I've been workin' on the
Vern Peterman · Dec 12, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 24
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262316323887

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We touched several weeks ago on the work that was typically done around the house, and we mentioned that the women in Biblical times, with rare, rare exception, worked really hard. And the men did too. Everybody worked really hard. Lots of hard work. My wife will often, you know, walk around our apartment and say, boy, I'm sure glad for indoor plumbing. Especially since we live on the fifth floor. Can you imagine hauling water in pots up there? But at any rate, it is really nice to have all of our modern conveniences, even though we still work hard.

So, occupations. What we'll be looking at here, there was lots of different occupations. There are even some occupations we don't have today, because technology has changed, right? But one of the things is technology changed a lot more slowly. in those days. Why would technology change more slowly in biblical times? How come it doesn't race along at the same pace we have? One of the things we have particularly is information technology, the ability to communicate. If I learn something, I can email it, send it, mail it, FedEx it, all those kinds of things.

Those people, you can't imagine, you know, if you live in England, they have people in the Roman Empire living in Britain, right? And you said, hey, I need to get something down to the folks that are over there in Israel. You're talking months, okay? You're talking a long period of time. So just getting things around took a while, whereas now it's an instant, right? I'm emailing with people over in Europe and people over in Asia. and people down in South America, all over the place, and it happens instantly.

Those would have been months at a minimum, if not years in prior time. So just the rate of change of things is slowed down just because you can't get the information around. The other thing, most of the population was involved in agriculture. Again, low level of technology.

We open up a bag of grain, rice, wheat, whatever you think of. We open up that bag of grain and it's been produced, even probably put in the bag by machines. But imagine when you've got to get every little piece of the grain in by hand. You've got to break it off, the wheat and other grains from the stem. You've got to break all those things off. throw it up in the air to separate the chaff, and wait till the wind's the right speed.

All that. Most of the work's going into just eating. Just getting the food ready to eat. The typical arrangement is family farms. That would be the usual. There was also some heavier work that was done by father and sons. The sons, as soon as they were able to help.

Smaller farms, basically they couldn't afford to hire anybody. You couldn't really afford to have slaves, so you just work it with what you got. And the wife would go out, particularly during harvest time, and even the daughters and help. Because as hard as they worked, there was still more work to be done. Larger farms were the ones that had maybe some work animals. They would have maybe some slaves.

They would go and hire people. What they would do in most of the towns and cities, there'd be a marketplace, an agora, and you'd have people standing there ready with their tools, and somebody would come up and say, you, here, help, come here, help. And so you'd get paid, a typical day's wage was a denarius. And so you'd get some help that way.

Here's a couple examples where Jesus For instance, it says, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light, drawing upon the people's understanding of what a yoke was. Or, Paul's admonition to the believers in Corinth, be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. Olives were a common crop. How come olives? Mostly, you've got to have the olive oil. Remember we said that the lamp is on all the time. In the household, in biblical times, you always, always, always had one lamp going, even all night. It was unthinkable that you'd do anything different, okay? So you'd always have one lamp going.

It means you gotta have lots of olive oil. The substitutes were animal fats or beeswax, but generally you're gonna have just burning olive oil was the standard, okay? This was olive trees like in the... I've got some lights on here that shouldn't be. Olive trees like in the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, just outside of Jerusalem. Let's see, this... is an old olive tree in the Mount of Olives, and that particular olive tree may have actually been around when Jesus was in the garden. This is one that's in the Garden of Gethsemane now. But raising olives was a continuing necessary item, and so gathering them up, pressing out like this, pressing out the oil, Something you just did all the time. This is it would be a small operation.

They'd sometimes have an animal you know go around and they'd be getting the oil out and Using the animal power to do that They use the oil also not just for lamps, but for medicine It was used it was used just kind of a sort of a soothing Protective substance How about Psalm 23? What does the Shepherd do? He anoints the head with oil.

