Moloch, Molech, or Molek is a word which appears in the Hebrew Bible several times, primarily in the Book of Leviticus. The Greek Septuagint translates many of these instances as "their king", but maintains the word or name Moloch in others, including one additional time in the Book of Amos where the Hebrew text does not attest the name. The Bible strongly condemns practices that are associated with Moloch, which are heavily implied to include child sacrifice.
Traditionally, the name Moloch has been understood as referring to a Canaanite god. However, since 1935, scholars have speculated that Moloch refers to the sacrifice itself, since the Hebrew word mlk is identical in spelling to a term that means "sacrifice" in the closely related Punic language. This second position has grown increasingly popular, but it remains contested. Among proponents of this second position, controversy continues as to whether the sacrifices were offered to Yahweh or another deity, and whether they were a native Israelite religious custom or a Phoenician import.
Since the medieval period, Moloch has often been portrayed as a bull-headed idol with outstretched hands over a fire; this depiction takes the brief mentions of Moloch in the Bible and combines them with various sources, including ancient accounts of Carthaginian child sacrifice and the legend of the Minotaur.
Beginning in the modern era, "Moloch" has been figuratively used in reference to a power which demands a dire sacrifice. A god Moloch appears in various works of literature and film, such as John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô (1862), Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914), Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955).
Etymology The etymology of Moloch is uncertain: a derivation from the root , which means "to rule", is "widely recognized". Since it was first proposed by Abraham Geiger in 1857, some scholars have argued that the word "Moloch" has been altered by using the vowels of "shame". Other scholars have argued that the name is a qal participle from the same verb. R. M. Kerr criticizes both theories by noting that the name of no other god appears to have been formed from a qal participle, and that Geiger's proposal is "an out-of-date theory which has never received any factual support". Paul Mosca, Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, similarly argued that "the theory that a form would immediately suggest to the reader or hearer the word (rather than or ) is the product of nineteenth century ingenuity, not of Massoretic or pre-Massoretic tendentiousness".
Scholars who do not believe that Moloch represents a deity instead compare the name to inscriptions in the closely related Punic language where the word ( or ) refers to a type of sacrifice, a connection first proposed by Otto Eissfeldt (1935). Eissfeldt himself, following Jean-Baptiste Chabot, connected Punic and Moloch to a Syriac verb meaning "to promise", a theory also supported as "the least problematic solution" by Heath Dewrell (2017). Eissfeldt's proposed meaning included both the act and the object of sacrifice. Scholars such as W. von Soden argue that the term is a nominalized causative form of the verb , meaning "to offer", "present", and thus means "the act of presenting" or "thing presented". Kerr instead derives both the Punic and Hebrew word from the verb , which he proposes meant "to own", "to possess" in Proto-Semitic, only later coming to mean "to rule"; the meaning of Moloch would thus originally have been "present", "gift", and later come to mean "sacrifice".
The spelling "Moloch" follows the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate; the spelling "Molech" or "Molek" follows the Tiberian vocalization of Hebrew, with "Molech" used in the English King James Bible.
Biblical attestations Masoretic Text
The word Moloch (מלך) occurs eight times in the Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew text of the Bible. Five of these are in Leviticus, with one in 1 Kings, one in 2 Kings and another in The Book of Jeremiah. Seven instances include the Hebrew definite article ('the') or have a prepositional form indicating the presence of the definite article. All of these texts condemn Israelites who engage in practices associated with Moloch, and most associate Moloch with the use of children as offerings.
Leviticus repeatedly forbids the practice of offering children to Moloch:
The majority of the Leviticus references come from a single passage of four lines:
In 1 Kings, Solomon is portrayed as introducing the cult of Moloch to Jerusalem:
This is the sole instance of the name Moloch occurring without the definite article in the Masoretic text: it may offer a historical origin of the Moloch cult in the Bible, or it may be a mistake for Milcom, the Ammonite god (thus the reading in some manuscripts of the Septuagint).
In 2 Kings, Moloch is associated with the tophet in the valley of Gehenna when it is destroyed by king Josiah:
The same activity of causing children "to pass over the fire" is mentioned, without reference to Moloch, in numerous other verses of the Bible, such as in Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 12:31, 18:10), 2 Kings (2 Kings 16:3; 17:17; 17:31; 21:6), 2 Chronicles (2 Chronicles 28:3; 33:6), the Book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5) and the Book of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 16:21; 20:26, 31; 23:37).
Lastly, the prophet Jeremiah condemns practices associated with Moloch as showing infidelity to Yahweh:
Given the name's similarity to the Hebrew word "king", scholars have also searched the Masoretic text to find instances of that may be mistakes for Moloch. Most scholars consider only one instance as likely a mistake, in Isaiah:
Septuagint and New Testament The standard text of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, contains the name "Moloch" (Μολόχ) at 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 30:35, as in the Masoretic text, but without an article. Moreover, the Septuagint uses the name Moloch in Amos where it is not found in the Masoretic text:
Additionally, some Greek manuscripts of Zephaniah 1:5 contain the name "Moloch" or "Milcom" rather than the Masoretic text's "their king," the reading also found in the standard Septuagint. Many English translations follow one or the other of these variants, reading either "Moloch" or "Milcom". However, instead of "Moloch", the Septuagint translates the instances of Moloch in Leviticus as "ruler" (), and as "king" () at 1 Kings 11:7.
