Moloch

OED: A person or thing to which extreme or terrible sacrifices are made; a terrible or remorselessly destructive person or force.

Wikipedia: As a god worshipped by the [|Phoenicians] and [|Canaanites], Moloch had associations with a particular kind of [|propitiatory] [|child sacrifice] by parents. Moloch figures in the [|Book of Deuteronomy] and in the [|Book of Leviticus] as a form of [|idolatry] (Leviticus 18:21: "And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch"). In the Old Testament, [|Gehenna] was a valley by Jerusalem, where apostate Israelites and followers of various [|Baalim] and Caananite gods, including Moloch, sacrificed their children by fire (2 Chr. 28:3, 33:6; Jer. 7:31, 19:2–6).

// "...the same sphinx face which she had been born with, which had looked down from the loft that night beside Judith's and which she still wears not at seventy-four, looking at me with no change, no alteration in it at all, as though it had known to the second when I was to enter, had waited there during that entire twelve miles behind that walking mule and watched me draw nearer and nearer and enter the door at last as it had known (ay, perhaps decreed, since there is that justice whose **Moloch's** palate-paunch makes no distinction between gristle bone and tender flesh)..." (AA 109). //