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Source: Barber, Elizabeth Wayland (1994). Women´s work - the first 20,000 years. Women, cloth and society in Early Times. W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London.
Women's fashion in Ur...
"One heavy cloth to Ashur-Malik previously for his caravan-trip I gave; but the silver from it he has not yet brought me... When the purse you dend, include some wool: wool in the city is costly" - Cuneiform letter from an Assyrian businesswoman to her merchant husband, ca. 1900 Before Common Era.
The realisation that domestic animals could be exploited for wool, milk and muscle power while alive, not just for meat when killed, revolutionised human society as profoundly as domestication itself. By 4,000 BCE in the Near East we see major changes occurring as a result. The advent of plowing with large animals, as we have seen, permanently removed women, especially those with children, from the mainstream of food production. Draft animals were big and dangerous, but the sowing of large fields of grain provided such an efficient source of food that there could be no going back to the old ways. Full-scale agriculture was largely a male occupation.
On the other hand, women had new things to occupy them. For some, this probably included small-scale dairy farming, since the making of yogurt and cheese from the milk of domestic animals increased the variety of storable foods and got around the problem that most adult humans can´t disgest fresh milk. The ability to produce the enzymes that break down milk sugar (lactose) in the stomach, before it gets to the intestines and causes major trouble, is controlled by a dominant gene, but has to be selected for. Long-time pastoral populations, like the Masai of Africa and the people of Northern Europe, have developed that trait. The Masai consume much milk, while northern European cooking relies heavily on fresh cream and milk. Mediterranean and steppe peoples, however, developed their cuisines around yogurt, cheese and koumiss (fermented milk). In these products, nontoxic strains of bacteria (which are carefully preserved and transmitted from one batch to the next) have been introduced to break down or predigest the sugar, thereby functioning also as a short-term preservative. Thus, the French consume the largest amount of milk per capta of any nation in the world today - almost entirely in the form of cheese. Most Chinese adults, on the other hand, cannot tolerate milk, yogurt or cheese in any form. Their civilization did not use milk and generic selection moved in other directions.
In areas where milk did become important, the work became so great that men and women divided it. Thus, in Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium Before Common Era, where the milk herds were large, sculptures show that men tended the flocks and milked them, but cylinder seals depict women doing a task that resembles churning.
As the reliance on grain increased, another related task grew up that fit very well with child rearing: grinding the grain for use, once it came in from the fields. Thus, the equipment for spinning and weaving lies side by side with the grinders in archaeological excavations throughout the Near East - for example, at the little Minoan village of Myrthos (see Chapter 4), or the Iron Age palace of Gordion in central Anatolia. At Gordion, the servingwomen lived in special quarters. Each of these houses yielded scores of spindle whorls, hundreds of loom weights - approximately six hundred in one case - and long rows of grindstones. Our earliest European author, Homer, repeatedly yokes the two occupations to each other and to females, as we have seen in the Odyssey (7.103-5):
"Fifty servingwomen belonged to the house, some of whom grind on the millstone the ruddy grain, while others weave at the looms and twirl their spindles..."
Ordinary housewives daily ground the flour and worked on cloth for the household, while the rich bought slaves to do these tiresome jobs for them. Slavery now flourished - and indeed lasted until self-powered machines became available to do the tasks instead.
Using animals for muscle power solved yet another problem: it made far easier to move goods about, especially after the invention of the axled wheel, which made a load-bearing cart possible. In a sense, the wheel had already been in use for some time, in the form of a spindle whorl, and log rollers had probably been in use since the Palaeolithic. The trick ws to figure out how to attach the rolling part to a nonrotating load bed. Of course, carts needed roads - a new concept in the Neolithic - not just narrow foothpaths. People had to construct such roads, or at least beat them flat, little by little. (Many a road in use today in Europe and the Near East was first laid out in the Bronze or Iron Age.) Furthermore, the earliest type of wheel (the solid slice-of-a-log kind we see so clearly in Sumerian representations of 2500 Before Common Era) was cumbersomely heavy. As a result, both of both of these factors - cumbersome vehicles and few roads - pack animals were far more effective than wheeled transportation for a long time, for both great distances and difficult terrain. They still are in remote regions.
The ability to transport large quantities of goods with animal power (however harnessed) meant that trade could blossom and women´s textiles with it. Trade in small luxury goods like shells from the seacoasts, amber from the Baltic, lapis lazuli from easter Iran, and obsidian from scattered volcanic sites (such as parts of Armenia, central Turkey and the island of Melos) had been trickling across the continents for a long time. Early in the Neolithic, people had discovered that obsidian (volcanic glass) made particularly sharp stone knives, and explorers hunted ever further for sources of these precious modules. In fact, one of the first large towns, Çatal Hüyük in south-central Turkey (see chapter 3) grew up shortly before 6000 BCE, near the foot of a great volcano that in eons past had spewed quantities of obsidian onto the flatland ground. The local inhabitants grew rich, it seems, from trading this volcanic glass. Among the crafts that flourished in the leisure provided by this relative wealth was weaving. Fine textiles of several types (both wide and narrow plain-weave fabrics, weft-twining of two sorts, fringed edges, rolled and whipped hems, and reinforced selvedges) have survived where they lay buried under the house floors, wrapped around the excarnated bones of ancestors. Unfortunately the portion of the town in which people carried out their crafts has not yet been excavated, so we know nothing of that aspect of this society´s organisation.
The size, wealth and complexity of this very early town, however, show the powerful effects of trading an important raw material, in a way strongly parallel to towns later involved in metal trade. As with obsidian, the advent of metal triggered a search that took people far and wide. They sought most especially for the tin with which to harden copper into bronze, as well as for gold and silver for jewelry and tableware. Luxury goods such as fancy textiles and ornate metal vessels, manufactured in the growing cities, often paid for the new raw materials with which to make more, in a never-ending cycle. All these goods traveled along the ever-extending trade routes by means of another invention, the pack-animal caravan.
An archaeologist excavating in central Turkey in 1925 located the end point of one of the most important of the ancient Near Eastern caravan routes, at a city known in early times as Kanesh. Its modern name, Kültepe, simply means "ash mound" - a frequent name-place in Turkey, where people have lived, warred, and burned one another´s cities down for thousands of years. Kanesh was no exception. Enemies burned it to the ground around around 1750 BCE, about 200 years after the Assyrians, trekking westward across 600 miles in pursuit of metals, had established a trade colony, or karum, there. We know from the cuneiform records that nine such karums eventually grew up, of which Karum Kanesh was the largest. It also functioned as the centre of the network. A second of the nine was recently discovered at Acemhöyük, a little further west.) The city of Kanesh, inhabited by the native people, sat atop a high mound composed of the accumulated debris of many centuries of living there. Near Eastern houses were commonly built of mud brick, which lasts at least a few decades, and each time a house needed rebuilding, the remains of the previous dwelling were simply leveled and the new house was constructed on top. As a result, such city mounds grew rather quickly, and they can still be seen all over the landscape in the Near East today. Being high up was an advantage to defense, moreover, especially when the man-made cliff was enhanced by a city wall.
At Kanesh the Assyrian karum lies just outside the parapets of the native town. There the foreign merchants lived, did their business and kept their records - written, fortunatelly for us, in cuneiform on clay tablets, which survive millennia very well. We have accounts of their transactions with the local king and his deputies, who inspected the goods from each incoming caravan and took hefty portion as import tax before allowing the merchants to start selling the rest on the open market. Even so, the 100$ profit available clearly made such taxation bearable.
We also have many of the letters that the traders´wives wrote to them from far away in Ashur, the capital of Assyria - letters about how the family was getting along, but also business matters. For at least some of the wives, daughters and sisters were in business for themselves, acting as textile suppliers to their menfolk six hundred miles away in Anatolia and taking considerable profit therefrom to use for their own purposes.
The men´s trade efforts revolved principally around metals. Anatolia was rich in silver and gold, as well as in copper. But to alloy copper into bronze tough enough for tools and weapons, the local people needed tin as a hardener. The Assyrians had access to sources of tin far to the east of Assyria, and this they transported westward across the continent, first to Assyria and then in part on to Syria and Anatolia.
Tin is heavy, however - too heavy to load much of it onto a donkey´s back. But mixed with textiles, which are bulky (too bulky to put enough of them on an animal for a profitable trip), the load is well balanced. Tin the textiles. That´s what the Old Assyrian traders carried for nearly 200 years from Ashur in Northern Mesopotamia to their trade colonies in central Anatolia. The tin belonged to the merchants, but many of the textiles were the produce and property of the womenfolk, as we larn in circumstantial detal from the little clay tablets.
Assyrian textiles found a ready market in Anatolia, and the women scrambled to get a few more woven before each packtrain departed, negotiating directly with the caravan dirvers to carry the merchandise. Lamassi, the wife of the merchant Pushu-ken, is the woman about whom we know the most. She writes to her husband such business information as: "Kuluma is bringing you 9 textiles, Idi Suen 3 textiles; Ela refused to accept textiles (for transport); Idi Suen refused to accept (another) five textiles".
