The Address given by Dr. Margaret Barker at the dedication of the New Stain Glass Window
This is a small limestone tablet, the earliest Hebrew writing ever found.* It measures about 4” x 3 “ and was found near Jerusalem in 1908. It is calendar, written in the time of King Solomon, and it mentions flax. The third line says ‘month of pulling flax’. Their year began in the autumn, and the first two lines say ‘two months of ingathering’ which would correspond roughly to our September and October; ‘two months of sowing’ would be November and December; ‘two months of late sowing’ would be January and February, and then in March they pulled their flax, pesheth. The prophet Hosea reminded the people, when they were tempted to forget the Lord, that he had given them all the produce of their land: the grain, the wine and the oil, the wool and the flax (Hosea 2.8-9).
Flax had been grown in that part of the world for centuries before the time of Solomon, who reigned just after 1000 BC. Archaeologists have found fragments of linen in a cave in the Judaean desert which radio carbon tests have dated to 6,000 BC. When Joshua sent spies to Jericho, before he took the Israelites into the land of Canaan, they were discovered and had to hide in Rahab’s house. She took them up to the flat roof and hid them under the flax which was laid out to dry (Joshua 2.6). The spinning and weaving of flax had always been women’s work in that part of the world: they wove the fabrics for the tabernacle that Moses constructed at the foot of Mount Sinai (Exodus 35.25); and when Solomon was collecting wise sayings for his Book of Proverbs, he included the description of a good wife. She spent her time spinning, and so was clothed in fine linen and she made linen gaments to sell to the merchants (Proverbs 31.19, 24).
Linen was used for many things. The coarser fabrics were used for everyday clothing, for wrapping goods, and for sails and fishing nets. If you imagine Jesus and his disciples, think of their linen sails and fishing nets! When the prophet Ezekiel described the extragavent luxury of the city of Tyre, he said that even the sails of her ships were made of fine embroiderd linen (Ezekiel 27.10).
Coarse linen fabric was used by the potters to store their wares before they went to the kiln. We know this because pots have been found from the time of Solomon that have the imprint of linen cloth on their bases.
The caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found also contained pieces of coarse linen, some woven to the size of the scrolls and presumably used to wrap them. Some were impregnated with wax, and possibly cedar oil too, since this was used to preserve scrolls (Testament of Moses 1.16).
Linen was also used to make rope: when Ezekiel had a vision of how the temple should be rebuilt after it had been destroyed by the Babylonians, he saw an angel holding a measuring rod and a linen rope. As Ezekiel watched, the angel measured out the plan of the new temple (Ezekiel 40.1-4).
Shorter pieces of coarse linen thread were used for lamp wicks, and they were proverbial for keeping the lamp alight. A guttering wick in a lamp that did not go out was compared to a person who suffered but survived: ‘A dimly buring wick, he will not be extinguished’ (Isaiah 42.3, my literal translation).
The finest line was used for luxury items: furnishings, fine clothes, and the garments of the priests in the great temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem. We shall return to the priests and their linen in a moment, but first, the religious law governing the manufactrure of linen; it was forbidden to weave it with any other fibre. ‘You shall not wear a mingled fabric, wool and linen together, (Deuternomoy 22.11). The exception to this was the law of the temple„ which prescribed a mixed fabric for the veil of the temple - the great curtain that separated the main hall from the holy of holies - and for the outer vestment of the high priest.
This fabric was unique, but little is known about it because of the technical terms used. It was chosheb work, usually translated ‘skilled work’ and it was woven from linen and ‘stuff’ of red, blue and purple (Exodus 26.31). All this was symbolic, but for centuries the meaning was known only to the high priests. Then Josephus, a member of the high priestly family in the time of Jesus, revealed what the weaving represented. He said the ‘stuff’ was wool, and that the colours represented the four elements from which the material world was made: red was fire, blue was air, purple was water, and white linen was the earth, because it came from a plant. Elsewhere he gave a different explanation: the linen represented eternity, because it did not come from an animal that died.
The temple veil of linen and wool was one of the treasures of the temple, and whenever the temple was attacked and looted, the veil was taken. The last veil, looted by the Romans in AD 70, was at first kept in Caesar’s palace in Rome, and then, after about 200 years, given to the Christians. After that it ws kept in the great church in Constantinople, but was lost when the crusaders sacked the city in 1204. And why was this last veil so treasured by the Christians? It tore when Jesus died, as Matthew, Mark and Luke record, but the early Christians also remembered that Mary had been one of the girls chosen to weave the last temple veil. Pictures show her spinning the red wool.