The Greek version of Amos with Moloch is quoted in the New Testament and accounts for the one occurrence of Moloch there (Acts 7:43).
Theories As a deity
Before 1935, all scholars held that Moloch was a pagan deity, to whom child sacrifice was offered at the Jerusalem tophet. Some modern scholars have proposed that Moloch may be the same god as Milcom, Adad-Milki, or an epithet for Baal.
G. C. Heider and John Day connect Moloch with a deity Mlk attested at Ugarit and Malik attested in Mesopotamia and proposes that he was a god of the underworld, as in Mesopotamia Malik is twice equated with the underworld god Nergal. Day also notes that Isaiah seems to associate Moloch with Sheol. The Ugaritic deity Mlk also appears to be associated with the underworld, and the similarly named Phoenician god Melqart (literally "king of the city") could have underworld associations if "city" is understood to mean "underworld", as proposed by William F. Albright. Heider also argued that there was also an Akkadian term referring to the shades of the dead.
The notion that Moloch is the name of a deity has been challenged for several reasons. Moloch is rarely mentioned in the Bible, is not mentioned at all outside of it, and connections to other deities with similar names are uncertain. Moreover, it is possible that some of the supposed deities named Mlk are epithets for another god, given that mlk can also mean "king". The Israelite rite conforms, on the other hand, to the Punic rite in that both involved the sacrifice of children. None of the proposed gods Moloch could be identified with are associated with human sacrifice, the god Mlk of Ugarit appears to have only received animal sacrifice, and the sacrifice is never offered to a god named Mlk but rather to another deity.
Brian Schmidt argues that the use of Moloch without an article at 1 Kings 11:7 and the use of Moloch as a proper name without an article in the Septuagint may indicate that there was a tradition of a god Moloch when the Bible was originally composed. However, this god may have only existed in the imagination of the composers of the Bible rather than in historical reality.
As a form of sacrifice
In 1935, Otto Eissfeldt proposed, on the basis of Punic inscriptions, that Moloch was a form of sacrifice rather than a deity. Punic inscriptions commonly associate the word with three other words: (lamb), (citizen) and (human being). and never occur in the same description and appear to be interchangeable. Other words that sometimes occur are (flesh). When put together with , these words indicate a "-sacrifice consisting of...". The Biblical term would thus be translated not as "to Moloch", as normally translated, but as "as a molk-sacrifice", a meaning consistent with uses of the Hebrew preposition elsewhere. Bennie Reynolds further argues that Jeremiah's use of Moloch in conjunction with Baal in Jer. 32:35 is parallel to his use of "burnt offering" and Baal in Jeremiah 19:4–5.
The view that Moloch refers to a type of sacrifice was challenged by John Day and George Heider in the 1980s. Day and Heider argued that it was unlikely that biblical commentators had misunderstood an earlier term for a sacrifice as a deity and that Leviticus 20:5's mention of "whoring after Moloch" necessarily implied that Moloch was a god. Day and Heider nevertheless accepted that mlk was a sacrificial term in Punic, but argue that it did not originate in Phoenicia and that it was not brought back to Phoenicia by the Punic diaspora. More recently, Anthony Frendo argues that the Hebrew equivalent to Punic (the root of Punic ) is the verb "to pass over"; in Frendo's view, this means that the Hebrew Moloch is not derived from the same root as Punic .
Since Day's and Heider's objections, a growing number of scholars have come to believe that Moloch refers to the mulk sacrifice rather than a deity. Francesca Stavrakopoulou argues that "because both Heider and Day accept Eissfeldt's interpretation of Phoenician-Punic as a sacrificial term, their positions are at once compromised by the possibility that biblical could well function in a similar way as a technical term for a type of sacrifice". She further argues that "whoring after Moloch" does not need to imply a deity as refers to both the act of sacrificing and the thing sacrificed, allowing an interpretation of "whor[ing] after the mlk-offering". Heath Dewrell argues that the translation of Leviticus 20:5 in the Septuagint, which substitutes "archons, princes" for Moloch, implies that the biblical urtext did not include the phrase "whoring after Moloch". Bennie Reynolds further notes that at least one inscription from Tyre does appear to mention sacrifice (RES 367); therefore Day and Heider are incorrect that the practice is unattested in Canaan (Phoenicia). Reynolds also argues for further parallels. However, Dewrell argues that the inscription is probably a modern forgery based on the unusual layout of the text and linguistic abnormalities, among other reasons.