There's also, of course, in cooking, lubrication because they did have wagons and things of that sort. And even you see on the olive oil press, you got this thing rotating, right? So lubrication would be another one. And cosmetics. They had cosmetics in those days. And a lot of times those would be olive oil. They would use the olive oil also in with powders and things of that sort to make salves. So lots of different things it was used for. Dates and pistachios would be another thing that you would have lots of. Now one thing, what about those dates?

How do they get those down? None of those hydraulic lips. None of those. Sorry you don't get those, right? You basically have to have some kind of pole that can reach up there where you've got people shimmying up the palm tree to get up there and get the dates.

If you don't have a pole, it's a lot of work, but that's the way to get them down. Pistachios. A lot of handwork. You can grab them down in bunches. You see them in bunches there on the tree, but a lot of handwork to break those open for a meal. Figs. were a common one.

You see it in Jesus' parables. And you'll have also Andrew, the apostle was called by Jesus. He was sitting under a fig tree. And that was a picture in Israel in the culture of the time. It was a picture of somebody thinking hard to be sitting under your fig tree. Here's one here where Jesus tells a parable in Matthew 24 about the fig tree, and it's putting out tender branches.

Plowing. This is an Egyptian painting here. You can look at Israel basically throughout the Middle East. You're looking at plowing, and you'll have hopefully some oxen. It's real tough when you've got to pull your own plow. Hopefully some oxen. And one of the other things, you see, what's that guy on the left doing there? Yeah, some of the crops they could actually, you know, this was automation, oh man, to actually have a little item there that was attached to the plow that would drop the seeds down at intervals.

That would be high tech, okay? Because then you're not hand casting. But anyway, that would be an example. Now, Jesus said in 9.62, no one after putting his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God. Why would he say something like that?

The idea is that you're supposed to plow straight, right? And to plow straight, you want to look at a distant object and keep your eye on that and drive accordingly. If you keep looking back, that's when the plow starts doing this, see? So that's the idea. Okay, common crops, wheat and barley. Here's Matthew 13, the parable of the sower. They would hand broadcast a lot of the grains and also, like we'll see here shortly, lentils, things like that, they'd hand-broadcast them. Plow up all the ground and then hand-broadcast so it's just sort of a random scatter of the seeds.

And they'd also have to make sure, now think of this for a minute, you'd have to save the seed from a prior year. What are the things, you've got your seed crop, what are the things that are going to reduce your seed crop from being a full crop? Think of what those things might be if you're a farmer in those days. One is you've got to save some seed for the next year, right? What else might reduce your crop from being a full crop?

Pardon? Yeah, a bad year. This is the account of the famine during the time of Joseph. Bad year, we just didn't get the water. They didn't have a lot of irrigation systems in place, right? They'd have some, but no pumps. No big rotating sprinklers. None of that. So, yeah, bad weather. What else?

Yes, and we'll see that in an instance here. You'd have foreigners marching through and they'd say, hey, we're going to take it. You might be working really, really hard and they come through and take it. Or sometimes just wreck it. Yeah, just walk through it. You've been working for months and months and months. You're just about ready to harvest and they come through and just wreck it. Burn it, chop it down. One instance we'll see here shortly, it just had a battle in it. There's this farmer trying to raise crops and they have a big battle in the middle of his crops.

Here's something else. How much of your grain crop are you supposed to tithe? A tenth. Okay, alright, so there's a tenth. That goes to the Levites, alright? When you really total up what the Jews were supposed to give, the tithe that everybody talks about was only a part of it. When you add it all up, it was more like a quarter to a third, given to various temple kinds of things. That's before your taxes. We'll get into this.

How about gleaning? Remember? We'll get here in a minute. You've got to leave the corners, and you can't go back a second time and kind of gather up the leftovers. You've got to leave that for the gleaners. So you think of it, I mean, there's lots of things that could be a problem. How about what just happened in the last month over there? Locusts. Oh man. So you see, it's a real chancy deal.

