Gatekeeper of the Dead

Molech and the gates of hell

All of the sacrifices and rituals directed toward the realm of the dead had purpose.

The communal meals, the pouring of water, the fertility rites, the children burned on detestable altars—they were intended to produce a desired result. They were deals offered to the spirit realm; if we do this, we hope you’ll do that in return. Obviously, this assumed that the dead were able to interact with the living; to travel or cross over the boundary between the land of the living and the abode of the dead. This was not an easy journey, even for the gods.

A myth called The Descent of Inanna describes a series of indignities that the Queen of Heaven endured as she passed through the seven gates that lead to the netherworld. It seems that Inanna wasn’t happy being the queen bee in the world above; she wanted to rule the world below as well.

Her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, saw through Inanna’s ploy. Ereshkigal insisted that Inanna remove an item of clothing or give up a symbol of divine authority at each of the seven gates. Inanna finally arrived in the underworld, naked and helpless. Ereshkigal clearly wan’t pleased to see her:

The Annuna, the judges of the underworld, surrounded her
They passed judgment against her.

Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.

She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.
She struck her.

Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hung from a hook on the wall.^[i]

Harsh. Inanna finally escaped the netherworld after three days (!) when her faithful servant went to the clever god, Enki, who gave instructions to two androgynous demons on how to free the goddess from her corpse-prison. Even then, however, underworld demons called galla refused to let her go. They demanded a replacement as a condition for Inanna’s freedom. The goddess refused to give up her servant or her son. Instead, she threw her husband under the bus—Dumuzi the Shepherd, king of Uruk. Apparently, Dumuzi wasn’t showing enough grief over the temporary death of the goddess to please her, so the galla dragged him away.

This is an excerpt from our 2019 book Veneration. If you want to own a copy, it’s available in paperback, as a Kindle e-book, and as an audiobook at Amazon and Audible.

A later myth tells of the sacrifice of Dumuzi’s sister, who offered to take his place in the underworld for half the year, resulting in the annual change of seasons. This is similar to the Greek myth of Persephone, who was tricked by the death-god, Hades, into remaining with him for six months out of the year. Thus, Dumuzi became the first of the ancient Near East’s “dying and rising” gods, still worshiped as Tammuz in the time of Ezekiel^[ii] nearly fifteen hundred years after The Descent of Inanna was written.

The point of this introduction is the illustrate the pagan belief in the difficulty of getting out of the netherworld, even for their gods. So, for human spirits to make the journey back required at least permission, if not assistance.

That much, at least, is consistent with the Bible. We’ve noted elsewhere in this book that the elohim of Samuel returned to deliver a message to Saul, the only example in Scripture of a human spirit returning to the land of the living. This was done with the approval of God. Note that when the medium saw Samuel, “she cried out with a loud voice.”^[iii] Probably because she was expecting her familiar spirit!

In the pagan mind, however, which god had control over the entrance to the netherworld? There are several possibilities.

We’ve already mentioned Baal-Peor, the “lord of the entrance to the netherworld” who was worshiped in ancient Moab around the time of the Exodus. But, as we noted, that’s a title, not a name. Can we ID this mysterious entity?

Further north, texts from Ugarit specifically identify the land of Bashan as the home of a Canaanite deity called Rapi’u, the “King of Eternity,” who reigned, like King Og, at the cities of Ashtaroth and Edrei.^[iv] This means that at the time of the conquest, Amorites in Canaan believed that the god Rapi’u, which is the singular form of Rephaim, ruled the underworld from exactly the same two cities at the center of Og’s kingdom.

Does it make a little more sense now that Og, last of the remnant of the Rephaim, was the first enemy specifically targeted by the Israelites (at God’s direction) during the campaign to take the Holy Land?

There’s more. One of Rapi’u’s home cities, Ashtaroth, links the King of Eternity with another dark god who’s mentioned in the Old Testament.

Mother Šapšu, take a message
To Milku in ʿAṯtartu [Ashtaroth]:

“My incantation for serpent bite,
For the scaly serpent’s poison.”^[v]

Mother Šapšu was the sun-goddess in Ugarit. In this ritual, she was asked to carry a message to a god ruling in Ashtaroth, Milku, which is another form of the name Molech.

This isn’t surprising. At the time of the judges in Israel, Bashan, basically the modern Golan Heights, was on the border of the relatively new nation of Ammon. The national god of the Ammonites was Milcom, who was likewise one and the same with Molech.^[vi]

Here’s where things get interesting. Molech was an ancient deity, worshiped at least a thousand years before the Exodus. A god called Malik, an early form of the name, is known from texts found at Ebla dated to around 2400 BC. Of the approximately five hundred deities identified at Ebla, one of most common theophoric elements in personal names—like el in Daniel (“God is my judge”) or yahu in Hezekiah (“YHWH strengthens”)—was ma-lik.^[vii]

By the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Malik was still worshiped in the Amorite kingdom of Mari, centered on the Euphrates River near the modern border between Syria and Iraq. Further, it appears that the god was served by a group of underworld deities called maliku. And five hundred years after the time of the Mari texts, during the time of the judges in Israel, Malik and the maliku (called malikim) were still venerated at Ugarit.^[viii]

Here’s the interesting bit: Molech was equated with the Babylonian plague-god and gatekeeper of the underworld, Nergal. Not only are both connected to death and the afterlife, Akkadian deity lists record the equation Malik = Nergal. Further, Semitic mlk and Sumerian “ner-gal” can both be understood as “king,” confirming the connection.^[ix]

Now, this gets a little weird, but hang on. We’ll pull all these connections together in our next article.

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[i]. Diane Wolkstein and Samuel N. Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 60.

[ii]. Ezekiel 8:14.

[iii]. 1 Samuel 28:12.

[iv]. KTU 1.108:1–3. Translation by Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit (2nd ed.). (London; New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), p. 395.

[v]. RS 24:244:40–41. Translation by Dennis Pardee & Theodore J. Lewis, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (Vol. 10). (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), p. 177. Ugaritic text RS 24:251:42 also places the god Milku in Ashtaroth.

[vi]. 1 Kings 11:5 calls Milcom “the abomination of the Ammonites,” but 1 Kings 11:7 uses the same description for Molech.

[vii]. George Heider, The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 1985), p. 96.

[viii]. Ibid., p. 129.

[ix]. Rebecca Doyle, Faces of the Gods: Baal, Asherah and Molek and Studies of the Hebrew Scriptures. Doctoral thesis (University of Sheffield, 1996), p. 129.