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John Day. Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament . University of Cambridge Oriental Publications, 41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, ix, 115 pp.

The meaning of the term molek has been subject to debate since 1935, when Otto Eissfeldt, in his Molk als Opferbegriff im Punischen und Hebrdischen und das Ende des Gottes Moloch, connected it to the Punic mlk, which he saw as a sacrificial term. For the last fifty-five years scholars have debated whether the biblical references to a cult of molek pertain to human sacrifice to a deity named Molech or to child sacrifice in general. They have also argued about whether the terms associated with the biblical molek allow for the possibility of an animal as a substitution for a human victim. This book reevaluates the comparative and biblical evidence associated with these positions, and argues that biblical Molech was an underworld deity, equivalent to the god Mlk of Ugarit and to the Akkadian Malik. The book has four substantive chapters: "Molech: Divine Name or Sacrificial Term?" (pp. 4-14), "The Nature of the Molech Cult and the Meaning of Tophet" (pp. 15—28), "The Background and Identity of Molech and His Relationship to Yahweh" (pp. 29—17), and "Passages Where Allusions to Molech Have Sometimes Wrongly Been Found" (pp. 72—81). In addition, it contains a concise introduction (pp. 1—3) and "Summary and Conclusions" (pp. 82—85) and a very useful appendix, "Classical and Patristic References to Phoenician and Carthaginian Human Sacrifice" (pp. 86-91). The book is generally well structured; it might have been improved, however, by having a short chapter examining the few biblical texts which explicitly mention Molech. The book as a whole presents a very plausible, but not a definitive thesis. Day's treatment of the Punic evidence is convincing; he synthesizes the material clearly and notes that mlk there is a general sacrificial term (pp. 4-9). He then uses context, not etymology, to independently investigate the meaning of Molech in biblical sources (pp. 9—13). This principle of favoring context to etymology is very sound, but Day's arguments are not fully persuasive. For example, he notes that the verbs used with Molech are typically used in the Bible with deities, not sacrifices (pp. 10—12). However, as Day himself notes, these verbs are predominantly, but not exclusively, used with