Gloves, Past and Present

by Willard M. Smith

Turning to the authorized text, we find: “Now this was the manner in former times in Israel concerning redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm all things; a man plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbor, and this was for a testimony in Israel. Therefore the kinsman said unto Boaz, Buy it for thee. So he drew off his shoe.”

A certain learned Hebrew of high literary attainments, M. Josephs, a noted authority in the early part of the nineteenth century, in dealing with this passage bids us follow the Targum, or Chaldaic version of the Old Testament, which renders, instead of shoe, the word glove. He reminds us that the men who wrote the Targum lived fifteen hundred years before the translators of our English Bible; that their rendition grew directly out of the oral interpretations and paraphrases of the Scriptures read in the synagogues—a custom which began, probably, soon after the return of the Jews from captivity. The Targumists, of course, were much closer to the original Hebrew usages than the mediæval scribes. The disputed phrase in their version, narthek yad, means “the covering of the right hand.” It is derived from the Hebrew text, nangal, which, employed verbally, means to close or enclose. The expression, nangal regel, is, literally, “to enclose the foot” and signifies a shoe. The use of nangal alone, however, as a noun, always implied an article enclosing the hand—in other words, a glove. There can be no doubt that the writer of the Chaldaic version accepted the term as a hand-covering, not a foot-covering—even specifying that the glove given as a testimony in Israel was drawn off the right hand.

Both ancient and modern rabbinical scholars, we are told, agree in rendering the word from the original as “glove,” not shoe. And Joel Levy, a distinguished German translator, gave, instead of shoe, his picturesque, native idiom of hand-schuh (hand-shoe), by which gloves are known in Germany to this day.

Added to etymological testimony, moreover, is the evidence of ancient custom. Gloves, in the symbolical sense, have been employed as a token of good faith as far back as history can be traced. The shoe, on the other hand, never is used figuratively in Holy Writ except to express humility or supine obedience. The man who wished to make a compact with his neighbor, as Boaz when he bought the lands of Ruth, must offer his glove as pledge in the transaction. The very same practice is common in the Orient to-day.

Challenge by the glove also appears to have been customary from antiquity. In the one hundredth and eighth Psalm, the prophet in an ecstacy of triumph cries: “Over Edom will I cast out my glove!” Had this warrior of the spirit merely thrown a shoe over the city he had vowed to reclaim to Jehovah, what boastful promise would there have been in that?

Among the Jews, however, three thousand years ago, gloves were by no means in common use. Probably they were worn only by men of high rank, and then solely on ceremonial occasions. We have reason to suppose that kings wore them, for in the mural paintings of Thebes ambassadors are depicted bearing from some far country gifts of gloves. The women certainly did not wear them, for they are not mentioned in the exhaustive list of “bravery,” enumerated by Isaiah (Chapter III.), the vainglorious fallals of which the daughters of Zion in their pride were to be despoiled on the Day of Doom. “Feet-rings, neck chains, thin veils, tires or bonnets, zones or girdles, jewels for the nostrils, embroidered robes, tunics, transparent garments, fine linen vests, armlets”—all such fineries as these must the fair Israelites relinquish at the sound of the last trump. Surely, had gloves been among their vanities, these also must have been confiscated by the Inexorable Judge!

Nearly a century after the Book of Ruth was written, Homer relates how he came upon Laertes, the father of Ulysses, working in his garden (for he was a farmer) “while gloves secured his hands to shield them from the thorns.” So, we know that the early Greeks wore gloves. It is striking to note that they employed them, too, for humble and useful purposes. They were not monopolized by priests and kings. However, we are given no hint how Laertes’ gloves were shaped nor of what materials they were made. Probably they resembled the modern mitten, for it is not until under the Roman emperors that we actually learn that gloves were made with fingers. These were called, specially, digitalia, to distinguish them from the chirothocae, or fingerless variety.

Virgil makes reference to gauntlets worn at the Trojan contests, as “the gloves of death”; and he describes gloves worn by Eryx, “composed of seven folds of the thickest bull’s hide, sewn and stiffened with knots of lead and iron.”

The gloves of the Persians, we may suspect, were not of the warlike type, but were sported simply for luxury and display. Zenophon who, somebody has remarked, “had the courage of his dislikes,” despised the ancient Persians and stigmatized them as effeminate because they gloried in their gloves. In his Cyropaedia he lays stress on the fact that on one occasion Cyrus was actually known to go forth “without his gloves”!

Varro, contemporary of Cicero, observes in his De Re Rustica that “olives gathered by the naked hand are preferable to those pulled with gloves on.” The Epicureans evidently had adopted the theory that fruit, to be fully enjoyed, should not even be handled in the plucking. Again, among the Romans, we find gloves an article of utility, worn by agriculturists—though it is likely that these hand-coverings were in the shape of mittens and not of the digitalia style. To the latter appear to have been attached far greater prestige.