We're not done. What happens every seven years in Israel? You let the land rest. You don't even plant it. So you see they're fighting lots of different things here. Lots of problems. Okay. Bread was the staple crop. Give us this day our daily bread. Right? We're going to eat that every day. Harvesting was hard work. How would you like to use one of these?

A stone sickle. They'd use a piece of wood or sometimes even an animal's jawbone. And they cut a slot down there and jam sharp stones. And if your sickle became a little dull, you chipped away at the edge to get it sharp again. How about that? Tough work, huh? All right. Threshing and winnowing.

You have to take grain crops, legumes, and you let them dry out a bit. You beat them to break away the heads, the grain heads and the seeds away from all the stems. That's the threshing, okay? You try to do that typically on either a packed earth floor or a stone floor. And ideally, it's a nice solid piece of bedrock or something like that, if you had it. And you beat the crops. You just got to beat them to get all the stuff knocked off. And then you pick it up and do what these guys are doing and throw it up in the air.

If there's no wind, you can't do it. because the wind is supposed to drive the chaff and all the inedible stuff away, right? What happens if there's a really high wind? You can't do it either, otherwise your crop's over in the neighbor's yard, right? So you have to wait for an ideal wind to do the winnowing. Isn't that interesting? There's several references in the Old Testament for the wind is too hard to winnow. Okay? Here's one here. In Luke 6, the winnowing fork is the idea of judgment separating out what will remain and what won't be.

Lentils was another. Anybody have lentils here? Lentils are kind of a flat, kind of bean-looking thing. There's two varieties of lentils. The ones that they used in the biblical times were small lentils. The larger ones are Western Hemisphere. These were little things. They look kind of like this plant you see here. They were like grains. They were broadcast seeded.

So you'd spread them out just like you would the grains. They'd also have to thresh them and winnow them, just the same. You'd gather them all up and you'd beat them. And then you'd have to sit there and do the winnowing as well because you've got to get all that loose, useless stuff off. You don't want to serve lentils and have a bunch of grass and sticks and everything else in there.

And here's an example, 2 Samuel 23.11. Now after him, David, was Shammah the son of Agi the Herorite, and the Philistines were gathered into a troop where there was a plot of ground full of lentils, and the farmer was delighted.

Right? Just like we were talking about before. Here I am trying to raise some crops, I just want to feed my family, and you guys are going to have a war in the middle of my crops. So, problem. Here's lentils on the threshing floor, so you get an idea of what that looks like. Here's the threshing floor, which is kind of rough, but looks like bedrock. And then on top of it would be the piled up lentils, which would be drying, and then they'd go and you'd see a pile like that, and you'd just beat it to get all the lentils to drop off. And then they'd go and have to winnow the lentils to get all those loose, inedible parts blown away.

Here's a grape harvest, common, requiring care throughout the season. You notice in the picture you've got some women helping as well. Basically it was all hands on deck. I used to work in the grapes when I was younger. But when it's time to harvest, you just better get going. I was about to say haul bananas, but it's not bananas, it's grapes. Anyway, it was a lot of work.

You'll hear reference to a tower because they would, in a larger grape vineyard, typically they'd have a tower for kind of a supervisor sort of role. You know, you could be up and see things and you could be heard because you were above the grape vines kind of tend to break up the sound, so you could be up higher and see what's going on and keep track of, you know, where things are getting moved and, you know, hey, get another one of these over there and those kinds of things. So, reference there to this tower. Stomping the grapes is something else that's involved.

Let's see, I haven't done that. But, you can imagine, you get some really colored, darkly colored grapes that look kind of like blood. And so, there's reference to slaughter being pictured by the wine press in Joel 3 and in Revelation 14 and 19. So the wine press is the picture of slaughter, because here's this blood-looking stuff flowing out of the side of the grape press.