These drivers had to load their donkeys carefully for the long trip over the mountains; one letter writer warns the arecipient not to pile too much on his donkeys. The cloths were put into protective bags or wrappers, roughly five to a bag, but sometimes more. The cloths might be sorted by quality (ordinary or expensive), and the package might be sealed by the woman sending it. Most of the tin, too, was sealed, after being wrapped in special cloths that were also sold at the other end. Then thee was usually some loose tin, purposely left unsealed so the driver could trade it as needed along the way for his travel expenses. It was so much in demand that it could function as ready cash. (Coins, the first true money, were not invented for another 1500 years.) The records tell us that one particular donkey heading for Kanesh carried twenty-six cloths of two sorts, 65 units of sealed tin, and nine units of loose tin. Usually the goods were grouped into two side packs, carrying 10 or 12 textiles each and/or some tin, plus a smaller pack across the top carrying half a dozen cloths or some loose tin the the driver´s personal belongings.
At the other end the merchants sold the textiles and the tin for the best prices they could get, afte paying the import taxes in kind to the local rulers. Then they sent the profits on the textiles back well and what poorly. A letter from Puzur-Ashur to Waqartum (apparently Lamassi´s daughter) says that he is sending her one mina of silver (about one poud), and please to make more fine textiles like the one he had just received from her, preferably sending them back with the same driver bringing her the payment. But, he says, put more wool into it, and "let them comb one side of the textile; they should not shear it; its weave should be close". And don´t send more "Abarnian" textiles, he instructs her; it must be that he can´t sell them readily because Anatolian tastes differed from Assyrian ones. That does not mean, however, not to keep weaving. In fact, he concludes, "if you don´t manage to make fine textiles in time for the caravan, as I hear it, there are plenty for sale over there. Buy them for me and send them to me."
From such little remarks we glean that, unlike the women of later times who were strictly confined to the harems, these women were free to go out to the market places and buy textiles from other women or buy the wool to make more cloths. They also dealt directly with the donkey drivers and sometimes were asked to attend to legal matters for their absent men.
The women´s rights were still far from equal to those of their husbands. Contemporary dowry contracts from farther South in Babylonia show that if a woman refused to stay married to her husband, she could be drowned, whereas if he refused ther, he merely paid her a fine. But women owned their own property and coujld engage in business for themselves. One woman´s dowry tablet lists a set of weights and a cylinder seal in its own box among her possessions; she was all set up for some sort of commerce. Another Old Babylonian dowry included four slaves or servants, gold and silver earrings and bracelets, "one shekel of gold as a ring for the front of her nose, one blanket, two coats, one leather bag". Other gear included a huge cauldron, two grindstones for flour, four chests, a bed, five chairs, a basket, two trays and two jars of oil, one of them scented.
Not every girl was so well equipped. Of the 10 dowry tablets collected and published by Stephanie Dalley (Old Babylonian Dowries, Iraq 42, 1980, 53-74, quotations from page 61), only two mention looms. The poorest girl received "two beds, two chairs, one table, two chests", plus two grindstones and two empty jars. The tem shekels of silver earnest money put down by the groom´s family, we are told, had been duly tied to the hem of the girl´s dress. Thus, according to the custom, when the girl was delivered and accepted, the earnest money was automatically returned and the marriage deal complete. The dowry list, however, ensured that if the man divorced her or left her a widow, she would get back everything that belonged to her personally, without his relatives being able to cheat her of it.
The particularly rich lady with the nose ring, a priestess, was supplied not only with the homekaing equipment listed above but also with "one ox, two three-year-old cows, 30 sheep, twenty minas (10 kg) of wool" plus "two combs for wool, three hair combs, three wooden spoons, two wooden asu-looms (?), one wooden container full of spindles, one small wooden pot-rack". What with two looms, spindles and all those sheep, she was set up to carry on the kind of home-based business that Lamassi was engaged in. Indeed, among the cloths regularly transported to Anatolia from Assyria are specifically "Akkadian ones", that is, cloths from central Babylonia.
If however, like Lamassi and Waqartum, one had no sheep of one´s own, getting the wool to make the next textiles was sometimes a problem. In three different letters, Lamassi asks her husband to send her wool all the way from Anatolia, compaining that in Ashur it is very expensive at the moment. (In one of these she even asks him to hide her silver in the middle of the wool, to avoid the attention of a tax collector who is after her.) Sending wool from Anatolia was unsual but not difficult. In general, the men expected to buy up godl and silver in Anatolia to send home, but when the silver was scarce, or when something else profitable offered itself, such as particularly nice Anatolian cloths (some of them are mentioned as red), that would do, too. Since the silver and gold were rather smaller than the tin and textiles of equivalent value, manyu fewer donkeys went home to Assyria than caravaned out to Anatolia (some were sold off at the karum), and even those might be more lightly laden. So there was plenty of room for the wool. Sometimes the men even included presents such as jewelry for their wives. The women, for their part, occasionally sent other "good buys" to their husbands. A letter to Pushu-ken from someone else mentions that Lamassi had just arranged to send her husband 10 textiles with one caravan, and with another driver a bundle of minerals.
The money these women earned was not for playing around with, however. They used it chiefly to run their households, to pay taxes, and as capital to buy raw materials for the next textiles to be woven. As a result, they complained bitterly when the men delayed payment. Waqartum writes to her brother that he told her not to go to a solicitor and that she trusted him and did as he said. "But to-day I mean even less to you than a pawned (?) slave-girl, for to a slave-girl you at least measure out food rations; but here I have to live from my debts." She complains that he has swiped the mina of gold that her husband dispatched to her as her profit from various cloths, which she enumerates at length, totaling "in all 15 textiles of good quality. All this is my production, my goods entrusted for sale with profit... My gold you have taken! I beg you...., send it to me with the first caravan and give me courage!"
We get tantalizing glimpses of the households they ran. Lamassi had several children. The older sons went off to join their father at Karum Kanesh, while the daughters stayed in Ashur and undoubtedly learned to weave by helping their mother. Waqartum seems to have been the oldest daughter, doing weaving for her own profit, as we have just seen, apparently in her own household. She was also a priestess, and one gathers that her husband, like her brothers, joined her father´s firm in Anatolia. But there were others in Lamassi´s house, as we see from the following letter she composed to her husband, Pushu-ken: "About the fact that I did not send you the textiles about which you wrote, your heart should not be angry. As the girl has become grown-up, I had to make a pair of heavy textiles for (placing/wearing) on the wagon. Moreover, I made some for the members of the household and the children. Consequently I did not manage to send you textiles. Whatever textiles (literally, my hand) I can manage I will send you with later caravans." Klaas R. Veeholf, the scholar who has translated and analysed many of these letters, remarks that Lamassi is occupied by some important event in the family - mentioned in several of her letters... apparently a religious ceremony involving a daughter... In view of these ceremonies the family had to be provided with garments and "textiles for the wagon"... Unfortunately, we do not know who the nisi bitim [members of the household] were, but it is possible that these people co-operated in the production of textiles in Lamassi´s house. It is also conceivable that part of the profit at one time or another went to purchase slave girls who could help with the weaving and thus expand the business. Capital then as now can beget capital.
I shall take many garments with my tribute to Babylon; I have collected together all the garments that are available here, but they are not sufficient. (Letter to a Mesopotamian queen from her husband after the neighboring city was sacked by Hammurabi of Babylon circa 1820 BCE.)
Women of the merchant class were not only the ones running the textile establishments. Queens did it, too, but for the state rather than directly for themselves. The caravans for which these textiles were destined carried royal gifts from one court to another, na important part of ancient diplomacy which the kings arranged and the queens, to some extent, provided for. Again we learn it from cuneiform letters, in this case letters to rather than from the women.
Iltani was the daughter of King Samu-Addu of Karana, a small city-state on the caravan route betwen Assyria to the east and Anatolia to the west. She lived a couple of generations after Lamassi and Waqartum , and became queen of Karana when her husband, Aqba-hammu, usurped the throne from her brother. Times were tough. Samu-Addu had lost his throne to na earlier usurper and his son had gotten it back only to lose it to Iltani´s husband when political alliances shifted again. Assyria was losing its grip on trade routes, while Hammurabi of Babylon - he of the famous law code - was on the rise, and Aqba-hammu seems to have seen what was coming. History proved him right. Iltani´s brother fled to the great city of Mari, on the Euphrates River in the South, and when its ruler, Zimri-Lim, the strongest man in Northern Mesopotamia refused to become Hammurabi´s vassal, Hammurabi sacked the city ruthlessly. Aqba-hammu took heed and lost no time in paying tribute to the great Babylonian prince - better safe than sorry.
Compared with the great palace operations at Mari, the royal workshops at Karana were small (although officials reported the Karana palace to be especially beautiful). Iltani had at her disposal only about 25 textile workers in comparison to 87 in one of the five textile-related workshops at Mari. Because Karana was fairly a small state, the king could not afford the luxury of a man paid to manage the palace and its business, as Zimri-Lim could at Mari, and his queen took over much more of this work than her Mari counterpart, Queen Shibtu. According to Stephanie Dalley, Iltani had
Some 15 women who spun and wove (2 of them brought a child) and 10 male textile workers. In addition, she employed 2 millers and a brewer called Samkanum, and six girls who worked (unknown capacity). 13 more women, 3 of them each with a child worked for Iltani, again with uncertain tasks; she had a doorman called Kibsi-etar and a man called Anda in charge of pack-asses, also 4 other men".
A man named Kissurum supplied her with wool and did her textile accounts, which had to be checked and sealed by Iltani. The men involved with textiles - to judge from nearly contemporary archives at other Mesopotamian sites - were most likely employed in such ancillary crafts as dyeing the wool or finishing the woven cloth in some way (cleaning it, putting in sizing, fluffing or shearing the nap, etc. ) Men elsewhere were also assigned the arduous job of making felt for pads, covers and linings out of sheep´s wool or goat hair.
