In the Hebrew Bible, Tophet or Topheth (; ; ) is a location in Jerusalem in the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna), where worshipers engaged in a ritual involving "passing a child through the fire", most likely child sacrifice. Traditionally, the sacrifices have been ascribed to a god named Moloch. The Bible condemns and forbids these sacrifices, and the tophet is eventually destroyed by king Josiah, although mentions by the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah suggest that the practices associated with the tophet may have persisted.
Most scholars agree that the ritual performed at the tophet was child sacrifice, and they connect it to similar episodes throughout the Bible and recorded in Phoenicia and Carthage by Hellenistic sources. There is disagreement about whether the sacrifices were offered to a god named "Moloch". Based on Phoenician and Carthaginian inscriptions, a growing number of scholars believe that the word moloch refers to the type of sacrifice rather than a deity. There is currently a dispute as to whether these sacrifices were dedicated to Yahweh rather than a foreign deity.
Archaeologists have applied the term "tophet" to large cemeteries of children found at Carthaginian sites that have traditionally been believed to house sacrificed human children, as described by Hellenistic and biblical sources. This interpretation is controversial: some scholars argue that the tophets may have been children's cemeteries and reject Hellenistic sources as anti-Carthaginian propaganda. Others argue that not all burials in the tophet were sacrifices.
The tophet and its location later became associated with divine punishment in Jewish eschatology.
Etymology There is no consensus on the etymology of tophet, a word which only occurs eight times in the Masoretic Text. The word may be derived from the Aramaic word meaning "hearth", "fireplace", or "roaster", a proposal first made by William Robertson Smith in 1887. Some have suggested that the word has been altered via using the vocalization of "shame". Others derive the word from the Hebrew root "to set (on fire)", cognate with Ugaritic "to set". A new proposal has been made to interpret the term as "place of vow" by Robert M. Kerr.
The Talmud (Eruvin 19a) and Jerome derive the name from a Hebrew verb meaning "to seduce". The historically most significant etymology, followed by both Jewish and Christian exegetes until the modern period, was made by the 11th-century CE rabbi Rashi, who derived the term from Hebrew "drum", claiming that the drums were beaten during the sacrifice to Moloch, deriving his ideas from Plutarch's description of Carthaginian sacrifice. This derivation is, however, morphologically impossible.
Biblical and Levantine references In the Bible
The tophet is attested 8 times in the Hebrew Bible, mostly to designate a place of ritual fire or burning, but sometimes as a place name. The connection to ritual fire is made explicit in , ; and . In 2 Kings, King Josiah The text includes the destruction of the Tophet among Josiah's other removal of "deviant" religious practices from Israel as part of a far reaching religious reform. However, the continued condemnation of both the tophet and related practices by prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel suggests that the practice may have continued after Josiah's reform, with a mention of the tophet by Isaiah suggesting it may have even continued after the Babylonian exile. Prior to Josiah's reform, the ritual of passing a child through the fire is mentioned, without specifying that it took place at the tophet, as having been performed by the Israelite kings Ahaz and Manasseh:
Both kings perform the sacrifices when faced with the prospect of wars. The sacrifices appear to have been to Yahweh, the god of Israel, and to have been performed in the tophet.
The tophet is condemned repeatedly by name in the Book of Jeremiah, and the term is especially associated with that book of the bible. An example is at :
Jeremiah associates the tophet with Baal; however, other sources all associate it with Moloch.
P. Xella argues that no fewer than twenty-five passages in the Hebrew Bible show the Israelites and Canaanites sacrificing their children, including passages in Deuteronomy, (Dt. 12:13, 18:10), Leviticus (Lev. 18:21, 20:2-5), 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Isaiah, Ezra, Psalm 106, and the Book of Job. In , king Mesha of Moab burns his first-born son as an offering while besieged by the Israelites:
This act has been compared with Greco-Roman sources discussing the Phoenicians and Carthaginians engaging in the same or a similar practice in times of danger (see below). It appears to have been performed for the Moabite god Kemosh.
Extrabiblical attestations There is no archaeological evidence for the Tophet at Jerusalem, so that we are reliant on the biblical descriptions to understand it. Archaeology has not yet securely identified any Tophets in the Levant, but there is other evidence for child sacrifice there. Ancient Egyptian inscriptions from the second millennium BCE attest the practice in the Levant. A late 8th-century BCE Phoenician inscription from İncirli in Turkey may indicate that first born sons were sacrificed there along with sheep and horses. The sacrifice of first-born sons in times of crisis appears to be dealt with at length in the inscription, although the precise context is unclear.
