Tophet
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- For the sacred precinct of Carthage with that name, see Carthage.
Tophet or Topheth (Hebrew:תופת ha-tōpheth) is believed to be a location in Jerusalem, in the Valley of Hinnom, where the Canaanites sacrificed children to the god Moloch by burning them alive. After 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. In modern Hebrew, the term is used in reference to the Holocaust.
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[edit] Etymology
The name is possibly derived from the Hebrew toph = drum, because drums were used to drown the cries of children, but possibly connected with a root word meaning “burning” - the "place of burning"; the King James Version, Tophet, except in 2 Kings 23:10. The references are to such a place: “They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire” (Jeremiah 7:31). On account of this abomination Topheth and the Valley of Hinnom should be called "The Valley of Slaughter: for they shall bury in Topheth, till there be no place to bury," the Revised Version margin “because there shall be no place else” (Jeremiah 7:32); see also Jeremiah 19:6, Jeremiah 19:12, Jeremiah 19:13, Jeremiah 19:14. Josiah is said to have “defiled Topheth” as part of his great religious reforms (2 Kings 23:10). The site would seem to have been either at the lower end of the Valley Of Hinnom, near where Akeldama is now pointed out, or in the open ground where this valley joins the Kidron Valley.
[edit] Literary references
- Robert Browning's poem, [1] stanza 24:
- '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.'
- Thomas Carlyle's fictional autobiography Sartor Resartus, The Everlasting No:
"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."
"... all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: “What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee!"
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?"
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."
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!"
"Buddha at Kamakura" by Rudyard Kipling
"...as a rule, I suspect that the Hierarchs of Tophet pass quite unnoticed, or, perhaps, in certain cases, as good but mistaken men."
"The White People", by Arthur Machen.
Harry Tophet was the name of the Devil in the Movie Oh God, You Devil
Hymn [2]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;
