Various allusions are made in the Gospels to beds that could be carried -. ' Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house' (Mt y") ; ' Rise, take up thy bed, and walk ' ; ' And immediately the man . . . took up his bed, and walked ' (Jn S^- «) ; ' Behold men bringing on a bed a man that was palsied' (Lk 5'8 KV). St. Luke and St. Mark tell us that on this occasion, when, because of the crowd in the house, the four men could not reach Jesus with the paralytic, they took him up on the house-top, broke through the roof, and ' let him down through the tiling with f/ie couch (K\ivlSiov ; in v.'", however, the word Mn-q, 'bed,' is used) into the midst before Jesus' (Lk C"), or, as St. Mark puts it, 'let down the bed (KpilifiaToi) wherein the sick of the palsy lay ' (2*).
For ordinary use at night the bed was laid on the floor, generally on tlie mat, which served to
keep it off the ground, frequently on a light portable frame of wood which served a like pur- pose : but sometimes on a more elevated bedstead (' under the bed,' Mk 4^1 RV). In the morning the bedding was all rolled up, and, after being aired and sunned, was put aside on the raised platform, or packed away for the day in a chest or closet. A bedstead of any pretensions was rare among the Hebrew.s, and was looked upon as a luxury ; the nearest approach to it being in general the raised platform on the side of the room. The richness of beds and of bedsteads among some of the Asiatic peoples, however, was at least equal to that of the Greeks and Roman.? (cf . Pr 7'"- ^', 1 S 28^^). The degree of richness would depend, of course, upon the wealth of the family and the style of the house or tent, as it does to-day among the Bedawin.
Usually a room was set apart as a bedroom, where the whole family slept. ' My children are with me in bed, I cannot rise and give thee ' (LJc IP'*). Among the poorest a portion of the single room occupied by the family was set apart for sleeping, and, generally, this was raised above the level of the floor. When the house was of two storeys, the beds were laid in one of the rooms of the upper storey, or, during the summer, prefer- ably, on the fiat roof. See, further, art. Couch. Geo. B. Eager.
BEELZEBUB or BEELZEBUL It is strange
that this name has never yet been satisfactorily explained ; stranger still that no trace of it has been found as yet among the scores of Jewish names for angels and spirits. The first part of the name is clear enough ; it is the Aramaic form of the Hebrew ' Basil ' ; nor is there anything strange in the dropping of X before f in the MSS followed by modern editors like "Westcott-Hort and Weiss [Cheyne in his art. ' Beelzebul ' in the Encyc. Bibl. finds 'this scepticism as to X in ^ee\ paradoxical,' ' the word /Seefe^ouX inexplicable and hardly pro- nounceable,' and urges against it 'the famous passage Mt lO-'*, where the olKoSeairbTrji implies the speaker's consciousness that Vji? is one element in the title,' but his objection completely misses the mark. The dropping of the X is merely pho- netical ; cf. in Josephus pe^iSeX in codd. MVK(J for fSe\i(SeK (BJ iii. 25), Bdfupos for BoX^fwpos (c. Apion. i. 124), Ba^cKppdfiis for Bap^a<pp. (Ant. xiv. .SSO) ; 'A^e<rd5 in Cod. Q of Un 1" [Theod.] for 'kixe\aAS ; ' Philadephia ' in the Syriac Version of Euseb. 's HE, etc.* More difiicult is the change of /i into X at the end of the word, supposing the common ex- planation to be correct, that the name comes from 2 K 1-. It has been explained as an intentional cacophonic corruption ( = ' god of the dung ') or a dialectical or phonetic variation (cf. Beliar for
Bella/ or Bab el-Mande/ for Mandei). The spelling with b was retained in the NT by Luther, though his Greek text had X, and by RV in text ; it was
introduced by Jerome in the Vulgate, see the Index of Wordsworth-White, where 15 Latin spellings of the name are given, and cf. Jerome's remark in OS 66, 11 : 'in fine ergo nominis b litera legenda est, non 1 ; musca enim zcbiib vocatur.' X is even found in Cod. 243 of the text of Symmachus in 2 K 1- ; but see the Syriac Hexapla in v.'*, and note, what has generally been overlooked, thai the Septuagint took nni not ant bv^ for the name of the god of Ekron : iin^rjTrjaat iv rrj BdaX (dative) 'ilvtav (accusative) eebv'A-KKapwv ; likewise Jos.: vpbi Ty)v 'AKKapojv debv Mi'^a**, tovto yap tjv ovo/xa tu) tfeu:.
On the/w in worship and legend see Plin. HN X. 28. 75 ; Pausan. Descr. Gr. v. xiv. 1 ; .Elian, Nat. Anim. v. 17, xi. 8; Usener, Gottcrnamen, p. 260. There were Jewish legends about flies, such as that there were none in the temple (Aboth
' The best analogy is the Syr. name |-DB'y3-|3, 'son of the Bel of heaven,' explained by Barheb. as ' he with four namei.'