With regard to the mlk-sacrifice, both the definition of the word mlk and the nature of the actual sacrifice are still under debate. There was an underworld deity named M-l-k (variously vocalized) in many Mesopotamian and Syro-Palestinian god lists and personal names from the late third millennium BCE on, and there existed an Akkadian term maliku designating shades of the dead or chthonic deities who received funeral offerings in texts from the same time period. However, there is no evidence that either the god or the shades are to be connected to child sacrifice or to the later Phoenician sacrificial term mlk. It is not necessary to assume that, by his nature, a god of the netherworld would receive such a sacrifice, and indeed the god Mlk at Ugarit (possibly pronounced Milku) receives only typical animal offerings (e.g., KTU 1.111). In addition, the later Phoenician or Punic mlk-sacrifice is given to more than one god and never to one called Mlk; for example, to the god Kronos in classical texts, to Baʿl Hammon and Tanit at Carthage and elsewhere in the western Mediterranean, and perhaps to Eshmun in the only Punic mlk text from Palestine (third or second century BCE). It is only in the Bible that human sacrifices are given to a god Molech (or Molek). This may be the result of a confusion on the part of the biblical text between the sacrificial term mlk and the divine designation Mlk, which was perhaps triggered by an antagonistic and rather defamatory view of non-Israelite religions.
It seems most likely that the term mlk/mlkt is a causative nominal form with the pattern maqṭil(at), meaning "thing presented" or "the act of presenting," from the causative of the root ylk (wlk), meaning "to offer, present" (cf. mtnt, "gift," from ntn, "to give," or mṣʾ "place or act of going forth," from yṣʾ, "to go forth"). The mlk-sacrifice is thus not connected to the root mlk, "to rule" (cf. biblical melek, "king"), even if the divine name Mlk may be.
Moreover, there have been new discussions about whether or not the mlk-sacrifice could sometimes actually indicate a human offering. Scholars have tried to distinguish between the sacrifices in the Punic realm and those on the Phoenician mainland. The large cemetery containing the burned bones and ashes of small children at Carthage, as well as the several occurrences of mlk ʾdm (sacrifice of a human) in Punic texts—in contrast to the almost total lack of archaeological and textual evidence in the Palestinian Levant—have led to the understanding of some scholars that there were no human sacrifices in Phoenicia. However, an unpublished basalt stela from İnçirli in southeastern Turkey found in 1993, written in standard Phoenician from the late eighth century BCE, may indicate that mlk-sacrifices of firstborn human sons were made there along with those of sheep and horses (Zuckerman and Kaufman, 1998).
One may still wonder whether mlk ʾdm denotes the literal sacrifice of a human. Some have proposed that the Carthage cemetery may simply contain burials of stillborn or short-lived infants whose bodies were cremated and then placed in an urn and buried. According to this view, the children buried in the special sacred precinct were symbolically "offered" to a deity in hopes for the divine protection or survival of others. Other scholars have suggested that the textual occurrences of mlk ʾdm could but did not necessarily mean the sacrifice of a human, and that the substitution of an animal would often occur, as is the case with, for example, the mlk bʿl (sacrifice in place of an infant) or with the mlk bšr (sacrifice in place of flesh). At any rate, the majority opinion among European scholars is that the immolation of humans may not have existed at all, or that, at best, it was a limited phenomenon in the Phoenician and Punic world. Nevertheless, other scholars tend to argue that human sacrifice played a somewhat essential role in non-Israelite religions. At this point, however, it seems that still more evidence is needed before the mlk-sacrifice is fully understood.
The Specialized Religion of Phoenician Mariners
That Phoenician mariners had a specialized religion is demonstrated by excavations of harbor shrines and ancient shipwrecks, burials of sailors, iconographic representations of seafaring activity, and classical texts. In addition to the gods Baʿl Šamem, Baʿl Malage, and Baʿl Ṣapon mentioned in the treaty between Esarhaddon and the king of Tyre, all of whom seem to be aspects of the weather god, one notes that Libyan Ammon and Baʿl Roʾš ("lord of the promontory") were invoked concerning control of the winds and weather. The goddesses ʾAsherah and Tanit, known mostly from their cults on land, were also believed to help in navigation. Many promontories, islands, and harbors were named after the god Melqart, and, on the basis of the attributes of his Greek counterpart, Herakles, it was probably believed that he was a god of travelers who also conquered sea monsters. Ships were thought to possess protective spirits, sometimes represented on the prow, and archaeologists can isolate promontory shrines that seemed to have served as landmarks for navigation and as indicators of freshwater sources. Maritime votive offerings such as model ships and dedicatory anchors in harbor shrines were presumably offered by sailors.
Recent discussions of the mlk-sacrifice include: J. Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge, 1989), G. C. Heider, The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment (Sheffield, 1985); D. Pardee, "Review of Heider, Cult of Molek," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 49 (1990): 370–372; K. A. D. Smelik, "Moloch, Molech or Molk-Sacrifice? A Reassessment of the Evidence Concerning the Hebrew Term Molekh," Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 9 (1995): 133–192. G. C. Heider, "Molech," in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, edited by Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst, pp. 581–585 (Leiden, 1999); H.-P. Müller, "Mōlek," in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 8, (edited by G. J. Botterweck et al., Grand Rapids, Mich., 1997), pp. 375–388. Otto Eissfeldt's classic article is now reprinted in a bilingual edition by C. González Wagner and L. A. Ruiz Cabrero, El Molk como concepto del sacrificio punico y hebreo y el final del dios Moloch (Madrid, 2002), and in the same volume an article by Edward Lipinski (pp. 141–157) sums up the strongest arguments for the occurrence of actual, nonsymbolic, human mlk-sacrifices. For counterarguments against mlk as a child sacrifice, see M. Gras, P. Rouillard, and J. Teixidor, L'univers phénicien (Paris, 1989).
For a preliminary description of the as-yet unpublished İnçirli Inscription, see Bruce Zuckerman and Stephen Kaufman, "Recording the Stela: First step on the road to decipherment," available from http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/nelc/ stelasite/zuck.html (last updated June 21, 1998). For a brief notice, see H. Shanks, "Who—or what—was Molech? New Phoenician Inscription May Hold Answer," Biblical Archaeology Review 22, no. 4 (1996): 13.
On the specialized religion of Phoenician mariners, see Aaron Jed Brody, "Each Man Cried Out to His God": The Specialized Religion of Canaanite and Phoenician Seafarers (Atlanta, 1998); see also the review by Ignacio Márquez Rowe, Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 97 (2002): 369–372. For an up-to-date edition and detailed commentary of Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess, see now that of J. L. Lightfoot (Oxford, 2003).
For works on the relation between Phoenician religion and the Bible, Albright's Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan is now surpassed by Mark S. Smith's The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2002), and John Day's Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield, 2000). For general matters on Phoenicians, see The Phoenicians, edited by Sabatino Moscati (New York, 1988) and Corinne Bonnet, Melqart: Cultes et mythes de l'Héraclès tyrien en Méditerranée (Leuven, 1988). For the Ugaritic texts (KTU), see now Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz, and Joaquín Sanmartín. The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (KTU) (Münster, 1995, 2nd edition of Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit, Neukirchen, 1976).
This is the complete article, containing 1,333 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
