A certain learned Hebrew of high literary attainments, M. Josephs, a noted authority in the early part of the nineteenth century, in dealing with this passage bids us follow the Targum, or Chaldaic version of the Old Testament, which renders, instead of shoe, the word _glove_. He reminds us that the men who wrote the Targum lived fifteen hundred years before the translators of our English Bible; that their rendition grew directly out of the oral interpretations and paraphrases of the Scriptures read in the synagogues—a custom which began, probably, soon after the return of the Jews from captivity. The Targumists, of course, were much closer to the original Hebrew usages than the mediæval scribes. The disputed phrase in their version, _narthek yad_, means “the covering of the right hand.” It is derived from the Hebrew text, _nangal_, which, employed verbally, means to close or enclose. The expression, _nangal regel_, is, literally, “to enclose the foot” and signifies a shoe. The use of _nangal_ alone, however, as a noun, always implied an article enclosing the hand—in other words, a glove. There can be no doubt that the writer of the Chaldaic version accepted the term as a hand-covering, not a foot-covering—even specifying that the glove given as a testimony in Israel was drawn off the _right_ hand. Both ancient and modern rabbinical scholars, we are told, agree in rendering the word from the original as “glove,” not shoe. And Joel Levy, a distinguished German translator, gave, instead of shoe, his picturesque, native idiom of _hand-schuh_ (hand-shoe), by which gloves are known in Germany to this day. Added to etymological testimony, moreover, is the evidence of ancient custom. Gloves, in the symbolical sense, have been employed as a token of good faith as far back as history can be traced. The shoe, on the other hand, never is used figuratively in Holy Writ except to express humility or supine obedience. The man who wished to make a compact with his neighbor, as Boaz when he bought the lands of Ruth, must offer his glove as pledge in the transaction. The very same practice is common in the Orient to-day. Challenge by the glove also appears to have been customary from antiquity. In the one hundredth and eighth Psalm, the prophet in an ecstacy of triumph cries: “Over Edom will I cast out my glove!” Had this warrior of the spirit merely thrown a shoe over the city he had vowed to reclaim to Jehovah, what boastful promise would there have been in that?