196 JAMES NEIL, M.A., 
held in the greatest reverence, and is respected even by the 
Turkish Government officers. It is unwritten, and is administered 
by the village elders, as distinct from the Sharyat el Mahhkameh 
(Moslem law) and the Sharyat el Osmanli (Ottoman Imperial 
law). 
K. A. Fryy, 
Member of the Royal Asiatic Society. 
REPLY BY THE AUTHOR. 
It is a great satisfaction to find that so competent an authority 
on the manners and customs of modern Palestine as my critic 
minutely confirms my facts. 
I am willing to adopt the derivation of maress, from (wre 
maras (or rather, for (w,e is a collective plural, popularly used 
as a singular in the sense of cable, from dus aye, marasah), “ rope,” 
as preferable to my own from | we, meerath (pronounced by 
the natives meerass), ‘inheritance ;” and this greatly confirms and 
strengthens the interpretation [ have given of all the Scriptural 
allusions to ‘‘the lot” and “the rope.” 
The reference in Deuteronomy xix. 14, Proverbs xxii. 28, and 
Proverbs xxiii. 10, to “ ancient land marks,” may as reasonably be 
referred to the boundaries of tribal and family inheritances—of 
which our parish boundaries are probably the modern survival— 
as to individual holdings in severalty. Clearly no conclusive 
argument can be established either way on these passages. 
The words of Proverbs xxiii. 10, “and into the fields of 
orphans (oI TWh, oovisdaiy (plural construct of sadeh) 
yethoameem) enter thou not”—by the term sadeh my critic admits 
that the unenclosed arable land is meant—are plainly the figure of 
synecdoche, either that form of it to which I have alluded on 
page 4 of my paper, by which sadeh stands for land generally, #.e., 
the part put for the whole, or else that form which consists of the 
very opposite, the whole put for the part, by which “ the sadehs of 
orphans”’ signifies that portion of the sadeh to which they are 
entitled in the annual allotment. The exceedingly figurative 