Also, you hear about blood up to the horse's bridles in kind of a prophetic discussion. The idea was not that blood is flowing like a river up to the horse's bridles, but that there's splash. People who are stomping the grapes get the splash up to the bridle's height. And so up to the horse's bridles, was an expression of that's the level of splash, it's coming up high. So guys when they're done stomping, they don't just get purple feet, they get it all the way up. Gleaning, we mentioned that earlier. The classic story of gleaning is Ruth. Ruth chapter 2 is where you see that come out. Mosaic law, Leviticus 19, 9 and 10.

Israel is not to harvest the corners of the fields, You're supposed to leave the corners, and you may not go back a second time to get up any leftovers. You have to leave the corners and those leftovers for the gleaners. This is Israel's version of a welfare system. No free checks.

Others had to be permitted to glean the fields. In this case, Ruth was the one who did it. And what you see as you read the account is Boaz was, beyond the law, exceedingly kind to Ruth, right? So, but gleaning basically was hard, hard work. Can you imagine going and trying to get grain leftover after, it's just leftovers after what everybody else has already picked? Real tough stuff. Real tough work.

Now, then there's the herdsmen. There's lots of references in the Bible to shepherds and flocks all the way from Genesis into the New Testament. flocks of sheep and goats kept by the shepherds. Usually they stayed with the sheep. I know my folks have sheep on their place over in California and we had some sheep there, not as many when I was there. The sheep were always left and you'd come visit them once in a while and keep them in fences. The sheep in those days were not left. The sheep always had a shepherd with them, at least one. Sometimes if you had a large flock, like for example royal sheep herds, things of that sort, you might have a team and even have a chief shepherd who had a position of reporting to the king or the king's food preparers about it.

But basically they would take land that was not suitable for farming and that was for the sheep. More rocky, hilly stuff, they'd have that for the sheep. The shepherds would always be with them and so the shepherds were kind of rough and sometimes smelly people. Shepherds were not well thought of. By the way, put together this week and last week, what do you call, the words for elders are overseer, remember that's a slave term, and then there's also a shepherd. So, you know, is that an exalted position? I don't think so.

Anyway, here's Luke 2.8, which of course fits our season now.

In the same region, there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night. It is possible, I don't know if there's any way of confirming it, it's possible that the shepherds around Jerusalem and Bethlehem is only seven miles south.

Many of them would be in charge of the sacrificial sheep. And so if that's the case, then the angels came to the shepherds and said, you've been tending the sacrifices all the time. and see God's Lamb. So this would have been a very momentous time for them. Anyway, this would be typical.

Now, notice they're keeping watch over their flocks by night. The pattern would be either you're going to have shepherds, where there's multiple shepherds and they take shifts, so you watch the sheep over at night, or the other would be to have a closed-in fenced area. And what you'll see in the Bible is both. We just saw one where they're keeping watch over the flocks by night, right?

This is one where they would have a fenced-in area. This one particular one here is made of stone. They can make it of stone and or, you know, a bunch of sticks. But one way or another, they have a protected area. There would be a doorway like this. And then this would be an example, for example, in John 10, 9. Jesus says, I am the door. If anyone enters through me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.

So the shepherd, in the case especially of a lone shepherd, would typically have more of a fenced-in approach versus watching at night. And he would sleep right out the door. That's his way of making sure that the sheep are okay, none of them get out, nothing else gets in.

Okay. The duties of shepherds. Lots of things. At various times, I've not stayed with sheep all the time, but we had a neighbor that had quite a few sheep and worked with them on different things. Some of the things you do with them are a little more pleasant than others. Anyway, you have to lead them to food and water.

Basically, what they would do is they'd have an area, okay, here's a pasture, and then they would need to say, okay, this area is starting to get eaten down. So we need to move on to a different area and there's also seasonal variations. And so one of the things that shepherds would often do is shift from one area to another depending on the season. As they move the sheep, they would need to pick a safe path. You pick a precarious path or a path where there's lots of predators, they're not good. So where should the sheep be and Where should I take them to get them to the other place?