Palace workers seem to have come largely from the spoils of war, from inheritance, or occasionally from gifts. While on campaign, Zimri-Lim wrote to his queen: "To Sibtu say, thus say your lord: I have just sent you some female weavers. In among them are some ugbabatum priestesses. Pick out the ugbabatum priestesses and assign them (the rest) to the house of the female weavers". He then instructed her to select the most attractive ones from both this group and the previous batch of captives to send them to a particular overseer (apparently to become religious singers), and to be sure that all of them got enough rations "so that their appearance does not worsen." Slaves were valued for their work, so it behooved one to feed them. They might even be blind, but if they could still work, they merited their keep. A blind woman who ground grain is listed among the recipients of rations in another city, and her rations were as big as anyone else´s. The children of slaves could grow up to become valuable slaves, too, adding to the state. We know that women who spun and wove in the palace and had children were issued extra rations to feed them.
Iltani, on the other hand, had to live with the fact that her husband was no small vassal to do very much plundering and far from being supplied with lots of extra slaves, the queen was constantly being importuned for slaves she felt she could not spare. For example, one of her sisters, a priestess, writes: "The slaves whom my father gave me have grown old; now I have sent half a mina of silver to the king; allow me my claim and get him to send me slaves who have been captured recently and who are trustworthy. In recollection of you, I have sent to you five minas of fist-rate wool and one container of shrimps". A little bribery there. Presents of slaves were not uncommon among the rich, but Dalley mentions several letters showing that giving away slaves who had served faithfully for a lifetime "was regarded as insensitive". She cites a plea to Zimri-Lim from a woman who begs him not to give away her ageing mother as a present. On the other hand, one wonders whether very old and very young slaves were sometimes given away as a means of satisfying a request for a slave while getting rid of a liability. Apparently Iltani once sent as a present a serving boy who was so young that the recipient complains that he has to take care of the boy rather than the other way around!
Other glimpses of daily life through these archives show us that most of the women working in the palaces were either making cloth - spinning and weaving - or helping with the food. The latter involved grinding grain, drawing water, cooking, baking and making beverages (iced fruit juices and wines were among the summer favourites). In Iltani´s palace, however, Dalley points out that the "millers were men, probably for heavier work on a much larger scale." Women singers and musicians of both sexes entertained, a woman doctor was available at Mari, and no fewer than nine of the Mari scribes were women. The women who were most comfortably fixed, after the queen, seem to have been the priestesses. One of Iltani´s sisters was a priestess in a nearby city, while another oversaw some type of weaving at Ashur.
The raw wool from which Iltani´s workers made the palace textiles came mostly from a regular supplier, the accountant named Kissurum - presumably from palace-owned flocks out in the countryside. Occasionally, as in the case just quoted, wool came in as a personal gift and may have been used by the queen for her own dresses. In one case she herself sent wool to a less fortunate friend living in a city that had just been plundered. Sometimes, too, her husband sent her wool directly, especially when he was in a hurry for gifts to distribute. One letter from him says: " Now, I have sent you 25 kg of wool for 50 garments. Make those garments quickly, I need those garments." Large though it may seem, the size of Aqba-hammu´s requisition differs radically from those made by Zimri-Lim in Mari - in one case, six hundred garments at once, in five different colors!
Most often the king needed the cloth and garments for gifts, not only for the formidable Hammurabi himself but also for minor vassals. One letter to Iltani reads:" The king of Shirwun has arrived; he asked of the caravan that was going out to Karana, but it had no garments fit for presents available. Now send me quickly any garments that you have available, whether of first-rate or second-rate quality, for presents." Some of the textiles were used, however, simply to clothe the palace personnel. Zimri-Lim received a rather comical letter from his trusted overseer of palace business, who finally turned to the king to solve a dispute between two obstinate heads of departments. It seems that the four hundred palace workers were due new sets of clothes, but only 100 had actually received them. When the manager looked into the matter, each of the two functionaries insisted that it was the other´s job to provide the remaining clothes and neither would budge from his position.
The types of cloth provided were quite varied and clothing was not entirely new in the 19th century BCE. Two kings of the Sumerian city of Lagash, who lived just after 2400 BCE were already setting up for big business. Lugalbanda, the earlier of the two, employed 12 spinners and weavers. Year by year the number increased, until a dozen years later his successor, Urukagina, had 114, divided into several workshops or weaving houses, each under na overseer.
The people making the textiles at this earlier date are all women, mostly designated as weavers, with a few extra women called spinners. But four spinners cannot supply 37 weavers (these are the figures we have for Year 6). Spinning by hand takes much longer than weaving, so one has to assume that the weavers in these shops normally spun what they then wove. On the other hand, the craft of spinning is quicker to learn and requires far less equipment than weaving, so perhaps women with less skill were assigned to help out with the spinning, perhaps even while learning weaving as apprentices. At the beginning, a man known to be involved in other palace departments functioned as overseer of the textile while, and by the beginning of the Year 6 of Lugalanda´s reign, two more men had been added as group overseers. But the rapid expansion in the next few years apparently made it necessary to promote some of the women weavers to the rank of overseer. Unfortunately, for them the title carried no known tangible benefits, only the extra responsibilites, because they still got 1/6 of a measure of rations, like the other senior weavers, instead of 1/2 measure, like the male overseers.
Among the ration list for these workshops (our chief source of information here), we see a few children listed, both boys and girls - clearly the children of the women. They are assigned a twelfth of a unit of grain each. In addition, however, there are a small number of orphans, also both male and female and also they were assigned for apprenticeship (but then, why boys?) or for the women in the shop to act as their wet nurses or foster mothers - a second job in addition to weaving.
Although we do not know what products these particular women were making, we know from excavation that royalty was already splendidly arrayed. The sumptuous burial of a lady known in the literature as Queen Shub-ab (or Puabi), which are displayed in the British Museum in London, UK, astonished the world when Sir Leonard Woolley published the Ur excavation reports in 1934. Some 74 retainers, male and female, had been drugged and killed in the great Death Pit surrounding her tomb. Guards fell beside their weapons, cart attendants by their animals, musicians next to their great inlaid harps. Each lady-in-waiting departed this world wearing na ornate headdress of gold and silver, huge gold earrings and necklaces of precious stones. The queen herself wore na even larger headdress over what must have been a huge bouffant wig (the picture shown in the beginning of this texty). The garments of all the ladies radiated splendor. Woolley says of them:
In the case of two or three bodies... a stray fragment of cloth was preserved... a thick but closely woven fabric the dust of which still retained a bright ochrous colour. Very many of these had around their wrists beads of gold, carnelian, and lapis lazuli which had not been strung together as loose bracelets but had been sewn to the edges of the sleeves of a garment. ... Around her waist, Queen Shub-ab had a row of gold rings pendant from a heavy band of beads which were sewn to a cloth background.
After citing much more evidence for the positions of durable things like beads, he concludes:
It would seem, therefore, that the costume of ladies of the court, at least, included a coat reaching only to the waist and having long .... sleeves; the cuffs and bottom hem of the coat might be enriched with beads, or along the hem there might be a row of pendant rings in shell or metal. It is likely that the coat was fastened in front and the border with its ring pendants did not hang loose but formed a belt in one piece with the garment. ... Of skirts and undergarments, no traces were discovered.
Such are the problems of trying to learn about something as perishable as cloth. In another spot, however, Wooley had better luck:
[T]here lay round the legs and feet of the skeleton a great quantity of cloth; it was all reduced to fine powder but did, so long as it was undisturbed, preserve the texture of the original sufficiently for three varieties of material to be distinguished. One stuff was rather coarse with a plain over-and-under right-angle weave; the second was a finely woven cloth with a diagonal rib; the third was a loosely woven ight-angle weave fabric on one side of which were long trheads forming either a very deep pile or else "tassels" like those on the skirts of the figures represented on the monuments.
Clearly the palace weavers and seamstresses of Mesopotamia were far down the road to producing sumptuous clothing by 2500 BCE, the approximate time of these burials. The labor may have been increasingly that of slave women - hapless captives of the incessant wars that had srung up over water rights, territorial disputes and the fun of owning sheer material wealth. But in some places, at least, na independent-minded middle class of free women continued for centuries to create handsome, salable textiles for the busy commercial caravans run by their equally business-oriented menfolk.
Even millennium after the Old Assyrian caravans ceased to ply their routes to Anatolia, in another corner of the Near East we get a glowing picture of the last chapter of Proverbs (31.10-25) of the Hebrew woman who still worked industriously at home for the household good:
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her... She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants´ ship: she bringeth her food for afar. She riseth also while it is yet night and giveth meat to her household and a portion to her maidens. She considereth a field and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard... She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet. She maketh herself coverings of tapestry and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant. Strength and honour are her clothing, and she shall rejoice in time to come.
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Here is the full dissertation I submitted for my Library and Information Management MSc at University of the West of England (click on the link below), the title of which is:
Library Aid to Developing Countries : A case study investigating how a Western literary library model is integrated into a Sub-Saharan African oral culture within the Malawian primary education system.
I was very excited to receive the LIRG Student Award 2010 for my research. Thank you LIRG!
If you don't fancy reading it, it has lots of nice pictures in it of the awe-inspiring village I stayed in and of my Malawian friends you can look at. Please feel free to leave feedback or ask questions.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
NAIROBI, Kenya, Sept. 11 (UPI) — Kenya's government says a huge water source has been discovered in the arid northern Turkana region that could supply the country for 70 years.
