090. Bed

Bed

We have only one reference to a bedstead in Scripture, that associated with the giant king Og (Deuteronomy 3:11). It was evidently something very unusual in those days. The bed we read of in the Bible was two forms. One is the divan, used most in cities, and in the interior of a house; it would almost never be seen on a housetop where the people slept much of the year. The divan is a long, narrow mattress, usually stuffed with straw. In a poor home merely the sacking is seen; people better off would have the sacking covered with a bright gay material, or with a homemade rug. In the daytime these mattress divans are used as a lounge, usually on the floor around the side of the room, at night they would be placed over the floor, as the living room is generally the sleeping-room also. Psalms 149:5 sounds strange to a Western ear: "the saints ... sing aloud upon their beds." It means simply that they were reclined on the divan or thin mattress or rug during the hours of rest in the hot part of the day, as they do even today. When Esther received Haman at the feast (Esther 7:8), it was not really a bed that he fell upon, but the seat, the divan or rug which was used for a seat or for reclining during the day and was used as a bed at night. The bedchamber, like the one in which Joash was hid (2 Kings 11:2), was a sort of cupboard place with usually an arched top, in which all the thin mattresses or rugs are piled up at night. This arrangement is very common in the East even now. The ordinary bed, used by most of the Orientals, the Bedouins, and the poorer classes in the cities and in every house, on the roof or in the court, is what we would call a mat. It was usually made from the dwarf-palm, or of tent cloth or grain bags or camel bags. This is unquestionably the bed of the New Testament. "Take up thy bed and walk"-a thing even a small child could easily do.