In the sixth chapter of the Book of Judges, the eleventh verse, begins the story of Gideon, the "mighty man of valour," who delivered Israel out of the hands of the Midianites. "And there came an angel of the Lord, and sat under an oak which was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash the Abiezrite: and his son Gideon threshed wheat by the wine-press, to hide it from the Midianites." It is a prevailing belief in the East that spirits and angelic visitors appear especially under trees and by streams of water. Huge oaks are often found in burying-grounds and in front of houses of worship. "Rag trees" also may be seen in many localities in Syria. A rag tree (_shajeret-omm-shrateet_) is a supposedly sacred or "possessed" tree, generally an oak, on whose branches the people hang shreds of the garments of afflicted dear ones for the {377} purpose of securing healing power for them. When the angel visited him, Gideon, we are told, was threshing wheat by the wine-press. The more correct rendering of the Revised Version and of the Arabic is, "Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine-press." As I have already stated,[5] the grapes are squeezed by being trodden in a large stone-flagged enclosure, which is about the size of an ordinary room. As the harvest time comes early in the summer, long before the wine-making season, Gideon could use the clean floor of this enclosure to beat out wheat, with a fair chance of escaping being discovered by his oppressors, the Midianites. He was not "threshing." He was beating with a club the sheaves he had smuggled, before threshing time came when the Midianites exacted their heavy toll from oppressed Israel. Threshing is done with the threshing-board (_nourej_), which is called in the Bible the "threshing instrument." The _nourej_ resembles a stone-drag. It consists of two heavy pine planks joined {378} together, and is about three feet wide, and six feet long. On its under side are cut rows of square holes into which sharp stones are driven. It is these sharp stones which Isaiah, refers to when he says, "Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument _having teeth_; thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff."[6] The sheaves are scattered on the threshing-floor about a foot deep; the thresher attaches the threshing-board to the yoke and sits on it, with his goad in his hand. As the oxen which "tread the corn" drag the heavy board round and round, the sharp stones cut the sheaves. In three days the "threshing" is ready to be sifted. The finely cut sheaves are thrown up into a heap and tossed up in the air with large wooden pitchforks. The breeze blows the chaff and straw away, leaving the heap of the golden grain in the center of the threshing-floor to gladden the eyes of the grateful tiller of the soil. To this "purging" of the threshing-floor--that {379} is, the freeing of the wheat from