In the passages above quoted it is used alone, and evidently signifies any kind of little bird, whether it be a sparrow or not. Allusion is made by our Lord to a custom, which has survived to the present day, of exposing for sale in the markets the bodies of little birds. They are stripped of their feathers, and spitted together in rows, just as are larks in this country, and always have a large sale. Various birds are sold in this manner, little if any distinction being made between them, save perhaps in respect of size, the larger species commanding a higher price than the small birds. In fact, they are arranged exactly after the manner in which the Orientals sell their "kabobs," i.e. little pieces of meat pierced by wooden skewers.
It is evident that to supply such a market it is necessary that the birds should be of a tolerably gregarious nature, so that a considerable number can be caught at a time. Nets were employed for this purpose, and we may safely infer that the forms of the nets and the methods of using them were identical with those which are employed in the same country at the present day.
It is rather curious that the mode of bird-catching which is familiar to us under the name of bat-fowling is employed in the East. The fowlers supply themselves with a large net supported on two sticks, and, taking a lantern with them fastened to the top of a pole, they sally out at night to the places where the small birds sleep.
Raising the net on its sticks, they lift it to the requisite height, and hold the lantern exactly opposite to it, so as to place the net between the birds and the lantern. The roosting-places are then beaten with sticks or pelted with stones, so as to awaken the sleeping birds. Startled by the sudden noise, they dash from their roosts, instinctively make towards the light, and so fall into the net. Bird-catching with nets is several times mentioned in the Old Testament, but in the New the net is only alluded to as used for taking fish.
Beside the net, several other modes of bird-catching were used by the ancient Jews, just as is the case at the present day. Boys, for example, who catch birds for their own consumption, and not for the market, can do so by means of various traps, most of which are made on the principle of the noose, or snare. Sometimes a great number of hair-nooses are set in places to which the birds are decoyed, so that in hopping about many of them are sure to become entangled in the snares. Sometimes the noose is ingeniously suspended in a narrow passage which the birds are likely to traverse, and sometimes a simple fall-trap is employed.
To these nooses many allusions are made in the Scriptures. See, for example, Ps. cxxiv. 7: "Our soul is escaped as a bird (tzippor) out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped." Also Prov. vii. 23: "He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter ... as a bird hasteneth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life." There is one passage in Ecclesiastes, where both the fishing-net and the snare are mentioned in connexion with each other: "For man knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them" (ix. 12).
Allusion is also made to the snare by the prophet Amos in one of the passages where his rough, homely diction rises by successive steps into sublimity: "Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him? shall one take up a snare from the earth, and have taken nothing at all?" (iii. 5.)
So common was the use of the snare that it was frequently used as a familiar image by the sacred writers. "How long shall this man be a snare to us?" said Pharaoh's servants of Moses, through whom the waters of the sacred river had been polluted, and various other plagues had come upon the Egyptians. Idols are called snares in many parts of the Scriptures, and so is the society of the wicked. A forcible use of this image was made by Saul when he found that his daughter Michal loved David: "And Saul said, I will give him her, that she may be a snare to him, and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him" (1 Sam. xviii. 21). His device, or snare, not only failed, but, as we learn in the succeeding chapter, verses 11-16, David was "delivered from the snare of the fowler," by the very means which had been employed for entrapping him.
We now pass to another division of the subject. In Ps. lxxxiv. 1-3, we come upon a passage in which the Sparrow is again mentioned: "How amiable are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!