Milcom- Canaanite GodDeity"God of the Ammonites"

The King of Ammon

East of the Jordan, in the hill country that is now central Jordan, the Ammonites worshipped Milcom as the god who had given them their land and their kingdom. His name meant simply "the King," the divine sovereign whose authority underwrote the earthly king's rule. Milcom granted victory in war and the legitimacy that kept the throne stable. When the Ammonites marched to battle, they marched under Milcom's banner; when the prophet Jeremiah taunted the Ammonites in defeat, he asked why Milcom had inherited Israel's territory, as though the god himself had crossed borders with his people.

To the biblical writers, Milcom was "the abomination of the Ammonites." But the Ammonite kings ruled as his earthly representatives, and the temples in their capital bore witness to a deity whose hold on his people was as absolute as Yahweh's claim on Israel.

The Shrine on the Mountain

In his old age, swayed by his many foreign wives, Solomon built a high place for Milcom on the mountain east of Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, directly across the Kidron Valley from the Temple of Yahweh. The national god of the Ammonites enthroned within sight of Yahweh's house, sharing the Jerusalem skyline. The tradition never forgave the provocation. Solomon's accommodation of foreign gods, Milcom among them, split the kingdom after his death.

The shrine endured for more than three centuries. Generation after generation, worshippers climbed the Mount of Olives to make offerings to Milcom while the Temple of Yahweh gleamed across the valley. When King Josiah launched his religious reforms around 621 BCE, he destroyed the high places Solomon had built, Milcom's along with Chemosh's. He defiled the sites to ensure they could never be used again. The shrine had survived three hundred years of prophetic condemnation before Josiah ground its stones to dust.