It is terrifying how common human sacrifice has been in history. Even societies like the Roman Republic who hated the practice still acknowledged its potential power and partook in it themselves when things got really dicey.

Oh my goodness, as a person reading the Bible your explanation of the brutality of surrounding Canaan just clarified all of my confusion with the Pentiteuch’s weird laws. Thanks!

It blows my mind how few people know how brutal ancient history could be

Always a good day when Tony4You uploads. I love learning about different religious deities

It seems that some of the gods of Canaanite culture were an influence for the Daedra in the Elder Scrolls series

I think it's easy to understand the two stones in the temples when you see in the Old Testament the Israelites are CONSTANTLY getting in trouble for Syncretism, mixing pagan religions with their own. That was the whole thing with Elijah, he was one of the few people left in Israel who weren't mixing Baal and Asherah and various other gods into worship, and that got him in big trouble with the King and Queen; to Israel he was a crazy heretic that lived in the wilderness and kept causing trouble. This syncretism is also what got them into exile in Babylon.

I would totally kill for a modern SMT interpretation of Moloch being a mecha suit powered by babies.

Moloch (essentially spelled MLK in Aramaic) was the ritual not the deity itself. The ritual was dedicated to one of the Ba'als, likely some version of the Carthaginian god Baal Hammon (possibly the same as Baalshamin in ancient Syria), to which there are accounts and evidence of child sacrifice.

So, when people say that God is evil in the Bible for telling the Israelites to wipe out these cultures, there's a reason the Israelites didn't let these cultures survive. They were evil and brutal, even for the era's standards.

The main problem with current people is that they refuse to accept that different people groups happened to use the same name for different gods in different cultures

human sacrifice has to be the most terrifying

Child sacrifice never ended, it’s being done en masse more than ever before in history

Carthage began as a colony of the Phoenicians (Canaanites, Tyrans. They called themselves Canaan, and their major city was Tyr).