StrongerBible

milkom

מִלכֹּם

HebrewH4445Proper Noun“Milcom, Malcam”

Appears 4 times · tap a cell to see the verses

1Ki 11:51Ki 11:332Ki 23:131Ch 8:9
Compound of
melekhמֶלֶךְking2526H4428
molekhמֹלֶךְMolech8H4432
Word studyResearch-grademil-KOHM (as the god's name); mahl-KAHM (as the personal name)proper noun

What milkom means

1

Milcom: the national god of Ammon, the kingdom just east of the Jordan, whom Solomon is condemned for worshiping and Josiah for tolerating

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintyStrong

Milcom was the national god of Ammon. The Bible names him this exact way only three times:

  • Solomon is condemned for going after him (1 Kings 11:5).
  • He is called the god of the Ammonites in the same chapter (1 Kings 11:33).
  • King Josiah later tears down the shrine Solomon built for him on a hill east of Jerusalem (2 Kings 23:13).

Outside the Bible, his name turns up in Ammonite inscriptions and on personal seals from the same region, so he was a real object of worship, not simply a biblical invention.

The name most likely comes from the same root as the ordinary Hebrew word for king, so Milcom probably meant something close to "the King." Some have wondered whether the unusual Hebrew vowels used to write his name were changed on purpose to make it sound unpleasant, the way Israelite scribes sometimes reshaped the names of foreign gods, but the vowel pattern here does not fit that pattern well, so it more likely just reflects how the Ammonites themselves said the word.

It is easy to confuse Milcom with Molech (מֹלֶךְ), the god or sacrificial term tied to child-burning in the Hinnom Valley, since the two names share the same root and one verse (1 Kings 11:7) appears to blur them together. Most scholars now treat them as different figures worshiped at different sites: when Josiah cleans up Judah's illegitimate worship in 2 Kings 23, he deals with Molech's site in the Hinnom Valley in one verse and with Milcom's shrine on the hill east of Jerusalem in another, as two separate targets. There is no clear evidence that the Ammonites offered child sacrifices to Milcom.

How central Milcom was to everyday Ammonite religion is less certain than the Bible's picture suggests. Ammonite inscriptions and personal names invoke the god El (אֵל) far more often than Milcom, which has led some scholars to argue that Milcom functioned mainly as a royal title for El rather than as an independent god. Others think he was closer to the Canaanite storm god Baal (בַּעַל), and still others warn against merging any of these gods together. What all sides agree on is that a real god named Milcom stood at the center of the Ammonite royal cult that the Bible condemns.

1Ki 11:51Ki 11:332Ki 23:13

Disputed

Whether a handful of other verses that read "their king" (a common Hebrew phrase spelled almost the same way but tagged as a different word) are actually hidden references to the god Milcom, which would mean the Bible names him several more times than the three secure occurrences of this exact spelling.

  • majoritySeveral of these verses do name Milcom: a king does not have priests, but a god does, so the pairing of "their king" with priests going into exile (Jeremiah 49:1, 3) points to the god; a talent of gold is too heavy to sit on a living person's head, so the crown David seizes (2 Samuel 12:30) is more likely the god's cult statue; and swearing an oath by "their king" alongside swearing by the LORD (Zephaniah 1:5) only makes sense if the other party is also a god.; Émile Puech, "Milcom," in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed. (Brill, 1999), 575-576; P. Kyle McCarter Jr., II Samuel (Anchor Bible, 1984), 311-313; Nicholas R. Werse, "Of Gods and Kings: The Case for Reading 'Milcom' in Zephaniah 1:5b," Vetus Testamentum 68 (2018): 505-513
  • minorityThe plain reading "their king" should stand in at least some of these verses, especially Amos 1:15, where the prophet's oracles against the surrounding nations consistently pair a foreign king with his officials rather than a god with priests, and the version of the idiom with "priests" elsewhere looks like a later expansion rather than the original wording.; Shalom M. Paul, Amos (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1991), 70-71; Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Amos (Anchor Bible, 1989), 273-277

Whether Milcom was an independent Ammonite god or essentially a royal title used for El, the chief West Semitic god, among the Ammonites.

