Cited in _Notes and Queries_, fifth series, Vol. IV, p. 463.
An American gentleman traveling among the Scandinavian immigrants in Wisconsin and Minnesota, was surprised to see their house doors quite generally standing open, as if they had no need of locks and bolts. He argued from this that they were an exceptionally honest people, and that they had no fear of thieves and robbers. A Scandinavian clergyman, being asked about this, said that they had thieves in that region, but that thieves would not cross a threshold, or enter a door, with evil intent, being held back by a superstitious fear of the consequences of such a violation of the covenant obligation incurred in passing over the threshold.
I asked a native Syrian woman, “If a thief wanted to get into your house to steal from you, would he come in at the door, if he saw that open?” “Oh, no!” she answered, “he would come in at the window, or would dig in from behind.” “Why wouldn’t he come in at the door?” I asked. “Because his _reverence_ would keep him from that,” she said, in evident reference to the superstitious dread of crossing a threshold with evil intent,–a dread growing out of an inborn survival of reverence for the primitive altar, with the sacredness of a covenant entered into by its crossing.
The very term commonly employed in the New Testament for thieving indicates the “digging through” a building, instead of entering by the door. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth consume, and where thieves break through [literally, dig through; Greek, _diorussō_ and steal.”[688] “If the master of the house had known in what hour the thief was coming, he would have watched, and not have left his house to be digged through.”[689]
Canon Tristram tells of an Adwan shaykh who was proud of being a “robber,” a “highwayman,” but who resented the idea that he was a “thief,”–a “sneak thief.” “I am not a thief,” he said; “I do not dig into the houses of fellaheen in the night. I would scorn it. I only take by force in the day time. And, if God gives me strength, shall I not use it?” Canon Tristram adds: “A ‘thief,’ as distinguished from a ‘robber,’ would never think of attempting to force the door, but would noiselessly dig through a wall in the rear,–a work of no great labor, as the walls are generally of earth, or sun-dried bricks, or, at best, of stone imbedded in turf instead of in mortar.”[690]