WHILE we were talking about food last evening, Aunt Edith," said Charley, "I thought of one thing I particularly wanted to ask you about, but there was not time; I never could understand about John the Baptist, and his eating locusts and wild honey.”
“Why, you know what locusts are like," interrupted May, "Auntie showed you that one which some one sent her all the way from Syria in a little box; it was just like those great grasshoppers in Switzerland, which make such a noise with their wings, only bigger.”
“I know," said Charley; "but how could anyone eat such creatures as those?
“I cannot tell you," replied their aunt, "whether my locust was one of the four kinds which are mentioned in the book of Leviticus as fit for food, but locusts, either roasted or boiled, are eaten to this day by the Bedawin, as the wandering tribes of Arabs are called.”
“How can they eat such things?" repeated May, with a look of disgust.
“Perhaps they don't look any worse than shrimps, May," said Charley, "when they are boiled; and you know you are fond enough of eating them; perhaps if you had been an Arab girl you would have liked locusts just as well.”
“Locusts and honey go together now, as they did long ago, Charley," said Aunt Edith, smiling; “the Arabs sometimes dry the locusts in the sun, take off their heads and legs, and then grind and mix them with flour to make a bitter kind of bread, which they eat with honey.”
“But, Aunt Edith, why was Canaan called a land flowing with milk and honey? '”
“You must remember, May," said her aunt, "that cattle-feeding was the chief occupation of the people, so that the milk, not only of cows, but of sheep and goats, must have been most abundant. Leben, or curdled milk, almost forms the food of the poor in Palestine now, during part of the year. The ‘wild honey’ which John the Baptist found in the wilderness must have been made by wild bees. M. Pierotti tells us that he has found honey stored up in holes in the rocks, and in hollow trees, and he once disturbed a swarm of these wild bees, which had taken the skeleton of a camel for their hive.”
“Oh," exclaimed both children at once, "he must have thought of Samson finding honey in the carcass of the lion!”
“No doubt he did," replied their aunt; "we are told that wild honey was so abundant in the time of the Crusaders, that many of Edward I.'s soldiers died from eating too freely of it; and in our time travelers have observed with interest that in the remote districts, where the habits of the people have changed very little since patriarchal times, milk and honey form part of every meal. But now that I have answered your question, Charley, I should like for us to talk a little this evening about the flat-roofed houses of the East; for some parts of the Bible become much clearer to us when we understand how very unlike our houses Eastern dwellings are.”
“I know what you mean," said May; "I remember so well the time when I thought that the roof which was broken through, so that the man sick of the palsy might be let down into the midst of the people before Jesus, was a pointed roof, made of slates, like ours, and I used to wonder however they could have stood upon such a roof without falling; but since I have seen pictures of flat roofs, with people walking up and down upon them, I know better.”
“Still I don't understand how the man was carried to the roof,” said Charley; "were there stairs outside, as there are in Swiss houses? Don't you remember, May, when we were in Switzerland, how we used to run up the stairs outside our little chalêt, and then go indoors by the window from the gallery?”
“Oh, yes," said May, laughing at the remembrance, "there never was anything more delightful than that gallery; we could run about there on wet days, Aunt Edith, and see the blue lake and the snow mountains so beautifully from it.”
“Are the houses in Syria built at all like chalêts?" asked Charlie.
“They are only alike in this respect, that both have an outside staircase, and a gallery or verandah. The better class of dwellings in Syria are built round a court, which is sometimes paved with marble, and ornamented with shrubs; from this court, stairs lead to the verandah, and outside stairs also lead to the house-top. The roof of the verandah is on a level with the flat roof of the house, but is generally made of some very slight material, so that it would not be safe to step from the terrace-roof on to it.”
“Are the terrace-roofs quite flat?”
“They are slightly raised in the center, to allow the rain to run off.”
“I suppose they are as hard as a pavement," said May, "since people walk so much upon them.”