  • contestedMilcom functioned mainly as a royal epithet for El among the Ammonites rather than naming a fully separate deity, since Ammonite inscriptions and personal names invoke El far more often than Milcom.; P. M. Michèle Daviau and Paul-Eugène Dion, "El, the God of the Ammonites? The Atef-Crowned Head from Tell Jawa, Jordan," Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 110 (1994): 158-167; Joel S. Burnett, "Iron Age Deities in Word, Image, and Name," Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 10 (2009): 153-164
  • contestedMilcom is better identified with the Ammonite form of Baal, the storm god, on the strength of bull and crescent imagery found on Ammonite seals.; Ulrich Hübner, Die Ammoniter (Harrassowitz, 1992), 256, 262
  • contestedThe similarities among Milcom, El, and Baal in the Ammonite evidence reflect traits common to Iron Age Levantine high gods generally, not a real merging or evolution of one god into another.; Collin Cornell, "A Moratorium on God Mergers? The Case of El and Milkom in the Ammonite Onomasticon," Ugarit-Forschungen 46 (2015): 49-99
2

Malcam: the name of a little-known Benjaminite man listed among the sons of Shaharaim in a tribal genealogy

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

Malcam appears exactly once in the Bible, in a list of names in 1 Chronicles 8:9. He is one of several sons born to a Benjaminite man named Shaharaim by his wife Hodesh, listed alongside brothers named Jobab, Zibia, Mesha, Jeuz, Sachia, and Mirmah. The text tells no story about him and gives no further detail; he is not mentioned anywhere else in Scripture.

The name is built from the same root that gives the ordinary Hebrew word for king, and, with slightly different vowels, the name of the Ammonite god Milcom described above. Ancient Israelite names often combined a word for king or a divine title with a pronoun or a blessing, so Malcam most likely meant something like "their king" and simply served as a family name. There is no reason to think this Benjaminite family had any connection to the Ammonite god who happens to share the same consonants.

Because he is known from a single genealogical entry, nothing more can be said about who Malcam was or why he was given this name.

1Ch 8:9

What scholars say about milkom

The three secure occurrences of מִלכֹּם (1 Kgs 11:5, 33; 2 Kgs 23:13) name the Ammonite national god; Heider calls 1 Kings 11:33 the bedrock attestation. Puech, Hübner, Day, and Heider hold that מִלכֹּם is etymologically cognate with but referentially distinct from מֹלֶךְ, chiefly on the strength of 2 Kings 23:10 and 23:13 defiling two separate cult sites. A cluster of further occurrences spelled מַלְכָּם ("their king") are widely, though not universally, read as further references to the same god: 2 Samuel 12:30/1 Chronicles 20:2 (McCarter, Anderson, Japhet, Knoppers, Klein), Jeremiah 49:1, 3 (Lundbom, Holladay, McKane, Bright, Carroll), and Zephaniah 1:5 (Berlin, Sweeney, Roberts, Werse 2018), while Amos 1:15 remains genuinely contested (Paul, Andersen and Freedman, and Jeremias retain the Masoretic "their king"). Epigraphically, מִלכֹּם is attested in the Amman Citadel Inscription (Horn 1969; Cross 1969) and the Tell el-ʿUmeiri seal of "Milkomʾor, servant of Baʿalyašaʿ" (Herr 1985), plus a handful of Milcom-theophoric personal names catalogued by Avigad and Sass. Aufrecht's count of the Ammonite onomasticon found El-names outnumbering Milcom-names roughly ten to one, spawning a debate over whether Milcom was an independent national god or a royal epithet of El (Daviau and Dion 1994; Burnett 2009), an Ammonite form of Baal (Hübner 1992), or neither identification (Cornell 2015). The genealogical מַלְכָּם/מלכם of 1 Chronicles 8:9 is unrelated: a personal name of a Benjaminite listed among the sons of Shaharaim, noted by the standard lexicons without further comment.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Émile Puech, "Milcom," in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Karel van der Toorn et al. (Brill, 1999), 575-576article
  • George C. Heider, The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment (JSOT Press, 1985)monograph
  • John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge University Press, 1989)monograph
  • Ulrich Hübner, Die Ammoniter (Harrassowitz, 1992)monograph
  • Walter E. Aufrecht, "The Religion of the Ammonites," in Ancient Ammon, ed. Burton MacDonald and Randall W. Younker (Brill, 1999), 152-162article
  • Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings (Anchor Bible, 1988), 287-288commentary
  • P. Kyle McCarter Jr., II Samuel (Anchor Bible, 1984), 311-313commentary
  • Nicholas R. Werse, "Of Gods and Kings: The Case for Reading 'Milcom' in Zephaniah 1:5b," Vetus Testamentum 68 (2018): 505-513article
  • Collin Cornell, "A Moratorium on God Mergers? The Case of El and Milkom in the Ammonite Onomasticon," Ugarit-Forschungen 46 (2015): 49-99article
  • BDB, s.v. מַלְכָּםlexicon

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of מִלכֹּם

noun

מִלְכֹּם

1Ki 11:5, 1Ki 11:33, 2Ki 23:13

m

מַלְכָּם

1Ch 8:9