Molech is the recipient of the child-sacrifice cult carried out at the Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where, the sources charge, worshippers 'passed their children through the fire'. The name is written mōleḵ, the word for king pointed with the vowels of the word for shame, and it is linked with Milcom, the national god of the Ammonites whose high place Solomon is said to have built and Josiah to have defiled. The law-codes of Leviticus and the prophets condemn the rite in the strongest terms as polluting the sanctuary and profaning the divine name. Scholars debate whether the term denotes a distinct deity at all or, following Eissfeldt's reading of Punic evidence, a technical term for a type of sacrifice; the tradition itself treats it as a god.