In a stela found at Thebes it is recorded that Barneses XII., while on his way through Mesopotamia to collect tribute, was so enraptured with the charms of a chieftain's daughter that he married her. Her father afterwards came to Thebes, to beg of the king the services of a physician to effect the cure of a younger daughter possessed by an evil spirit. The physician sent, like Jesus' disciples (Luke ix. 40), could not cast him out, and eleven years later the father went again to Thebes to sue the gods of Egypt for more effectual aid. The king then gave him the use of the ark of the god Chons, which on arriving in Mesopotamia, after a journey of eighteen months, immediately drove forth the evil spirit from out his victim. On this the Mesopotamian chieftain was unwilling to part with the ark; but after retaining it three years and nine months, being warned in a dream in which he saw the deity fly back to Egypt in the shape of a golden hawk, he returned the ark to Egypt, in the thirty-third year of Rameses. The Zoroastrian conception of the prince of the "devils," Ahriman, and his attendant powers, reminds forcibly of the taunt of the Jews to Jesus, "He casteth out devils through Beelzebub, the chief of the devils." But how unlike this conception is to that of the impotent god of Ekron Beelzebub, referred to in 2 Kings i. These instances abundantly suffice to show that the belief held by the Jews in the time of Jesus, as to possession by evil or unclean spirits, or demons, or devils, was a belief gathered from the nations among whom they were scattered after the first captivity, and that it would have been held by Moses as an "abomination of those nations." What, then, becomes of the testimony of the devils to the claim of Jesus? Moses and the prophets would have held it in derision. (d.) _The temptation in the wilderness_ (Matt. iv. 1-11; Mark i. 12, 13; Luke iv. 1, 13).