The confirmation of two aquifers is significant for the drought-hit region, Kenyan Environment Minister Judi Wakhungu said in a Twitter posting.
"This newly found wealth of water opens a door to a more prosperous future for the people of Turkana and the nation as a whole," she later told a meeting of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Satellites and radar were used to find the aquifers in the Turkana Basin and the Lotikipi Basin, with test drilling confirming the presence of water beneath the arid earth, the BBC reported Wednesday.
Turkana, one of the hottest, driest and poorest parts of Kenya, suffered a drought last year that was particularly hard on the region's nomadic herders.
The aquifers are estimated to contain around 325 billion cubic yards of water; Kenya currently uses about 4 billion cubic yards a year, Wakhungu said.
"We must now work to further explore these resources responsibly and safeguard them for future generations," she said.


text:
In the process of writing a book, I said I was going to stop writing books because there are too many books and there continues to be a need and requests for writing a book, and so I put together a book which is going to be called Why One Way?. It's about an exclusive gospel in an inclusive time. It's about a narrow gospel in a tolerant day, that kind of thing. And it was just interesting, Phil Johnson was a bit upset the other day and he said to me, he got a message from the lady who was editing it for the publisher and she called to say that it's really not good to use anything more than a two-syllable word in a book if you expect it to reach the people. And Phil reminded her that syllable is more than a two-syllable word. She said, "Confusing words like evangelical..."
You know, we chuckle at something like that and there's a certain amount of humor in it but on the other hand, the severe dumbing down of evangelicalism is a great tragedy. I can't write books with only two-syllable words. I don't want to condescend to people as if they're incapable of grasping great truth. God didn't write a book with two-syllable words. The Bible is profound and the objective that I have is not to dumb down the truth of God, but to lift up the people of God to an understanding of its glorious truths. So we are not interested in books that are written to keep people at a low level of comprehension, or to keep things insufficiently simple. I say insufficiently in that they are insufficient to help them to understand great truth.
The Word of God is not a book with just two-syllable words, it is not a simple book. It is a not a dumbed-down version of the mind of God. It is high and deep and broad and wide, it is profound, more profound than any book ever written. It is comprehensive. It is sweeping. It takes us deep into the heart of man, it takes us high into the heavens of God and everything in between.
And, of course, we love the Word of God and I'm so grateful for our church because you have such an understanding of the Word of God that it is not necessary for me to dumb it down for you. I hope that I can make it clear and simple, but at the same time profound.
When somebody confesses that evangelicalism has to be dealt with in no more than two-syllable words, that is a confession to me that people do not understand the deep things of God. It isn't that the deep things of God can't be related in two-syllable words, but it's simply a statement that indicates people aren't interested in anything that is complex, or complicated, or profound, or mentally challenging. And that tells me that people are biblically illiterate. That's exactly what Paul was saying in 1 Corinthians 3, "I can't write unto you as unto mature, I can only write unto you as unto babes." I'm so grateful that we're not like that here, that you have a desire to understand the great truths of Scripture, no matter how many syllables they come in.
To be biblically illiterate is the greatest lack of all because Scripture is God's only book and provides for us everything we need for spiritual sufficiency. And it's tragic to hear from even a Christian publisher the admission that the evangelical world can't handle anything of any substance. And I understand that that's true, that's why they buy ten million Prayer of Jabezbooks which essentially says absolutely nothing about anything, least of all about prayer.
We have in the Word of God everything we need and therefore we ought to do all we can to plunge the depths of everything that's there. Second Corinthians 3:5 says, "Our sufficiency is from God," that's a basic truth. All of our sufficiency is from God. Everything pertaining to life and godliness comes from Him. He is the one who provides the grace, 2 Corinthians 9 says, so that we have all sufficiency in all things, so that we are enriched in everything to all bountifulness. Everything comes from God. In the words of James, "Every good and perfect gift comes down from Him who is the Father of lights in whom there is no variation or shadow of turning." Everything comes from God and the understanding of everything that God gives is in the Scripture. That's why Micah the prophet said, "Do not My words do good to him that walks uprightly?" All God's goodness and all God's truth, all the explanation of God's power and blessing and intention for us, all that relates to the gospel, all that relates to redemptive history, all that relates to justification, sanctification and glorification, all that relates to everything that God has for us comes to us through Scripture. And then its truth is energized in us by the Holy Spirit and worked out by our obedience. But the Word of God, then, is the source of sufficiency.
Paul again said to the Corinthians that the Spirit of God reveals to us the truth not in the words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, 1 Corinthians 2:13. "And by that we can judge and appraise and evaluate all things." That is a great statement, 1 Corinthians 2:15. It is by the teaching of the Spirit of God in Scripture that we're able to judge, appraise and evaluate all things because...as the next verse says, 1 Corinthians 2:16, "We have in the Scripture the mind of Christ."
Everything you need to know about how God thinks, what God expects, what God desires, what God wills, what God will do, everything God desires you to know about that is revealed in Scripture. And when you know the Scripture, you have the mind of Christ and therefore you are able to evaluate everything, to appraise everything, to judge everything. It is impossible to be more sufficient than to think the way God thinks, the way Christ thinks. It is impossible to be more sufficient than to have the mind of Christ brought by the Word of God. In Mark 12:24 Jesus affirmed that to know the Scriptures was to experience the power of God...to know the Scripture is to experience the power of God. The power of God to deal with every issue in life comes from the Word energized by the Spirit. It is the Word that is alive and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. And by the Word, Hebrews 4:13 says, "All things are laid open, laid bare." The Word of God alone then gives us the mind of Christ, gives us the truth we need to judge, appraise, assess, evaluate everything. It is, as James called it, the perfect law and he said, "Whoever follows it shall be blessed."
So, you know, it is a sad thing when people within the framework of Christianity are cheated from the glorious realities of the Word of God. Paul said, "Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly." I think he had in mind more than just two-syllable words. "Let it dwell in you profoundly, deeply, in a penetrating way." "Like a newborn baby," Peter says, "desires milk, you should desire the Word because by it you will grow." Peter in his second epistle says, "According as God's divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him." Everything pertaining to life and godliness comes through your mind, it comes by way of knowledge and the source of that knowledge is a single book, the Bible. All the knowledge of the Lord that you need to be sufficient comes to you through the Word of God. That's why Paul in Acts 20 and verse 32 said, "I commend you to God and to the Word of His grace which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all who are sanctified." All you need is the Word, I commend you to that one book and it is able to build you up and it will show you what your eternal inheritance is. And it will even gain that inheritance for you because it sanctifies you and by your sanctifying life you are therefore gaining a greater eternal glory. So we need to be what the apostle Paul called in Colossians, "rooted and built up and established in the faith as we have been taught."
The Word of God taught to us, energized in us by the Spirit of God gives us then the mind of Christ, the ability to evaluate everything and anything. It gains for us sanctification which increases our eternal reward. So Paul says to the Colossians, "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and empty deceit after the tradition of men, the rudiments of the world and not after Christ because you are complete in Him." You don't need any worldly philosophy or psychology or anything else. You don't need any traditions. You don't need the ABC's of human thought and ideologies. All you need is the truth of Christ and in Him you are complete.
I love 1 Thessalonians 2:13. It says, "When you received the Word of God which you heard from us, you received it not as the word of men but as it is in truth, the Word of God which also performs its work in you who believe." This is the work of the Word...the work of the Word.
And that's why we do what we do. We've been doing a little bit of a series here on why we preach the Bible, why we systematically, expositorially, exegetically go through passage after passage after passage. And I'm in these few weeks together showing you that this is the only source of divine truth. I've told you and I say it again, God only wrote one book with 66 parts, then He said in that one book all that He wanted us to know and all that is necessary for our spiritual sufficiency.
Now that's a general look at the subject. Turn with me to Psalm 19. We are kind of working our way through Psalm 19. We'll finish it up a little tonight. And in Psalm 19 we are noticing in particular verses 7 to 9 where you have six statements about the Scripture. This is the Bible's own testimony to its sufficiency.
And there are six statements; two of them in verse 7, two in verse 8, and two in verse 9. And you'll notice that they're parallel statements, six titles for Scripture, six characteristics of Scripture, six benefits of Scripture. Each of the sentences is structured the same way.
First of all, just look at the titles for Scripture. It is called the law of the Lord, the testimony of the Lord, the precepts of the Lord, the commandment of the Lord, the fear of the Lord and the judgments of the Lord. Six titles, Scripture is law, it is testimony, it is precepts, or statutes, it is commandment and it is fear...and I'll explain that in a moment...and it is judgments. That's looking at the Scripture from its different facets.
Then there are six characteristics of Scripture, again emphasizing its sufficiency. It is perfect, it is sure, it is right, it is pure or clear, it is clean and it is true. Perfect, sure, right, pure, clean, true.
Then there are six benefits of Scripture. It restores the soul. It makes wise the simple. It rejoices the heart. It enlightens the eyes. It endures forever. And it says it produces comprehensive righteousness, it is righteous all together, the end of verse 9.
So here you have six statements that sweep up the whole issue of the sufficiency of Scripture, the magnitude of Scripture sufficiency reduced to six statements. By the way, each time you have the phrase "of the Lord...of the Lord...of the Lord...of the Lord...of the Lord...of the Lord," just so there's no question about who wrote the Bible. It is from the Lord.
