Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/158

Franciscans were again expelled, and had to find new quarters. Since that time, the place has been in Moslem hands.

P. 94. Birket Israil_—This great pool, which twenty years ago, before the discovery of the Double-pools at St Anne’s was made public, used to be pointed out as “the Pool of Bethesda” ; is now being rapidly filled up with rubbish.

P. 95. Bridge at Lydda—This bridge at Lydda was built by the same Emir of Ramleh who treacherously sent assassins to kill the crusading Heir-Apparent of England, the same who afterwards became Edward I.

P. 99. Detective stories.—A good many tales are current respecting the means used by specially gifted persons for the detection of criminals. Some of them remind one of the Biblical Story of Solomon and the two mothers (1 Kings iii.; v. 16 to end) and also of the Apocryphal account of Daniel’s procedure in the “History of Susanna.”

For two other and similar stories, versions of which are current in this country, see Dr Thomson’s “ The Land and the Book,” edition of 1873, p. 153.

P. 100. “Writing and using magic arts” on the Sabbath.— Rabbinnic ordinances permit one for the preservation of life, to cook on the Sabbath, or even to eat pork; but it is doubtful whether writing or the practice of magic is permissible.

P. 101. Burial of Kolonimos.—It is no uncommon thing for very pious Jews to give orders that after their death, and by way of expiating sins committed during their lifetime, their bodies should be ill-treated. Some even direct that the four modes of capital punishment ordered in the Law, viz., beheading, strangling, burning, and stoning, should be executed on their corpses. Others arrange that they are, after death, to have the “malkoth” or public scourging with forty stripes save one, inflicted upon them; whilst others again, as in in the case of a lately deceased Grand-Rabbi of Jerusalem, give orders that their bodies shall be dragged along the path to their graves. In the case just mentioned, the bier on which the corpse was lying was so dragged for a short distance.

P. 101. Grave of Kolonimos.—It is said that the small cairn now shown as the tomb of Kolonimos, was thus formed, and that the last stone was thrown upon it during the early part of the nineteenth century. It is in the bed of the Kedron, a little south-west of the so-called tomb of Zechariah.

The above story may contain a historical kernel. Kolonimos