Yet he is the most humorous of all the inhabitants of the East. Beside him, with his sardonic pleasantry, the monkey is a mountebank and the donkey but a solemn little ass. He has been described as ‘the tall, simple, smiling camel’; but on closer acquaintance he turns out to be hardly as simple as he might be taken for, and if he smiles, he is generally smiling at you. The camels you meet in Syria are carrying barley with the air of kings and regarding their human companions with, at best, a contemptuous tolerance.” Dr. Kelman in conclusion comments on, and cites examples of the camel’s unsanctified capacity for conduct bearing a horrible resemblance to that abomination of human invention--the practical joke. To sum up. Eastern humour is by no means non-existent, but being often deliberately concealed or restrained in the presence of strangers and being of a different temper from our own, it may easily fail to be observed by Western eyes. Generally speaking, it is apt to be of the most awkward Order of the Camel’s Hump, tending to other people’s disadvantage, fond of personalities, often coarse because primitive, and, it may be, cruel. This being so, it will now readily be understood that the Bible held for its contemporaries much more wit than we are wont to perceive in it. Thus to many a Hebrew the incidents of Jacob’s clever, and none too scrupulous, dealings narrated in _Genesis_ would seem not only edifying but also extremely amusing. From this point of view such a saying as (Pr. 17^{12}) _Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than a fool in his folly_ is a merry jest; other examples from the proverbs will be given below. But however plentiful this fierce and bitter kind of fun, the sting of the original accusation is not drawn. After all, our conviction remains deep-rooted that there is only one real humour--our humour; and no other brand is genuine. What men miss, and complain of missing, is that fine impartial sense of the ludicrous which is just as ready to see the disproportionate in ourselves as in others. The humour we demand is that kindly, tolerant, variety which can laugh at our own folly with profit and enjoyment, and at our neighbour’s without malice. But is even this best of all humour absent from the Bible? Rare it may be; absent altogether it is not, and with a certain triumph we venture to claim its presence in not a few of the Wise-men’s sayings, to which may be added an occasional proverb from the Rabbinic literature. Beginning, however, with examples of the dry or caustic type of wit, camel-humour, let us take some of the sayings on Woman to illustrate the point. Doubtless the ladies had a great deal to say in reply, but with the customary meanness of man their remarks have been suppressed by the Sages: _As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, So is a fair woman without discretion_ (Pr. 11^{22}).