Those are all things the shepherd had to consider carefully. Dealing dangers of theft, dangers of course being injury to the sheep, but also predators. And disease and injury, and finding the lost sheep. These would all be things that they'd be involved in. Sometimes they were really hard tasks.

Sheep can get involved in crazy places. Sheep can do crazy things. I remember one sheep and I was out there. I watched for several minutes because I couldn't believe it. Here's two pastures. One pasture is as good as the other. And there's a fence. And the sheep is out there just butting his head against the fence again and again and again and again, finally breaking the fence down and getting through the other side to the pasture which is just the same as the one he got out of.

You know? Go figure. But sheep can do crazy things. Get caught up in things. A friend and I, once we were walking along the roadway and we heard this really strange sound. Went over and checked and there's a sheep fallen in a well. So I had to pull the sheep out of the well. Very odd thing. Why did it do that? I don't know. Some of the examples we find.

Jesus says, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And that's a phrase, by the way, lost sheep of the house of Israel is used twice. This is Matthew 15, where Jesus says, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And chapter 10, he tells the disciples, he sends them out two by two, go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Very exclusive. So it was a phrase and it came out of the Old Testament, the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So a term that the prophets used in the Old Testament.

All right, here's Acts 20. This is the longest discourse to Christians recorded in the book of Acts. Longest single discourse to Christians. And so here is Paul, he's talking to the elders from Ephesus. He asked to meet them in Miletus, which is the next major port city to the south.

And so as he's meeting them there, He says, Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. That's a verb. Shepherd the church of God. And in verse 29, I know that after my departure, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. So here's Paul talking to the elders. Now, get into 1 Peter 5, and what does he say to them?

Shepherd the flock of God among you this again. He uses a verb We have in our culture this you know go around calling people a pastor There's only one place where in the New Testament where a church leader is called a pastor and it is poignant and basically it's a sheep herder Okay, and that's Ephesians 411 and that's the only place that's given as it for church leaders and now and it's not as a title and The only place that that word is applied as a title is for Jesus Christ. Interesting. So our culture has gone... Oh, I know what a pastor is. And we've gone and applied that. Scripture never uses it that way. And the only place that uses it as a title is for Jesus Christ, where it calls him the chief shepherd, which was typically a royal position.

Oh, by the way, before we leave the shepherds, you want to read something substantial, you of course are aware of Psalm 23, Ezekiel 34 is another one I'd recommend. Ezekiel 34, Ezekiel describes the bad shepherds of Israel, and God says, because you have failed, I will shepherd these people personally. The Lord says, I'll be their shepherd, because you have not done it well. So anyway, Jeremiah 25 is another one if you're interested in taking a look at that. But it's a picture that's used in the Old Testament, it's used in the New, Jesus makes reference to it, and obviously Paul and Peter do as well. People had not a high regard for shepherds, but everybody knew what one looked like.

Alright, now. Boats on the Sea of Galilee. This is the Sea of Galilee and some boats that are there now. Basically, there's people doing fishing. Many of the disciples were fishermen, right? Zebedee, the father of James and John, appears to have had sort of a high-level fishing business, not just as kind of a lone fisherman, but probably a team of boats and fishermen and things of that sort. Such that, even with his sons gone, he could do just fine. The other reason why we would suspect that he's fairly high level in a developed fishing business is John, unlike the other writers of the Gospels, records numerous conversations and contacts with the Sanhedrin that the other Gospels don't record. Jesus and Nicodemus, for example.

But anyway, here's the Galilean fishing scene. There were lots of things to do. Besides just fishing, you've got to mend the nets and keep them in good shape. If your nets are in bad shape, you're going to lose money. You're going to lose fish. They're going to be falling apart on you. You're going to have trouble with them. So keep them mended. Making nets, mending nets, and all that.

