person
Anammelech
עֲנַמֶּ֫לֶךְ
Anammelech was an Assyrian deity worshiped by the Sepharvites, who were among the foreign peoples settled in Samaria by the Assyrian king.
- verses
- 1
- first named
- 2 Kings 17:31
- last named
- 2 Kings 17:31
- period
- Divided Monarchy
- role
- Man
Description
Who was Anammelech?
Anammelech was an Assyrian deity mentioned in the Bible as one of the gods worshiped by the Sepharvites. The Sepharvites were a people group from the Assyrian Empire who were brought to Samaria by the Assyrian king after the deportation of the Israelites. They settled in the cities of Samaria and continued to worship their own gods, including Anammelech.
The worship of Anammelech involved child sacrifice, as the Sepharvites were known to "burn their children in the fire" as part of their religious practices. This abhorrent act was strongly condemned by God and was one of the reasons for His judgment against the foreign nations who had been settled in Samaria.
The name "Anammelech" is believed to mean "Anu is king" or "Anu is prince," referring to the Mesopotamian sky god Anu. This connection suggests that Anammelech may have been a local deity or a manifestation of Anu worshiped by the Sepharvites. The worship of foreign gods, including Anammelech, was a violation of God's covenant with Israel and demonstrated the syncretistic practices that led to the downfall of the Northern Kingdom.
Relations
Direct connections
Every entity the graph places in a stated relation with this one, grouped by the kind of link. Each relation is authored once and its inverse derived, so both ends always agree. Rows marked “registry” come from the identity spine rather than from a verse, and a row marked “which bearer is the source’s decision” is one where the name could have meant more than one person. The last group is not a relation at all — it counts the events two entities stand in together.
Stands in the same events as
- Adrammelech1 event
Places
Where this happens
A person is placed by the events they take part in, and an event has to clear three things to place them: it must say where it happened, that place must be one the gazetteer can put a coordinate on, and the verse must report it rather than foretell, command or ask it. Nothing anchored here clears all three. Where the text names a setting no gazetteer surveys — a vineyard, a palace, a plot of ground — it is left off rather than guessed at; where a place is named only in a prophecy, the map does not draw what was said to be coming as though it had happened; and a place reached only through a relation is not inherited, because standing beside somebody is not being somewhere.
No verse Atlas has read as a report puts this person anywhere.
Not read yet
The pattern
Where Anammelech is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
1 verse across 1 of 66 books; 65 write the name nowhere. Named in 2 Kings (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — one, across 1 book.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Sources