The veil was huge: over ten yards wide [20 cubits], and over twenty yards [40 cubits] long. The description of the weaving is not clear – the scribes were probably unfamiliar with the language of the weavers - but it seems to say there were 72 strips and each one was 24 threads wide (Mishnah Shekalim 8.5). This 20 yard warp thread was made of ‘twisted linen’.
The technical terms used by the weavers are a problem. There are several in the Hebrew Bible that are clearly related to linen making, but their exact meaning is hard to determine. Since the original texts written at least 2,500 years ago, there are bound to be some problems. One of the uncertain words describes King Solomon’s trading activites; he seems to have made some of his fortune from trading in linen from Egypt. The men who made the King James Bible - which was published 400 years ago - translated the Hebrew like this: ‘And Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt, and linen yarn: the king’s merchants received the linen yarn at a price.’(1 Kings 10.28). Modern versions differ - a good example of the problem with technical terms used in linen making.
Another seems to be the term for a fancy weave: the high priest had a coat of fine linen that was ‘emboidered’, according to the King James Bible, but other translations say ‘woven in chequer work’ (Exodus 28.39). The same word shabats was also used to describe setting the precious stones in the high priest’s breastplate, literally ‘they shall be shabats in gold and enclosed’. Modern translations say this was gold filigree work, which suggests that shabats meant a complicated linen weave if it was a similar technique. And it seems there was a firm of these shabats weavers in Judah. The genealogies recorded about 400 BC in the Books of Chronicles included ‘the families of the house of those who worked fine linen’ (1 Chronicles 4.21). They lived at the house of the shabatz, the same word, or so it seems. These genealogies were copied out at a time when two Hebrew letters were written in a very similar way. Our current translations read the word one way, that they lived in a place called Ashbea, which is otherwise unknown, but the other way of reading gives ‘the house of the shabats worker’. This is a very likely ‘business address’ if these people were workers in fine linen.
Another type of linen was shesh, a word which also means ‘six’, so perhaps they used a six-ply thread. Who knows? It later became the word for marble, because the smooth shiny surface of marble looked like this shesh linen. Sometimes it was described as ‘twisted shesh’, and in all but one of the 20 examples (the exception is Exodus 39.28), it described a linen warp thread for the heavy woollen fabric of the temple veil and the vestments.
There was also buş, a very fine shiny linen; the Greeks borrowed the word and called it byssos. In Hebrew, however, the word reveals how it was made. The name buş was the same as the word for whiteness, buş, and sounded the same as the word for trample, bus. This was trampled linen and it was very white. It was used for lower orders of priests, for example, the musicians (1 Chronicles 5.12).
Two places just south of Jerusalem, where the valley of the Kidron meets the valley of Hinnom, suggest that they were named after the linen workers there. One was called En-Rōgel, the place where King David’s son Adonijah declared his intention to sieze the throne (1 Kings 1.9). The name means ‘the treader’s spring’. What would a man – this is a masculine word - be doing treading in the fresh-flowing waters of a spring? Washing was women’s work. Then there was a place which the English Bibles call the Fuller’s Field, near a water conduit form the upper pool. The Hebrew name is, literally, the field of the trampler, kōbes, and it was near a water course. How might a trampler have been using a field near a water course? I suspect that this was a field for the linen workers to lay out their trampled linen for bleaching.
A very important event took place near this field. It was where the prophet Isaiah met King Ahaz and gave the prophecy that we hear each Christmas: ‘Behold the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son and call his name Immanuel.’ (Isaiah 7.14). When you next hear those words, try to imagine the prophet and the king meeting by a linen green.
There must have been a demand for fine linen from the high priestly families. The clothes which they wore in the temple were made of shesh, fine linen. At Sinai, when the tabernacle was established, ‘… they made coats of fine linen, shesh, woven work, for Aaron and for his sons; and a turban of fine linen, shesh, caps of fine linen, shesh, and linen breeches of fine twined linen’, shesh again, the only example of twisted shesh that is not a warp thread for woollen fabric. (Exodus 39.27-29).
