11 P.M.
With the exception of noon and midnight, there is no hour so exactly marked as this in the whole of the Old Testament. The noble and heroic Gideon and his three companies blew their three hundred trumpets, and crashed their pitchers, and flashed their firebrands, "in the beginning of the middle watch, and they had but newly set the watch." The middle watch, as we have said before, lasted from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. This terrific signal for the attack on the Midianites must have been given, therefore, about 11 p.m.
Of the many midnight scenes that are available, we will choose one that is remarkable, not for its profound ethical teaching, its tenderness, its tragedy, but, if we may say so with reverence, its humour. Samson lifting the gates of Gaza upon his back, and carrying them up "to the top of the mountain that is before Hebron" (R.V.), is one of those stories which delighted our childhood, and which will never be displaced by any recital of the glories of latter-day athleticism. The gist of this incident is to be found in the cleverness with which the Philistines, proverbial then as now for their stupidity, are outwitted by the prisoner, whom they fancied they had trapped so securely.
12 MIDNIGHT.
It may be that, as we lay our big clock aside, and return our watches to our pockets, some scenes of the sacred Long Ago will shape themselves more clearly and definitely for the future in our remembrance, because we shall associate them with the hour at which they occurred. We have not sought to disguise the fact that, so far as time goes, a mist of incertitude must always cling round events, however momentous, which took place in any Oriental country, and at a remote age. But we shall understand our Bible all the better, and its unchangeable and imperishable essence will be the more vital to our souls, as we realise that the Almighty was pleased to reveal Himself to a people whose modes of thought and whose ways of life were widely different from our own.
As might be expected, the languorous and unpractical Orient soon lost the impress of Roman preciseness in the matter of hours. The average native of Palestine to-day is as careless about time as he was when Abraham completed his pilgrimage from Ur of the Chaldees. Nor is this truth without its curious analogy in that life immortal into which we believe those holy men of old are entered, with whose earthly deeds we have been concerned. There is no time where they have gone. In the sight of the King before Whose presence they stand, "a thousand years are but as yesterday, seeing that is past as a watch in the night." And we think, too, of that Dial, hidden somewhere in the archives of the Eternal, whose awful Hand points to the Hour, unknown even to the angels in heaven, "when the Son of Man cometh."
