 Richardson suggests that the event in Matthew's gospel was inspired by Herod's murder of his own sons.That noted, scholars generally agree that the Massacre of the Innocents reflected the Pharaoh of the Exodus' massacre of Hebrew infants in which the baby Moses was spared, as the author of the Gospel of Matthew took creative liberties throughout the Gospel to portray Jesus as the new Moses.Herod died in Jericho, after an excruciatingly painful, putrefying illness of uncertain cause, known to posterity as "Herod's Evil".