In the course of study a rereading of what the scripture actually says revealed in
IKings 19:19. Elisha was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen before him, and he with the twelfth.
The last 5 words tells us something we may have missed and when we have a clearer understanding of the cultural aspects of farming and agriculture of the day it makes more sense. And as we are all learning, this is an amendment to the post previously made in mantle of glory, where it was mentioned as:
Worthy of note that:
Elisha was working with twelve yoke of oxen that is a huge number of animals.
Two or four were a more usual number.
He had to have been very skilled and strong to manage and control so many, we miss the importance in the reference to the number of oxen that were yoked together.
Now with further information and another translation recording the call of Elisha which says:
19 So Elijah went from there and found Elisha son of Shaphat. He was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair.
Rather than being inclined to think, from a surface reading, that he had a team of twelve yoke of oxen with which he was plowing;
there were twelve teams of oxen in the field,
and Elisha was plowing with the twelfth team.
The picture is actually of twelve separate plows following another one another as closely as possible as they traversed the field.
In that time the arable land of nearly all villages was cultivated in common. The local inhabitants joined forces and cooperated with each other enjoying each others company and camaraderie. The fact of being a group was also partly for protection, there being safety in numbers.
Each of their small plows did not make a really deep furrow, and only scratched the top surface of the soil, so the added number of plows that could follow after, with each making its own scratch, had a much greater effect and took less time than if it was done by only one individual. They went back and forth in this manner until the whole piece of land was plowed.
The yoked oxen with their farmer had to remain in line and could not pass one another as they plowed. Elisha was plowing last in the procession and this was significant because it gave time for the mantle to be given and at the same time not hinder or interrupt the plowing process because once a furrow was started they had to plow through to the end without stopping.
So Elisha was not plowing with 12 yoke of oxen by some supernatural strength but working in a well organized group of local farmers ( or possibly his servants); coordinating and combining their resources to achieve a common goal.
Rachel Took the Images
Genesis 31:34 Now Rachel had taken Laban’s household idols, put them in the saddlebag of her camel, and was sitting on them. And Laban searched everything in the tent but found nothing.
Another translation says:
“Now Rachel had taken the images, and put them in the camel’s furniture, and sat upon them.”
hat·tə·rā·p̄îm
הַתְּרָפִ֖ים
household idols
Later on they were frequently mentioned however, this appears to be the first mention we have of the existence and worship of these teraphim in this patriarchal family.
They were very small and easily hidden under the saddle bags/furniture of the camel. People were known to often hide stolen property under their saddles. Though it may seem strange to us, stealing a god to worship was in fact not to them. Why? Because, their logic and reasoning would no doubt tell us that it was not a sin to steal a god who would help you get other things you wanted and needed!
Teraphim were frequently consulted for answers about the future by the children of Israel; a kind of fortune telling, divining. After they entered the Promised Land, the worship or use of the teraphim remained one of their corrupt practices.
Many of the Hebrews leaned to idolatry in those days and consulted these images of gods, while still holding on to their belief in the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob/Israel.
The statement in the passage:
Rachel stole the family gods or teraphim.
If we’ve ever wondered why such a big issue was made over a pair of small figurines that had very little money value. Here is one possible explanation from an inscription found by an archaeologist on a clay tablet. The Nuzi tablets 15th century.
To date, around 5000 tablets are known, mostly held at the Oriental Institute, the Harvard Semitic Museum and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
Although the Nuzi tablets are to be dated in the 15th and 14th centuries b.c., sometime after the patriarchal period (c. 2000–1800 b.c.), nevertheless, they illustrate the times of the patriarchs. The reason is that when the patriarchs came out of Ur, they sojourned in Haran and mingled in west Hurrian society.
The Nuzi tablets tell us why the person who was in possession of these domestic images (teraphim) also had the rights to the inheritance. Taken together there is a striking conformity between the Bible and the Nuzi texts.
Nuzi (or Nuzu; Akkadian Gasur; modern Yorghan Tepe, Iraq) was an ancient Mesopotamian city southwest of Kirkuk in modern Al Ta’amim Governorate of Iraq, located near the Tigris river.
