which created the inner order of “Molly Maguires,” with the object, it appears, of intimidating the Welsh, English, and German miners, and of ridding the region of mine superintendents, bosses and police who should make themselves in any way objectionable to members of the order. Any member having a grievance might lay a formal complaint before his “body master,” who thereupon conferred with the officers of the neighbouring divisions and secured members from a distance to make away with the offending person. Under this system the crimes in a given district were always committed by strangers rendering identification of the criminal difficult and escape easy. The society grew in strength during the Civil War, when the increased demand for coal caused an influx of miners, many of them lawless characters, into the coal-fields, and in 1862–1863 it opposed enlistments in the Federal Army and roughly treated some of the enlisting officers. After the war its activity was shown by an increasing number of assassinations, burnings and other outrages, until by 1875 it completely dominated the mining classes and forced a general strike in the coal regions. After repeated efforts to bring the criminals to justice had failed, Franklin B. Gowen (1836–1889), president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, sent James McParlan, an Irish Catholic and a Pinkerton detective (who some thirty years later attracted attention in the investigation of the assassination of Governor Steunenberg of Idaho), to the mining region in 1873; he joined the order, lived among the “Molly Maguires” for more than two years, and even became secretary of the Shenandoah division, one of the most notoriously criminal lodges of the order. The evidence he secured led to the arrest, conviction, and execution or imprisonment of a large number of members during the years 1876–1877, and subsequently the outrages ceased and the society was disbanded.
See F. P. Dewees, The Molly Maguires Philadelphia, 1877); Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (New York, 1877); E. W. Lucy, The Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania; (London, n.d.); The Commonwealth versus John Kehoe et al. (Pottsville, Pa., 1878); and an article by J. F. Rhodes in Amer. Hist. Review, April, 1910.
MOLOCH, or Molech (in Hebrew, with the doubtful exception of 1 Kings xi. 7, always “the Molech”), the name or title of the divinity which the men of Judah in the last ages of the kingdom were wont to propitiate by the sacrifice of their own children. According to the Hebrew consonants it might simply be read “the king” (mélek), an appellation for the supreme deity of a Semitic state or tribe. The traditional pronunciation (Μολόχ), which goes back as far as the Septuagint version of Kings, probably means that the old form was perverted by giving it the vowels of bōsheth “shame,” the contemptuous name for Baal (q.v.). In 1 Kings xi. 7 (see above) it is the name of the god of the Ammonites, elsewhere called Milcom or Malcam; but it appears from 2 Kings xxiii. 10, 13 that the worship of Milcom at the shrine set up by Solomon was distinct from Molech worship, and the text should probably therefore be emended to the longer form (so the Septuagint).
The phrase employed in speaking of these sacrifices is that of dedication—“to make one’s son or daughter pass through (or by means of) fire to (the) Molech” (2 Kings xxiii. 10; but elsewhere without the words “through fire” Lev. xviii. 21); and it appears from Jer. vii. 31, xix. 5; Ezek. xvi. 20 seq., that this phrase denotes a human holocaust,[1] and not, as sometimes has been thought, a mere consecration to Molech by passing through or between fires, as in the Roman Palilia and similar rites elsewhere (on which see Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed., ii. 40 sqq., iii. 237 sqq.). Human sacrifice was common in Semitic heathenism, and at least the idea of such sacrifices was not unknown to Israel from early times (see Isaac; Jephthah).[2] We learn from 2 Kings iii. 27 that the piacular sacrifice of his son and heir was the last offering which the king of Moab made to deliver his country. Even the Hebrew historian ascribes to this act the effect of rousing divine indignation against the invading host of Israel; it would not, therefore, be surprising if under the miseries brought on Palestine by the westward march of the Assyrian power, the idea of the sacrifice of one’s own son, as the most powerful of atoning rites, should have taken hold of those kings of Judah (Ahaz and Manasseh, 2 Kings xvi. 3, xxi. 6) who were otherwise prone, in their hopelessness of help from the old religion (Isa. vii. 12), to seek to strange peoples and their rites. Ahaz’s sacrifice of his son (which indeed rests on a somewhat late authority) was apparently an isolated act of despair, since human sacrifices are not among the corruptions of the popular religion spoken of by Isaiah and Micah. In the 7th century, however, when the old worship had sustained rude shocks, and all religion was transformed into servile fear (Mic. vi. 1 seq.), the example of Manasseh did not stand alone, and Jeremiah and Ezekiel made frequent and indignant reference to the “high places” for the sacrifice of children by their parents which rose beneath the very walls of the temple from the gloomy ravine of Hinnom or Tophet.[3] (Jer. vii. 31, xix., xxxii. 35; Ezek. xvi. 18 sqq., xxiii. 37). The children apparently were not burned alive; they were slain and burned like any other holocaust (Ezek. loc. cit.; Isa. lvii. 5), their blood was shed at the sanctuary (Jer. xix. 4; Ps. cvi. 38). Thus the late Rabbinical picture of the calf-headed brazen image of Molech within which children were burned alive is pure fable, and with it falls the favourite comparison between Molech and the Carthaginian idol from whose brazen arms children were rolled into an abyss of fire, and whom Diodorus (xix. 14) naturally identifies with the child-eater Kronos, thus leading many moderns to make Molech the planet Saturn.
