Having done this much for the Jews, Moses appears to have connived at the intercourse of their young men with foreign prostitutes. He took an Ethiopian concubine himself. Syrian women, Moabites, Midianites, and other neighbors of the Jews--many of them, as it appears, young and lovely, but with debauched and vicious principles--established themselves as prostitutes in the land of Israel. For many years, until the time of Solomon, they were excluded from Jerusalem and the large cities. Driven to the highways for refuge, they lived in booths and tents, where they combined the trade of a peddler with the calling of a harlot. Unlike Tamar, they did not veil the face. Reclining within the tent, with no more clothing than the heat of the climate suggested, these dissolute girls invited the complaisance of passengers who stopped to refresh their thirst or replenish their wardrobe at their booth. So long as their practices violated no law of nature, the prudent legislator pursued a tolerant policy. Before long, however, abominable rites in honor of Moloch, Baal, or Belphegor, were formally established by the "strange women" and their male accomplices. Moloch, whose disgusting exactions we find in Phoenicia, and at Carthage also, demanded male worship. The belly of the god's statue was a furnace, in which a fierce fire was kindled and fed with animal sacrifice; around it the priests and their proselytes danced to the sound of music, sang wild songs, and debased themselves by practices of a disgusting and unnatural character. Nor was the worship of Baal less revolting. He too had his statues, in forms eminently calculated to excite the animal passions, and surrounded by cool groves in which the most shameless prostitution was carried on by all who would deposit an offering on the altars of the idol. It would even seem, from several passages in the Bible,[13] that the participators in these infamies were not invariably human beings. Against such enormities the wrath of Moses and his successors was aroused, on hygienic as well as moral and religious grounds. Participation in the rites of Moloch was punished with death.[14] Aaron's grandson did not hesitate to commit a double homicide to mark the Divine abhorrence of the daughters of Midian; and Moses himself, warned by the frightful progress of disease among the male Jews, struck at its roots by exterminating every female Midianite among his captives, save the virgins only.