The site consists of one medium-sized multiperiod tell and two small single period mounds.
Nuzi was a provincial town in the kingdom of Arrapha.
The tablets of this period indicate that Nuzi was a small provincial town of northern Mesopotamia at this time in an area populated mostly by Hurrians, a people well known though poorly documented, and that would be even less if not for the information uncovered at this site.
According to the inscription their belief was that:
“If a son-in-law possessed the household gods of his father-inlaw, then he was considered a real son and shared in the inheritance.”
Is it possible then that Rachel stole the family gods to make her husband an immediate member of her father’s family, and that made him an heir and gave him a claim to a portion of Laban’s property?
Her husband had served the father-in-law fourteen years for the two daughters so, did she feel he had a right to be considered an heir?
Household gods similar to those Rachel stole.
Genesis 31:19
The objects Rachel stole may have been small figurines that resembled certain gods of the day. Worshipers thought that the gods were present in/on these images or idols, and why Laban speaks of them as “my gods” Genesis 31:30.
Perhaps Rachel stole those household gods because she hoped that possessing them will bring her good fortune and deprive her father of such benefit? If so, she had not fully broken free from her polytheistic upbringing read Genesis 35:2; Joshua 24:2. She may also have taken the items for their monetary value if they were made of precious metals.
However, the fact that we are informed she sat on them, also meant she had no respect for them and by that, we would understand she was probably not a worshipper of these gods.
In Genesis 31:19-20 we are told,
Rachel stole . . . Jacob deceived.
Although it is not immediately obvious from most English translations, these verses describe two thefts.
In verse 20 the Hebrew text says,
Jacob stole the heart of Laban;
in Hebrew the idiom to steal someone’s heart
means to deceive or trick a person. Genesis 31:26-27.
While Jacob steals Laban’s heart (that is, deceives him),
Rachel steals her father’s gods.
Later, Laban accuses Jacob of stealing everything that Jacob now possesses Genesis 31:43.
Laban searches for what he fears he lost, in this case his protection and entered Jacob’s tent, and Leah’s tent, and the tent of the two female servants, but he did not find the idols.
Genesis 31:33 33
Then he left Leah’s tent and entered Rachel’s.
Instead of showing love to his family, Laban searches out his family for his possessions.
His idols are seemingly of more valuable to him than his family.
A very old interpretation (the Tanhuma Yelammedenu) suggests that Rachel stole the teraphim in order to “eradicate idolatry from her father’s home.”
What might the teraphim have looked like?
The Tanhuma has a picturesque vision of them:
And how were they constructed? First they would take a firstborn male child, kill him, and sprinkle him with salt and spices. Then they would write a demon’s name upon a gold tablet and place it beneath the child’s tongue while performing certain magical rites. After this, they inserted the corpse into a recess in the wall and bowed down before it. Then, they would bow down before it, and it would speak to them in a whisper.
(Tr. Samuel Berman)
It s no wonder from the above quote, that our Heavenly Father forbade such idolatry!
More likely, the teraphim were much less gruesome, (but who knows?): household gods, familiar deities were made of stone or clay. Such deities, perhaps a foot or so high, have been found through much of the territory of ancient Israel.
What did Jesus/Yeshua mean
when He used the local idiom of:
The Grass of the Field
in Matthew 6:30saying
“IF God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven.”??
The term is used generically to include the meadow-flowers which were cut down with the grass, and used as fodder or as fuel.
The shortage of wood in Israel, Palestine at that time, made their use for fuel more common there than in Europe.
The oven in this passage was the portable earthen vessel used by the poor for baking their bread.
The rough hay/grass/sticks were placed below it and round it, and short-lived as the flame was, so that “the crackling of the thorns”
became well known, and it had time to do its work.
Which for us today means:
It lives today, or it lives for a day.
It is short-lived, and seems to be a thing of no value, and is so treated.
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field:
What grows up in the field, or grows wild and without culture. The word grass, also applied here to the lily, denotes merely that it is a vegetable production, or that it is among the things which grow wild, and which are used for fuel.
