A male deity also, who gave fruit and increase from water, was worshipped by the Canaanites. At Gaza and Ashdod, the cities of the Philistines, and near the coast, at Beth-Dagon, and Kaphar-Dagon, the god Dagon was invoked, whom Philo mentioned as the Zeus Arotrius, the Zeus of the field, the god of nourishment. His temple at Gaza was the pre-eminent shrine of the Philistines, the centre of their federation. The image of Dagon in his temple at Ashdod had the face and hands of a man, the body of a fish, and again the feet of a man.[517] Philo's account denotes Dagon as the discoverer of the plough and the god of nourishment, as the giver of corn and protector of the field, and therefore he must in any case have been a spirit of increase and fertility. We found the name of this god in Babylonian inscriptions of the time of Hammurabi, and before it, his image, and that of his priests, among the monuments of Assyria. We saw that his name designated him as a fish-god, and know that Babylonian legends connected him with the sea, and represented him as arising from the sea (p. 272). By the side of the deities of the beneficent powers of nature and of birth, the Canaanites placed severe and gloomy deities, who were averse and hostile to the bloom of nature, the life and generation of mankind. These were Moloch and Astarte. The first is known to the Greeks under the name of Cronus, and from Philo's account of El we must deduce the relation of this god to Saturn. The Moloch of the Canaanites is the cruel destroying god of war; fire in its consuming, though also in its purifying properties, was his element. He is said to have been represented in the form of a bull or with a bull's head or horns.[518] Among the booty which Sethos I. (1439-1388 B.C.) brought back from his campaigns against the Cheta and Retennu we may see, in the sculptures at Karnak (p. 150), the image of a bull.[519] The Canaanites offered human sacrifices to Moloch. If we remember that the Sepharvites of Babylonia offered up men to Adrammelech, _i.e._ "to king Adar," the spirit of the planet Saturn, we may venture to regard the Moloch of the Canaanites as the god of Saturn, without excluding the possibility that the burning glow of the midsummer sun may have lain at the root of the Canaanite conception of this god.[520] Not only were captives, often to the number of thousands, sacrificed to Moloch in gratitude for the victory bestowed;[521] but also at the beginning of an important undertaking, or the opening of a campaign, his favour was sought by human sacrifices. These were indispensable in order to appease his wrath, and turn destruction from all upon the head of a few.[522] If the crops withered, or a pestilence devastated the cities, or great reverses fell upon the land in war, human victims were burned as expiatory offerings.[523] Such offerings could only be taken from among the native families. Pure victims as yet undefiled by sexual intercourse, children and youths,