Baal-hamon

And this obviously gets tied into the use of the word Holocaust.

And some of the arguments were claiming that the term Holocaust in Hebrew was actually a reference to the child sacrifices that were occurring in the Valley of Hinnom, all these sacrificial rites to Baal and Moloch.

Okay, I think all of them can be true.

I think it's a real deity.

in some of the Talmudic readings of Moloch.

And Christian thought, yes, Moloch is absolutely a symbol.

As I said, when you read the church fathers, and I have a section here where we'll look over a little bit of it, but when you look at the church fathers, they are explicit to state that whether it's Baal or Moloch, it doesn't matter the mask.

It's the same forces.

L- look at verse 11.

"Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon," an idolatrous place.

"He let out the vineyard to keepers.

Each one was to bring for its fruit 1,000 pieces of silver.

So and that's Sidon is Astarte, like you're talking about.

Carthage is Baal Hammon and Tanit.

So you have Carthage, who's a city that's, city-state that's born out of Tyre.

Mm-hmm.

But instead of just going through and taking Melqart like Tyre did, they chose their own patron god with Baal Hammon.

Well, he can't, they can't be in both.

You gotta have a separate one, 'cause they need to be looking over that city.

Mm-hmm

Uh, you know, Greek author Cleitarchos, a historian of Alexander the Great in the mid-4th century, uh, w- [laughs] kind of wrote about the same thing.

He said, "Out of reverence for Kronos," which is the Greek equivalent of Ba'al Hammon, "the Phoenicians, and especially the Carthaginians, whenever they, whenever they seek to obtain some great favor, they vow one of their children, burning it as a sacrifice to the deity if they are especially eager to gain success," or we might say self-worth.

[laughs] To fortify self-worth.

Okay.

And the gods of this world aren't the ones carved into marble that we know.

The great deities of Carthage were Baal Hamon, the sky father who made the crops grow, and the goddess Tanit, his partner, whose symbol, a simple figure of a triangle with a circle floating above it and arms stretched wide, you would find cut into stone across the whole western Mediterranean.

These weren't strange little local spirits.

They came out of the old Phoenician and Canaanite religion of the eastern Mediterranean, the same deep well of belief the Hebrew Bible spent so much time arguing with.

In the world where Carthage wins, the temples that anchor the West belong to Tanit and Baal Hamon, and parents name their children for those gods.

The whole shape of it is different, though, because Carthage was never the conquer-and-assimilate machine that Rome was.

It was a trading empire at heart.

The Greek and Roman writers all reported it.