512 ANNUAL KBPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 



valuable bronze vessels. But what would the Tabernacle and the 

 Temple treasury do with iron vessels if they were in general use and 

 therefore to be had in large quantities and at a small price? No; 

 this regulation made by Joshua is intelligible only if we assume that 

 at that time iron was to the Jews something rare and precious which 

 they would consecrate along with the other valuable tilings to the 

 Temple treasury. Likewise the passage in Joshua xxii, 8, in which 

 Joshua says to the two tribes and a half, who were returning to 

 Bashan and Gilead: 



Return with much riches unto your tents, and with very much cattle, with silver, 

 and with gold, and with brass, and with iron, and with very much raiment: 



clearly proves that iron objects were then classed as valuable booty, 

 even as was the case with the Assyrians in 800 B. C; that is, about 

 300 years later. 



If this view, that iron and iron vessels were then both by the Jews 

 and probably also by peoples living still farther away from the 

 Philistines considered as something rare and costly, the following 

 tradition of the iron bedstead of King Og of Bashan, contained in 

 Deuteronomy iii, 11, presents an entirely different aspect: 



For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the giants; behold, his 

 bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? 

 nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit 

 of a man. 



It has been recently assumed that it was not a real bedstead, but 

 a sarcophagus of basalt, 1 which may also have appeared to the Jews 

 as something unusual. Whether, even so, the Jews, who devote 

 scarcely a word to the coffins, tombs, and interments of their own 

 kings, even the most famous and favored ones, would consider it 

 worth mentioning in their sacred writings, seems to me very ques- 

 tionable. Besides, it has been entirely overlooked that this iron 

 "bedstead" was still at a much later time preserved and shown as a 

 curiosity (compare Deuteronomy iii, 11), though not, as would be 

 expected, in Bashan, but in Rabbath-Ammon — that is, among a 

 people hostile to the Jews. This fact is difficult to understand if it 

 were a sarcophagus, which with its enormous weight could not, like 

 some piece of war booty, be carried from one place to another. 



But if, on the other hand, it is remembered that according to the 

 Assyrian cuneiform accounts couches of state of pure gold for the 

 princes of that time were very common, it can be easily understood, 

 on the assumption that at the time of the Israelitish invasion in Pales- 

 tine iron was a rare and costly article, that a rich prince had himself, 

 for the sake of variety, made a bedstead of the costly iron. And there 

 will be nothing strange that the Jews in the account of their victory 



i Compare Blanckenhorn, Zeitschr. Ethnol., 1907, p. 365. 



