Don’t blame Baal, blame the “historians”.

Whether the Canaanites practiced child sacrifice is one of the most debated topics in ancient history. It sits at the intersection of religious texts, hostile propaganda, and complex archaeological findings.

The short answer is: There is strong evidence that child sacrifice occurred in “Punic” / Western Phoenician colonies like Carthage, but the evidence for it in the Canaanite heartland / the Levant is much more contested.

While the Carthaginians were technically “Punic,” they were descendants of Phoenician-Canaanite settlers who brought their religion with them. In Carthage, in what is now modern Tunisia and other Western Mediterranean colonies, the evidence is quite compelling:

• The Tophets: Archaeologists have found sacred open-air enclosures containing thousands of urns with the cremated remains of infants, often mixed with animal remains (lambs or kids)

• Inscriptions: Many of these urns are marked with stone stelae (monuments) thanking the gods Baal Hammon and Tanit for hearing a vow, suggesting the child was a “gift” in exchange for a favour

• Recent scientific consensus: for decades, scholars argued these were just cemeteries for babies who died naturally. However, recent dental and skeletal analysis suggests the infants were often healthy and of a very specific age (such as a few weeks old), which does not match the natural infant mortality patterns of the time

But in the “homeland” of the Canaanites, the physical evidence is much thinner:

• Archaeology: Earlier 20th-century claims of finding “foundation sacrifices” (babies buried under walls) in cities like Gezer have largely been reinterpreted by modern archaeologists as natural infant burials under the floors of homes—a common practice in the ancient world to keep deceased family members close

• Biblical accounts: The Hebrew Bible repeatedly condemns the Canaanites — and later, the Israelites themselves — for “passing their children through the fire” to a deity often referred to as Molech.

• External accounts: Greek and Roman historians (like Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus) wrote graphic descriptions of Canaanite/Punic child sacrifice, though some scholars caution that these writers were often biased against their enemies

Linguistically, many scholars now believe Molech (or mlk) was not the name of a god, but a type of sacrifice. In Punic inscriptions, the term molk refers to a specific kind of votive offering. This suggests that the biblical “Molech” was actually a reference to the ritual itself rather than a specific “demon-god” the Canaanites worshipped.

While it was likely a real practice, it probably wasn’t a daily occurrence. Most historians believe it was an extreme “crisis ritual” performed by the elite during times of war, famine, or drought to appease the gods.