Fasting, more or less strict, seems to have been an invariable accompaniment of mourning, and mourners denied themselves recreation and other enjoyments. When it is said that the men of Jabesh-gilead fasted seven days in grief for the death of Saul and Jonathan (1S 3118), we must suppose the fast to have been less strict than usual among Orientals, and that some food was allowed to the mourning people. From the Talmud (Baba Bathra, 16a) we learn that lentils were allowed during the period of mourning. It was customary for friends and neighbours after an interval to come and comfort the mourners and urge food upon them (2S 12'* 17), and food was also distributed at funerals (Jer 147 RV, Ezk 24”, Hos 9%), especially to the poor (? Job 41”), ‘The bread of mourners,’ the bread partaken of by the nearest relatives of the deceased during the period of mourning, was accounted ceremonially unclean and defiling (Hos 94). It has been dis- cussed whether this mourners’ meal of the days of the prophets was not in some way connected with a funeral feast. The subject is obscure, but in Dt (2014) the Israelite, speaking of the tithe, is represented as saying, ‘I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I put away thereof, being unclean, nor given thereof for the dead.’ ΤΆ we adopt the rendering ‘for the dead,’ the passage sity Ne taken as pointing to the custom for the friends of the nears to testify their sympathy with the mourning rela- tives by sending bread or other food for their refreshment, as we have just observed. If we render ‘to the dead,’ the passage would rather point to the widespread custom of placing food in the ΤΑΥ͂Θ with the dead—a custom common among the Egyptians, and found among the later Jews in ‘the messes of meat laid upon a grave’ (Sir 30'8). See the subject discussed in Driver, Deuteronomy, pp. 291, 292. That funeral feasts became an institution of later Judaism is clear, for Josephus (BJ 1. i. 1) records that the custom of giving funeral feasts ‘is an occasion of poverty to inany of the Jews, because they are forced to feast the multitude, for if any one omits it he is not esteemed a holy man.’ To this day it is a custom among the Jews to dispense alms with a liberal hand cusing the week of mourning in honour of the departed.
In a time of mourning it was a good custom to send messages of condolence to the bereaved (2S 10'-?); and friends were wont to gather to com- fort them in their sorrow (Jn 11!*)—a custom which prevails to this day in Syria in the bands of mourners who assemble from neighbouring villages to join in the lamentations. Funeral orations
MOURNING
were common in later times. Elegies, as we learn from Scripture, were composed to be sung for the dead. David composed his well-known elegy to honour the memory of Saul and Jonathan (2 Sim, and another for the gallant Abner (2S 3%). Such an elegy was composed by Jeremiah for king Josiah, and the ‘singing men and women’ sang dirges for him, continued, as it would appear, through a course of years (2 Ch 35%). Of this character were the Hashem ations of Jeremiah, called in the Talmud and elsewhere by the very name (n)3'7), ‘elegies,’ ‘ dirges,’ full of the bitterness of grief, as they were, for Jerusalem destroyed by the Chaldeans. See LAMENTATIONS (BOOK OF), and, on the rhythm of such kindth, POETRY. When a young persen dies unmarried, modern Syrians make the funeral lamentation more pathetic by first going through some forms of a wedding ceremony.
The chief mourners naturally were the relatives of the deceased, —husband (Gn 23?), widow (Job 27"), father and mother (Mk 5*:“), brother (Lk 718), sons (Gn 25° et passim). Among the well-to-do it was common to hire professional mourners. They accompanied the dead body to the grave, moving onwards with formal music (cf. Mt 9%), and singing dirges to the dead. They were both men and women. We have already noted the presence of both in Egyptian funeral processions, and, as has been just observed, they were ‘ singing men and women’ thatlamented Josiah. Itis men skilful in lamenta- tion whom Amos (5᾽5) summons to pronounce a dirge over the moral ruin of their country. It is men that are spoken of in Ecclesiastes (125) as the wailers that go about the streets. It was male flute-players that were present lamenting the death of Jairus’ daughter (Mt 953). On the other hand, it is the women whose profession it was (n}3;\p>) to attend at funerals, and by their skilled lamentations to aid the real mourners in giving vent to their grief, whom Jeremiah has in view when he says, ‘ Call for the women who chant dirges, and send for cunning (Heb. ‘ wise’) women that they may come’ (Jer 917. They are still required for such service, and are skil in interweaving femuily references and inimprovising poetry in praise of the departed. These professional mourning women are met with both in ancient and modern Arabia (Trumbull’s Studies in Oriental Life, p. 153 ff.); and Maspero (Dawn of Civilisation, p. 684) mentions that among the ancient Chaldeans old women performed the office of mourners, washing the dead body, per- fuming it, and clothing it in its best apparel.