“I fancy the mixture of small stones, lime, and ashes, of which they are made," said her aunt, "must give them something of the look of our asphalte pavements. But you must remember that I have been describing to you a well-built house. Some poor huts now to be seen near the Sea of Galilee, are as wretched as the poorest mountain chalêt, consisting of only one little room, with no opening but the door. The roof, which is used for a sleeping-place, and is reached by a ladder from the outside, is covered with a solid bed of earth, often overgrown with the ‘grass upon the house-top, which withereth before it groweth up,’ which is used in Psa. 129 as an expressive figure of the short-lived prosperity of those who hate the people of God.”
“But if the four men who carried the sick man broke a hole into such a roof as that, or into one of the hard asphalte roofs, I should think the people below must have thought the house was coming down upon them," said Charley.
“Which sort of house do you think it was, Aunt Edith, a poor hut, or one of those good houses with a verandah?" asked May.
“Let us look at two of the accounts given of the healing of the palsied man," replied their aunt; "will you read the early part of Mark 2, Charley, and then May shall read for us a few verses from Luke 5, beginning at the 16th verse.”
When both passages of scripture had been read, Aunt Edith asked Charley whether he could tell her where this mighty work of Jesus took place.
“It was at Capernaum.”
“Yes; the Lord had returned across the lake to the city which was especially called ‘His own,’ the scene of so many of His works of power, and the report had gone abroad that He was at home, for that is the true meaning of the expression, ‘in the house’; no particular house is referred to, but it is probable, since, besides the poor who always flocked to hear His gracious words, there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, who had come from ‘every village of Galilee and Judea, and from Jerusalem,’ that the building in which the Lord was ‘preaching the word’ was not a small one. I will tell you what Dr. Kitto, who observed Eastern houses very carefully while he was in Palestine, and thought a great deal about this very scene of which we have read, says.”
“Oh, Aunt Edith," said Charley, "is that the same Dr. Kitto who fell from the ladder when he was a bricklayer's boy, and became quite deaf? Mother says she will read us a book he wrote some day, but that is called ‘The Lost Senses,’ and is about his deafness, I believe.”
“That same poor boy, after his terrible accident, by his patient industry became a great scholar, Charley, and wrote most interesting books, explaining difficulties in the Bible narrative, which, as I told you, are often made quite plain by a knowledge of the customs of Eastern people. He was for some time puzzled by what has puzzled you, and wondered how a roof, firm enough to walk upon, could have been broken through without danger to the people below; but he came to the conclusion that it was probably when our Lord stood in the verandah, speaking to the crowd below, that the four men carried their helpless burden up the outside staircase to the housetop; then, uncovering a part of the thin roof of the verandah, and standing firm upon the terrace-roof, they gently let the sick man down through the Opening they had made, and laid him upon his little couch at the feet of Jesus. What did the Lord see, in this act of theirs, which no one else saw, May?”
“It says: ‘when Jesus saw their faith, He said, Man, thy sins are forgiven thee.’ I suppose," continued May, thoughtfully, "Jesus forgave the poor man's sins first because his soul was more than his body.”
“But it must have been a wonderful payment for all their trouble," said Charley, "when the men who had carried him saw him, as soon as over Jesus had said, ‘Arise, and take up thy couch, and go into thy house,’ rise up at once and take up what he had been lying upon, and go to his house, glorifying God.”
“Was what he lay upon a folding bedstead, Aunt Edith?”
“It was a mattress, I think, May; mattresses, stuffed with wool or cotton, are generally used in the East for beds, and to ‘make a bed’ there only means to roll up the mattress upon which one has been lying, with its rug or coverlet, and put it in the corner.”
“Oh, what an easy way of making beds; but it would only do in warm countries.”
“I must tell you what an English lady saw when she was staying at Tiberias, a city on the Sea of Galilee. At four o'clock one April morning she was looking from a terrace where she had gone, as soon as she was dressed, for air, when she saw a curious sight. ‘The neighbors,’ she says, ‘were not up, and I overlooked many households asleep on their roofs. They had laid their mattresses there, and slept in their ordinary clothes, with a coverlet thrown over them. As the daylight brightened upon their faces one after another began to wake -the children stirring first. They rolled, and rubbed their eyes, threw off their coverlets, and jumped up, dressed for the day, apparently.’”
“It was well they got up early," said Charley, "for the house-top would be a very hot place when the sun was shining, I should think.”