Greco-Roman sources also reference child sacrifice, such as an attempt at Tyre to revive a custom of sacrificing a boy during Alexander the Great's Siege of Tyre in 332 BCE, recorded by first century CE Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus. The church historian Eusebius (3rd century CE) quotes from Philo of Byblos's Phoenician history that:
Theories Although a minority of scholars has argued that the tophet ritual described in the Bible was a harmless activity that did not involve sacrificing any children, the majority of scholars agree that the Bible depicts human sacrifice as occurring at the tophet. Modern scholarship has described sacrifice at the tophet as a mulk or mlk (sacrifice). The term appears to derive from a verb meaning "presentation as an offering" from the root "to offer, present" found in Phoenician and Carthaginian inscriptions in the phrases "sacrifice a human", "to sacrifice a citizen", and "sacrifice in place of flesh". Lawrence Stager and Samuel Wolff argue that the term "refers to a live sacrifice of a child or animal".
Modern scholarship debates the identity of the god to whom these sacrifices were directed, with a dispute arising over whether the sacrifices were part of the cult of Yahweh. Tradition identifies the god to whom the sacrifices were offered as Moloch, supposedly an underworld god whose name means "king". The Bible connects the tophet with Moloch in two later texts, 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 32:35. Lindsay Cooper writes in support of this connection: "The location of the Jerusalem tofet outside the city's eastern wall, at the traditional entrance to the netherworld, explicitly connects child sacrifice with the cult of death." However, while some scholars continue to argue the existence of an underworld deity called "M-l-k", there is no evidence to connect such a deity to human sacrifice. Later Phoenician and Punic child-sacrifices called mlk in inscriptions or described by Greco-Roman sources are not associated with these gods. On the basis of the word meaning "to sacrifice" "an increasing number of scholars now take the biblical traditions to attest not to the offering of children in fiery sacrifices to the deity "Molek", but rather to the sacrifice of children as "mlk" offerings to another deity". On the basis of the stories of Abraham and Jephthah offering their children to Yahweh, as well as Micah 6:6–7 and other passages, Francesca Stavrakopoulou argues that the offerings were in fact dedicated to Yahweh rather than to a foreign deity.
Association with punishment The topheth's description as a place of punishment derives in part by the use of the word in , in which Yahweh ignites a large tophet to punish the Assyrians:
The location of the tophet, the valley of Gehenna, subsequently became a place of punishment in the eschatology of Jewish Apocalypticism, something found in the 3rd- or 4th-century BCE Book of Enoch (1 Enoch 26:4; 27:2–3). The Talmud, discussing the passage in Isaiah, states that whoever commits evil will fall there (Eruvin 19a).
Carthage and the western Mediterranean Various Greek and Roman sources describe the Carthaginians as engaging in the practice of sacrificing children by burning as part of their religion. These descriptions were compared to those found in the Hebrew Bible. The ancient descriptions were seemingly confirmed by the discovery in Carthage in 1921 of the so-called "Tophet of Salambô", which contained the urns of cremated children. However, modern historians and archaeologists debate the reality and extent of this practice. Some scholars propose that all remains at the Tophet resulted from sacrifices, whereas others propose that only some do. Whilst scholars generally see the Carthaginians as faithful adherents to the mainland Phoenician religion, others regard them as dissidents and their sacrificial customs as unique innovations.
Archaeological evidence
In Phoenician sites throughout the Western Mediterranean (except in the Iberian Peninsula and Ibiza), archaeology has revealed fields full of buried urns containing the burnt remains of human infants and lambs, covered by carved stone monuments. Archaeologists conventionally refer to these fields as "tophets", after the location mentioned in the Bible. When Carthaginian inscriptions refer to these locations, they use the terms bt (house, temple or sanctuary) or qdš (shrine), not "tophet". Archaeology reveals two "generations" of Punic tophets: those founded by Phoenician colonists between 800 and 400 BCE; and those established under Carthaginian influence (direct or indirect) in North Africa from the 4th century BCE onward.
No Carthaginian literary texts survive that would explain or describe what rituals were performed in connection with such "tophets". Archaeological evidence shows that the remains could consist of human infants or of lambs, often mixed with small portions of other animals, including cows, pigs, fish, birds, and deer. The proportion of lamb to human remains differs by site. At Carthage, 31% of the urns contained lambs; Tharros has 47%. Analysis of the bone fragments provides some information about the remains. In a sample of seventy infants from the tophet at Carthage, 37% were identified as male and 54% as female. The age of the children and whether they had died before they were interred is controversial (see below). The lambs are usually between one and three months old; this might indicate that offerings were made at a specific time following the lambing (February/March and October/November). The bone fragments were subjected to uneven temperatures, indicating they were burnt on an open-air pyre over several hours. The remains were then collected and placed in an urn, sometimes mixing in bones from other infants or lambssuggesting that multiple infants/lambs were burnt on the same pyre. Sometimes jewellery or amulets were added to the urn. The urn was placed in the ground, in holes cut into the bedrock or within boxes made from stone slabs. In some cases a stone monument was set up above the urn. This could take the form of a stele, cippus, or throne, often with figural decoration and an inscription. In a few occasions, a chapel was built as well. Steles are oriented toward the east.