The sources for Salammbô include a study by Friedrich Daumer seeking to prove that « in the beginning, Moloch and Jehovah were one and the same god » and linking the early Hebrew and Christian cults to human sacrifice and cannibalism. Flaubert was well aware of this theory, which he formulated on several occasions in his notes on the Bible and in his drafts, and which helps to explain the « anti-religious rage » that he expresssed in his letters of that period. For Flaubert the novel was the locus of a subterranean theological reflection through which the pagan god came to colour his perception of the Christian god : in seeking Moloch in Jehovah for the purposes of documentation and because the available information on Carthage was so meagre in comparison with the vast expanses of the Bible, the novelist found Jehovah in Moloch. In these circumstances, the bringing back to life of the child-devouring statue of Moloch can no longer be regarded merely as the reconstruction of a cranky, defunct cult, but as the resurrection of a rite that is linked to the very origins of Christianity, that explains it, and that contains its very essence.