In the Hebrew Bible, Tophet or Topheth (Biblical Hebrew: תֹּפֶת, romanized: Tōp̄eṯ; Ancient Greek: Ταφέθ, romanized: taphéth; Latin: Topheth) is a location in Jerusalem in the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna), where worshipers engaged in a ritual involving "passing a child through the fire", most likely child sacrifice. Traditionally, the sacrifices have been ascribed to a god named Moloch. The Bible condemns and forbids these sacrifices, and the tophet is eventually destroyed by king Josiah, although mentions by the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah suggest that the practices associated with the tophet may have persisted.

Most scholars agree that the ritual performed at the tophet was child sacrifice, and they connect it to similar episodes throughout the Bible and recorded in Phoenicia and Carthage by Hellenistic sources. There is disagreement about whether the sacrifices were offered to a god named "Moloch". Based on Phoenician and Carthaginian inscriptions, a growing number of scholars believe that the word moloch refers to the type of sacrifice rather than a deity. There is currently a dispute as to whether these sacrifices were dedicated to Yahweh rather than a foreign deity.

Archaeologists have applied the term "tophet" to large cemeteries of children found at Carthaginian sites that have traditionally been believed to house sacrificed human children, as described by Hellenistic and biblical sources. This interpretation is controversial: some scholars argue that the tophets may have been children's cemeteries and reject Hellenistic sources as anti-Carthaginian propaganda. Others argue that not all burials in the tophet were sacrifices.

The tophet and its location later became associated with divine punishment in Jewish eschatology.

There is no consensus on the etymology of tophet, a word which only occurs eight times in the Masoretic Text. The word may be derived from the Aramaic word taphyā meaning "hearth", "fireplace", or "roaster", a proposal first made by William Robertson Smith in 1887. Some have suggested that the word has been altered via using the vocalization of bōsheth "shame". Others derive the word from the Hebrew root špt "to set (on fire)", cognate with Ugaritic ṯpd "to set". A new proposal has been made to interpret the term as "place of vow" by Robert M. Kerr.

The Talmud (Eruvin 19a) and Jerome derive the name from a Hebrew verb meaning "to seduce". The historically most significant etymology, followed by both Jewish and Christian exegetes until the modern period, was made by the 11th-century CE rabbi Rashi, who derived the term from Hebrew toph "drum", claiming that the drums were beaten during the sacrifice to Moloch, deriving his ideas from Plutarch's description of Carthaginian sacrifice. This derivation is, however, morphologically impossible.

The tophet is attested 8 times in the Hebrew Bible, mostly to designate a place of ritual fire or burning, but sometimes as a place name. The connection to ritual fire is made explicit in 2 Kings 23:10, Isaiah 30:33; and Jeremiah 7:31–32. In 2 Kings, King Josiah

defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech.