properly only an opening in a house for the admission of light and air, covered with lattice-work, which might be opened or closed ( 2 Kings 1:2 ; Acts 20:9 ). The spies in Jericho and Paul at Damascus were let down from the windows of houses abutting on the town wall ( Joshua 2:15 ; 2 co 11:33 ). The clouds are metaphorically called the "windows of heaven" ( Genesis 7:11 ; Malachi 3:10 ). The word thus rendered in Isaiah 54:12 ought rather to be rendered "battlements" (LXX., "bulwarks;" RSV, "pinnacles"), or as Gesenius renders it, "notched battlements, i.e., suns or rays of the sun"= having a radiated appearance like the sun.
The window of an Oriental house consists generally of an aperture closed in with lattice-work. ( Judges 5:28 ; Proverbs 7:6 ) Authorized Version "casement;" ( Ecclesiastes 12:3 ) Authorized Version "window;" ( Solomon 2:9 ; Hosea 13:3 ) Authorized Version "chimney." Glass has been introduced into Egypt in modern times as a protection against the cold of winter, but lattice-work is still the usual, and with the poor the only, contrivance for closing the window. The windows generally look into the inner court of the house, but in every house one or more look into the street. In Egypt these outer windows generally project over the doorway. [HOUSE]
WINDOW
win'-do.
See HOUSE, II, 1, (9).
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