BLOODY

blud'-i (dam = "blood" of man or an animal; and where the King James translators have rendered with the adjective "bloody," the Hebrew employs the noun in the construct case, "of blood"): "A bridegroom of blood" (Exodus 4:25, 26, the King James Version bloody husband). Zipporah, not being an Israelite, probably objected to the circumcision of infants, if not to the rite altogether; apprehending, however, that her husband's life was imperiled possibly through some grievous sickness (Exodus 4:24) because of their disobedience in this particular, she performed the ceremony herself upon her son, saying, "A bridegroom of blood art thou to me."

In the Revised Version (British and American) the expression (the King James Version "bloody") is variously rendered, "man of blood" (2 Samuel 16:7, 8); "men of blood" (Psalm 26:9); "bloodthirsty" (Psalm 5:6; Psalm 59:2; Psalm 139:19). In 2 Samuel 21:1, "It is for Saul, and for his bloody house," might be rendered "Upon Saul and his house rests bloodshed."

Ezekiel calls Jerusalem "the bloody city" (Ezekiel 22:2; Ezekiel 24:6; compare Ezekiel 7:23), referring to those unjustly put to death by the wicked rulers of Jerusalem. Nineveh also is called "the bloody city" (Nahum 3:1). The capital here virtually stands for the kingdom, and history bears witness to the enormous cruelties perpetrated by the Assyrian rulers. It is siege on siege, pools of blood everywhere, the flaying of men alive, "great baskets stuffed with the salted heads of their foes." For two hundred years it is the story of brute force and ruthless cruelty. "The prey departeth not." And now every cruelty which they have visited upon others is to be turned upon themselves (Nahum 3:19).

M. O. Evans

BLOODY FLUX

fluks (puretos kai dusenteria, literally "fever and dysentery"): The disease by which the father of Publius was afflicted in Malta (Acts 28:8). the Revised Version (British and American) calls it "dysentery"; a common and dangerous disease which in Malta is often fatal to soldiers of the garrison even at the present day (Aitken, Pract. of Medicine, II, 841). It is also prevalent in Palestine at certain seasons, and in Egypt its mortality was formerly about 36 percent. Its older name was due to the discharge of blood from the intestine. Sometimes portions of the bowel become gangrenous and slough, the condition described as affecting Jehoram (2 Chronicles 21:19). There seems to have been an epidemic of the disease at the time of his seizure (2 Chronicles 21:14, 15), and in the case of the king it left behind it a chronic ulcerated condition, ending in gangrene. Somewhat similar conditions of chronic intestinal ulceration following epidemic dysentery I have seen in persons who had suffered from this disease in India.

Alex. Macalister

BLOODY SWEAT

(swet hosei thromboi haimatos): Described in Luke 22:44 as a physical accompaniment of our Lord's agony at Gethsemane (on the passage, which is absent in some manuscripts, see Westcott and Hort, The New Testament in Greek). Many old writers take this to mean that the perspiration dropped in the same manner as clots of blood drop from a wound, regarding the Greek word prefixed as expressing merely a comparison as in Matthew 28:3, where leukon hos chion means "white as snow." Cases of actual exudation of blood are described in several of the medieval accounts of stigmatization, and Lefebvre describes the occurrence of something similar in his account of Louise Lateau in 1870. For references to these cases see the article "Stigmatization" in Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edition), XXII, 550. It is perhaps in favor of the older interpretation that the word used by Aeschylus for drops of blood is stagon (Agam. 1122) and by Euripides stalagmos, not thromboi. None of the instances given by Tissot (Traite des nerfs, 279), or Schenck (Observ. med., III, 45:5), can be said to be unimpeachable; but as the agony of our Lord was unexampled in human experience, it is conceivable that it may have been attended with physical conditions of a unique nature.

Alex. Macalister