Now we remember, don't we, that the law of the Lord, the first statement we looked at, the law of the Lord used Scripture as God's law for man's life, divine instruction, divine teaching. And that is true of the Scripture. It is God's law for man's life. It is perfect, that means it is complete, not only is it perfect as opposed to imperfect but it is perfect, more importantly, as opposed to incomplete. It is perfect therefore it can restore the soul. I told you the soul is the inner person. Restore means to transform. So the statement means the Scripture is so comprehensive and perfect as to be able to totally transform the whole inner person. That is to say it can justify, it can bring about the new birth. As Peter puts it, "We are born again by the Word of God, incorruptible seed."
The second statement that we looked at is also in verse 7, the testimony of the Lord and that views the Scripture not as divine instruction or divine law for man's conduct, that views the Scripture as God's own self-disclosure. It is God's personal testimony. It is God testifying of Himself, of His glory, of His plan, of His purpose, of His will. It is that, too, as well as instruction for man.
And it is sure, that is to say it is trustworthy, unwavering, unmistakable, reliable. In a world of unreliable things it is absolutely sure and trustworthy, unwavering in its reliability. And it also, by virtue of that, takes simple people, simple means, undiscerning, undiscriminating, ignorant, naive, and makes that person wise, chakamin Hebrew, skilled in all aspects of holy living.
So the Word of God is the source of truth that can totally transform the whole inner person. That's regeneration, that's salvation. The Word of God also is reliable so that it can take a simple person, undeserving, naive, without knowledge, without wisdom, without understanding and make that person skilled in all matters of holy living. Therein lies its sanctifying power. It has the power then to regenerate. It has also the power to sanctify, to bring a person to full, mature sanctification in the understanding and application of divine wisdom.
Then in verse 8 we saw the third statement, the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. Precepts are statutes or doctrines, or guidelines, or principles, truths. And it is truths that are right, and the idea of the word "right," as we saw, is not so much right as opposed to wrong, but they lay a right path. They establish a right direction. And when you walk in the path that the Scripture establishes, the result is rejoicing the heart. True joy, we saw, comes from obeying the Word. True joy, true happiness, true satisfaction comes from walking in obedience to the Word of God.
And the fourth statement, this is where we ended last time, is that the Word of God is also commandment, the commandment of the Lord, divine decrees that are authoritative, binding, not optional and demand obedience. The Scripture then, called here commandment, is clear. The word rather than "pure" is the word "clear," lucid, makes things easy to see. It enlightens the eyes, contrast to the muddled, muddy unclear dark musings of men who are blind in their sin, the Word of God allows us to see the truth, the dark things, the things the world can never understand. It brings to our hearts light, makes everything clear. Proverbs 6:23, "The commandment is a lamp and the teaching of Scripture is light."
So we looked then at those four statements. Two more remain for us in verse 9. When we talk about the sufficiency of Scripture we say then that it is sufficient for salvation. It is sufficient for sanctification. It is sufficient to produce lasting joy. And it is sufficient to bring a clear understanding of things not otherwise understood. That is one of the tasks of the preacher when something happens, whether...you know this through the years, generally I teach through books and teach through books and then we have an earthquake so I do a series on what's a biblical view of the earthquake, or we have a war in the gulf, a few years ago, and I did a three-part series on understanding the war in the gulf. When the terrorist attacks hit, I did a message on Terrorism, Jihad and the Bible, giving a perspective on that. And that's right back to 1 Corinthians 2:15, because when you know the Scripture you can judge and evaluate and appraise all things in the light of it, things that are otherwise not easily understood.
I was meeting with a force of sales people who are going to distribute that book, and I mentioned this to some of you, that I was explaining to them the intent of the book and these are Christian people who love the Lord and serve Him, and they were quick to say, "We had no idea of any of this, we didn't understand it." Well the reason is no one had brought the light of the Word of God into the darkness of those issues.
All right, let's go to number nine in this passage, verse number 9. There are two other statements I want to address. Verse 9, the fear of the Lord. Now what is that about? That doesn't seem to be a very consistent title with the others. The Bible is law, testimony, precepts, commandment, but what is this fear? Well, what that simply means is the Bible a manual on worship. The Bible is the source of all the information we need on worshiping God. The word "fear" can mean awe, reverence, wonder, respect, honor, but it sums up in divine worship. T he Bible is the manual on worship. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Proverbs 9:10, all of our obedience, all of our honor to the Lord, all of that is part of fearing Him, holding Him in awe. Scripture then instructs us on how to worship, it tells us how to worship God, it tells us about God, the God we worship. It tells us how He wants to be worshiped. So when you need to know how to worship, you go to God. Even in a church when you want instruction on how to worship, you go to the Word of God. The Word tells us who God is. It tells us how He wants us to worship Him.
So, we have not only divine instruction for man's life, that is in the Bible, we have God's self-disclosure and revelation, His own testimony, we have doctrines and principles that lay out the path of life, we have commandments of the Lord, very clear statements of God that make everything clear to us that otherwise is dark. But we also have a manual on worship. He says, verse 9, "That is clean, that is clean."
What does that mean? Without error, without corruption, without evil. The root tahorof this word "clean" has the idea of the absence of impurity, the absence of anything that defiles, the absence of any imperfection, the absence of any filthiness. It is to say that it is unsullied, unstained, pristine. Psalm 12:6 puts it this way, "The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver tested in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times." it is hallowed, holy, separate. So that when you turn to the Word of God, you're turning to something that is flawless and consequently you notice at the end of the first line of verse 9, it endures forever...it endures forever. It cannot die for it is pure. First Peter 1:23, "It is the living and abiding Word of God," Peter says, "that is imperishable." It is imperishable. It is the lasting thing. It never needs to be edited, it never needs to be updated, it never needs to be refined. It is not inadequate, it doesn't have errors, it doesn't have short-comings that somehow need to be corrected. The Bible doesn't need to be bolstered. It is an eternal Word and it will dwell eternally in the glory of the eternal state, unchanged. God's living Word will never pass away. Jesus said, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but...what?...My Word will never pass away."
So what you have in the Bible then is a source of divine truth that for every culture, in every age is relevant...relevant. Certainly you've lived long enough and been exposed to enough history, the history of redemption, the history of God's work in God's people to know that throughout the centuries people have been reading and been being saved and sanctified, instructed, brought joy, been enlightened by the same Word that you and I read. That's one of the amazing things. I've been a lot of places in the world and I can hear still in my memory the singing of, "What a friend we have in Jesus," in a little town called Colta. Colta is way high in the Andes. It was being...the tune was being sung, the words were the words of a tribe of Indian people living at the tips of the Andes. Patricia and I were down there visiting and I remember it was a strange society of primitive people and yet there they gathered in a little building and sang, "What a friend we have in Jesus." And they were taught and brought to salvation and to sanctification by the very same truth that God used in my life. I've seen it all over the world. I've seen it in the most remote parts of the world and the most varied cultures of the world that is so through all of human history, the Word of God endures.
I remember one time, and I don't normally like to get into debates, but I was invited to debate Troy Perry(?) who is the head of the Metropolitan Community Church, the homosexual church. He calls himself a Christian. And so I was asked if I would come down under the auspices of Decision Magazine, the Billy Graham organization, and debate him face to face. Now there was another young man there who was a homosexual graduate of Fuller Seminary who also took that side and they wanted to debate me on the fact that a homosexual can be a practicing homosexual and also a true believer in Jesus Christ.
And so, I thought that was an interesting debate. I was a little concerned about hostility that might be generated, so I took one of the...at that time...Los Angeles Rams lineman with me whom I knew, who was about six foot three and weighed about 280 pounds, just in case because there's a tremendous amount of volatility in that community we don't need to go into.
But anyway, we sat down to talk about this and this was the basic argument that they threw out, they said, "The Bible is a good book, we like it. But it is psychologically and sociologically unsophisticated and antiquated. The Bible is a primitive book, it was written in a primitive time and it reflects the low level of social understanding and the lack of sophistication in the matters of tolerance and so it reflects all the prejudices of its era. And humanity has come so far from that that we now have to recognize the lack of sophistication in the Scripture, we have to understand its primitive biases because it did not have the benefit of modern understanding."
That was their argument. And, you know, I really didn't want to argue too much about that, but I said, "You then are sitting in judgment on the Word of God? You're going to stand in the face of God and tell Him His book is unsophisticated and antiquated and out-dated? The living and abiding Word of God that shall never perish?"
I never will forget that. The Bible is just unsophisticated and antiquated and out of date. You mean, the Bible that is the Bible that God wrote which is clean and endures how long? Forever? Are we to believe that this Word of God which is eternally pure and powerful is all of a sudden in our day bound to have inadequacies, errors and short-comings that needs the corrections and additions of men? Are we to believe that it needs the bolstering of those who point out those inadequacies and speak to some new understanding of man that God never had? Are we to believe that it doesn't rightly assess man? Are we to believe that it cannot do its pure work?
We're not to believe that. And the echo of this great statement in Psalm 19 again is found in Psalm 119. Now each time I've taken you over to Psalm 119 because I want you to know that these things are all over here repeated numbers of times. Psalm 119:2, "How blessed are those who observe His testimonies, who seek Him with all their heart. They also do no unrighteousness, they walk in His ways." That's just universal. Anybody who follows this path walks in righteousness.
Verse 9, "How can a young man keep his way pure? Be keeping it according to Thy Word." That's always the standard. It doesn't matter when you live. "With all my heart," verse 10, "I have sought Thee, do not let me wander from Thy commandments? Thy Word have I treasured in my heart that I may not sin against Thee." It doesn't matter who you are or where you are, this is the truth, nothing less than the truth, it sanctifies.
