“A man plucked off his glove and gave it to his neighbor: and this was for a testimony in Israel.”—Old Testament, Chaldaic Version: Ruth: ch. iv., vs. 7.

Gloves are so ancient that the first mention of them in literature is to be found in a great classic of three thousand years ago—the Bible. Zealous disputants in all kinds of causes have had a trick of twisting Holy Writ to serve the purpose of their arguments. But in appropriating the above lines from the Book of Ruth, the writer has not been guilty of taking liberties with the Scriptures—even though the passage does not read as he has quoted it in the King James Version.

Turning to the authorized text, we find: “Now this was the manner in former times in Israel concerning redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm all things; a man plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbor, and this was for a testimony in Israel. Therefore the kinsman said unto Boaz, Buy it for thee. So he drew off his shoe.”

A certain learned Hebrew of high literary attainments, M. Josephs, a noted authority in the early part of the nineteenth century, in dealing with this passage bids us follow the Targum, or Chaldaic version of the Old Testament, which renders, instead of shoe, the word glove. He reminds us that the men who wrote the Targum lived fifteen hundred years before the translators of our English Bible; that their rendition grew directly out of the oral interpretations and paraphrases of the Scriptures read in the synagogues—a custom which began, probably, soon after the return of the Jews from captivity. The Targumists, of course, were much closer to the original Hebrew usages than the mediÆval scribes. The disputed phrase in their version, narthek yad, means “the covering of the right hand.” It is derived from the Hebrew text, nangal, which, employed verbally, means to close or enclose. The expression, nangal regel, is, literally, “to enclose the foot” and signifies a shoe. The use of nangal alone, however, as a noun, always implied an article enclosing the hand—in other words, a glove. There can be no doubt that the writer of the Chaldaic version accepted the term as a hand-covering, not a foot-covering—even specifying that the glove given as a testimony in Israel was drawn off the right hand.

Both ancient and modern rabbinical scholars, we are told, agree in rendering the word from the original as “glove,” not shoe. And Joel Levy, a distinguished German translator, gave, instead of shoe, his picturesque, native idiom of hand-schuh (hand-shoe), by which gloves are known in Germany to this day.

Added to etymological testimony, moreover, is the evidence of ancient custom. Gloves, in the symbolical sense, have been employed as a token of good faith as far back as history can be traced. The shoe, on the other hand, never is used figuratively in Holy Writ except to express humility or supine obedience. The man who wished to make a compact with his neighbor, as Boaz when he bought the lands of Ruth, must offer his glove as pledge in the transaction. The very same practice is common in the Orient to-day.

Challenge by the glove also appears to have been customary from antiquity. In the one hundredth and eighth Psalm, the prophet in an ecstacy of triumph cries: “Over Edom will I cast out my glove!” Had this warrior of the spirit merely thrown a shoe over the city he had vowed to reclaim to Jehovah, what boastful promise would there have been in that?

Among the Jews, however, three thousand years ago, gloves were by no means in common use. Probably they were worn only by men of high rank, and then solely on ceremonial occasions. We have reason to suppose that kings wore them, for in the mural paintings of Thebes ambassadors are depicted bearing from some far country gifts of gloves. The women certainly did not wear them, for they are not mentioned in the exhaustive list of “bravery,” enumerated by Isaiah (Chapter III.), the vainglorious fallals of which the daughters of Zion in their pride were to be despoiled on the Day of Doom. “Feet-rings, neck chains, thin veils, tires or bonnets, zones or girdles, jewels for the nostrils, embroidered robes, tunics, transparent garments, fine linen vests, armlets”—all such fineries as these must the fair Israelites relinquish at the sound of the last trump. Surely, had gloves been among their vanities, these also must have been confiscated by the Inexorable Judge!

Nearly a century after the Book of Ruth was written, Homer relates how he came upon Laertes, the father of Ulysses, working in his garden (for he was a farmer) “while gloves secured his hands to shield them from the thorns.” So, we know that the early Greeks wore gloves. It is striking to note that they employed them, too, for humble and useful purposes. They were not monopolized by priests and kings. However, we are given no hint how Laertes’ gloves were shaped nor of what materials they were made. Probably they resembled the modern mitten, for it is not until under the Roman emperors that we actually learn that gloves were made with fingers. These were called, specially, digitalia, to distinguish them from the chirothocae, or fingerless variety.

Virgil makes reference to gauntlets worn at the Trojan contests, as “the gloves of death”; and he describes gloves worn by Eryx, “composed of seven folds of the thickest bull’s hide, sewn and stiffened with knots of lead and iron.”

The gloves of the Persians, we may suspect, were not of the warlike type, but were sported simply for luxury and display. Zenophon who, somebody has remarked, “had the courage of his dislikes,” despised the ancient Persians and stigmatized them as effeminate because they gloried in their gloves. In his Cyropaedia he lays stress on the fact that on one occasion Cyrus was actually known to go forth “without his gloves”!

Varro, contemporary of Cicero, observes in his De Re Rustica that “olives gathered by the naked hand are preferable to those pulled with gloves on.” The Epicureans evidently had adopted the theory that fruit, to be fully enjoyed, should not even be handled in the plucking. Again, among the Romans, we find gloves an article of utility, worn by agriculturists—though it is likely that these hand-coverings were in the shape of mittens and not of the digitalia style. To the latter appear to have been attached far greater prestige.

At the same time, the fingered gloves also had come to be used for a practical protection. Pliny, the younger, speaking of the private secretary of his illustrious uncle, writes: “His amanuensis” (who accompanied him on his notable journey to Mount Vesuvius) “wore gloves upon his hands that winter, lest the severity of the weather should make him lose any time” (from his duties as scribe). It is to gloves, then, that we are indebted in part for some of the most remarkable passages in the works of the celebrated Roman naturalist, whose scientific enthusiasm eventually cost him his life in the eruption of Vesuvius, 79 A.D.

