The hungry god

Nine Numbers, Three Letters, & Marx’s Nameless God: A Reflection for Advent

Sumerian idol, c. 3000 BC

Expanded from a reflection given at Season of Hope, a event of the New Personalist Movement in London, on the Third Sunday of Advent, 2024

Begin with two numbers: 436. 44,930. The first are days; the number of days since the bombing of Gaza began. The second are lives. The true number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces so far is likely to be significantly higher than this. The eventual number of lives ended in the course of the conflict, by bullets, bombs, starvation and disease, is likely to be higher still.

Another number: 246 million. This is the direct dollar cost of the war’s continuation every single day.

Death is expensive.

Here are some more numbers: 300, 111,000, 5, 10. 300 people in the UK die in poverty every week, 111,000 a year, one person every five minutes. Poverty will take ten years off your expected lifespan. That number is growing every year. So is the number of people in this country who live in poverty.

Two more numbers: 5 and 12. Five million children in this county grow up in poverty. The net wealth of the UK in 2023 was 12 million million pounds. Over half of this wealth rests in the possession of one tenth of the population. Go from the top to the bottom: the poorest tenth own just one percent.

With one percent of one percent of the nation’s wealth, we could lift the two-child limit on welfare, and 300,000 children would no longer grow up in poverty. We cannot, so our government informs us, afford it.

Death is cheap.

A question: why?

One way to answer that question is contained in these three letters: M,L,K. But the only way to know what those letters mean, I’m afraid, is to begin all over again.

So we begin with these numbers: 436 days and 44,930 lives; 300 dead every week, 111,000 every year; one every five minutes. 10 years taken away. 5 million children, living in poverty, in a country wealthy to the tune of 12 trillion pounds.

These numbers are visible signs of invisible realities: forces which stand over us and against us in every aspect of our lives, but about which we struggle to speak: of which we are unable to ask questions. Death is everywhere, and feared everywhere, and no-where understood. Money is the measure of all things; and that measure is taken by a logic we neither understand nor control. Curses and blessings; poverty and riches; a war fought, a war ended: choices set and known and taken for us, authored by the movement of an invisible hand.

Our politics, our economics, our society, are, in this sense, not ours at all. In the money-system, Marx wrote, “the worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him”. That was 1844. A ballad of the English civil war: the sword masters money, but money masters all things. That was 1659. Four centuries on, and we, more than ever, direct ourselves to ends we cannot determine. Our lives are not our own.

This is the meaning of our three letters, M and L and K.

But to why that is, we have to stay with Marx a little longer.

Later in 1844, in his Notes on James Mill, Marx writes the following:

“The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act” - how, in other words, we order our lives together - “is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself … the relation itself between things, man's operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man.”

Man’s “will, his activity and his relation to other men,” appears as “a power independent of him and them.” To this “alien mediator”, Marx writes, he becomes a slave. “Human individuality, human morality itself,” becomes “an object of commerce and the material in which money exists.” To our “flesh and blood,” the “spirit of money” takes “material, corporeal form”.

And here Marx says something interesting. “It is clear that this mediator now becomes” and Marx places what he says next in emphasis, “a real god”.

Here’s another way of describing what he’s just discovered: M, L, K.

A real God, Marx writes. What is he trying to say? A better way of putting it: what is he trying to get us to see? One way not to see it, I think, is to read the phrase as pure rhetoric, a kind of literary device. Recall his exact words, his emphasis: a real god. Another way not to see it is to read the same words as a covert, even unconscious, admission of belief. But Marx says this precisely as an atheist, someone who took unbelief far more seriously than most atheists do today.

When he talks about a real god he speaks of what he thinks any god is: an invisible force, visibly seen, which stands over and against human life. Something you give your life to - hopes, dreams, heartbreak, frustration, joy - and takes on a life of its own. “You worship the work of your hands”. That’s the Prophet Jeremiah. Marx, if you like, didn’t abrogate the commandment against idolatry: he just extended it.

What Marx and Jeremiah would agree on is that idols being false gods doesn’t mean they aren’t, in some important ways, real. Omnes dii gentes daemonia, Augustine warned. Or take Psalm 115, which says that idols have mouths which cannot speak, eyes that cannot see; ears which cannot hear. And then the psalmist makes a disturbing prediction: “those who make them become like them/so do all who trust in them.” We spend ourselves in the money-system, Marx says, and are diminished: “the increasing value of the world of things” he writes “is in direct proportion” he wrote “to the devaluation of the world of men”.

This is what a real god is, for Marx: a force which stands outside and over every aspect of human life, but about it we struggle to think about, to speak about, to ask questions of. Our mouths and eyes and ears are shut. Those are visible signs of an invisible reality. A false idol, yes: but a real god. Marx’s answer leaves him with a question, however. Does the god of the money-system have any qualities specific to it? Does it have a nature?