“The richer people," said his aunt, "sometimes set up tents upon their terrace-roofs during the summer, and the poorer make little sheds there with mats, where they sleep to escape from the insects. M. Pierotti tells us that fires are lit upon the house-tops in times of rejoicing; that must be a very pretty kind of illumination; don't you think so, May?”
“Yes, indeed," said May; "I wish we might make a bonfire on our house when a birthday comes!”
“Aunt Edith," said Charley, "it was to the house-top that Peter was gone to pray when he saw the vision of the sheet let down from heaven full of all kinds of animals; I daresay he went there that he might be quiet.”
“Very likely; the house-top seems to have been a place for retirement, for we read that ‘Samuel communed with Saul upon the top of the house’ the night before he anointed him to be king. There is one passage of Scripture, Charley," continued his aunt, "which used to puzzle me much: our Lord (Matt. 24:1717Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: (Matthew 24:17)), when speaking to His disciples of the terrible time of distress which should come upon the land, said, ‘Then let them which be in Judea flee unto the mountains; let him which is on the house-top not come down to take anything out of his house.’ It was only when I read the accounts of travelers, and found that the flat-roofed houses communicate with each other, so that, as one traveler says, ‘a person might proceed to the city walls and escape into the country without coming down into the street,’ that I understood the meaning. At Nazareth the road is actually so little like our idea of what a road ought to be, that, when riding along, a traveler once found himself upon the top of a house, looking into the yard. ‘Happily,’ he says, ‘the roof was so strong that my horse did not intrude on the domestic privacy of the inhabitants.’ This picture of part of a street in Cairo will give you some idea of the very irregular way in which Eastern towns are built.”
“Yes," said Charley, "that house to the left seems almost ready to fall."
“It must be delightful to go to Nazareth,” said May, "even though the roads are so bad. I always think Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, and Nazareth must be the places everyone would like best to see in all the world," and she repeated-
“‘At Nazareth, in olden time,
A peasant's cottage stood,
Where Joseph, the poor carpenter,
Toiled for his daily food.’”
“Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament," said her aunt; "we first read of it (Matt. 2:2222But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee: (Matthew 2:22)) as the place where the Child Jesus dwelt with His parents when they returned from their flight to Egypt. It is situated, as you see from this picture, in a hilly country, just at the south of the Lebanon range—indeed, the ancient city was built upon the slope of a hill, from the brow or ridge of which the wicked people of the place ‘where He had been brought up’ sought to cast the meek lowly Man, who was to them only ‘Joseph's son,’ down. In the interior of Palestine, generally," continued Aunt Edith, after a pause, "the chiefs of the villages have stone houses; the people who are pretty well off, wretchedly-built cottages of sun-dried bricks, and the poor people huts of clay. There is plenty of good limestone in Palestine, but the people are too indolent to use it. When a house is finished, it is usual to have a sort of festival to rejoice over it; but I must not forget to tell you that the houses of good Jews never are quite finished.”
“Why; are they too lazy to finish them properly?”
“No, there is a better reason than that, Charley; but, perhaps, I am not right in saying they are always left unfinished; I only know that the rabbis long ago ordered that one part of a house must be left unfinished, in remembrance of Jerusalem and the temple lying desolate, and so it became a custom to leave about a yard of the wall unplastered, and to write upon the bare space this touching verse from Psa. 137, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning,’ or the words, ‘The memory of the desolation.’”
“That writing on the house reminds me that we often saw texts over the doors of the chalets at Chateau d'Oex," said May.
“I dare say you remember, May, how when Moses charged the people to keep the commandments of God ever before them, he said, ‘Thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.’ Other nations, too, used to write their laws upon their gates, but I will tell you at some future time how foolishly the Jews of modern times have acted with regard to this precept; now, as our time is short, I want to read you from this interesting book a description of the interior of a house in a Christian (by which I mean not a Muslim) village.”
“Oh, thank you, Aunt Edith; we have been talking so much about the outside of the houses, I shall like to hear what is inside.”
“May I look at the book?" asked Charley. "Oh, there are beautiful pictures! But what a monster of a book!”