You had to prepare the fish and take them to market. Remember the three different forms of fish? Fresh fish? Unusual. Basically, those who lived in the communities right next to the lakes and if there was a stream where they had them, they had fresh fish. Other than that, it was the other options. Dried fish, more likely used, for example, the feeding of the 5,000 was a dried fish, or the fermented fish paste. So those three forms.

Any volunteers? No, okay. You're not going to have fermented fish paste on your Christmas table? Oh well. All right, taking them to market. Now, if you think about it, you've got fish and you're going to take them to market, you might have to take them quite a ways. So this could be quite a job, getting fish to some of these other places, and by then it's not going to be fresh fish, right? So once you get very distant from the Sea of Galilee and some of the other, you know, streams and rivers and whatnot, you're pretty much guaranteed you're talking about dried or fermented fish paste.

Okay. Fisherman-used nets caught many fish at a time. They required lots of work and maintenance because you've got to keep any snags and breaks. You've got to fix those. If any part starts to get old and worn, you've got to fix that. One of the things that the nets made necessary, and that's sorting it out.

You've got the Mosaic Law, right? It says you can't just eat everything that you catch. And nets catch everything, right? Let's catch everything. So you have to toss out. So the first thing you're going to do once you get the fish in is you're going to toss out the fish.

The mosaic law won't allow you to eat. You're not allowed to have eels. You're not allowed to have any kind of crab, shellfish, things like that. None of the other things that some of us might consider delicacies. You can't have it. They're like lobster, like abalone. You can't do that. Only the fish with scales and fins permitted. Everything else you've got to toss back. So the first thing you're going to do is start tossing stuff back.

How about a metal worker? Of course, I have different kinds of metal workers. Think of it, here's the Jews that are leaving Egypt. What have they been doing for over 400 years? Making bricks, okay? If you're making bricks, that makes you no expert in how to do things with metals, right?

So typically, the Jews initially had very little in the way of metalworking skills. It would be rare. And oftentimes, they had to do things without the metal or go to other groups to get metal. As time went on, they were able to acquire the skill, and so by New Testament times, you see more of that. But you can imagine, you know, we saw how the plow works. What if you've got a plow and all you've got on there is a sharp stick? Not going to work so good. So what you would like is some metal on the end of that plow, right?

Well, in the early times they didn't have the skills to make that. So what you'd do instead is you'd go to somebody maybe from another culture who you probably alienated and get them to try to fix something for you. Plus, initially, a lot of them didn't have iron. They'd have bronze, which was softer. So you'd be plowing with some bronze plow and all of a sudden you hit a rock. Ouch! That's a problem. Now you've got to get this thing fixed. But it was a real issue for them. Okay.

Carpenter shop. Most of the carpenters are going to act as single proprietors. They'd have several different hand tools that they'd have available to them. starting out or in smaller towns, either one. Typically, the carpenter would operate out of his own home.

So you can imagine, imagine what, here is Joseph teaching Jesus. Okay, here's Jesus being the oldest son. He's going to be first one along the line to learn this carpentry skill. And so, there they are in Nazareth, which was a little podunk town. And so here's Mary trying to get the food ready, right? And here's Jesus and Joseph doing their carpentry work there, right in the same place, keeping all the tools.

At night, remember, you're responsible for your stuff, and if anything gets stolen, it's your problem, right? So you've got to bring everything inside, keep it inside the house. So it was a pretty crowded, busy place, right? Now, here's the other aspect.

Carpens are also loggers. Nazareth did not have a lumber yard. So what would happen, imagine you go and you're going to build something for somebody. Maybe it's the plow that we talked about. People didn't have a whole lot in the way of furniture. But you might have something like that too. Or somebody says, I've got to have a yoke for my oxen. What are you going to do? You're not going to go down to the Nazareth lumber yard. They didn't have Home Depot yet. So what are you going to do? You're going to go out to these woods. These are the forests up in Galilee. You're going to go out to the woods and select the tree and cut it down, cut the branches off that you aren't going to need, and you're going to cut out the part that you need and haul it back into town.

