186 JAMES NEIL, M.A., 
too great demands for men and money, and held back its 
tax-farmers (publicant) from extortion and the soldiers, who 
accompanied them to convoy the taxes, from violence and 
robbery, so long: life must have gone very happily with the 
masses under the primitive land system of the Village-Com- 
munities—so long, but no longer. It is, therefore, very im- 
portant to study this system whilst it is still to be seen, for 
modern civilisation will soon inevitably sweep away its last 
vestige, and, whilst the present order of society continues, 
prevent any possibility of its return. 
Besides the great historical and legal interest possessed by 
this subject, it also serves to light up with vivid meaning an 
obscure allusion to be met with in the Hebrew Scriptures. 
David, rejoicing in the favour of God, cries, 
“ Thou [art] taking hold of my lot, 
The measuring-lines (oan) are fallen unto me in pleasant [places].”* 
Written as this was amongst a people wholly given to agri- 
culture. it will be seen, in the hght of the foregoing facts, 
to contain a far more graphic and familiar figure than has 
‘been hitherto supposed. The word “taking hold of,” pain 
toameek, the present participle, kal of JOM, tamak, trans- 
lated in our version “ maintained,” may possibly be rendered 
‘holding up,” but its first and commonest sense is “ taking 
hold of,” and that would naturally seem to be the meaning 
here. David is not speaking in these verses of Jehovah’s 
protecting or maintaining him in the enjoyment of his 
prosperity, but of his bestowing it upon him. This highly 
figurative passage bears the following interpretation, “Thou 
art taking hold of, that is, drawing out for me my lot from 
the bag, and so assigning to me the nght of ploughing in 
the richest parcel of land, and the lines, that is, the strips 
marked out by the measuring-line, have fallen to me in the 
fattest fields of this goodly ground.” Underthis exceedingly 
familiar and suggestive figure—for did not all Israel live by 
* Psalm xvi, 5, 6. The word here translated ‘lot,” Orta, goaral, 
appears to be the Arabic jaral, “a stone,” or “anythirg carried about,” 
the very goaral, or “lot,” now in use. Jt means in the first instance the 
stone, or other similar object employed in the casting of lots ; and in its 
secondary sense, by metonymy, the parcel of land so assigned. The word 
“line” here, and in the following passages, is 220, hhevel (Arabic 
hhabaleh), “ measuring-line,” that rope or line by which each field of each 
parcel of ground was divided into strips, or mawaress; and this rope, as 
we have already seen, by the similar figure of metonymy, gave its name 
to these mawaress, or strips of soil, which it served to measure out. 
