(M10) The names of these kings suggest that they claimed affinity with their god Baal or Moloch, for Moloch is only a corruption of _melech_, that is, “king.” Such a claim at all events appears to have been put forward by many other Semitic kings.(29) The early monarchs of Babylon were worshipped as gods in their lifetime.(30) Mesha, king of Moab, perhaps called himself the son of his god Kemosh.(31) Among the Aramean sovereigns of Damascus, mentioned in the Bible, we find more than one Ben-hadad, that is, “son of the god Hadad,” the chief male deity of the Syrians;(32) and Josephus tells us that down to his own time, in the first century of our era, Ben-hadad I., whom he calls simply Adad, and his successor, Hazael, continued to be worshipped as gods by the people of Damascus, who held processions daily in their honour.(33) Some of the kings of Edom seem to have gone a step farther and identified themselves with the god in their lifetime; at all events they bore his name Hadad without any qualification.(34) King Bar-rekub, who reigned over Samal in North-Western Syria in the time of Tiglath-pileser (745-727 B.C.) appears from his name to have reckoned himself a son of Rekub-el, the god to whose favour he deemed himself indebted for the kingdom.(35) The kings of Tyre traced their descent from Baal,(36) and apparently professed to be gods in their own person.(37) Several of them bore names which are partly composed of the names of Baal and Astarte; one of them bore the name of Baal pure and simple.(38) The Baal whom they personated was no doubt Melcarth, “the king of the city,” as his name signifies, the great god whom the Greeks identified with Hercules; for the equivalence of the Baal of Tyre both to Melcarth and to Hercules is placed beyond the reach of doubt by a bilingual inscription, in Phoenician and Greek, which was found in Malta.(39)