Tophet

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For the sacred precinct of Carthage with that name, see Carthage.

Tophet^[1] is a location near Jerusalem where according to the Bible, the Canaanites sacrificed children to the god Moloch by burning them alive. It is thought to be a specific geographic location within the valley of Gehenna.

The name is possibly derived from the Hebrew toph = drum, because drums were used to drown the cries of children; or from the Hebrew taph or toph = to burn.

The practice of child sacrifice was outlawed by King Josiah. The valley became a refuse site where animal carcasses, waste and the bodies of criminals were dumped, with fires permanently burning to keep disease at bay.

Tophet became a synonym for hell. Tophet as the name of the Gehenna site was transferred to the child cemetery in Carthage; the assumption that child sacrifice was also practiced in Carthage is not unanimously accepted by modern scholars and the debate is continuing.

[edit] Examples of the metaphorical use of "Tophet" in literature

'And more than that - a furlong on - why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? With all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.'

From Robert Browning's poem, Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came, stanza 24.

"Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer-matches, which, in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet."

From The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

MLA Citation (Bibliographic Reference): Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

"It’s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel, and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?"

From Moby Dick: or, the White Whale by Herman Melville, chapter 15.

"By the engine stood a dark motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engineman. The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines."

From Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

"O ye who tread the Narrow Way/ By Tophet-flare to judgement Day/ Be gentle when "the heathen" pray/ To Buddha at Kamakura!"

From "Buddha at Kamakura" by Rudyard Kipling

Harry Tophet was the name of the Devil in the Movie Oh God, You Devil

From the hymn Our earth we now lament to see by Charles Wesley

As listed on Abaddon's side, They mangle their own flesh, and slay: Tophet is moved, and opens wide Its mouth for its enormous prey;

In Brooke McEldowney's comic strip 9 Chickweed Lane for 26 March 2007, one of the characters, Edda, says that:

"During my walk back, I encountered 5 people who required immediate damnation in Tophet for being obnoxious scum, and I put a curse of 42 others just for being ugly."