And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine. But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words: For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.
- Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 2, v.8-15
Listen again… “hearken to my words, For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.”
I remember that summer day in 1979, seated in a hole in the wall fuul and ta’miyya joint in Cairo’s Bab al Louk, as if it were yesterday. It must have been the 3rd hour of the day, lets say noon since my Arabic class had started at 9 and just ended, and I was hungry and very, very thirsty. Sharing the table with schoolmates, I didn’t wait for a bottled soda and, doing what under normal circumstances was highly inadvisable, long before the days of filtering or RO, I reached for the water pitcher and drank it down in a single gulp, a zarad. We were supposed to keep to Arabic as much as possible outside of class, so I said, Ana ‘atshaan jidan, I am very thirsty.
And they answered in unison, You are very wet, Inta mablool jidan. The water had entered my throat and exited immediately through every pore. My shirt was soaked. And I learned a new word, mablool, from the verb balla, to be wet, with the secondary meaning of to recover from an illness, such as from a case of severe hypohydration, on a hot Cairene summer’s day at the 3rd hour.