An American gentleman traveling among the Scandinavian immigrants in
Wisconsin and Minnesota, was surprised to see their house doors quite
generally standing open, as if they had no need of locks and bolts. He
argued from this that they were an exceptionally honest people, and that
they had no fear of thieves and robbers. A Scandinavian clergyman, being
asked about this, said that they had thieves in that region, but that
thieves would not cross a threshold, or enter a door, with evil intent,
being held back by a superstitious fear of the consequences of such a
violation of the covenant obligation incurred in passing over the
threshold.
I asked a native Syrian woman, “If a thief wanted to get into your house
to steal from you, would he come in at the door, if he saw that open?”
“Oh, no!” she answered, “he would come in at the window, or would dig in
from behind.” “Why wouldn’t he come in at the door?” I asked. “Because
his _reverence_ would keep him from that,” she said, in evident
reference to the superstitious dread of crossing a threshold with evil
intent,–a dread growing out of an inborn survival of reverence for the
primitive altar, with the sacredness of a covenant entered into by its
crossing.
The very term commonly employed in the New Testament for thieving
indicates the “digging through” a building, instead of entering by the
door. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth
and rust doth consume, and where thieves break through [literally, dig
through; Greek, _diorussō_ and steal.”[688] “If the master of the house
had known in what hour the thief was coming, he would have watched, and
not have left his house to be digged through.”[689]
Canon Tristram tells of an Adwan shaykh who was proud of being a
“robber,” a “highwayman,” but who resented the idea that he was a
“thief,”–a “sneak thief.” “I am not a thief,” he said; “I do not dig
into the houses of fellaheen in the night. I would scorn it. I only take
by force in the day time. And, if God gives me strength, shall I not use
it?” Canon Tristram adds: “A ‘thief,’ as distinguished from a ‘robber,’
would never think of attempting to force the door, but would noiselessly
dig through a wall in the rear,–a work of no great labor, as the walls
are generally of earth, or sun-dried bricks, or, at best, of stone
imbedded in turf instead of in mortar.”[690]
A former missionary in Palestine[691] says: “Digging through the wall is
the common method pursued by housebreakers in Palestine, and, save in
the cities, the operation is not one of great difficulty. Windows, in
our sense, do not exist in the houses of the villagers; ... but the
walls, built of roughly broken stones and mud, are easily, and by a
skilled hand almost noiselessly, penetrated. One night, about midnight,
I was driven from my resting-place under a stunted olive-tree in the
plain of Sharon by a terrific thunderstorm, and took refuge in the
miserable fellahy village of Kalansaweh. A good woman unbarred her door
and admitted me to a single apartment, in which, on the ground level,
were several sheep and cattle, with an ass, and on the higher level a
pretty large family asleep, all dimly discerned by the light of a little
oil lamp stuck in a crevice of the wall. The atmosphere was awful. I
asked why they did not have a window or opening in the wall. The woman
held up her hands in amazement. ‘What!’ she exclaimed, ‘and assist the
robbers [“thieves”]?’... The robbers [‘thieves’], she explained, were
the Arabs in the plain. Greater rascals do not exist. They were great
experts, she explained, in ‘digging through’ the houses; to put a window
in the wall would only tempt them, and facilitate their work.”
Now, as of old, among the more primitive pastoral people of Palestine,
“He that entereth not by the door into the fold of the sheep, but
climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.... The
thief cometh not, but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy.”[692]
I remember now, what I did not realize the meaning of at the time, that
while I was journeying in Arabia we did not set a watch before the
entrance of our tents, when we were near a village; but the guards were
at the rear of the tents, to watch against thieves, who would crawl
underneath the canvas to steal what they might.
It seems to have been a custom in medieval times, and probably earlier,
for the besiegers in war time to endeavor to enter a city which they
would sack through a breach in the walls, or by scaling the walls,
rather than by entering the gates. On the other hand, if a conqueror
would protect the inhabitants of a captured city, he would pass in
through the opened gates. To deliver up the keys of the city gates to a
hostile commander was equivalent to capitulating or making formal terms
of surrender. In the military museum at Berlin are preserved the keys of
cities captured by the emperors of Germany at various times along the
centuries.
There is a trace of this custom of besiegers, even in Old Testament
times, in the injunctions to Israel with reference to its warfares:
“When thou drawest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim
peace unto it [proffer quarter]. And it shall be, if it make thee answer
of peace, and open [the gates] unto thee, then it shall be, that all the
people that is found therein shall become tributary unto thee, and shall
serve thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war
against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: and when the Lord thy God
delivereth it into thine hand, thou shalt smite every male thereof with
the edge of the sword.”[693]
It has been suggested on a former page,[694] but perhaps not
sufficiently explained, that this idea of subjecting one’s self to the
covenant obligations of citizenship by passing through the city gates,
over the threshold, had to do with the Grecian custom of welcoming back
to his own city the victor in the Olympian games through a breach in the
walls, instead of through the gate. The meaning of this Greek custom
(continued in Rome) was not clear in the days of Plutarch, and he, in
seeking to account for it, suggests that it may have been intended to
show that a city having such men among its citizens needed no walls of
defense.[695] But, as they rebuilt their walls after the entrance of the
victor, this explanation is not satisfactory. The world-wide recognition
of the covenant obligations of a passage through a gate over the
threshold is a more satisfactory explanation. If the victor, on
returning in triumph from the games, were to enter his city through the
gates, like any other citizen, he would be subject to the laws of the
city as a citizen or a guest; but if the city would recognize him as a
conqueror, at home as well as at Olympia, they would let him come in
through a breach in the walls. In this act the citizens nominally
submitted themselves to him; and a city thus entered, and, as it were,
captured, often felt that it received more honor from its victor than it
could confer upon him.[696]
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Footnote 688:
Matt. 6 : 19; also Matt. 6 : 20.
Footnote 689:
Luke 12 : 39; also Matt. 24 : 43; Exod. 22 : 2; Ezek. 12 : 2–7.
Footnote 690:
See The Sunday School Times for March 7, 1896.
Footnote 691:
The Rev. William Ewing, in The Sunday School Times for March 7, 1896.
Footnote 692:
John 10 : 1, 10.
Footnote 693:
Deut. 20 : 10–13.
Footnote 694:
See pp. 5–7, _supra_.
Footnote 695:
Plutarch, _Symp._, Bk. ii, Quest. 5, § 2.
Footnote 696:
See Smith’s _Dict. of Greek and Roman Antiq._, s. vv. “Athletæ,” and
“Olympic Games;” Gardner’s _New Chapters in Greek History_, pp.
297–302.
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