Does it have a name?

Marx initially tries to find these answers in analogy; notoriously, to Judaism; in the Notes on James Mill, to Christianity. Neither quite fits. It takes twenty years since his discovery of the god of the money-system for Marx to find out who that god really is.

The year is 1862. In an early draft of Das Kapital, Marx returns to the subject of his Notes on James Mill, in a chapter on the “externalisation of the relations of capital”. This is what he writes:

“In its capacity of interest-bearing capital, capital claims the ownership of all wealth which can ever be produced, and everything it has received so far is but an instalment for its all-engrossing appetite. By its innate laws, all surplus-labour which the human race can ever perform belongs to it.”

And then the paragraph breaks off, as if Marx, writing about economics, has realised he’s writing about something far bigger than that. Then he writes down one word: he doesn’t explain it, doesn’t expand, moves on without providing any context. He writes a name. Moloch.

Who is Moloch? The Hebrew Bible contains eight separate references to Moloch, “the detestable God”, but it doesn’t, all things considered, tell us much about him. Polytheism is essentially conservative. We worship forces with real power over our lives, and those forces are present everwhere: weather and war, poverty and wealth, knowledge and love. In Ba’al, Ishtar, Chemosh, and the other “other gods” of scripture, we see old roles repeat. Moloch, peculiarly, doesn’t seem to have one.

His cult reappears from century to century; sometimes outside the people of Israel, sometimes in Israel itself. Archaeologists have struggled to turn up evidence of his worship: which is, again, peculiar.

We don’t know who Moloch is, then. We don’t know who worshipped him. We don’t actually know, after all this time, with all the fury scripture directs at him, what he was the god of. We do know what he demands. Moloch demands everything.

To Moloch, scripture tells us, worshippers would sacrifice their own children. This wasn’t simply a case of parental neglect. At the time the survival of your progeny were, economically, socially, politically, bound up with your own survival. They were part of you - hence scripture, in condemning these sacrifices, refers to “your children” as “your seed”. It’s unsurprising Moloch appears to have been worshipped in desperation, then, because the sacrifice involved was an ultimate one.

To the money-system, Marx writes, the worker makes “a sacrifice of his life”.

An aside: although we don’t know much about Moloch, we do know how his name may have been written, in the temple script of a dead civilization, located not far from the borders of ancient Israel. You just use these three letters: M and L and K.

M-L-K means Moloch.

Marx arrived at his realisation - perhaps we should say epiphany - by degrees over the decades since 1844. He did so, significantly, through looking at what the money-system was doing to the world outside it. Watching the wholesale expulsion of Scottish highlanders from land valued higher than the inhabitants were; sheep eating men, someone said - the hierophants of the invisible hand, more commonly known as economists, affirmed it as a necessary sacrifice.

In their reaction to the clearances, Marx recognised the rational calculation of the economists had an eerily religious tone: they “regard "Net Revenue",” he wrote, “as the Moloch to whom entire populations must be sacrificed". The same decade, another sacrifice; this time India invaded, plundered, colonised. What our society calls progress, he writes “resembles that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.” Empire and economy, money and death, each crime setting the stage for another. Expand or die. Which is to say: someone, somewhere, has to die.

In Das Kapital, Marx describes how, in pre-capitalist economies, money functions as a kind of middleman: a good is sold for money, itself used to purchase some other good: Money to Commodity to Money. Money has power; but only as means to other ends.

With the advent of the money-system, this changes. Money becomes an end in itself. Every human good become a kind of means; money acquires a value beyond itself. Another way of putting it: money becomes supernatural. And this marks the advent, Marx writes, of a “general corruption,” as an ouroboros of accumulation - Money to Commodity to Money - uncoils across the globe, consuming all aspects of human life; consumes life itself.

“Things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc.

“Everything,” Marx writes, “passes into commerce.” A formula with three components: Money to Commodity to Money. A name in three letters: M-C-M. A end with no ending. A terminal loop.

“Capital,” the final draft of Das Kapital reads: “demands the whole world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right”.

London, 1864: Marx addresses the founding conference of the first International. Britain is the richest country in the world; London the richest city. In working-class areas, one in five children die before turning ten. “In olden times, child murder was a mysterious rite of the religion of Moloch,” Marx tells his audience: except “Moloch had no exclusive bias for the children of the poor.”

Again: what is Marx trying to get us to see? He tried, remember, using Judaism and Christianity to make his point here, and found he couldn’t make it. What is specific to Moloch is specific to the money-system. When he talks of the God of Capital being Moloch, it’s because he believes that’s the god’s true name. Here, don’t think, as Marx asked us in 1844, in terms of money as an object. Think of it as he did: a mediator, an agent transformation, a movement. A movement with an internal, inhuman logic. A movement with a direction. A movement from life into death.

