In Luke Chapter 5, it says that Jesus was teaching the multitude by the shore, and there were some fishing boats there, and He stepped into one of the boats and asked Simon to take Him out a little way from the shore. When He finished His teaching, He told Simon to let down his nets for a draught. Simon protested that they had just spent all night fishing and hadn’t caught anything, but, since Jesus said so, he let down the nets. They ended up catching lots of fish. Now I personally am not a fisherman, but they tell me that, generally, the night is the best time to fish. There are other factors, of course: tides, currents, water temperature, and such things, but, in general, if you can’t catch anything at night, you aren’t going to catch much during the day either.
It goes on to say that they caught a draught of fishes. Now, I have to admit, that confused me for a while. As I said, I’m not a fisherman, but I have done some sailing in my time, and I know that the draught (or draft, as we spell it here in the U.S.) of a ship is how deep it sits in the water, that is, the depth of its keel. I had always assumed that Jesus was simply telling Simon not to let the nets down any deeper than the keel of his boat. Of course, that didn’t explain the second use of the word. I finally looked up the word “draught” and discovered that the British use that word (among other things) to refer to a quantity of fish (as in, more than a few). So Jesus was telling Peter that if he would lets down his nets, he would catch a quantity of fish. This, of course, was not guesswork; Jesus knew how many fish were down there, and that they were ready to be caught, and even knew how they had avoided the nets during the night. He may very well have been responsible for all of that.
This revelation, as it were, led me to wonder about the other uses of the word “draught” in scripture. It is used only once in the Old Testament: In 2 Kings 10:27, Jehu broke down the house of Baal in Israel, and made it a draft house. I have been unable to ascertain exactly what that means: It could mean a place set aside for drawing (a place for draftsmen, if such a thing even existed then), or a place where casks of liquid were stored (although I know of no Biblical references to draft beer), or, perhaps a gaming parlor (what we call “checkers,” the British call “draughts”). I think it’s a little more likely that it was a place for writing (as in different drafts of a given document), perhaps even for copying over existing texts, but I’m not sure. The point is, though, that it was no longer used as a house of worship. There is an interesting point, in and of itself: Does it matter what house of worship one attends service in, as long as one knows in one heart that they are worshipping the one true God?
Both of the other places that the term is used in the New Testament, it is used to refer to something somewhat less mentionable. Jesus said that what goes into a man doesn’t defile the man, because it goes into the belly, and ends up in the draft. Again, I know what that sounds like, but, to be honest, I can’t be sure. I haven’t been able to find a definition (for draft or draught) that fits what it seems to me that Jesus was talking about. The first definition that my dictionary lists for draught is the drawing of a liquid from its receptacle, which is sort of close, but it doesn’t really sound like He was talking about stuff leaving the body in the form of a liquid to me… Maybe He was, the people He was talking to didn’t have the anatomical knowledge that we have, but it seems pretty obvious that whatever the body takes in that it can’t digest goes right back out again pretty much as solid as it went in. Maybe this is one instance where it’s really better not to know exactly what Jesus was talking about.
Um, I just did a little more research: It occurred to me to check the ancient languages that the Bible was translated from, and it seems that the Ancient Hebrew word that was translated as “draught house” in Second Kings and the Ancient Greek word translated as “draught” in Matthew 15 and Mark 7 both essentially mean latrine. I imagine that the ultimate rejection of a religion would be to turn its house of worship into a latrine. Apparently that’s a usage of the term draught that hasn’t survived the almost-400-years since the Bible was translated.
Posts
