story of the birth of Cyrus came into existence through the transfer to King Cyrus of one of the myths concerning the Sun-God, the God in this way being confused with a human individual. Now since Cyrus, as has been said, was in the eyes of the Jews a kind of Messiah and was glorified by them as such, we can understand how the danger through which the Messianic child is supposed to have passed found a place in the Gospels. Again, a similar story of a king, who, having been warned by a dream or oracle, orders the death of the children born within a specified time, is found in the "Antiquities" of Josephus [134] in connection with the story of the childhood of Moses. Moses, however, passed like Cyrus for a kind of forerunner and anticipator of Christ; and Christ was regarded as a Moses reappearing. [135] Again Joab, David's general, is said to have slaughtered every male in Edom; the young prince Hadad, however, escaped the massacre by fleeing into Egypt. Here he grew up and married the sister of the king, and after the death of his enemy King David he returned to his home. [136] But Hadad is, like Cyrus, (Kyrus) a name of the Syrian Adonis. Another name of Adonis or Tammuz is Dôd, Dodo, Daud, or David. This signifies "the Beloved" and indicates "the beloved son" of the heavenly father, who offers himself for mankind, or "the Beloved" of the Queen of heaven (Atargatis, Mylitta, Istar). [137] As is well known, King David was also called "the man after the heart of God," and there is no doubt that characteristics of the divine Redeemer and Saviour of the same name have been intermingled in the story of David in the same way as in that of Cyrus. [138] According to Jeremiah xxx. 8 and Ezekiel xxxiv. 22 sqq. and xxxvii. 21, it was David himself who would appear as the Messiah and re-establish Israel in its ancient glory. Indeed, this even appears to have been the original conception of the Messiah. The Messiah David seems to have been changed into a descendant of David only with the progress of the monotheistic conception of God, under the influence of the Persian doctrine concerning Saoshyant, the man "of the seed of Zarathustra." Now David was supposed to have been born at Bethlehem. But in Bethlehem there was, as Jerome informs us, [139] an ancient grove and sanctuary of the Syrian Adonis, and as Jerome himself complains the very place where the Saviour first saw the light resounded with the lamentations over Tammuz. [140] At Bethlehem, the former Ephrata (i.e., Place of Ashes), Rachel is said to have brought forth the youngest of the twelve month-sons of Jacob. She herself had christened him Benoni, son of the woeful lament. He was, however, usually called Benjamin, the Lord or Possessor of light. In the Blessing of Moses he is also called "a Darling of the Lord," and his father Jacob loved him especially. [141] He is the God of the new year born of the ashes of the past, at whose appearance lament