"The musky daughter of the Nile, with plaited hair and almond eyes." This is how Oliver Wendell Holmes prettily, if too fancifully, describes Hagar. The pathetic dismissal by the patriarch of this ill-starred Egyptian and her son Ishmael, has always been a theme dear to poetry and art. We are not astray in shedding over the picture the grey tints of earliest dawn. "Abraham," we are told, "rose up early in the morning," and it seems probable, from the narrative, that the unhappy business was concluded before Sarah was about. The wife of an Arab sheik would rise betimes.
5 A.M.
We are fairly secure in fixing this for the hour on that memorable Sabbath when, after the six days' single investiture, Joshua ordered the seven priests, with the seven trumpets of rams' horns, to bear the Ark seven times round the walls of Jericho. "They rose early, about the dawning of the day." The date, calculating from the previous Passover, was about April 23rd. The dawn at this season would bring us roughly to 5 a.m. Jericho was a city of considerable extent, and allowing that it took the procession an hour and a half or more to finish each of the seven circuits, it is not likely that the leader would be able to exclaim, "Shout, for the Lord hath given you the city," and to command the massacre, till 6 p.m., when the Sabbath would be over.
The old method of the commentators, which made St. John reckon his hours like the other three evangelists, would place the call of himself and St. Andrew at 4 p.m. The theory that St. John counted his hours as we do is supported by the high authority of Bishops Wordsworth and Westcott, and many others. It surely gives a more natural sense to this passage: The two apostles abode with their Master, after their call, "that day." It would be a short day which began at four in the afternoon, instead of ten in the morning, and St. Andrew's search for his brother, together with St. Peter's subsequent call, are recorded in "that day" besides.
10 A.M.
It was at noon, upon the knees of his mother, that the son of the Shunammite lady died. We remember how the little boy, the cherished child of many prayers, toddled out to meet his aged father in one of those rich harvest fields which nestled round the base of Mount Carmel; and how, smitten by the fierce Syrian sun, he called out to his father, "My head, my head!" and a lad carried him home to his mother. The picture is none the less fresh because we look upon it blurred by the tears of many generations, and the simple story ends in smiles, for God, through Elisha, graciously gave back the treasured life.
12 NOON.