” ... horrid king, besmeared with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears; Though, for the noise of drums and timbrels loud, Their children's cries unheard, that pass'd through fire To his grim idol.”—_Par. Lost_, i. 392.
This cruel child-sacrifice was probably the giving of his seed to Moloch[63], fwhich any Israelite, or stranger that sojourned in Israel, guilty of the crime was, according to the Mosaic law, to be stoned to death. We are informed in the Sacred Records, that no such denunciations of the idolatries of the surrounding nations, no revelations of the attributes, or teachings of the pure worship of Jehovah, restrained the Israelites from the practice of the foul and cruel rites of their heathen neighbours; and we find, in the latter days of the Jewish commonwealth, the prophet Jeremiah predicting[64] the desolation of the people for this sin among others, that they had estranged themselves from the worship of Jehovah, and burned incense to strange gods, and filled the holy place with the blood of innocents, and burned their sons and their daughters with fire for burnt-offerings unto Baal.[65]
There appear to have been two modes in which the ancient idolaters devoted their children to Moloch. In one they were sacrificed and consumed in the manner already described, a burnt-offering to the cruel idol for the expiation of the sins of their parents or their people. In the other, they were only made _to pass through the fire_, in honour of the deity, and as a sort of initiation into his mysteries, and consecration to his service. Thus Ahaz, King of Judah, is said to have “made his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen.”[66] And it is reckoned in the catalogue of the sins of Judah, which drew on them the vengeance of God, that they “built the high places of Baal, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Moloch.”[67]
In the case of infants, it is supposed that this initiation, this “baptism by fire,” was performed either by placing them on a sort of grate suspended by chains from the vault of the temple, and passed rapidly over the sacred fire, or by the priests taking the infants in their arms, and swaying them to and fro over or across the fire, chanting meanwhile certain prayers or incantations. With respect to children of older growth, they were made to leap naked through the fire before the idol, so that their whole bodies might be touched by the sacred flames, and purified, as it were, by contact with the divinity.