Human sacrifices, similar to those of Greece and Rome, existed in Palestine. Children were sacrificed to the nameless god or gods that bore the cult title of _melech_, _i.e._ “king.” As in the rest of the Mediterranean world such sacrifices were exceptional and grisly forms of expiation, used when ordinary means had failed. Among the Jews, on the other hand, they seem to have been prohibited from the very beginning of their history as a community. It is a purely gratuitous theory that makes _melech_, or _molech_, a cult-title of Yahveh in Israel. There is simply no evidence of any kind that it was so. On the contrary, the oldest traditions of the Jews represent the abolition of human sacrifices as one of the first reforms instituted by the founders of their faith. The Mosaic code made these sacrifices a capital offense (Lev. xviii. 21; xx. 2). The very name _molech_ indicates an intense abhorrence, if, as has been plausibly suggested, it is simply מלך, or “king,” with the vowels of בשת, “the Abomination.”[205] With so old a tradition on the subject, the Jews must have felt, as peculiarly irritating, the transference of this vituperative tag to them. That it might be so applied was of course an inevitable expansion of the belief that the Jews were μισόξενοι, “haters of strangers.” However, it must not be supposed that the statement was widely current. On the contrary, we have only two references to it. Damocritus, who lived perhaps in the first century B.C.E., as quoted by the late Byzantine compiler Suidas,[206] asserts that the Jews captured a stranger every seven years, and sacrificed him to their god; and Apion, in the first century C.E., relates the circumstantial story of the captured Greek who was found immured in the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes. The latter story is an amusing instance of rhetorical method. Of its baselessness of course no proof need be adduced. It is almost certainly the concoction of Apion himself, perhaps based upon some such statement as this just quoted from Damocritus. Its melodramatic features, the fattening of the stranger, the oath sealed by blood, are highly characteristic of Apion’s style. It cannot be said that this particular charge against the Jews had any real success. The later writers do not mention it. Tacitus and Juvenal, both of whom are very likely to have read Apion, pass by the story in silence. And Juvenal, who in his Fifteenth Satire expresses such detestation of a similar act among the Egyptians he abominated,[207] would certainly not have let off the Syrian fortune-tellers, whom he equally disliked, with an allusion to their unsociability. _Non monstrare vias nisi eadem sacra colenti_,[208] “They are instructed not to point out a road except to those who share their rites.” It might almost seem as though even rhetorical animosity demanded more for its terms of abuse than the authority of Apion.