Henceforwards the mother-voice was heard no longer:
but to this succeeded an imperfect or daughter-voice, (_Bathcol_,)
which lay in the first words happening to arrest the attention at a
moment of perplexity. An illustration, which has been often quoted from
the Talmud, is to the following effect:--Rabbi Tochanan, and Rabbi
Simeon Ben Lachish, were anxious about a friend, Rabbi Samuel, six
hundred miles distant on the Euphrates. Whilst talking earnestly
together on this subject in Palestine, they passed a school; they
paused to listen: it was a child reading the first book of Samuel; and
the words which they caught were these--_And Samuel died_. These
words they received as a _Bath-col_: and the next horseman from
the Euphrates brought word accordingly that Rabbi Samuel had been
gathered to his fathers at some station on the Euphrates.
Here is the very same case, the same _Bath-col_ substantially,
which we have cited from Orton's _Life of Doddridge_. And Du Cange
himself notices, in his Glossary, the relation which this bore to the
Pagan _Sortes_. 'It was,' says he, 'a fantastical way of divination,
invented by the Jews, not unlike the _Sortes Virgilianae_ of the
heathens. For, as with them the first words they happened to dip into
in the works of that poet were a kind of oracle whereby they predicted
future events,--so, with the Jews, when they appealed to _Bath-col_,
the first words they heard from any one's mouth were looked upon as a
voice from Heaven directing them in the matter they inquired about.
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