Child sacrifice to the Canaanite god Moloch — the horrific ritual condemned in the Bible — was not limited to Israel’s pagan neighbors. Archaeologists excavating a cistern at the ancient Israelite town of Azekah, southwest of Jerusalem, have uncovered a mass grave of children’s skeleton, adding explosive new evidence that the ancient Israelites participated in this dark practice.
This mass grave for infants — most of them less than two years old — was likely in use during the Persian Period around 2,500 years ago. It contained the fragile, jumbled remains of up to 89 individuals, according to the researchers.
The disturbing find raises uncomfortable questions about the beliefs and social practices of the ancient Israelites, suggesting they may have carried out ritual child sacrifices long after scholars once assumed such Canaanite customs had ended.
For centuries, the Bible has painted a damning portrait of Canaanite religion centered on the worship of Moloch, a bloodthirsty deity demanding the ultimate price: the fiery sacrifice of innocent children.
Described as “passing through the fire,” the ritual reportedly involved placing infants into the red-hot arms or belly of a towering bronze idol, where they were consumed by flames while drums drowned out their screams.
Though modern scholars downplay these accounts as antisemitic propaganda, the prophets’ fierce condemnations — and repeated warnings that Israelites were copying these “abominations” of their Canaanite neighbors — suggest the practice was real, seductive, and embraced within the Kingdom of Judah.
While analysis of the archaeological discovery of the infant mass grave is still ongoing, the researchers found no clear signs that the children were victims of a plague or epidemic, according to a team of Israeli and German experts who published their findings Friday in the journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly.
Instead, the team suggests the cistern served as a decades-long burial site for infants who supposedly died of natural causes — a convenient explanation in an era of extremely high infant mortality.
Yet the location itself raises deeper questions. Azekah, a strategic hilltop settlement overlooking the Elah Valley, is best known from the Bible as the site of David’s legendary duel with Goliath.
Originally a prosperous Canaanite town dating back more than 4,000 years to the Early Bronze Age, it thrived until the late Bronze Age collapse around the 12th century B.C.E. After a period of abandonment, it was later rebuilt and absorbed into the Kingdom of Judah — a time when Canaanite religious influences, including the cult of Moloch, were still deeply embedded in the region.
Haaretz report: During its existence Azekah was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times and this tell, an accumulation of superimposed layers of habitation over millennia, has been intensely investigated by researchers of the ancient Levant.
Between 2012 and 2014, archaeologists excavated a cistern in the outer reaches of the town and discovered this unexpected mass burial, containing dozens of tiny skeletons, apparently accompanied by paltry grave offerings: mainly pottery and some jewelry, including beads, earrings and rings.
Part of the reason why the find has gone unreported for more than a decade was the difficulty researchers faced in dealing with such a gut-wrenching discovery of dead infants, says Oded Lipschits, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who leads the Azekah expedition.
“For several years, I didn’t touch it. It was a scary topic,” Lipschits tells Haaretz in a phone interview. “My own children were young at the time, so it was not easy.”
Eventually, the bones made their way to the anthropology lab at Tel Aviv University, and the researchers began to try to make sense of the shocking find.
The cistern was originally used for its intended purpose, to store water, in Canaanite times, throughout the Middle and Late Bronze ages, and then again by the Israelites through the Iron Age (or the First Temple Period – if one prefers a reference to the biblical chronology).
At the bottom of the pit, the archaeologists found a layer of jars from the end of the Iron Age, suggesting the cistern went out of use at the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 B.C.E., which resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem, Azekah and other major towns in the kingdom.
Following a few decades of abandonment during the Babylonian Exile, the city was repopulated once Judah and the rest of the Levant fell under Persian rule.
It was then that the cistern was repurposed as a mass grave, Lipschits and colleagues report.
Based on radiocarbon dating, as well as the types of ceramics and jewelry found in the pit, the grave was in use over the course of the 5th century B.C.E., when Azekah was part of the Persian province of Yehud, as Judah was called then.
Of the up to 89 people buried in the cistern, around 90 percent were under 5 years old, with more than 70 percent under 2, says Prof. Hila May, a physical anthropologist at Tel Aviv University. Only a handful of individuals – between two to eight – could be identified as older children or young adults, and we’ll talk about these few outliers later on.
Greek babies
Although the Azekah cistern is the first case unearthed in Israel, the idea of a separate, mass burial for infants is not confined to the ancient Levant, the archaeologists note in their study. A cemetery housing more than 2,400 infants, with no adults, was found on the Dodecanese island of Astypalaia,. Most of the burials there date to the 6th-5th centuries B.C.E., roughly the same time as the Azekah grave, the study says.
Hundreds of infants and fetuses dated to the 2nd century B.C.E. were also found buried in wells just outside the agora (the main square) of Athens and of Messene, in the Peloponnese.
All these discoveries are different from cases of clearly intentional disposal of newborns in antiquity, such as the infants found in a sewer under a Roman-era brothel in Ashkelon, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, or the cremated bones of sacrificed children in the “tophets” of the Carthaginian cultural sphere, the Azekah team believe. Instead, these discoveries point to a cross-cultural phenomenon of separate mass burial for un-weaned children, victims of the high mortality rate in societies that didn’t consider them sufficiently formed individuals to warrant their own grave, the researchers say.
This doesn’t mean that parents in antiquity were not emotionally attached to their children or didn’t mourn when they died, May qualifies.
“We know people cared for their children in ancient times. Maybe parents were aware that their children had a higher chance of not surviving; that was their reality. But I don’t think this prevented them from connecting to them,” she says. “I think this burial custom is more a social question, it’s about their role in society and at what age someone was considered a full member of society.”
Assuming the interpretation of the mass grave is correct, we are left with the further enigma of the handful of older children or young adults who were also found there. Possibly they may have been individuals of very low social status, or people who died at a great distance from their family tomb and could not be transported, Lipschits says.
Alternatively, they may have been young mothers who died in childbirth and were buried with their stillborn progeny, May suggests. Hopefully, the ongoing genetic analysis will give us more answers.
