Game of Thrones begins....

[Queequeg]

My recollection is that in Greek drama, the line and file troops were the ones pushing for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter, so at least as a literary trope, it wouldn't necessarily have a negative impact.

Ritualized slaying of the firstborn is pretty important in all non-Jewish West Semitic societies. Carthage did it, and Rome famously flirted with human sacrifice during the worst bits of the Punic Wars.  I think, in a weird way, the shared guilt of having sacrificed Shireen could cement loyalties, and once the power of the Lord of Light is proven you'd have a lot of converts in the army. 

[Zanza]

Ritualized slaying of the firstborn is pretty important in all non-Jewish West Semitic societies. Carthage did it, and Rome famously flirted with human sacrifice during the worst bits of the Punic Wars.  I think, in a weird way, the shared guilt of having sacrificed Shireen could cement loyalties.

Wasn't Abraham supposed to sacrifice Isaac and God only stopped him at the very last moment? That's about as Jewish-West Semitic as you can get.

[Berkut]

My recollection is that in Greek drama, the line and file troops were the ones pushing for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter, so at least as a literary trope, it wouldn't necessarily have a negative impact.

Ritualized slaying of the firstborn is pretty important in all non-Jewish West Semitic societies. Carthage did it, and Rome famously flirted with human sacrifice during the worst bits of the Punic Wars.  I think, in a weird way, the shared guilt of having sacrificed Shireen could cement loyalties, and once the power of the Lord of Light is proven you'd have a lot of converts in the army. 

Especially if it actually works...which presumably it will.

[Queequeg]

Ritualized slaying of the firstborn is pretty important in all non-Jewish West Semitic societies. Carthage did it, and Rome famously flirted with human sacrifice during the worst bits of the Punic Wars.  I think, in a weird way, the shared guilt of having sacrificed Shireen could cement loyalties.

Wasn't Abraham supposed to sacrifice Isaac and God only stopped him at the very last moment? That's about as Jewish-West Semitic as you can get.

Yup yup yup. 

That's one of the reasons people-even Kierkegaard-pointing to that as proof of the essential arbitraryness of the Abrahamic diety always pisses me off.  This is one of the great central Jewish reforms of the shared Western Semitic faith; you don't have to kill your firstborn son when times get tough.   The Jews are WILLING to do this to prove their devotion to HaShem, but HaShem is a way nicer god than Moloch.  It's comparable and contemporaneous with Zoroastrian and Brahminical reactions against shared Indo-Iranian horse and cattle sacrifice and raiding.

[Queequeg]

My recollection is that in Greek drama, the line and file troops were the ones pushing for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter, so at least as a literary trope, it wouldn't necessarily have a negative impact.

Ritualized slaying of the firstborn is pretty important in all non-Jewish West Semitic societies. Carthage did it, and Rome famously flirted with human sacrifice during the worst bits of the Punic Wars.  I think, in a weird way, the shared guilt of having sacrificed Shireen could cement loyalties, and once the power of the Lord of Light is proven you'd have a lot of converts in the army. 

Especially if it actually works...which presumably it will.

Yeah.  Shireen would be less of a victim than a kind of self-made Joan of Arc. I think that'd be the smart/horrifying/interesting way of portraying this, but IDK if they'll do that. 

[Martinus]

Ritualized slaying of the firstborn is pretty important in all non-Jewish West Semitic societies. Carthage did it, and Rome famously flirted with human sacrifice during the worst bits of the Punic Wars.  I think, in a weird way, the shared guilt of having sacrificed Shireen could cement loyalties.

Wasn't Abraham supposed to sacrifice Isaac and God only stopped him at the very last moment? That's about as Jewish-West Semitic as you can get.

Yup yup yup. 

