Thanks btw. I wasn’t as familiar with Moloch’s other names. I did some searches on them and found that in a single child cemetery (in Phoenicia) called the Tophet by archaeologists, an estimated 20,000 urns were deposited. That’s quite a few. And that was just one cemetery. In just one region.
The eerie part of it was how the belief in Moloch haunted the region. Phoenicians, Ammonites, Canaanites, and Hebrews. Despite the death penalty for those that worshiped Moloch, sacrificed their children, or even had their children ritually walk through or jump over fire to imitate the ritual.
No matter their “real” religion, when times were hard, they would itch to go back to their blood sacrifices to Moloch. Even today there are traces of it in our culture, descended from the Roman god Saturn, itself based on the Greek deity Cronus. Thus Saturday is the day of Saturn. Makes you wonder about the brass “golden bull” of Wall Street.
Cronus, or as the Carthaginians called it, Ba‘al Hammon, the chief god of Carthage, was their Phoenician gift given to Greece and Rome, before the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. The Romans rebuilt it, and thus it remained until destroyed again by the Muslims in 698 A.D.