Not until the age of Musonious, the philosopher, who lived near the close of the first century of the Christian era, do we find gloves among the Romans falling into disrepute. Musonious ejaculates: “It is shameful that persons in perfect health should clothe their hands with soft and hairy coverings!” The denunciation of the dress-reformers of those days, however, seems to have had as little effect in stemming the tide of fashion as in our times.

A truly revolting use to which gloves are said to have put—if we may believe certain tales of the famous story-teller, AthenÆus (200 A.D.)—is described in a bit of ancient fiction in which he relates that “a well-known glutton,” one of his own contemporaries, “always came to the table with gloves upon his hands, that he might be able to handle and eat the meat while it was hot, and devour more than the rest of the company.” No wonder the early Fathers of the Church looked upon gloves as vicious and corrupting! But their biting invective was directed principally against the effeminancy of those who fell victim to the pleasurable practice, and about the beginning of the ninth century ecclesiastical authority forbade the monks from wearing any gloves save those made of the tough, unyielding sheepskin. Such, it was thought, could not possibly afford the brethren any sensuous enjoyment, nor tempt them into love of luxuries.

There is an ancient story of Saint Gudula, patroness of Brussels, which well illustrates the early Christian distrust of gloves. In Butler’s Legends of the Saints, it is related of this holy woman—who died in 712 A.D.—that one day, kneeling at prayers barefooted, one of the monks, moved to compassion, “put his gloves upon her feet” to protect them from the cold stones of the floor. St. Gudula, however, snatched off the offending articles and contemptuously tossed them ceiling high. And there they remained, says the legend, miraculously suspended in midair for one hour.

The first legal enactment concerning gloves occurs in the records of France. About 790, Emperor Charlemagne granted unlimited rights of hunting to the abbots and monks of Sithin for the purpose of procuring deer skins for making covers for their books, and also for gloves and girdles. The bishops, however, grew to feel that theirs should be the exclusive privilege of wearing gloves of such fine quality; and by the Council of Aix, in the reign of Louis, Le Debonnaire, the inferior clergy were ordered to abstain from deer skin and to wear only sheep skin, as was formerly deemed fitting for monks.

In England gloves virtually “came over with the Conqueror.” The French importation—which several centuries later was to be the cause of such intense commercial rivalry between the two countries—was the mailed glove of stout deer or sheep skin, with joined plates of metal affixed to the back and fingers. The early Saxons, however, wore gloves of a rude sort, for the derivation of the word from gluf is distinctly Saxon, and they are mentioned in the epic of Beowulf, composed in the seventh century, A.D. William S. Beck thinks that the early Britons may have been quick to appreciate the comfort afforded by the gloves worn by their Roman conquerors. It is known for a fact that the Britons of that age wore boots of untanned leather, and it should be no tax upon the imagination to suppose that if they protected one extremity they probably did the other.

But Professor Boyd Dawkins, without a doubt, has pushed the history of the glove farthest back of any antiquarian. Professor Dawkins assures us that the cavemen wore gloves. He actually defines their style; they were “not of ordinary size,” he tells us, “but reaching even to the elbows, anticipating by untold ages the multi-button gloves of the Victorian era.” Now just when did these pre-historic, glove-wearing men live? Another eminent geologist holds that they inhabited the south of France before they were driven forth by the excruciating cold of the glacial period. It is impossible accurately to fix the date of the great ice age; Dr. Croll, however, and other celebrated scientists, appear to agree that it began about 240,000 years ago, that it lasted about 160,000 years and ended somewhat over 80,000 years since.

Here, then, is an antiquity for gloves which should satisfy our fondest ambitions! This theory also restores to France with a vengeance the original prestige for glove-making of which that country is so jealous. Theory, should we say? The cavemen’s gloves, as we are distinctly told, were made of roughly dressed skins, sewn with elaborate bone needles; and an unmistakable drawing of such a glove was discovered by Professor Dawkins, rudely etched upon a bone, found among pre-glacial relics.

The glove, accordingly, dates from the twilight of mankind. The ancient peoples wore gloves; and by the tenth century in Europe we find them in fairly general use—to some degree as a practical protection and hand-covering, but, more strikingly, as the badge of royal or ecclesiastical authority and dignity.

The gentler sex, however, at that time had by no means come into their own, so far as gloves were concerned. Among the early nations men seem to have enjoyed the monopoly of this article of dress, and the reason is plain to see, when we remember that gloves, in those days, were worn almost exclusively as part of the regalia of public office. The daughters of Israel, and the ladies of Persia, Greece, Rome and mediÆval Europe, adopted the voluminous sleeve which came down over the hand and rendered gloves, for practical purposes, unnecessary. A manuscript of the tenth century, however, describes a hand-covering worn by an Anglo-Saxon lady which resembled a muffler provided with a separate division for the thumb. This was reproduced by PlanchÉ in his History of British Costume, and is colored blue. But the long, flowing sleeves were customary, and were even worn by both sexes—men in the ordinary walks of life, apparently, being compelled to content themselves with sharing the feminine expediency for keeping the hands warmly covered. For a man to be gloveless at that period certainly spelled humiliation!

It was not until the thirteenth century that the ladies of Europe blossomed forth in gloves—not of the mitten variety, but boasting four fingers as well as a thumb. The first to be introduced for the fair sex were made of linen, of simple design, and reached to the elbows to accommodate the short-sleeved gowns of the period. Not before Queen Elizabeth’s time, however, did the elaborately embroidered, bejeweled and perfumed glove captivate woman’s fancy and satisfy her feminine dreams of beauty and extravagance.