"Establish Thy Word to Thy servant," verse 38 says. Verse 67, "Before I was afflicted I went astray, now I keep Thy Word." Verse 101, "I have restrained my feet from every way that I may keep Thy Word." Psalm 170--verse 172, "Let my tongue sing of Thy Word, for all Thy commandments are righteousness." There is nothing in error in the Bible, there's no statement of God, no commandment of God, no rule of God, no doctrine, no principle, no historical account, no nothing that is anything other than true and therefore powerful and therefore purifying so that Scripture is permanently and forever relevant. And anyone at any time who walks according to Scripture walks in a righteous way. The morality of the Bible has not been overturned by contemporary understanding.
Well a final statement, and then we'll look a little at the rest of the chapter. The final statement in verse 9, "Judgments of the Lord are true, they are righteous all together." Judgments--some of you may have ordinances, it has to do with judicial terminology. It's a divine verdict. The judge of all the earth has rendered His verdict and put it in the Bible.
So you can look at the Bible in all these ways. It is law, testimony, principles, or precepts. It is commandments. It is a manual on worship and it is the judication of the judge of all the earth. It is the verdicts of the heavenly bench, the one final supreme justice. This wonderful book that comes from the judge of all the earth, I love this, is true.
That says it all, folks, it's absolutely true. Let God be true and every man a...what?...a liar. If you stand against God, you are the liar. God speaks only the truth. Do you understand how important that is? I saw a person with a T-shirt one time, it said, "Personally, I have abandoned my search for the truth." That's probably 25 years ago, this was a pre-post-modern-post-modern. That was somebody who was ahead of his time.
I remember walking through the woods up in northern California. I was at a camp at a conference and I was walking through...it was during the seventy's hippie deal. I came across a guy living in an overturned refrigerator crate in the woods in the rain, misty rain. And so I sort of stuck my head in his refrigerator crate and started up a conversation. And he told me that he had graduated from Berkeley University of California and he was now living in the woods in this crate. And I said to him, we talked a little bit, I remember saying to him, "Have you found the answers you've looked for?"
He said, "No, but at least I don't ask the questions anymore." That's post-modernism, they don't even ask the questions anymore. Some people can be so jaded, our culture has become so jaded that they've just decided in their quest for the truth they couldn't find it because they wouldn't look where it really was. They've now decided there is no truth and their happy not even to ask the questions...just like fast, do what you want, don't ask questions. But in the midst of this world the Bible is true, it is absolutely true.
It's hard for people to understand that. It was not many years ago, well I guess it's been some now, I was invited to speak at Cal State Northridge in the philosophy class, which is great, I enjoy that. Now you have to understand in a philosophy class, they're all looking for the truth. You can't find it, of course, because then class would be over. But you can get credit for looking. You have to look the whole time, you can't ever find it.
The professor had invited me to come to speak...he said...on the Christian standard of morality, to help these philosophy...advanced philosophy students at Northridge...to understand sort of Christian ethics.
So, I remember going in, I can't remember exactly the way I said it, but I remember pretty well, I said to them, "I am here to tell you the truth about everything, absolutely everything, everything you could ever need or want to know. I can tell you the truth about how the universe came into existence, and why it's here and we'll go out of existence." And I said, "I could tell you the truth about life and death. I can tell you the truth about time and eternity. I can tell you the truth about the character and nature of man. I can tell you the truth about morality. I can tell you the truth about marriage. I can tell you the truth about friendship. I can tell you the truth about everything."
And, you know, by then they think that you just got out of a mental institution, or that you're the ultimate ego-maniac. It's just inconceivable that anybody would stand there and say that. But I said, "I can tell you the truth, I can," and so could you.
And then, of course, you've got to turn the tables a little bit. So I said, "But, when I tell you this truth you won't buy it, you won't accept it as truth, you won't even know it's the truth."
And somebody just said, "Well, why?"
And I said, "Well, because there's a prerequisite. Apart from the prerequisite you couldn't discern the truth if it was told to you."
And this guy said, "Well, what's the prerequisite?"
I said, "You have to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ so that you are made alive from the dead and can understand the things of God."
And he said, "Well, how does that happen?"
So it kind of turned the tables on them, now they want to know how to qualify to know the truth. So I went on to explain the gospel.
We live in a world where people are abandoning their search for the truth and that's so sad because the Word of God is true. What else can you say? It's true...it's true. Everything it says is true. Everything it says about God, everything it says about man, everything it says about angels, everything it says about history, everything it says about the past, the present, the future, everything it says is true...absolutely true.
And as a result of that, look at verse 9, "They are righteous altogether." What that phrase means is it produces comprehensive righteousness. If the Bible is true and you bring the Bible into life at any point, then it's right. The Bible will give you a right understanding of everything. It's comprehensively right because it's true. That's why, you know, after all these years here, year after year after year, Sunday after Sunday, thousands of times of opening the Bible and opening the Bible and when the Bible is explained, that is the right view of everything, isn't it? It's right. I'm not right, the Bible is right. It provides the source of truth and everything is right.
Psalm 119:89, "Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in heaven." God doesn't have to change His Word, He doesn't have to adjust to the times. It's right about everything. It is settled forever. It is the right assessment of everything. It is the right understanding of everything. Psalm 119:128, "Therefore I esteem right all Thy precepts concerning everything." Boy, you ought to underline that, verse 128. I esteem right all Thy precepts about everything. If God said it about anything, it's right.
I mean, do you understand how valuable that is, folks? Do you understand how valuable that is? Do you know how many people go down a library at UCLA or wherever and fumble all over the place in that library year after year after year trying to figure out what's right? You've got it all in one book.
Verse 137, "Righteous are You, O Lord, You're right and upright are Your judgments. You have commanded Your testimonies in righteousness." That's just a way of saying it's right. "And Your righteousness...verse 142...is an everlasting righteousness," then this, "and Your law is truth." It's truth and it's right.
Verse 151, "You are near, O Lord, and all Your commandments are truth." Verse 160, "The sum of Your Word is truth and every one of Your righteous ordinances are everlasting." It is true, it is true about everything, therefore it is right and it is right forever. Wow. You talk about that and then the obvious response is, "It produces comprehensive righteousness."
What do you need then to be all that you should be? You need an understanding of the truth. It produces comprehensive righteousness.
What do you have then here? You have everything a person could want. You want to be totally transformed? The Word of God can do that. Do you want to be skilled in all aspects of living? The Word of God does that, and the Word of God alone. You want to have permanent lasting joy, peace, satisfaction? The Word of God produces that. You want to have all the dark things of life made crystal clear? The Word of God does that. You want to have a source that is pure and without flaw and without error and it never changes and never can be edited, added to, or taken away from, but forever will endure in the same way? You can always go there and you can always trust it, the Word of God. And you want a book that can produce a right life comprehensively? You turn to the Bible because it's true about everything. This is the sufficiency of Scripture.
Now how valuable is that? How valuable is that? Is that the most valuable thing you've ever heard of? Sure. And the psalmist responds in verse 10 by saying, "They...that is the law, testimony, precepts, commandment, fear and judgments of the Lord, the Scripture, they are more desirable than...what?...gold, yes than much fine gold." Having a Bible that you understand is better than having a fortune, it has no equal in value. It is better than gold, that was the supreme earthly possession, gold, in ancient days. The Bible was better than the best the material world had to offer, yes than much fine gold. The Scripture is the greatest possession.
And then he goes on in verse 10 to add something. "Sweeter also than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb." The delicacy of delicacies in that world at that time was honey. And what the psalmist is saying is there is no possession in life that is its equal, and there is no pleasure in life that is its equal.
The Word is more desirable than any possession, and more desirable than any pleasure. It is supreme in its value. It is supreme in its sweetness. And I wish we had time, but Psalm 119 repeats this about twenty times. Look at verse 20, Psalm 119:20, "My soul is crushed with longing after Your ordinances at all times." Isn't that interesting? Here is a guy who says I am literally broken on the inside with the desire and a longing for Your Word all the time. Wow!
Verse 24, "Your testimonies are my delight." Verse 40, "I long for Your precepts." Verse 47, "I delight in Your commandments which I love." Verse 48, "I shall lift up my hands to Your commandments which I love and I will meditate on Your statutes." Verse 70 even, "I delight in Your law." Verse 72, "The law of Your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces." Verse 77, again, "Your law is my delight." And then familiar verse 97, "O how I love Thy law, it is my meditation all the day." And verse 103, "How sweet are Thy words to my taste, yes sweeter than honey to my mouth." Verse 113, "I hate those who are double-minded, but I love Thy law." Verse 127, "Therefore I love Thy commandments above gold, yes above fine gold." Verse 131, "I longed for Your commandments, I even opened my mouth wide and panted." Have you been panting lately for the Bible? Amazing. Verse 159, "Consider how I love Thy precepts." One-sixty-three, "I love Thy law; 167, "I love them exceedingly." Wow!
So, the response then of the psalmist is that the Word of God is our greatest possession and it is our greatest pleasure. Thirdly, it is our greatest protector. Verse 11, "Moreover by them," that is the words that come from God, "Thy servant is warned." The Word of God is full of warnings. And one who knows the Word of God is duly warned. And we know that one of the characteristics of Scripture, of course, is filled with warning. Back to Psalm 119:9, "How can a young man keep his way pure? By keeping it according to Thy Word, so with all my heart I have sought Thee. Do not let me wander from Thy commandment. Thy Word have I treasured in my heart that I may not sin against Thee." And that's repeated another twelve times or so throughout Psalm 119. It is the greatest possession, the greatest pleasure and the greatest protector.
