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[quote=Anonymous]Life was hard on Canaanite children because, among other things, the Canaanites committed two types of sins which damaged their children. Archaeological evidence shows that the Canaanites were an incestuous people. Sexual molestation is a horrible crime in our society—and it should be—but in Canaanite society their god, Baal, raped his sister while she was in the form of a calf “seventy-seven, even eighty eight times.” ((Albright says that in “the light of several Egyptian accounts of the goddess, unquestionably translated from an original Canaanite myth” that Baal raped his sister Anath while she was in the form of a calf. W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the God’s of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1968), 128-129. )) In other words, Baal raped her a lot. Baal also regularly had sex with his daughter Pidray, ((Albright, Yahweh and the God’s of Canaan, 145. )) and at his father’s urging Baal had sex with his mother Asherah to humiliate her. ((For the story of Baal having sex with Asherah see: “El, Ashertu and the Storm-god” Albrecht Goetze, trans., James B. Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near East: Supplementary Texts and Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University, 1969), 519.))

But there was a worse evil than molestation and rape, and that was offering a child to Molech. Molech was a Canaanite underworld deity represented as an upright, bull-headed idol with human body in whose belly a fire was stoked and in whose outstretched arms a child was placed to be burned to death. ((John Day, Molech: A god of human sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989), 62.)) Plutarch reports that during the Phoenician (Canaanite) ((“The word ‘Canaanite’ is historically, geographically, and culturally synonymous with ‘Phoenician,’ the title immediately becomes more impressive, since it also deals with the role of the Phoenicians in the history of civilization” (W. F. Albright, The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in honor of William Foxwell Albright, G. Ernest Wright, ed. [Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1965], 438).)) sacrifices, “the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of the wailing should not reach the ears of the people.” ((Plutarch, De Superstitione 13 as quoted in Day, Molech, 89.)) And it wasn’t just infants; we know that children at least as old as four were sacrificed.

Kleitarchos says the Phoenicians and especially the Carthaginians who honoured Kronos, whenever they wished to succeed in any great enterprise, would vow by one of their children if they achieved the things they longed for, to sacrifice him to a god. A bronze image of Kronos was set up among them, stretching out its cupped hands above a bronze cauldron, which would burn the child. As the flame burning the child surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up and the mouth would appear to grin as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron. ((Kleitarchos, Scholia on Plato’s Republic 337A as quoted in Day, Molech, 87. See Albright, Yahweh, 234-244 for a significant discussion of the nature and archaeology pertaining to child sacrifice.))

Oxford professor John Day wrote: “In fact, we have independent evidence that child sacrifice was practiced in the Canaanite (Carthaginian and Phoenician) world from many classical sources, Punic inscriptions and archaeological evidence, as well as Egyptian depictions of the ritual occurring in Syria-Palestine, and from a recently discovered Phoenician inscription in Turkey. There is therefore no reason to doubt the biblical testimony to Canaanite child sacrifice.” ((John Day, “Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic, 2000), 211-212.)) U.C.L.A researcher Shelby Brown writes: “The longevity of child sacrifice and the tenaciousness with which Carthaginians and other Phoenicians adhered to the practice despite their frequent contacts with neighbors who abhorred them for it suggests that the ritual was crucial to Phoenician religion and to the well-being of a city and its inhabitants.”[/quote]

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