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not to any individual owner. Now, as the parable of the Sower indicates, some of this
land may be good, some bad and some indifferent, and instead of this land, good, bad and
indifferent being the possession of some person for all time, it was divided, once a year,
by lot to whom each portion of this communal land should fall. Very often a little child,
too young to be influenced by bias, would be selected and he would put his hand into the
vase or receptacle and draw out the different lots. Whether the translators of the
Authorized Version consciously chose the word "maintain" because it is derived from
main "a hand" and teneo "to hold", we do not know, but the Hebrew word so translated
means to uphold as with the hand (Isa. 41: 10) or to stay up the hand (Exod. 17: 12).
We believe the following extract from the book "Pictured Palestine", by the
Rev. James Neil, M.A., will be of service here.
"The tenure by which these open fields are held is exceedingly interesting and
evidently ancient. The land is not, as with us, in individual holding. The village house,
the enclosed garden, vineyard, orchard, olive or fig yard, and even fruit trees, such as the
olive growing on unenclosed land, may be held, as with us, individually, or, as lawyers
say, in severalty. But broad acres are crown-lands, ard amiriyeh, and the whole village
as occupiers have only the muzara'a, or right of cultivation, held by them all in common
(musha'a). But they possess this right in perpetuity, and are virtually joint free-holders in
common of all the land belonging to their village community. The cultivation each year
begins with ploughing, about the middle of November, as soon as the first heavy winter
rain, the Hebrew geshem, has come to saturate and soften the soil. Before this, all the
men of the village who possess oxen meet in a general assembly in the saha, or
`guest-house', which answers to our public hall; for all of these, one as much as another,
except slaves, have the joint right of tillage and pasturage over all the lands of the
community, in proportion to the number of their cattle.
The course of procedure is then as follows: the Khateeb, or Mohammedan religious
teacher, who is also the scribe, recorder, and accountant of the place, presides at this
gathering. He first writes down the names of all who desire to plough, and against each
man's name enters the number of ploughs that he intends to work. The farmers now form
themselves into several equal groups, generally making up ten ploughs in a group, each
of which chooses one of their number to represent them. If there are forty men who
desire to farm, making up amongst them sixty ploughs, they will divide themselves into
six parties of ten ploughs each, represented by six chiefs. The whole of the land is then
parceled out into six equal parts, one for each group of farmers, by the six elected chiefs.
The land being in most instances of various qualities, some very good, some much
poorer, and some comparatively bad, has to be chosen from different and often distant
parts to form each of the six several parcels. Although there are no hedges, ditches, or
walls, the tillage is all divided into portions somewhat answering to our fields, marked off
from one another by rough natural boundaries, each bearing a name, such as `the field of
the partridge', `the field of the mother of mice', &100: It would seem to have been the
same in ancient times for we read of `the fuller's field' and `the potter's field', the latter
called afterwards, on account of its purchase with the thirty pieces of silver given to Judas
as the price of Messiah's betrayal, by the tragic name of `the bloody field', Aceldama
(Acts 1: 19).
The six representatives, having parceled out the land, now cast lots for its distribution.
Each of them give some object to the presiding Khateeb, such as a stone or a piece of
wood, and he puts them into a bag. The Khateeb then asks to whom one of the six
parcels of ground which he names is to belong, and a little boy, chosen to draw out the