under his raiment upon his right thigh, and drew it with his left hand. Again, we read, ‘Gird thy sword upon thy thigh’ (Ps. xlv. 3); and as Joab proceeded to assassinate Amasa (2 Sam. xx. 8), the ‘garment that he had put on was girded unto him, and upon it a girdle with a sword fastened upon his loins in the sheath thereof; and as he went forth it fell out.’ The allusions to the oppressing Sword (Jer. xlvi. 16; l. 25) recall the Assyrian emblem of the Sword and the Dove, which are both figured in one image. Perhaps we must so understand the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead: ‘I came forth as his child from his Sword.’ Apparently the Chereb was worn, as by the civilised Greeks and Romans, only on emergencies and not, like the chivalry of Europe, habitually in peaceful towns. The Cultellarii or Sicarii, whom Josephus and Tacitus[591] mention, were mere assassins, like the French Coustilliers and the English Coustrils or Custrils. That the Hebrews were not first-rate Sword-cutlers, we may infer from the history of Judas the Maccabee.[592] A vision of Jeremiah the Prophet, preceding the victory over Nicanor, had promised him ‘a Sword of God, a holy Sword,’ not the short Machæra but the large Rhomphæa (2 Mac. xv. 15). After his war with the Samaritans and the Gentiles of Palestine, ‘Judas took the Sword of Apollonius (the Syrian general) and fought with it all his life’ (2 Mac. iii. 12). And yet how general was the use of the Sword in Jewry we gather from the fact that it assisted in taking the Census: so David, by one account (2 Sam. xxiv. 9) mustered one million three hundred thousand ‘valiant men that drew the Sword.’[593] The expression ‘girding on the Sword’ (1 Sam. xxv. 13) denoted adults able to serve as soldiers, and also noted the beginning of a campaign (Deut. i. 41). It has been stated that Saul, son of Kish, used the Sword with his left hand, by virtue of being of the tribe of Benjamin. Of the latter, however, we learn (Judg. xx. 16) that many were ambidexters, fighting and slinging with the left as well as with the right. Finally, to be ‘slain by the Sword’ was evidently as great a misfortune as the ‘straw-death’ among those muscular Christians, the Scandinavians. The curse of David upon Joab was that there might never be wanting in his house ‘one that hath an issue, or is a leper, or that leaneth on a staff, or that falleth on the Sword’ (a suicide). All this makes the fact the more singular that no Jewish Sword-blade has ever been found.