Endnote 3 – Why King Mesha of Moab Sacrificed His Oldest Son

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.