Approaching his hoped-for guest, a Syrian engages him in something like the following dialogue, characterized by a glow of feeling which the translation can only faintly reveal:--
"Ennoble us [_sherrifna_] by your presence."
"I would be ennobled [_nitsherref_] but I cannot accept."
"No, I swear against you [_aksim 'aleik_] by our friendship and by the life of God. I love just to acquaint you with my bread and salt."
"I swear also that I find it impossible [_gheir mimkin_] to accept. Your bread and salt are known to all."
"Yea, do it just for our own good. By coming to us you come to your own home. Let us repay your bounty to us [_fadhlek_]."
"_Astaghfero Allah_ [by the mercy of God] I have not bestowed any bounty upon you worth mentioning."
Here the host seizes his guest by the arm and with an emphatic, "I _will not_ let you go," pulls at him and would drag him bodily into his house. Then the guest, happy in being vanquished "with honor," consents to the invitation.
Do you now understand fully the meaning { 210} of the passage in the fourteenth chapter of Luke's Gospel? "A certain man made a great supper, and bade many ... and they all with one consent began to make excuse.... And the Lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and _compel_ them to come in, that my house may be filled."[1] So also did Lydia, "a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira," invite the apostles, who had converted her to the new faith. In the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Acts, the fifteenth verse, Paul says, "And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. _And she constrained us_."
In the interior towns and villages of Syria the ancient custom still prevails that, when a stranger arrives in a town late in the day, he goes and sits in the "open space" (_saha_). While not designed to be so, this open space corresponds to the village common. In the English Bible it is called "the street." Streets, however, { 211} are unknown to Syrian towns. Sitting in the _saha_, the stranger is the guest of the whole village. The citizen who first sees such a wayfarer must invite him to his home in real Syrian fashion. Failing in this, he brings disgrace, not only upon himself, but upon the whole town. It is needless to say that no people ever rise to the height of their ideals, and that failure to be "given to hospitality" occurs, even in the East.