trines which He had come to teach, and the duty of spreading them, and alludes to a mode of religious teaching which was then in vogue.

The long captivity of the Jews in Babylon had caused the Hebrew language to be disused among the common people, who had learned the Chaldaic language from their captors. After their return to Palestine, the custom of publicly reading the

Scriptures was found to be positively useless, the generality of the people being ignorant of the Hebrew language.

Accordingly, the following modification was adopted. The roll of the Scriptures was brought out as usual, and the sacred words read, or rather chanted. After each passage was read, a doctor of the law whispered its meaning into the ear of a Targumista or interpreter, who repeated to the people in the Chaldaic language the explanation which the doctor had whispered in Hebrew. The reader will now see how appropriate is the metaphor, the whispering in the ear and subsequent proclamation being the customary mode of imparting religious instruction.

If the reader will now turn to Matt. x. 29, he will find that the word "sparrow" is used in a passage which has become very familiar to us. "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. "But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

"Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows." The same sentences are given by St. Luke (xii. 6), in almost the same words.

Now the word which is translated as "Sparrow" is strouthion, a collective word, signifying a bird of any kind. Without the addition of some epithet, it was generally used to signify any kind of small bird, though it is occasionally employed to signify even so large a creature as an eagle, provided that the bird had been mentioned beforehand. Conjoined with the word "great," it signifies the ostrich; and when used in connexion with a word significative of running, it is employed as a general term for all cursorial birds.

In the passages above quoted it is used alone, and evidently signifies any kind of little bird, whether it be a sparrow or not. Allusion is made by our Lord to a custom, which has survived to the present day, of exposing for sale in the markets the bodies of little birds. They are stripped of their feathers, and spitted together in rows, just as are larks in this country, and always have a large cale. Various birds are sold in this manner, little if any distinction being made between them, save perhaps in respect of size, the larger species commanding a higher price than the small birds. In fact, they are arranged exactly after the manner in which the Orientals sell their "kabobs," i.e. little pieces of meat pierced by wooden skewers.

It is evident that to supply such a market it is necessary that the birds should be of a tolerably gregarious nature, so that a considerable number can be caught at a time. Nets were employed for this purpose, and we may safely infer that the forms of the nets and the methods of using them were identical with those which are employed in the same country at the present day.

It is rather curious that the mode of bird-catching which is familiar to us under the name of bat-fowling is employed in the East. The fowlers supply themselves with a large net supported on two sticks, and, taking a lantern with them fastened to the

top of a pole, they sally out at night to the places where the small birds sleep.

Raising the net on its sticks, they lift it to the requisite height, and hold the lantern exactly opposite to it, so as to place the net between the birds and the lantern. The roosting-places are then beaten with sticks or pelted with stones, so as to awaken the sleeping birds. Startled by the sudden noise, they dash from their roosts, instinctively make towards the light, and so fall into the net. Bird-catching with nets is several times mentioned in the Old Testament, but in the New the net is only alluded to as used for taking fish.

Beside the net, several other modes of bird-catching were used by the ancient Jews, just as is the case at the present day. Boys, for example, who catch birds for their own consumption, and not for the market, can do so by means of various traps, most of which are made on the principle of the noose, or snare. Sometimes a great number of hair-nooses are set in places to which the birds are decoyed, so that in hopping about many of them are sure to become entangled in the snares. Sometimes the noose is ingeniously suspended in a narrow passage which the birds are likely to traverse, and sometimes a simple fall-trap is employed.

To these nooses many allusions are made in the Scriptures. See, for example, Ps. cxxiv. 7: "Our soul is escaped as a bird (tzippor) out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped." Also Prov. vii. 23: "He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter . . as a bird hasteneth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life." There is one passage in Ecclesiastes, where both the fishing-net and the snare are mentioned in connexion with each other: For man knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them" (ix. 12).

Allusion is also made to the snare by the prophet Amos in one of the passages where his rough, homely diction rises by successive steps into sublimity: "Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him? shall one take up a snare from the earth, and have taken nothing at all?" (iii. 5.)

So common was the use of the snare that it was frequently

used as a familiar image by the sacred writers. "How long shall this man be a snare to us?" said Pharaoh's servants of Moses, through whom the waters of the sacred river had been polluted, and various other plagues had come upon the Egyptians. Idol are called snares in many parts of the Scriptures, and so is the society of the wicked. A forcible use of this image was made by Saul when he found that his daughter Michal loved David: "And Saul said, I will give him her, that she may be a snare to him, and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him" (1 Sam. xviii. 21). His device, or snare, not only failed, but, as we learn in the succeeding chapter, verses 11-16, David was "delivered from the snare of the fowler," by the very means which had been employed for entrapping him.

We now pass to another division of the subject. In Ps. lxxxiv. 1-3, we come upon a passage in which the Sparrow is again mentioned: "How amiable are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!

My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even Thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God."

It is evident that we have in this passage a different bird from the Sparrow that sitteth alone upon the house-tops; and though the same word, tzippor, is used in both cases, it is clear that whereas the former bird was mentioned as an emblem of sorrow, solitude, and sadness, the latter is brought forward as an image of joy and happiness. "Blessed are they," proceeds the Psalmist, "that dwell in Thy house: they will be still praising Thee. . . . For a day in Thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness."

According to Mr. Tristram, this is probably one of the species to which allusion is made by the Psalmist. While inspecting the ruins in the neighbourhood of the Temple, he came upon an old wall. Near this gate I climbed on to the top of the wall, and walked along for some time, enjoying the fine view at the gorge of the Kedron, with its harvest crop of little white tombs. In a chink I discovered a sparrow's nest (Passer cisalpinus, var.) of a species so closely allied to our own that it is difficult

to distinguish it, one of the very kind of which the Psalmist The swallows had departed for the winter, but the sparrow has remained pertinaciously through all the sieges and changes of Jerusalem."

The same traveller thinks that the TREE SPARROW (Passer montanus) may be the species to which the sacred writer refers,

Tea, the sparrow hath found an house, where she may lay her young."-Ps. lxxxiv. 3.

as it is even now very plentiful about the neighbourhood of the Temple. In all probability we may accept both these birds as representatives of the Sparrow which found a home in the Temple. The swallow is separately mentioned, possibly because its migratory habits rendered it a peculiarly conspicuous bird; but it is probable that many species of birds might make their nests in a place where they felt themselves secure from disturbance, and that all these birds would be mentioned under the collective and convenient term of Tzipporim.

As we are engaged upon the word Sparrow, it may be mentioned that several species of Sparrow inhabit Palestine. There