Well also, fourthly, it is the greatest provider. Look at the second part of verse 11, "In keeping them," that is in obeying the words of God, "there is great reward."
The Hebrew here is very interesting. The Hebrew literally reads this way, "In keeping them there is the end...the end." And it's rightly translated, "reward," because that's what it means. When you obey the Word of God there is the glorious end. And what is that end? Eternal blessing. So we live for that obedience to the Word of God that brings us that eternal inheritance. It's not about health, wealth, prosperity and success NOW, it's about the end...it's about obeying the Word of God that it may provide for us that glorious eternal reward.
Listen to how Psalm 119 begins. "How blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. How blessed are those who observe His testimonies, who seek Him with all their heart." If you walk according to the Word of God, the psalmist says you will be blessed...you will be blessed. And that is repeated throughout Psalm 119 all the way through to verse 165, "Those who love Thy law have great peace." Blessing comes now and in the great reward to one who obeys God's Word.
So, the Word of God is our greatest possession, our greatest pleasure, our greatest protector, our greatest provider. And then one other, it is our greatest purifier. Look at verse 12, "Who can discern his errors, acquit me of hidden faults? Also keep back Thy servant from presumptuous sins, let them not rule over me. Then I shall be blameless and I shall be acquitted of great transgression."
What's he talking about? Well he's saying, "Lord, on my own I can't discern my sins, my wanderings literally in the Hebrew, my secret faults, my hidden faults. I can't...I can't be discerning enough to on my own know my own wicked heart. Please then...verse 13...You keep me back from presumptuous sins, from those presumptions that would rule over me. You keep me from those kinds of things that would literally bring me to the great transgression, apostasy, rebellion." The verb in the Hebrew means to break pass the boundary, to free oneself. Don't ever let me go to the place where I turn from you. Lord, I don't know my own errors, I can't even see my secret sins, I commit presumptuous sins all the time, I don't want them to rule over me. I want to be blameless, I never want to be ultimately rebellious and apostatized and apart from You.
He's crying out to God and saying I don't want this to happen. So do I prevent it? Verse 14, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation in my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer." He's saying...if I'm going to know my own sinfulness, if I'm going to understand my own errors, if I'm going to be able to see the hidden sins, if I'm going to avoid the presumptuous sins that would dominate me, if I'm going to be blameless and not apostatize apart from the truth then it's going to have to start in the way I think and the way I speak. So let my words that come out of the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
What kind of words would these be? What kind of thoughts would these be? Well the answer is in Joshua, that's where, I think, the psalmist borrowed this, Joshua 1:8, and we'll just wrap it up at that point. Joshua 1:8, when the children of Israel were coming into the land of promise, Moses had died, Joshua had become their leader to lead them into their land, and so the Lord speaks to Joshua and this is what He says, verse 8, "This book of the law...Scripture...shall not depart from your mouth but you shall meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, then you will make your way spiritually prosperous and then you will have spiritual success."
So what is to be on our mouth? This book of the law shouldn't depart from your mouth. It ought to be the subject of your constant conversation. It should be meditated on day and night so that it is the subject of your constant thought, so your words are scriptural, your thoughts are scriptural and that issues in obedience that brings prosperity and success.
Now go back to Psalm 19 and see how that fits with verse 14. "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer." You tell me what kind of words and what kind of meditation is acceptable to Him...the kind that were described in Joshua 1:8. Your words should be about the book of the law of God, your meditation should be about the book of the law of God. And when your thoughts and your words are acceptable in the sight of your rock and your redeemer, then you will be kept back from the great transgression so that the Bible, the Word of God, the precious Word of God, is all these things to us. And in the end, our greatest possession, our greatest pleasure, our greatest protector, our greatest provider and our greatest purifier, this glorious Word of God.
Jeremiah the prophet said, "They have rejected the Word of the Lord so what kind of wisdom do they have?" On the other hand, Jesus said, "He who is of God hears God's words." No wonder Paul said, "I joyfully concur with the law of God in my inner man." No wonder Job said, "I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food." No matter the psalmist said in Psalm 1 that, "The man of God delights in the law of the Lord and in His law he meditates day and night." No wonder David said, "The Word of God is more precious than gold, and more sweet than honey." He also said in Psalm 40 verse 8, "I delight to do Your will, O God, Your law is within my heart."
This then is why we do what we do...is why we teach you the Word...is why we call you to study it, to learn it, to love it and to obey it. I don't know what else to add to this glorious Psalm except to say we don't worship the Bible.
Some of you know that I have a Bible that was given to me, I've showed it to some of you, it was given to me, it was the first Bible ever printed in Scotland in 1576. It's a magnificent Bible. It is a study Bible, by the way, with notes all down the side and across the bottom and in the front and in the back to help people to rightly understand the truth...1576...boy, that's long ago. It was the first Bible ever printed in Scotland and it launched the Scottish Reformation under the great leadership of John Knox. In fact, it was John Knox who brought that Bible to Scotland from Geneva where it was translated under the protection of John Calvin when the Catholics were killing Protestants in England and Scotland.
That Bible is a treasure to me because it's over 400 years old. I can open it and read exactly what Scottish reformers read when the gospel burst into Scotland, the light of the glorious gospel, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ shone on that land...it's the same Bible. People have died for it and its truths throughout all history. Many have been martyred for their faith in that book. That is a treasure to me because it reminds me of the great cost that was translated in the midst of terrible persecution and bloodshed. They had to flee to Geneva to do it and they brought it back. When they got back to Scotland, John Knox may have had this one in his hand, he brought the translation back and I think he was actually given the first couple that were printed. But he gave the first one that was printed to the prince of Scotland whose name was Prince James VI, and when you open the Bible the first four or five pages are a letter to Prince James..."Dear High and Mighty Prince James, with all due respect, get your spiritual act together for the wheel of the kirk, in old Scottish, for the good of the church." And it goes on to call him to accountability.
Well, young Prince James VI must have gotten the message because later on he became King James I and he authorized the King James. There's a great heritage in the Word of God not to be tampered with but to be accepted in all of its glory. I just pray that it will have full life in you to do its mighty work.
Father, again Your Word is precious to us. We don't worship it, we worship You but we love it because it tells us about You and Your glory and Your grace and Your salvation. Thank You for opening our hearts to the truth, may we like the psalmist consider it more precious than any possession, sweeter than any pleasure, the source of our eternal inheritance, the great reward, the protector from sin, the purifier and so may it be on our lips and in the meditations of our heart so that they may be acceptable in Your sight, our Rock, and our Redeemer. In Your Son's name we ask, and everyone said...AMEN
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Debbie Croft: Storytelling festival returns to Mariposa
More than the telling of tales, the Mariposa Storytelling Festival features renowned artists who have entertained and enlightened audiences around the world. It's a weekend packed with conviction, imagination and hilarity.
Visitors can sit back and simply enjoy as performers share the trials and triumphs of the human experience.
On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, sessions are scheduled for daytime and evening hours. Friday and Saturday sessions will be held at Mariposa County High School. Sunday afternoon's finale will take place at Yosemite National Park.
The following is this year's list of award-winning storytellers:
• Andy Offutt Irwin's personality can be summed up in one word: zany. From his website comes this description: "People are drawn to him like magnets to a refrigerator. And inside, it's all Mountain Dew and Jolt Cola." His artistic career includes theater, comedy troupes, children's camps and educational programs, and impersonations. All five of his storytelling CDs have received awards.
• First Nations storyteller Dovie Thomason is a Lakota-Plains Apache. She has performed for audiences across North America and in Great Britain. This delightful storyteller uses humor, wit and characterization. Her indigenous values and rich oral tradition are woven through the stories of her people, past and present.
• In addition to performing, Antonio Sacre teaches storytelling, writing and theater arts to students and teachers across the country. He is frequently heard on National Public Radio's Latino USA program. This bilingual performer was born in Boston to a Cuban father and Irish-American mother. He has authored three children's picture books.
• Dan Keding is practically a one-man-band. Accompanied by his guitar, banjo and collection of spoons, his specialty is the ballad. His Croatian grandmother told him the stories of her homeland when he was a boy. With many recordings and books to his credit, he has appeared at some of the most prestigious events in the storytelling circuit.
• Kim Weitkamp is a musician and humorist who combines a soothing voice and naturally vivid imagination with her Americana roots. Whether speaking or singing, she recounts childhood and not-so-childish escapades with warmth and candor. Audiences quickly become endeared listening to her on radio and stage.
• Dianne Ferlatte remembers listening to the stories of her African-American relatives on the front porch at her grandparents' house. Little did she know that learning American Sign Language, playing the piano, singing in church choirs and performing in stage productions would prepare her for a career in storytelling. Internationally known, she travels extensively, but most enjoys her partnership with schools and libraries.
The new book "Inspiring Generations: 150 Years, 150 Stories" will be officially released at the festival. On Saturday during the lunch break, the public is invited to gather in the high school library for this special event. The book will be available for purchase.
New this year is the Story Slam, when brave novices will be given a turn at the microphone. Community members are welcome to tell their original, true stories on Thursday night, March 6, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Each five-minute story must connect with the theme "Trains, Planes, Automobiles."
The Story Slam will be held in the board room of the county government center near Mariposa County Library. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the event is free. Cash prizes will be awarded to the top three winners.
More details are available at the Mariposa County Arts Council website or by calling (209) 966-3155 or (800) 903-9936.
