Two hours and a half northwest of Bîr ez-Zayt is the little village of ‛Âbûd, with four hundred Christians and three hundred Moslems. The English Church Mission sustains work there. The road thither passes the tiny hamlet of Umm Ṣuffah, the houses of which seem to be made with a core of tiny stones and cement, faced with larger stones. The ruin Khurbet Jîbya is near by. The road then passes near Neby Ṣâliḥ, where it enters the little Wâdy Rayyâ, following which one comes to the tombs of Tibneh within forty minutes of ‛Âbûd.
Northwest of ‛Âbûd is a place called Muḳâṭ‛a, evidently an old quarry, the working of which had disturbed a still older cemetery of rock-cut tombs, some of them painted. The carving in some of these is elaborate. One tomb, with a vestibule twenty-one and three-quarters feet wide and ten feet deep is ornamented at the top with a grape cluster suspended between two wreaths. Another vestibule twenty-six feet two inches wide shows gate sockets on each side. This vestibule served two tomb-chambers, one directly in front as one enters and the other in the right wall. The entrance to the former has been crushed open, leaving a large irregular hole. Within are nine full-sized _kokim_ with smaller, shallow cuttings in the tier above them which looked like embryo kokim. The right-hand tomb-chamber has three kokim on the left side and three opposite the entrance, one of the latter having been broken or cut through to the daylight, probably in the process of quarrying from the other side. This smaller tomb shows a fresco in black and red and perhaps yellow paint. The design is in large, diamond-shaped figures, with a rope border over it. There are many scratchings on the walls.
_Cf._ Deut. 11: 14; Job 29: 23; Prov. 16: 15; Jer. 3: 3; 5: 24; Hosea 6: 3; Joel 2: 23; Zech. 10: 1; James 5: 7.
Jer. 18: 17; Ezek. 17: 10; 19: 12; Hosea 13: 15; Jonah 4: 8.
1 Sam. 30: 6; 1 Kings 12: 18; 2 Kings 3: 25; _cf._ Matt. 23: 37; John 8: 59; 10: 31.
Deut. 14: 21; 15: 3; 23: 20; _cf._ Matt. 5: 44–46
In the evening of the wedding-day when the bridegroom is allowed a glimpse of his wife’s face before he goes to join his friends in the merrymaking, he presses a gold coin on her forehead. It is his gift, and falls into her lap.