Nor hid trouble from mine eyes.”
Referring to this passage, the Babylonian Talmud (Treatise Bechoroth, 45 a) quotes Rabbi Eliezer as saying, “Just as a house has doors, so also a woman has doors.” Others say: “Just as a house has keys [miphteakh, literally ‘opener’], so the woman has a key; for it is said (Gen. 30 : 22) ‘God hearkened to her, and opened patakh, ‘to open,’ and miphteakh, ‘key’] her womb.’” The famous Rabbi Akibah says: “Just as a house has hinges, so there are hinges to a wife; for it is written (1 Sam. 4 : 19), ‘She kneeled and gave birth, for her hinges had turned’ [translating ṣîrîm (or tseereem) as ‘hinges’ instead of ‘pains’; the word has the former meaning in Proverbs 26 : 14, ‘As the door turneth upon its hinges, so doth the sluggard upon his bed.’]”
The Talmudic treatise Middâ (Mishna § 2, 5) explains the different parts of the womb under the metaphors khĕdĕr, “interior chamber;” pʾrosdôr, “vestibule;” ʿalîyyâ, “upper story.”[[669]] Professor Dr. Morris Jastrow, Jr., in citing these metaphors, suggests that they coincide with the Arabic and Egyptian custom of using a key in the marriage rite, as described at page 244.
Critics have long puzzled over the seemingly contradictory uses of the Hebrew word pôth in two places in the Old Testament; and the connection of “woman” and “door” with the parts thereof, above suggested, may aid in resolving the difficulty. At 1 Kings 7 : 50, in a list of the holy vessels of the house of the Lord, there are mentioned “the hinges (Heb., pôthôth), both for the doors of the inner house, the most holy place, and for the doors of the house, to wit, of the temple, of gold.” At Isaiah 3 : 17 the same word poth is translated “their secret parts,” in a reference to the humiliation of “the daughters of Zion.” It has been suggested by some that there was a corruption of the text in Isaiah. (See Delitzsch and Dillmann, in their commentaries at this place.) Yet in view of the rabbinical uses of language, the text would seem to be trustworthy. Pôth is an “opening,” of a woman or of a door. Additional light is thrown on the use of the term pôth as “opening” and as “hinge,” or “socket,” when we bear in mind that the hinge of an Oriental door was a hole, or cavity, or door socket, on which the door turned, in order to give an opening or entrance. Often these door sockets were made of metal,–bronze, silver, or gold.[[670]] Sometimes the entire thresholds, in which were these sockets or “basons,” were of metal. If, however, the threshold was of stone or wood, the socket, or a plate with a depression in it, was of metal. The pôth, therefore, when referring to a door, was the metal plate or socket in the threshold on which the door turned as on a hinge.
It is, indeed, possible that the opening or cavity in the ancient stone or metal threshold was sometimes the bason, or vessel, into which the covenanting blood was poured.[[671]] In that case, the correspondence of the opening of the woman, and the socket of the threshold, would be more obvious. Important inscriptions are usually found at or around these so-called “door sockets,” in Babylonian relics; and there is still doubt in many minds whether these cavities were always hinge sockets.
The word “hinges,” or “hangers,” is at the best an inaccurate and misleading term, as applied to the pivots or knuckles on which an ancient door swung in its socket. Ancient doors were not hung on hinges, but they swung on pivots. Instead of a hinge, there was a knuckle or pintle, with a corresponding socket, or cavity, or opening, in the threshold or door-sill. Both Gesenius[[672]] and Stade[[673]] give “socket” as one of the meanings of pôth. The plural, pôthoth, of course, refers to the sockets of two leaves of a double door on one threshold.
When Samson was shut in at Gaza by the Philistines, the double leaves of the city gate were held together by a bar, without the lifting of which the doors could not be opened. “And Samson lay till midnight, and arose at midnight, and laid hold of the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts [the upright stiles, at the bottom of which were the knuckles that turned in the threshold sockets], and plucked them up, bar [cross-bar or latch] and all, and put them upon his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of the mountain that is before Hebron.”[[674]]
I have in my possession a bronze door-socket and knuckle of an ancient gate or door, unearthed from a mound in the vicinity of Ghuzzeh, the site of ἡ τύχηancient Gaza, that meets this description.
In primitive symbolism, as shown in Babylonia, Egypt, and India, the circle or ring, like this socket, represents woman.