It is with these sacrifices that the name of “the Molech” is always connected; sometimes “the Baal” (lord) appears as a synonym. At the same time, the horrid ritual was so closely associated with Yahweh worship (Ezek. xxiii. 39) that Jeremiah more than once finds it necessary to protest that it is not of Yahweh’s institution (vii. 31, xix. 5). So too it is the idea of sacrificing the firstborn to Yahweh that is discussed and rejected in Micah vi. It is indeed plain that such a sacrifice—for we have here to do, not with human victims in general, but with the sacrifice of the dearest earthly thing—could only be paid to the supreme deity; and Manasseh and his people never ceased to acknowledge Yahweh as the God of Israel. Thus the way in which Jeremiah (Jer. xix. 5) and the legislation of Leviticus (xviii. 21, xx. 2–5) and the author of Kings, seem to mark out the Molech or Baal as a false god, distinct from Yahweh, is precisely parallel to the way in which Hosea speaks of the golden calves or Baalim. In each case the people thought themselves to be worshipping Yahweh under the title of Molech or Baal; but the prophet refuses to admit that this is so, because the worship itself is an apostasy to heathenism. Note, also, the attitude of Ezekiel in xx. 25 seq., 31, references which cannot be explained away.
Although the motive came from within, the form taken by the cult has appeared to many to be of non-Israelite origin. Babylonia and Assyria, however, seem to be out of the question: malik, “arbiter, decider,” is there an epithet of various gods, and as an appellative means “prince” and not king; further, little
- ↑ In 2 Chron. xxviii. 3 (parallel to 2 Kings xvi. 3) a single letter is transposed in the phrase, changing the sense from “caused to pass through the fire” to “caused to burn with fire.” Geiger (Urschrift und Uebersetzung, p. 305) very unnecessarily supposed that this was everywhere the original reading, and that it had been changed to soften the enormity ascribed to the ancient Hebrews. The phrase “to give one’s seed to Molech” (Lev. xx. 2 seq.), and the fact that these victims were (like other sacrifices) regarded as food for the deity (Ezek. xvi. 20) explain and justify the common reading.
- ↑ In Hos. xiii. 2, the interpretation “they that sacrifice men” is improbable, and 2 Kings xvii. 17 and Lev. xviii., xx. are of too late date by themselves to prove the immolation of children to Moloch in old Israel. The “ban” (חךם), which was a religious execution of criminals or enemies, was common to Israel with its heathen neighbours (cf. the inscription of Mesha), but lacked the distinctive character of a sacrifice in which the victim is the food of the deity, conveyed to him through fire.
- ↑ The etymology of the word Tophet is obscure; it is possibly of Aramaic origin and means “fire-place,” cf. tophteh, “pyre,” (Isa. xxx. 33). The vocalization is artificial, the Masoretes having given it the vowel-points of bōsheth. See W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 2nd ed., 377.