Keep that in mind. Recall the three letters we started with: M, L, K. Archaeologists have struggled to find evidence of the cult of Moloch. What they have found is those three letters, all over the Near East, repeating across millennia, in temples and charnel-heaps and tombs holding the small bones of children: M-L-K. As far as they can tell it means this: king.

If M-L-K means Moloch, this might confirm a very old speculation about Moloch - that it’s a mistranscription of Melekh. Melekh means king, too. It’s maybe because of this tradition that the authors of the Septuagint translate Moloch not as a name but a title, a ruling authority: archon. But if M-L-K means king, then a question that naturally follows is this: what does king mean? And the answer is very simple. Because the first and most obvious meaning King has is: power.

A question: what kind of sense does human sacrifice make?

The answer, I think, is this: all the sense in the world.

You sow and you reap; you store the harvest so the cold won’t kill; you sleep to wake, you work for bread: you spill blood to save your own. Power demands sacrifice. Life requires death. Marx calls this the realm of necessity. The psalmist calls it the vale of tears. Same difference. You get what you pay for, and only that. No exchange is ever equal. Everything has a price.

So it shouldn’t surprise us when we look at any mythology, any body of folklore, from almost anywhere, and find the rule repeated to us in the form of a story. Call it the great sacrifice. It’s told differently in different places: with a young hero or a wise monkey; a dragon who lives at the bottom of a lake; a sorcerer; a serpent; a king. There’s always a problem and a power and an offer and a question: what would you give to have what you most desire?

What would you give to have what you need? Knowledge, wealth, peace, power. How much would you be willing to give? How much of yourself? Would you take a life? Would you sacrifice your own child?

Would you sacrifice someone else’s?

Stop for a moment there. Keep in mind the numbers we began with: the wealth, the poverty, the war, the dead. Add these: 735. 1,000. The number of people in chronic hunger, worldwide, in 2024: seven hundred and thirty five million. The number of people we produce enough excess food to feed, worldwide: one thousand million. Three more: 5.44, 3.5, 30. The number of people, worldwide, who live on less than 5 pounds 44 pence a day: 3.5 billion. This number hasn’t changed for the last thirty years.

Add to this the numbers we began with: the war, the money, the poverty, the wealth, the death. Think of these not as objects, as events. Think of them as mediation, as exchange, as sacrifice. Think of them as requests made to a world dominated by forces which stand outside and against us, a petition to power, for power. When the Prophet Samuel tells God Israel asks for a king, think about the response he gets: this means, God tells Samuel, they have rejected me.

Consider one more number: One thousand, nine hundred and thirty eight, thousand, thousand, thousand pounds. 2443 billion dollars. That’s the total expenditure on weapons of war, worldwide, this year. The next time you see a homeless person, hold that number in your head. 2443 billion dollars for the shedding of blood; and for this person, bearing the image of the one who made all things, this.

Here’s one reason we know human sacrifice makes intuitive sense: We’re still doing it.

We can see it happen, on our streets, in the headlines, on our phone screens, in the numbers we read and only half-believe. Sometimes we calculate the terms of the exchange; this much life for that much security; these deaths for that one; blood for money; money for blood. We judge these sacrifices worth it - for our security, for our nation, for the economy, for peace - because they are.

Until we discover, eventually and invariably, that they weren’t. We recurrently rediscover that we have increased our sorrows; endangered what we most desired to save; that, as Isaiah says, our ways are not His ways. And we recurrently forget. The words of the prophets are a harmony of repetitions; the same errors made; the same unheard warnings: across centuries, across epochs, they tell us we never really learn. That we return, again and again, to the service of what is silent and sightless and blind. And in doing so, we become what we serve.

So think of the numbers we began with again: the dead, the suffering, the injustice, the banality. Think of them in terms of a price paid, a cost exacted, a complicity entered into. Think of eyes averted, words unspoken, cries for help unanswered and unheard. We have hands that do not feel.

We grow numb to all of it, to the suffering of others, to the sin of the world. We grow numb to ourselves. We look away. We fall silent. We become cynical or apathetic. We despair. This too is a kind of a sacrifice. And this too is a kind of death. When the poor of Gaza are buried, we go with them into the grave.

Think of other graves, other bones, other inscriptions: think of those three letters. M-L-K. Some scholars think M-L-K can be interpreted to mean not just king, but the definitive king; a power over all other powers, inexorable, all-consuming. They identify M-L-K with the Ugaritic deity Milku, named the eternal king. And some say Milku is who Molech is. Which would mean we know what Molech, the detestable god, is god of. He’s the god of death: the one eternal king.

