Note 10 — Chapter XII

As we repassed the same plain in July, many heaps of corn and barley were collected in various parts of it, and the greater part of the verdure had disappeared. We found the oxen of the place very busily employed in treading out the grain, in the good old-fashioned way practised before the invention of flails; while the Arabs, availing themselves of a little breeze of wind, were occupied in tossing up the grain into the air which had been already trodden out, in order to separate it from the husks, after the manner often alluded to in Scripture. Among other instances of this allusion, we may mention the fragments of Nebuchadnezzar’s image, which are compared in Daniel (ii. 25.) to “the chaff of the summer threshing-floor carried away by the wind.”