Moloch

The name Moloch does not describe a character: it describes an office. Behind it lies the Semitic root m-l-k, «to reign», the same as Hebrew mélek, «king», and the same that stands in Milcom, the national god of the Ammonites. The form «Molek» carried by the Hebrew text is anomalous: it bears the consonants of mélek with the vowels of bóshet, «shame», a device the scribes used to disarm a name without ceasing to write it. The word we read, in other words, reaches us deliberately deformed by those who copied it.

The passages are four and they are brief. Leviticus 18:21 and 20:2-5 forbid making a child «pass through the fire» «to Molek». The Second Book of Kings (23:10) reports that King Josiah defiled the Topheth in the valley of Ben-Hinnom so that no one should do it again. Jeremiah (32:35) repeats the condemnation and adds an awkward detail: it was done at high places consecrated to Baal. In none of the four is the recipient described, nor is he given a myth, a genealogy or a shape.

From there springs a debate still alive. Some read «Molek» as the name of a god, others as the name of the rite: in the Punic inscriptions of Carthage and Sardinia, mlk designates a kind of offering, not the one who receives it. If that reading is right, the Bible would be forbidding a ceremony rather than naming a deity, and Moloch would have been born of an act of reading.

In the Bible, the word tophet names one particular precinct, in the valley of Ben-Hinnom outside Jerusalem. Archaeologists borrowed it for something else: the open-air sanctuaries of Carthage, Motya, Nora and Sulcis, where thousands of urns were buried holding the cremated remains of newborns and lambs, covered by stelae dedicated to the goddess Tanit and to Baal Hammon. The Carthaginian one has been dug since 1921 and remains the largest infant cemetery known from antiquity.

What those urns mean is the second great argument. Some see confirmation of what Greek and Roman authors, hostile to Carthage, reported; others point out that the infant mortality of the age was enough to fill such a precinct, and that a cemetery is not an altar. The formula on the stelae, thanking a vow fulfilled, admits both readings. What no excavation has ever turned up is a bronze statue with a furnace inside.

Because that image (the metal colossus with a bull's head, the arms sloping over the fire, the child sliding into the red-hot belly, the drums that cover the cry) is neither Canaanite nor Phoenician: it is medieval. Diodorus Siculus, in the first century BC, describes a bronze Cronus at Carthage whose hands tipped the offering into a burning pit, with no animal head and no chambers. The rest is added by twelfth-century Jewish commentators, Rashi on Jeremiah 7:31 and the compilation of the Yalkut Shimoni, who imagine a hollow idol of seven compartments, a calf's face and priests with timbrels. The detail of the drums is a pun: tuppim, «tambourines», sounds like tophet. Fifteen hundred years separate the forbidden rite from the machine everybody remembers.

It is worth saying early, because it contradicts what one usually reads: Moloch is not among the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, does not appear in Weyer's Pseudomonarchia daemonum nor in the Key of Solomon, and governs no circle of Hell, because the circles are Dante's and Dante does not mention him. His demonic career was not made by the grimoires: it was made by literature.

The leap is taken by John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667). There Moloch heads the catalogue of fallen gods as a «horrid king besmear'd with blood of human sacrifice», and he is the first to speak in the council of Pandemonium, where he argues for open war against Heaven on a desperate ground: if they cannot win, let their ruin at least trouble the enemy. Milton paints him strong and short of wit, the fiercest of the spirits that fought above and the worst counsellor among them. That characterisation, and no manual of magic, is what fixes Moloch as a character.

The portrait that circulates today comes later. Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire infernal (1818) enrols him among the infernal princes, and the illustrated edition of 1863 gives him Louis Le Breton's plate: an enthroned being with a calf's head and open arms, fusing the idol of the medieval commentators with Milton's demon. It is the same operation seen in other entries of this catalogue: a nineteenth-century drawing becomes, for the public, more real than the four verses that started everything.

The name outlived its origin and changed trades. In the twentieth century it stopped designating a god and came to designate a mechanism: any system that demands young lives in exchange for prosperity. The image that fixes that sense comes from silent cinema. In Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang shows Freder watching the machine that devours workers turn, before his eyes, into a stepped idol with open jaws up which the men who feed it climb in file; the film names it on screen. Thirty years later, Allen Ginsberg builds the second part of Howl (1956) by repeating the name like a litany against the city, the factory and money.

Since then it is used that way, and almost always without recalling where it came from: in economics, in criticism of technology and in debates about collective risk, «Moloch» names the trap in which everyone gives up something valuable because no one can afford to be the only one who does not. It is a figurative use which, curiously, resembles rather closely what the forbidden rite meant: handing over what you love most to secure the harvest or the city.

The archaeological question remains, and it has not closed. Every campaign in the Phoenician-Punic tophets reopens the matter of whether those urns prove an institutional sacrifice or an infant cemetery, and with it the matter of how much credit is owed to what his enemies wrote. Moloch is, in that sense, a textbook case: almost everything believed about him comes from those who wanted his cult ended.