MOLOCH. – Name of a Semitic deity, from the common melekh, “king”; the Septuagint, by rendering II Reg. 23, 10.13 as ὁ Μολόχ, caused the current pronunciation, which never existed in living speech; the Masoretes vocalized Mólekh from the term bōšeth, “ignominy, infamous object”; one must adhere to the pronunciation melekh or to that of the Phoenicians, milk.
In the Old Testament M. is always associated with human sacrifices, particularly of children (Lev. 18, 21; 20, 2-5; I Reg. 11, 7; II Reg. 23, 10; Ier. 32, 35); they were slaughtered (Ez. 16, 21) and then placed upon a grate (tōpheth) to burn, according to the typical Hebrew expression: ha-ābhīr... bā'ēl lam-mōlekh (II Reg. 23, 10) or ha-ābhīr lam-mōlekh (Lev. 18, 21; Ier. 32, 35), or even without the name of the god M., which is understood (Deut. 18, 10; II Reg. 16, 3; 17, 17; 21, 6; Ier. 7, 31; 19, 5; Ez. 16, 21; 20, 26.31; 23, 37; etc.).
It is the Canaanite deity Milk, who appears in the theophoric names of the el-'Amārnah letters; human sacrifices were offered to him, as is attested by recent discoveries, especially at Gezer. Milk has been associated with Melkart (“Melek of the city”) of Tyre, and with Baal-Kammōn, a deity to whom the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, according to the classical authors, sacrificed human victims, especially children. Milk, the national god of the Ammonites, is the same name Milk with mimation.
Recently, O. Eissfeldt attempted to explain M. as a common noun, “a kind of sacrifice,” basing himself on three or four Punic inscriptions from the 3rd century A.D. (I). M. therefore would not be a divinity: in the Bible, the god to whom such a bloody sacrifice was offered is Yahweh. This attempt, exegetically untenable, was directly refuted, as regards the Old Testament, by Fr. A. Bea.