King Solomon came under the influence of the child-murderers, and he rebuilt an altar to Milcom (Molech, from the Hebrew melekh, meaning king). I Kings 11:5-8. Molech, or Moloch, was honored by his worshippers by the building of a great fire on his altar. The parents were then forced by the priests to throw their children into the fire. In excavations at Gezer (the Pharaoh Merneptah had called himself the Binder of Gezer after he put a. stop to the obscene rites of the Canaanites at Gezer) Macalister, under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, from 1904 to 1909, found in the Canaanite stratum of about 1500 B.C., the ruins of a "High Place," a temple to Ashtoreth, containing ten crude stone pillars, five to eleven feet high, before which human sacrifices were offered. Under the debris in this "High Place," Macalister found great numbers of jars containing the remains of children who had been sacrificed to Baal. "Another horrible practice was what they called 'foundation sacrifice.' When a house was to be build, a child would be sacrificed and its body built into the wall, to bring good luck to the rest of the family. Many of these were found in Gezer. They have been found also at Megiddo, Jericho, and other places." (Halley's Bible Handbook)