Who is Molech?

Amidst the list of unlawful sexual relations there is a seemingly misplaced warning against the worship of a false god:

"You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord" (Leviticus 18:21).

If this had been the only occurrence of the name Molech I would have been curious, but probably not as much as when I read it again in Leviticus 20, where the protagonist, God, tells Moses he "will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech" (Leviticus 20:3).  Since he was mentioned twice, and as I later found out, three more times in the Old Testament, I knew there had to be more to this character.

Molech's name has various forms and "was the name given to the national pagan god of the Ammonites, a people descended from Abraham's nephew Lot" (Blank).  The Ammonites were a "Semitic people living northeast of the Dead Sea in the area surrounding Rabbah who often battled with the Israelites for possession of the fertile Gilead" in what is now part of the Kingdom of Jordon (Holman Bible Dictionary ).

Some, like Otto Eissfeldt, believe that the word Molech described a certain type of sacrifice in which children are burned as offerings.  They attribute this to several different cultures, one of which where children were burned as offerings to Cronus of Carthage in North Africa. Nonetheless, there is a god named Molech in the same region at the time the Israelites would have been passing through, and it is more likely that deity that God is referring to because the phrase "whoring after" is used.  This word "whoring" is used many times in the Bible from Exodus (Old Testament) to Hosea (New Testament) and usually refers to the act of worshiping false gods.

Only one question remained.  Why is Molech sacrifice mentioned in the list of unlawful sexual relations in Leviticus 18?  The connection can be made due to the link to the fertility goddess Ashtoreth, who was the consort of Molech.  By the time Israel entered this region, religious Canaanites already had an established practice for worshiping Ashtoreth in which "male worshipers had anal sex with priests and priestesses of the goddess" as an offering (Who Was Molech or Moloch?).

In conclusion, Molech was the name of a pagan god in Canaan.  The practice of burning children as a sacrifice became known as Molech (or molk) sacrifice.  Canaanites and corrupted Israelites would have worshiped Ashtoreth, who represented the female principle of fertility, along with Molech, who represented the male principle of life and reproduction, by taking part in cultic sexual rituals (Who is Molech or Moloch?).