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Why King Mesha of Moab Sacrificed His Oldest Son

By Baruch Margalit

In his highly interesting article, “Why the Moabite Stone Was Blown to Pieces,” BAR 12:03, Professor Siegfried Horn recounts the ninth-century B.C. war between Moab and an alliance of Israel, Judah and Edom. When the alliance besieged the Moabite capital of Kir-Hareseth, the Moabite king Mesha, in desperation, sacrificed his eldest son to the god Chemosh. King Mesha offered the crown prince as a burnt offering on top of the city wall in full view of the enemy forces (2 Kings 3:26–27). With this horrifying act, Mesha turned defeat into victory. The allied forces retreated and Moab retained its […]

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Footnotes

1.

See “The Last Days of Ugarit,” BAR 09:05, Claude F. A. Schaeffer, and “The Tablets from Ugarit and Their Importance for Biblical Studies,” BAR 09:05, Peter C. Craigie.

2.

Lawrence E. Stager and Samuel R. Wolff, “Child Sacrifice at Carthage—Religious Rite or Population Control?” BAR 10:01.

Endnotes

1.

A. Herdner “Nouveaux Textes Alphabetiques de Ras Shamra,” Ugaritica VII (Paris, 1978), pp. 31–38 (text facsimile on p. 33). For an earlier publication, see Herdner, “Une priere a Baal des ugaritains en danger,” Proceedings of the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres (CRAIBL, 1972 [1973]), p. 694. The present writer’s views on this text may be found in “A Ugaritic Prayer for a City Under Siege,” in Proceedings of the Seventh World Congress of Jewish Studies: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East 177 [1981], pp. 63–83 (in Hebrew).

2.

The Ugaritic word bkr in Hebrew equals [bekor], the same word used in 2 Kings 3:27! The initial sign of the Ugaritic word is heavily damaged, and some have doubted that it is a B rather than a D. But Mlle. Herdner, an acknowledged specialist in Ugaritic epigraphy, was quite definite in her reading on both occasions, and the present writer has marshalled the literary-prosodic arguments in favor of this reading in his aforementioned study (endnote 1). For a contrary opinion, cf. P. Xella in Rivista di Studi Fenice 6 (1978), pp. 127–136.

3.

The text actually reads an otherwise unknown H|-T-P which I take to be a scribal error for the well-attested H|-T-K—“offspring” or the like. In Ugaritic cuneiform script P and K are very similar and are on more than one occasion confused with each other. Attempts to interpret Ugaritic H|-T-P as the equivalent of Akkadian Hå-T-P are highly improbable on purely phonological grounds, and the results are much less convincing literarily, since the word stands in obviously synonymous parallelism with B-K-R. For further discussion, the reader is referred to my afore cited study, pp. 76ff.

4.

Bibliotheca historica, Book XX.13.4ff, 14.1ff; transl. R. M. Greer.

5.

A History of Alexander the Great (of Macedon), Book 4.3.23; transl. J. C. Rolfe.

6.

Porphyrius, De Abstinentia, II.56 = Eusebius, Praep. Evang., 16.6. Translation and commentary in C. Clemen, Die Phönikische Religion (Liepzig, 1939).