And if you've been hired, for example, somebody comes to you and they say, I need structural beams for a new house I'm building. You've got big structural beams and if you don't have a donkey or something like that, you may have to haul it in by hand. Drag those by yourself. Hard work. So being a carpenter was also being a logger. And so people would imagine, here's a carpenter, he goes out and he says, I know where I can find that kind of wood, that kind of tree. Maybe he needs a special shape or configuration, especially like for plows. And you want something that's good and solid and is going to last.

Glassblowing. You won't find any of that really in the Old Testament, but by New Testament times they had glassblowing. It was the time between the Testaments when glassblowing was invented. This is a rare, whole New Testament piece of glass. You can imagine, as archaeologists dig through these things, the glass gets busted up. So this is a rare piece where you've got the whole thing together.

But they would have glass blowers in some of the larger cities and towns there. Tent making. Now, here's a real advantage, because think of it, what does it take to be a tent maker? You've got some patterns you're working with, and you've got some tools, but you can get your materials wherever you go, and you can sell them wherever you go. So it was a very portable skill for Paul to carry from one town to the next. Wherever he went, he would go and put those together.

I put down here 2 Timothy 2.15 where it talks about rightly dividing the word of truth. This rightly dividing was a term that was used for a tent maker. They would lay the pattern down on the material that they were going to make the tent out of and cut along the pattern lines. so that when you put all the pieces of the tent together, everything fits. The rightly dividing was cutting along the lines just right so that you don't end up with gaps and wild overlaps. So he's writing to Timothy and he's using, I'm sure Timothy either saw him or helped him make these tents. So what does Paul do, having spent hours and days and years with Timothy? He uses a term that most certainly Timothy understood.

Rightly dividing the word of truth. Take it apart at just the right place so that when you put it all together, it all makes good sense. It all fits. It goes together and you have a useful, complete whole. That's the picture that he used with Timothy. There are lots of other occupations. We haven't even touched on them. They tended to be more specialty items, but they did exist.

Obviously, over in the far left, we've got the idols that were related to the Artemis worship in Ephesus. They even had a whole guild that was centered around the Artemis Temple. By the way, the guild workers for each of the different crafts, when you go outside of Israel, the guild workers, the people who are members of the guild, whether it was stone masonry or goldsmithing, whatever it was, They would have their guild meetings in the pagan temples. So that the believers, when they became believers, would have a tough time with the pagan temples, because all the food that was laid out on the table had been offered to idols.

Imagine being a believer, let's say you've been a believer for a very short period of time, but you've been a silversmith for decades. Now this issue comes up. It could be a tough time. Here's a stone mason, and they not only would have to shape the stones, but you have to have somebody who knows how to read, and engraving letters. This particular engraving was the warning that told the people right at the entrance to the most sacred part of the temple, Gentiles are not to pass here upon penalty of death. So they had people with that skill. Scribes, I have them shown there.

Scribes in the Egyptian culture, particularly, were thought of as being exceedingly powerful. They were actually looked at above the level of the pharaoh. And here's why. In the Egyptian culture, if you would write something down, it was prophetic. It was prophecy if you wrote it down. Writing was looked at as this powerful stuff. So a scribe was looked at as predicting the future. So that's why the Pharaoh would be considered a deity, but the scribe could make the future happen. That was their perspective on things. Other cultures didn't always hold to that, but nonetheless, being a scribe was a special role.

Stamping out coins. They, of course, have the various shapes. Our idea of coins, we have something that's fairly uniform. What they'd do is they'd take a blob of metal and just bang! They'd stamp it and put whatever shape it is and if the metal came out kind of oblong or funny looking, oh well. But you have people doing that. People stamping out the metal.