Remember how Paul writes his epistles like the world is under occupation by an enemy we cannot see;: that occupying forces aren’t flesh and blood but powers, spirits, archons, the archon of the world. Remember what he says in Thessalonians: we are under death’s dominion. Remember the offer made twenty centuries ago, in the desert named the place of desolation. Worship me, and I will give you all the kingdoms of the world. Just do as all the powers of the world do. Recognise my power. Call me your king.

Stop there. Go back, past the numbers, past the letters, back to the only place worth starting from. Akedah. It means binding. On Mount Moriah, Abraham offers Isaac to God. And God, the true God, refuses the sacrifice. And in the refusal, God reveals not just his will but his nature. He demands everything, of course, because real transcendence always does: nothing could be greater, and so nothing could ever be enough. But this God, the true God, the God of Abraham, demands everything, only to give everything back. He desires mercy, not sacrifices. In the Akedah the logic of the exchange breaks open, and sacrifice takes on a new meaning: gift.

It’s also here that we know who Moloch was: why the prophets named him “the detestable god” . Moloch’s worship inverts the Akedah almost exactly; enjoining sacrifice; precluding covenant; immolating the future for the present, hope for fear, love for power. This is, of course, exactly what Marx thought a god had to be: stand over and against us, demanding our diminishment for his increase, asking us to shut our eyes and ears and mouths, always choosing for us, and always choosing death.

It matters a great deal that in this much, Marx was wrong. Because out of the Akedah comes a great covenant; and this is another revelation. God arrives: not just in history, but in our history, speaking to us in a language we understand. God doesn’t desire our diminishment. He desires our friendship. He tells us the power of death, the eternal king, is not a power but a choice, one set out before us. He asks us to choose life. The choice is made, and the covenant, and the promise. Isaac is set free, and remains free. Akedah means binding. Isaac means one who laughs.

On that day we discover a way unlike the ways of the world . And from that discovery, across the centuries, pour the words of the prophets, promises of justice and repair; liberation for captives, ploughshares into swords, good news to the poor. Every warning of every prophet is also, seen differently, a commitment: that if we desire what is good about the world we will, one day, receive just that. We are given hope.

A choice is set before those who give ear to the words of the prophets; made, then made wrongly, then set and again, by one who desires mercy, not sacrifice. An image, in outline, emerges; the peaceable kingdom; the new earth, the world to come. From Moriah to Sinai to the rivers of Babylon, and then back again, a direction is set; a movement unfolds: from slavery into freedom, from death to life. A sign is promised; a name. Emmanuel. God with us.

And twenty centuries ago, there’s an Advent, an arrival which is again, itself, a revelation, and we know from then on, with a certainty called faith, that in a world ruled by powers which stand over and against us, blind to our needs, deaf to our cries, silent, refusing question, we have a God who is none of these things. Who stands with and alongside us, who suffers as we suffer, who speaks to us in a language we understand. Who asks us to choose life.

At Christmas, we remember, temporarily, a permanent change. We are subject, as Paul noted, to principalities, and powers, the rulers of this present darkness; forces that write our history for us, with an invisible hand. Everything is demanded: our individuality, our morality, our fear: not to hear, not to speak, not to struggle, not to love. Forms change - for M-L-K, write M-C-M - but the pattern set out for us to follow remains the same: life into death.

One way to describe what the New Personalist Movement set out to do, earlier this year, was to find out what the revolutionary tradition and the Christian faith had to learn from each other. In 1844, Marx saw an old spirit in the new world money made: a real God. He was wrong to think that a real god and the true God were one and the same. Idols demand flesh and blood; the true God gives us his. And so in the present darkness, the headlines and statistics, the crimes of a world which sacrifices but does not pray, we have received good news.

Another way to describe what New Personalism set out to do is that we wanted to combine theory and practice; and that if we wanted a different world we had to live a different way: praying together and talking together, sharing a common meal and a common struggle. And that this would have to start in small ways, with ordinary people, a long way from relevance. This kind of beginning happens to be the story of Advent; which is to say it is how God works.

If you asked me why New Personalism started, and is continuing, and God willing will continue, I would say that we believe the Gospel is true. And if it is true; then, in a bad time, we really do have good news. Powers and principalities, invisible hands and reasons of state, the illimitable empire of the prince of this world: all this is passing away. Now, everything can be questioned. Now, everything can be changed. Death has no dominion.

So to the numbers we began with, end with a different one: one. The first hour, of the first day, of the first year called the year of our lord. A passage made from death into life. A God who desires mercy, and not sacrifice; a kingdom not of this world; a kingdom which is already here, among you, with the little ones and the poor and the despised. The true God, not just a real one.

A God who has shown us who he is; on Sinai and Moriah, in Bethlehem and Golgotha, in a death freely offered; in a life freely shared. In a promise kept.

End not with a number but with a name: Emmanuel, God with us, now and then and throughout all the days which are coming, even to the end of the age.

And certainly, we might hope, to the end of this one.