033. "And She Painted Her Face"

"And She Painted Her Face"

Making Her Eyes With Paint (Hebrew)
(2 Kings 9:30) The ladies of the Bible Lands have always had the same mode of making themselves beautiful. They "paint" or rather blacken their eyelids and brows with kohl and prolong the application in a decreasing pencil, so as to lengthen the eye in appearance to make it almond shape. The custom of painting is very, very ancient, for painted eyes, faces, fingernails and toe nails are found on the mummies in the very oldest of the Egyptian tombs. They applied to the cheeks colored paints of different shades. The powder from which kohl is made is collected from burning almond shells, or frankincense, and is very black. The powder is kept in metal containers, and is applied to the eyes by a small probe made of wood, ivory or silver, which they call meel, while they call the whole apparatus mukhuly. A very large number of paint jars of metal and alabaster of all sizes and shapes have been removed from the very oldest tombs in Egypt, so after all cosmetics are not so very modern, but are as old as the desire of the human heart to be beautiful, which means as old as the human race itself.

Painting does not appear, however, to have been by any means universal among the Hebrews. The notices of it are few; and in each instance it seems to have been unworthy of a woman of high character. Thus Jezebel "put her eyes in painting" (2 Kings 9:30, margin) . Jeremiah says of the harlot city, "Though thou rentest thy face with painting" (Jeremiah 4:30) ; and Ezekiel again makes it a characteristic of a harlot (Ezekiel 23:40). The paint was moistened with oil, and kept in small jars made of horn.

"And she painted her face."