Making of the Ark of the Covenant, for example, is another craft. So there's lots of other crafts and skills that tend to be more rare. And what you find as you read the account of the temple in Jerusalem with Solomon's temple, had to bring in lots of other skills from other cultures.

In New Testament times, when Herod started in 20 BC, having the temple reconstructed, it was an operating temple, so they couldn't have pagan craftsmen. So they trained a thousand priests in the various crafts to do the temple because the pagans were not allowed to come within the inner temple area. So they had the pagans train the priests and then the priests did the work that was right in the temple area. So the pagans didn't have to go in and they could keep using the temple.

This was an example of the gold work from a Scythian culture. Anyway, lots of other occupations tended to be rare and unusual. Most people, if you see anybody going by on the street, you probably figure they're in agriculture. But lots of other occupations. Okay. Questions? Yes? No? He was a carpenter in a small town of Nazareth, right?

You know this time of year you're likely to see Christmas cards that show Mary on a donkey probably not When Jesus went into the temple Craig's got a good point. Do you notice that nobody took him on? Hey, here's this one single singular guy this guy had probably been hauling logs out of the woods by hand Okay, this guy is no wimp So when he goes into the temple and he starts whipping the animals out, pushing the tables over, you'd think people would get really upset. Nobody takes him on. Not even sorta.

Very interesting. Yeah, Craig, you got a good point. Jesus was probably in exceedingly good shape and used to dealing with tough things. Working real hard. Hauling logs. lifting up structural beams, things like that. Yeah, good point. Other questions, thoughts? Yeah. Yeah, in small operations, he may have to go out and do some of the metal mining himself. Yeah.

One of the words that we came across in Our study a few weeks ago, remember the false teachers of Colossae were puffed up and it used the word for bellows that was used for metal refining. They would take a goatskin and put a couple of paddles on it and that would be a part of the operation for getting the metal from an ore into being a workable metal. And yes, you may indeed have to have somebody who knows how to get the the metal and deal with shaping it and all that. A variety of skills, especially in smaller areas.

Other thoughts, comments, observations? Some hard work, isn't it? Plus, imagine the work that had to go into some of these things without the technology that we have available now. No skill saws. No power drills. If Jesus wanted to make a hole, it was a bow drill. Have you ever seen those?

It's like a bow, and you've got a loose string, and you wrap that around the item that you're wanting to spin. And you go like this. And the loop moving up and down the string is what makes the thing go around in circles. So that's how you drill your hole. Now drill a really tight hole. Tough job, huh? How do you get the hole started? All that is kind of mind-boggling for us to imagine. But that's what was involved. You wanted to drill a hole in something? That's how you're going to do it. Odds are Jesus is going to use a peg before he's going to use a nail. You're in some little podunk town called Nazareth. By the way, the Roman military records indicate Nazareth was just a garbage town. They just stomped through it and said this place is trashy. So it wasn't a fancy place.

But here's Jesus. He's probably not going to use a metal nail if he can use a wooden peg, which means he's going to use a bow drill every time he wants to drill a hole. Lots of work. Well, they would sure be amazed at some of the things we have, right? Other observations or comments, questions? All right. Yes, Marion. Real interesting. I'm glad you asked about that.

We don't find lots of record of that. That seems to have been kind of a later development. Part of the problem was that a lot of the dogs, we think of dogs as a pet, and they also had wild dogs. And they were common even in the cities. They had these packs of wild dogs. Nobody's dogs. So having a trained sheepdog was sort of a later development. I just don't find lots of mention of it in the literature. It's possible that they had it, but it seemed to be more unusual than the typical.

Okay, let's pray. Lord, if we look at this, certainly we recognize the difficulties that people faced in those times. But we also recognize, too, that you paid the price for those people as hard as they worked, as well as ourselves. And we also recognize, too, that and understanding these things better, we can better understand your word. We thank you for that. Thank you for what you've revealed, because you love us and care for us. In Jesus' name, amen.