COVENANT OF THRESHOLD-CROSSING.
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]]