That's one of the reasons people-even Kierkegaard-pointing to that as proof of the essential arbitraryness of the Abrahamic diety always pisses me off.  This is one of the great central Jewish reforms of the shared Western Semitic faith; you don't have to kill your firstborn son when times get tough.   The Jews are WILLING to do this to prove their devotion to HaShem, but HaShem is a way nicer god than Moloch.  It's comparable and contemporaneous with Zoroastrian and Brahminical reactions against shared Indo-Iranian horse and cattle sacrifice and raiding.

Who's HaShem? I have seen IHVH, Elohim, Eheieh, Shaddai Elohai, Adonai and several other names, but not this one.

[Habbaku]

That entire group would desert en masse at such an instance of kinslaying.

I don't know that I expect massive desertions (aside from Davos, the poor bastard). In the show, I don't know if they ever presented Stannis as having any northern contigent to speak of. The non-nothern contigents may not have anywhere else to go in the middle of winter.

Does the "in the books" part that you lopped off mean something different than what I think it means?

[Queequeg]

Don't try to out pedantic me, Marty.  You won't win.

[Martinus]

Don't try to out pedantic me, Marty.  You won't win.

I am just curious. I have not encountered that name of the God of Israel before.

Edit: Googled it. Clever!

By the way, it has been speculated that I-H-V-H (with all the vowels you can fit in between) is very similar to the kind of sound one would make when touching a very highly charged battery made of something as conductive of electricity as a box made of solid gold.

Like, say the Arc of Covenant.

[Queequeg]

HaShem just means "The Name" as I'm sure you know from Google.  Religious Jews will often use "HaShem" instead of any of the names you listed because of a sacred taboo that TBH has probably been around a very, very long time.  I actually didn't meant to sound pretentious, at least consciously, by using it, it's just kind of the name I tend to associate religious Jews describing their own God with. 

[Martinus]

HaShem just means "The Name" as I'm sure you know from Google.  Religious Jews will often use "HaShem" instead of any of the names you listed because of a sacred taboo that TBH has probably been around a very, very long time.  I actually didn't meant to sound pretentious, at least consciously, by using it, it's just kind of the name I tend to associate religious Jews describing their own God with.

Yeah, thanks checked it. I'm not a religious Jew and my knowledge of these names comes more from Western Hermetic Qabbalism so I guess I get a pass.

[Valmy]

Woah you really had never heard Hashem before? But I guess there are no Jews in Poland left to educate you on their ways.

[Martinus]

Woah you really had never heard Hashem before? But I guess there are no Jews in Poland left to educate you on their ways.

I probably had but forgot. 

But yeah, these names I know from reading English language books, not anything in Polish.

[Queequeg]

I got in a multi hour long hilarious argument with some Black Hebrew Israelites (a syncretic Black Supremacist cult that takes a weird hodgepodge of Judaism, racialized American Calvinism and the Nation of Islam and is hilarious) about what "Fake Jews" (meaning Real Jews) call God.  They argued that "Yahweh" was a Yiddish corruption of the "real name" Yahawashi, and that "Fake Jews" worship "HaShem."  I tried to inform them that they were breaking one of the oldest taboos in the history of Judaism by taking Adonai's name in vain like that, and that "Yahweh" was just a natural phonetic evolution of whatever came before it, but you know, they were idiots in a cult.

[Martinus]

I got in a multi hour long hilarious argument with some Black Hebrew Israelites (a syncretic Black Supremacist cult that takes a weird hodgepodge of Judaism, racialized American Calvinism and the Nation of Islam and is hilarious) about what "Fake Jews" (meaning Real Jews) call God.  They argued that "Yahweh" was a Yiddish corruption of the "real name" Yahawashi, and that "Fake Jews" worship "HaShem."  I tried to inform them that they were breaking one of the oldest taboos in the history of Judaism by taking Adonai's name in vain like that, and that "Yahweh" was just a natural phonetic evolution of whatever came before it, but you know, they were idiots in a cult.

Western Qabbalists do not seem to have this kind of concerns, but for the sake of accuracy, most pronounce it Yod-Heh-Vau-Heh as "Yahweh", "Yehowah" and all other versions are all likely to be wrong.