A copy of the festival brochure, including pricing and the festival schedule, is available at the council website and at the council office, 5009 Highway 140, above Chocolate Soup in downtown Mariposa.
In the words of Ferlatte: "For that little moment of intimate connection telling personal stories and opening ourselves up to whoever is listening there is often a value to be learned, or encouragement to be gained, knowing that others before them have conquered fears and challenges similar to their own the right story at the right time will enrich their day, and even make the world a little better place. That's why I really love to tell stories."


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Because I was ripped from my sleep at 4am this morning by a little voice saying "my tummy hurts", followed by a lot of throwing up.
And because my 2yr old is chasing my 5yr old yelling "I not butt-head! I not butt-head!".
And because my bladder has completely turned it's back on my pregnant body.
And because I am determined to find joy and laughter amidst this insane, crazy, and unpredictable journey of motherhood.
We are going to laugh.
And take an updated Mommy Quiz. Again. You may remember some of it from back in the day.
These are the questions of our lives. Or maybe just my life. You can decide.
1.) You go out for a morning run (that now has become a waddle, and you feel that the neighbors have started getting up early to watch this kind of entertainment out their windows), and upon arrival home you have 4 minutes before you need to wake the children. Do you...
A. Brush your teeth
B. Take the worlds quickest shower
C. Wait 5 minutes till the baby starts screaming then shower with him on your hip.
D. Wait till all the children are up and available to stand in the bathroom to confirm you have no privacy.
2.) Breakfast is over for the kids and now you have 90 seconds to eat something before the first fight of the day breaks out over who holds the remote. Do you...
A. Eat the leftover scraps from the table.
B. Eat the half eaten granola bar that's in your pocket from yesterday (Yes, you have the same pants on. And yes, they are sweat pants).
C. Pray that Starbucks has started delivering breakfast to moms across the nation at 8am every morning.
D. Eat Cheerios out of the no spill bowl that you poured for your toddler while another child hangs on your leg.
3.) There are 47 loads of laundry to do and only 24 hours in the day. Do you...
A. Pack the washer way beyond capacity and pray that the water reaches every piece.
B. Drag it all to goodwill and start over.
C. Eat a donut.
D. Ignore it and wait for your imaginary cleaning lady to show up. (Just FYI, she ain't ever coming.)
4.) 3 of your kids have basketball. The oldest has practice at 5:30 and the middle 2 have practice at 6pm. They all need to eat 1 hour before and will want to eat again within 1 hour of being home. Then all 7 kids need baths before the 1st bedtime at 7:15 and the 2nd bedtime at 7:45 which is basically impossible. And speaking of impossible, you're huge because you're a million weeks pregnant, so bending over the bath to bathe the children isn't an option. How do you go about all this without losing your mind?
Explain your answer & show your work.
5.) "Me time" is now defined as...
A. Sitting in the car by yourself during basketball practice.
B. A root canal on a sunny afternoon.
C. Walking to the mailbox.
D. All of the above.
6.) Your foster care worker shows up unexpectedly and rings the doorbell during naptime and WAKES THE BABY AND TODDLER. Do you...
A.) Punch him in the face.
B.) Kick him in the shins.
C.) Make him trade jobs for a day now that he's made yours harder.
D.) Take deep breaths similar to those while in labor to cool down before opening the door.
7.) You were just ripped from your sleep by (please note that the offender is subject to a don't-wake-mama outburst followed by a heartfelt & half-asleep apology)...
A. A child who has peed in their bed
B. A child who has peed in your bed
C. A child who has thrown up in their bed
D. A child who has thrown up in your bed
8.) When driving alone in the car Dora the Explorer comes on your Ipod and it takes you how long to change it...
A. 5 seconds
B. 10 seconds
C. 15 seconds
D. Before you know it, you realize you are at a stop light with the window rolled down and you have sang along to the whole song. (You know you don't know any adult songs anymore.)
9.) You tell the children to sit at the table quietly, but it translates into kid language as...
A. Run around the table till someone falls and cries.
B. Act like your sippy cups are bowling balls.
C. Say you aren't eating what is cooking before you've even seen it.
D. Start making fake crying noises because mom hasn't heard enough actual crying and whining today.
10.) 67 is...
A. The amount of times someone yelled "mom!" in the past 10 minutes.
B. How many diapers you changed this week.
C. The amount you spent at Target after going in for only 1 thing that cost $3.99.
D. The amount of times you've said this week that your van should have one of those dividers that can go up and down like in a limo.
11.) You can't get anywhere on time. For this you blame...
A. Shoes that won't tie themselves.
B. Someone inevitably always having to go potty the moment you're ready to walk out the door and after all their winter gear is on.
C. Pregnancy hormones.
D. Not being able to find your car keys that have been clipped to YOUR OWN belt loop for the past 20 minutes.
12.) While on the phone, one of the children is saying, "mom...mom...mama...mommy...mom...mama". Their important question is...
A. How tall are you?
B. Can turtles jump?
C. Is Ohio a country?
D. Can you flush a barbie doll?
(Insert me banging my head against the nearest wall after that last one.)
13.) You still have 45 minutes till the husband gets home. 3 children are fighting, 3 are crying, 1 has the TV volume turned up to 84, and the 1 inside of you has a foot in your ribs. (HOW ARE THERE SO MANY OF THEM. Don't answer that.) Do you...
A. Consider scheduling a tubal.
B. Consider scheduling a vasectomy.
C. Eat another donut.
D. Call your mom and apologize for anything you ever did as a child.
*Bonus option!*
E. All of the above.
14.) While changing clothes, with all the kids in your room of course, you hear...
A. Total silence. Just stares, wide eyes and looks of confusion and wonder on their face. You might get an occasional self esteem boosting, "you're really big" or "what is that???".
Please note that the test administrator decided there was only one answer for the above question.
(Its shocking that mothers get out of bed in the morning sometimes, isn't it?)
15.) You're life is...
A. Busy, but so blessed.
B. Completely exhausting, but fulfilling.
C. Chaotic, but packed full of sweetness.
D. All of the above.
Sigh, what would I do with all my extra time if I didn't have to answer these pressing questions all day long :)?
Tired, but thankful.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
The Mommy Quiz
3 comments:
- kathygrace said...
All I can say is we need you as a bone fide comedian! You are hilarious! And to think that one of your kids just might have your tendencies to make others laugh! How Blessed we are! Thank you!
P.S. And I am aware that all of these quiz questions hold threads of truth! You just make such a wonderful zoo of it!
- December 10, 2013 at 4:35 PM
- Thoughts for the day said...
I agree...your humor is hysterical in fact if you put that whole thing on you tube with you in a 'crazy' outfit and saying it rather comical and sarcastic you could make a ton of money. Remember Anita Renfro who started out 'as a mom' comdedian? I think you have found your calling. Perhaps if not in public write these down for a book. Keep pressing on you are doing great.
- December 11, 2013 at 9:36 AM
- Hunter said...
Oh girl I just flat out need your mama humor and your realness. Some days (ok lets face it, everyday) I just need to be reminded that I am not alone!
- December 13, 2013 at 2:37 PM


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Because we are committed to serving the needs of church choirs of all sizes—and especially those of smaller choirs in "the real world"—we're excited to offer you Christ Is Risen! Alleluia!, the latest from our Worship in Unison Series. We feel certain you'll appreciate the flexibility and accessibility built into the vocal arrangements here. And the theme and celebratory nature of this new, 15-minute musical is just right for Easter Sunday morning worship, leaving enough time for other elements of the service.
While the entire work can be sung in unison, there are a few optional voice divisions available to you. And you can assign these however you wish, the choice is yours! Because the opening and closing medleys in this musical include lots of familiar material, the option of including the congregation on these selections is obvious.
The narrations are taken exclusively from the book of I John, so the theme of God's love in Christ is prominent. The narrator may read these passages dressed in street clothes. Or, for added dramatic effect, you may choose to have the narrator portray the apostle John, dressed in biblical attire, and reading as if from his actual letters.
We're honored to partner with you in your ministry. May the reality of the risen Christ be very real to you this Easter season and throughout the year.
Limit one per customer.
Voicing: Worship in Unison
Cast: Narrator
Performance Time: 20 minutes
Suggested Use: Easy Easter musical in Unison for Choirs or Ensembles
Skill: Easy
Style: Traditional
Also available:
Choral Book - item 9780834177529
Preview Pack - item 765762167100
Bulk CDs (pkg. 10) - item 765762117525
Accompaniment CD (split-channel & stereo) - item 765762117624
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text:
We noted a month ago that the Buccaneers were trying to trade running back LeGarrette Blount. Nothing has happened on that front, but that could change this week.
Stephen Holder of the Tampa Bay Times reports that Blount is still in play in a potential trade, and that a couple of teams are interested. A trade during the draft is possible.
It's not surprising that the Bucs are still looking to trade Blount. Reports out of Tampa have suggested that he and coach Greg Schiano don't see eye to eye, and the arrival of Doug Martin in last year's draft reduced Blount to 41 carries last season.
The question is whether any team is willing to give up a pick for Blount. It's possible that a team that hopes to draft a running back like Alabama's Eddie Lacy or Wisconsin's Montee Ball will decide to trade a third-day pick for Blount if Lacy and Ball get snapped up.
If that's what happens, the team that acquires Blount will be adding a running back who's 26 years old, who didn't get much wear and tear last season, and who is only three years removed from a 1,007-yard season. That wouldn't be a bad use of a late-round pick.