Wednesday, July 29, 2015

The borrowed tomb

Matthew 27:59-60English Standard Version (ESV)

59 And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud 60 and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away.

"In a family tomb..., a body would be stretched out on the shelf until it had been completely decayed.  Then the living would return, the tomb would be reopened, the bones would be collected and stored in the little rear hallway, leaving the shelf empty for the next in line to die." -- N. D. Wilson, Death by Living

In first-century Judaism, Jesus really could have "borrowed" Joseph's new tomb.  Without the intervention of the resurrection, his body would have been left to decay, then put in a bone box and returned to his family or followers, leaving the storage area of the new tomb to be used by Joseph of Arimathea and his family.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Another plague of locusts

Joel 2:7-8English Standard Version (ESV)

Like warriors they charge;
    like soldiers they scale the wall.
They march each on his way;
    they do not swerve from their paths.
They do not jostle one another;
    each marches in his path;
they burst through the weapons
    and are not halted.


"The day after this which was the third day since they came, the grasshoppers began to walk toward the west.  Every one was walking in the same direction like an army.  They did not stop nor go around anything but went straight on over or through whatever they came to.  They came to the east side of the house walked up it, over the roof and down the other side.  There was an open window up stairs on the east side and those that came to the window walked on in.  There were hundreds of them in the room when Ma thought of it and ran to shut the window.  Pa tried with a stick to turn some of them, but they wouldn't go a step in any direction except west.

When they came to the creek, they walked out on the water and drowned.  Others came up and walked out on the drowned ones, until they drowned too, when others walked out over them until finally the creek was choked with drowned grasshoppers and others walked safely across on the bodies."

-- Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), 81.

A plague of locusts

Exodus 10:15 English Standard Version (ESV)

15 They covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, andthey ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.

"They ate every green thing, the garden, the grass, the leaves on the trees.  Our chickens ate grasshoppers until they would eat no more.  The fish in the creek ate all they could hold.  Everywhere we stepped we mashed grasshoppers and they crawled up under our skirts and down the backs of our necks." 
-- Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), 79.