from them to the Greeks, sons of Japhet, who lived more to the north, in
what were called the Isles of the Gentiles.

The Canaanites had a still fouler worship than the other sons of Ham in
Egypt. They had many gods, whom they called altogether Baalim, or lords;
and goddesses, whom they called Ashtoreth; and they thought that each
had some one city or people to defend; and that the Lord Jehovah of the
Israelites was such another as these, instead of being the only God
of Heaven and earth. Among these there was one great Baal to whom the
Phoenicians were devoted, and an especial Ashtoreth, the moon, or Queen
of Heaven, who was thought to have a lover named Tammuz, who died with
the flowers in the autumn and revived in the spring, and the women
took delight in wailing and bemoaning his death, and then dancing and
offering cakes in honour of his revival. Besides these, there was the
planet Saturn, or as they called him, Moloch or Remphan, of whom they
had a huge brazen statue with the hands held a little apart, set up over
a furnace; they put poor little children between these brazen hands, and
left them to drop into the flames below as an offering to this dreadful
god.

Well might such worship be called abomination, and the Israelites be
forbidden to hold any dealings with those who followed it. As long
as the generation lived who had been bred up in the wilderness, they
obeyed, and felt themselves under the rule of God their King, Who made
His Will known at Shiloh by the signs on the breastplate of the High
Priest, while judges and elders governed in the cities. But afterwards
they began to be tempted to make friends with their heathen neighbours,
and thus learnt to believe in their false deities, and to hanker after
the service of some god who made no such strict laws of goodness as
those by which they were bound. As certainly as they fell away, so