The same instructions are given in Leviticus 16, but they use a different word: bad. This was used for linen garments rather than the fabric, but the name implies they were garments that separated the wearer from the everyday world. They were holy garments. These are the instructions for the high priest entering the holy of holies on the day of atonement: ‘He shall put on the holy linen coat, bad, and he shall have the linen breaches, bad, on his body, be girded with the linen girdle, bad, and wear the linen turban, bad; these are the holy garments. He shall bathe his body in water and then put them on.’ (Leviticus 16.4). When he came out of the holy of holies, he had to change into his ordinary priest’s clothing: ‘[When] Aaron shall come out of the tent of meeting, he shall put off the holy garments which he put on when he went into the holy place, and shall leave them there; and he shall bathe his body in a holy place, and put on his garments and come forth…’ (Leviticus 16.23).
Ezekiel, who was a priest, said that the priests had to wear clothing made of flax when they entered the inner court of the temple. The reason? So that they did not sweat (Ezekiel 44.18). He himself would have been too young to serve as a priest before he was taken into exile by the Babylonians, along with the ruling classes of Jerusalem, but he would have heard talk about the lost temple. Try to imagine the holy of holies that Ezekiel’s family had known: an enclosed space with no windows, a thirty-foot cube lined completely with beaten gold, with incense burning and seven great oil lmaps. It must have been very hot in there, and so, said Ezekiel, the priests wore linen, so that they did not sweat.
It seems that linen for the most holy garments was woven within the temple precincts. King Josiah, at the end of the 7th century, decided to remove from the temple everything that he felt was inapproriate, everything that resembled the customs of the nations round about. One of these customs was weaving linen garments in the temple. The mother goddess of Canaan had a spindle for her symbol, and so we can imagine her devotees weaving in their temples. King Josiah destroyed the places in the Jerusalem temple where the women used to weave baddim, the sacred linen garments (2 Kings 23.7).
The baddim, the sacred linen garments of the priests, are our link to one of the most remarkable developments in the story of linen in the Bible. The priests in the temple said that worship in the temple was a reflection on earth of the worship in heaven. The priests corresponded to the angels. As a result, people imagined that the angels dressed like priests, in the holy garments of white linen, the baddim. When Ezekiel had a vision of the angels bringing judgement on the wickedness in Jerusalem, he described their leader as a man in baddim ( Ezekiel 9.2, 3, 11; 10.2, 6, 7). When Daniel had his visions of an angel by the river Tigris, he saw a man clothed in baddim (Daniel 10.5; 12.6,7).
This picture of angels as men in white garments passed into the Christian imagination too. When the women went to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning, they saw ‘two men in dazzling apparel’- that is how St Luke described them (Luke 24.4).8 The two who were walking to Emmaus the same evening said that some women had gone to the tomb and seen a vision of angels ( Luke 24.23). Men in dazzling white garments were angels, and Jesus himself told us that the resurrected were like angels. He said that there was no marriage in heaven because all were ‘equal to angels, and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.’ (Luke 20.36). This too passed into the Christian way of picturing heaven. When St John saw the multitude in heaven who had come through the great tribultion, he saw people in white robes. They were dressed like the angels, and that means they were wearing linen (Revelation 7.9).
From the very beginning it was a Christian custom to put on a white robe at baptism, and for the same reason. This was the moment of beginning a new life as a Christain, being ‘born again’ or ‘born from above’ [ in Greek this would be the same words], and the children of heaven wore white linen like the angels.
At this time of the year we have just been thinking about the Transfiguration- August 6th, and the gospels describe how Jesus’ everyday garments changed. ‘His garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them’ (Mark 9.3). This is the language of linen again: we assume that Jesus’ everyday clothing was the rough linen that men wore in Palestine at that time, and here, in the vision, the disciples saw the everyday clothing transformed into the shining white garments of heaven. So too St John, who saw the risen Lord in his vision, clothed, say the English translations, in a long robe (Revelation 1.13). The Greek word here is podērēs, the long linen robe worn by the high priest, (Lxx Exodus 25.6).
From the story of Joshua and the Israelites entering the land, when the spies hid under the flax, to St John’s visions of the risen Lord in heaven and the resurrected in glory wearing their white linen robes, it is clear that linen is a thread that running all through the Bible.