“It is called ‘The Land of Israel,’ said his aunt, "and I am sure you will enjoy reading it yourself some day, though its size may frighten you now. But here is the description:"‘Each house has a courtyard, with a high wall, for goats, camels, firewood, and bees. At the end stands the mud-built house, with a single door opening into its one room. A pillar and two arches run across it, and support the flat roof. The door opens into the stable portion, where horses and camels are standing before the manger of dried mud. Stepping up from this, the visitor finds himself at once in the simple dwelling-room of the family. A large matting of flattened rush generally covers one half, and a few cushions are spread in the corner, near the unglazed window. At the farther end are the mud stairs, leading up to the roof-the summer bed-chamber of the family. Furniture there is none, except a few cooking utensils hanging on wooden pegs, a hole in the center of the floor for holding the fire, with a few loose iron rods across the top, and the quaint wooden cradles of the babies.’”
“Oh, thank you, Aunt Edith," said Charley; "it is a capital description-even the bees are not forgotten!”
“It seems that there is generally a pile of beehives in the yard, but the hives are not in the least like ours-they are made of sun-dried mud, and are said to look like gas-pipes laid in rows, or piled in pyramid form. These tubes are closed at each end, and the bees go in and out at a small hole in the center.”
“I suppose,” said May, "great people have very beautiful houses. David said that he dwelt in a house of cedar”
“There was Solomon's house, too," said Charley, "which surprised the queen of Sheba so much when she came from the south countries; then there was the ivory house of King Ahab, perhaps that palace which he built at Jezreel, close by Naboth's vineyard. Of course the king's dwelling was always as splendid as possible. Do you know, May, Nero actually had a golden house!”
“I have tried to give you rather a detailed description of an Eastern dwelling of a humble kind, dear children," said their aunt, "because it was probably in the stable portion of such a house that He who was greater than all the kings of the earth found His lowly resting-place. We read that when Joseph and Mary came to Bethlehem there was no room for them in the inn. The khan, or house for the reception of travelers, was crowded, and it is probable that they, being shut out, took refuge in a poor cottage close by. Even there the strangers were only allowed a place in the portion allotted to the cattle, and there, in the long earthen trough from which the cattle fed, Mary laid her Babe.
“'No peaceful home upon His cradle smil'd,
Guests rudely went and came, where slept the royal Child.'”
"But the angels were praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men,’ because that day in the city of David the Savior was born," said May, softly. "Aunt Edith, what was that song you were singing to baby last night, something about the birth of Jesus, I think?”
“It was written more than two hundred years ago, May; it has a great many verses, but the part which I was singing to baby begins-
“‘When God with us was dwelling here,
In little babes He took delight.’”
"Oh, do go on; tell us as many verses as you can remember.”
“A mother is singing her little child to sleep, Charley, and as she sings, she thinks of the Child Jesus, and how
"' No peaceful home upon His cradle smiled,'
and says—
“'A little infant once was He,
And strength in weakness then was laid
Upon His virgin mother's knee,
That power to thee might be conveyed.
Sweet baby, then forbear to weep;
Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.
“‘In this thy frailty and thy need
He friends and helpers doth prepare,
Which thee shall cherish, clothe, and feed,
For of thy weal they tender are.
Sweet baby, then forbear to weep;
Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep,
“‘The King of Kings, when He was born,
Had not so much for outward ease;
By Him such dressings were not worn,
Nor such-like swaddling-clothes as these.
Sweet baby, then forbear to weep;
Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.
“‘Within a manger lodged thy Lord,
Where oxen lay, and asses fed;
Warm rooms we do to thee afford,
An easy cradle, or a bed.
Sweet baby, then forbear to weep;
Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.
“‘The wants that He did then sustain
Have purchased wealth, my babe, for thee.
And by His torments and His pain
Thy rest and ease securèd be.
My baby, then forbear to weep;
Be still, my babe; sweet baby, sleep.’”
“I am sure baby will like that song more and more when she is old enough to understand the words,” said May.
“Do you remember, Charley," said his aunt, "one verse in the ninth chapter of Isaiah which gives some of the names of the One who lay, a helpless infant, in the manger at Bethlehem?”
Charley repeated "Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”