A Jewish proverb says:
People are like grass in the field:
some blossom, some wither.
Is cast into the oven
The Jews had different modes of baking. In early times they frequently baked in the sand, warmed with the heat of the sun. They constructed, also, portable ovens made of clay, brick, or plates of iron, which could be easily transported.
The one probably referred to here, was the most common kind made by digging a hole in the ground 2 1/2 feet in diameter, and from 5 to 6 feet deep and paving the bottom with stones. It was heated by putting wood or dry grass into the oven, and, when heated, the ashes were removed and the bread was placed on the heated stones. Frequently, however, the oven was an earthen vessel without a bottom, about 3 feet high, smeared outside and inside with clay, and placed upon a frame or support.
Fire was made within or below it. When the sides were sufficiently heated, thin patches of dough were spread on the inside, and the top was covered, without removing the fire as in the other cases, and the bread was quickly baked.
This is illustrated, by the short endurance of the grass of the field, which is so clothed; and the use it is put to, when cut down; which today is in being, but does not live long, as it were only for a day: it flourishes in the morning, continues for the day in its glory and verdure, is cut down at evening, and withers and dies, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, to heat it with,
or as the Syriac version reads
“in the furnace“.
(From Munster’s Hebrew edition of this Gospel.)
For furnaces used to be heated with straw and stubble, and things, that were gathered out of the fields; so, we read in the Mishna (k), that pots and furnaces were heated;
“a pot which they heat “with straw and stubble”, they put into it that which is to be boiled–a furnace which they heat “with straw and stubble”, they put nothing into it, nor upon it (i.e. till they have removed the coals or ashes): a little furnace, which they heat , “with straw and stubble”, is as the pots.”
The last word, is said to signify wood, or sticks, small as stubble, which they gather out of the field; that is, the stalks of some sort of herbs and plants, that grow in the field:
This is for readers to understand that if God clothes these plants, which are so short lived, and at their end used for such basic purposes; shall He not much more clothe you, His people, who are of a much longer life, designed for greater ends and destined for His purposes; including the worship and service of God, for His honor and glory here, and for eternal life and happiness hereafter.
We as God’s children can trust our Heavenly Father to provide everything we need.
Yeshua/Jesus asked in the previous verses why they worry about what they will wear Matthew 6:28–29; it’s likely some of His original listeners, literally did not know where the money would come from to replace their tattered garments; so He asked them to think about lilies, clothed in splendor despite doing nothing equivalent to human work.
Then He makes the point of the illustration clear, encouraging them that our Heavenly Father cares much more deeply about His children than He does about birds, or about flowers.
Matthew 6:26
The wild lilies are considered only grass here. They spring up, bloom in splendor, and quickly die before being raked up and burned. If God provides clothing for them, Yeshua/Jesus says, don’t you think He will clothe you?
He cares for us SO VERY MUCH,
so let’s focus on Him above all else
and as we wait for Him
let these songs minister to us…
We’re going home very soon… but, have we already sent our hearts on ahead?
Be Our Vision…
A bruised reed, smoking flax and
a shepherds pipe in part 2…
May His true Shalom rest upon each one in Yeshuas’ Name.
You are greatly loved and prayed for daily..
and make sure you are secure in the knowledge you are saved
NOT SURE? YOU CAN BE..
SAY THE FOLLOWING FROM YOUR HEART RIGHT NOW…
Heavenly Father I come to you in the Name of Jesus/Yeshua asking for forgiveness of my sins for which I am truly sorry. I repent of them all and turn away from my past.
I believe with my heart and confess with my mouth that Jesus/Yeshua is your Son and that He died on the cross at calvary to pay the price for my sin, so that I might be forgiven and have eternal life in the kingdom of Heaven. Father I believe that Jesus/Yeshua rose from the dead and I ask you to come into my life right now and be my personal Savior and Lord and I will worship you all the days of my life. Because your word is truth I say that I am now forgiven and born again and by faith I am washed clean with the blood of Jesus/Yeshua. Thank you that you have accepted me into your family in Jesus’/Yeshua’s name. Amen.
