Oriental customs: or an illustration of the sacred Scriptures, by an explanatory application of the customs and manners of the Eastern nations, and especially the Jews. Therein alluded to, together with observations on many difficult and obscure texts, collected from the most celebrated travellers, and the most eminent critics / by Samuel Burder.

Samuel Burder

Date:: 1802

Credit: Oriental customs: or an illustration of the sacred Scriptures, by an explanatory application of the customs and manners of the Eastern nations, and especially the Jews. Therein alluded to, together with observations on many difficult and obscure texts, collected from the most celebrated travellers, and the most eminent critics / by Samuel Burder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$Veneration of the sacred stones, called baetyli, so cele- brated in all pagan antiquity, were derived. These baetj/li were stones of a round form; they were sup- posed to be animated, by means of magical incantations, with a portion of the deity: they were consulted on occasions of great and pressing emergency, as a kind of divine oracles, and were suspended, either round the neck, or some other part of the body. Thus the setting up of a stone by this holy person, in grateful memory of the celestial vision, probably became tlie occasion of the idolatry in succeeding ages, to these shapeless masses of unhewn stone, of which so many astonish- ing remains are scattered up and down the Asiatic and the European world. Maurice’s Indian Antiquities, vol. ii. p. 355. No. 17.—xxix. 2. A great stone was upon the well's 7iiouth.~\ In Arabia, and other places, they cover up their wells of water, lest the sand, which is put into mo- tion by the winds, should fill, and quite stop them up. (Chardin.) So great was their care not to leave the well open any length of time, that they waited till the flocks were all gathered together, before they began to draw water : and when they had finished, the well was imme- diately closed again. Harmer, vol. i. p. 113. No. 18.—xxix. 24. And Laban gave unto his daughter Leah, Zilpah his maid, for an handmaid.] Chardin ob- serves that none but very poor people marry a daughter in the East, without giving her a female slave for an handmaid, there being no hired servants there as in Europe. So Solomon supposes they were extremely poor that had not a servant. Prov. xii. 9. Harmer, vol. ii. p. 366. c$

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