any conversation about this stuff. Even though what the prophet is ultimately saying is that sacrifices aren't the point, the rhetoric presupposes that each form of sacrifice listed is a legitimate form of Yahwistic worship. The list of sacrifices increases exponentially (rivers of oil, countless sheep, etc.) and culminates with sacrifice of the first born. Given that Micah is likely one of the older prophetic books, I'm inclined to see some solid reflection of historical reality here.
It's vital to remember, too, that any discussion of TEXTUAL remains must be weighed against archaeological data. This was aptly noted in the podcast. However, what I found a little lacking was an emphasis on the fact that the biblical text is not only equivocal, it is only representative, really, of the voices of social elites. That is to say, because literacy rates were so low in the Iron Age, it was only elite persons who would have been trained to read/write. This means that the people writing early layers of biblical texts had a very biased view and, likely, a generally antagonistic view of more popular forms of religion. Texts like Deuteronomy are thoroughly laced with this kind of ideology--however, your garden variety Shmuel wouldn't have access to Deuteronomy (or, perhaps even know that Deuteronomy had been written!).
See more in my follow up comment below.
Second, I have some thoughts in response to /u/koine_lingua's podcast that I'll come back to the comment and edit in. He seems to ride the fence a little during the cast (although I haven't listened to the whole section on child sacrifice yet!).
The mulk sacrifices found by Larry Stager at Carthage are telling (and inform on how to interpret "Molech" in the Hebrew Bible--spoiler alert, he's not a deity).
A few quick hits on scholarship:
Jon D. Levenson, Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son
Heath Dewrell's Johns Hopkins dissertation on the topic
I'm convinced at this point that child sacrifice was happening (or, at least such a concern to biblical authors that they felt compelled to include literary legislation prohibiting the practice). Textual evidence is difficult because it only represents a slice of the time period and not the popular aspects of religion or religious practices.
I'll come back to this when I'm not on mobile.