VT-Mustard Seed

Mustard Seed Cover Page

Bent Knees

Village Bible Church

Evangelical Musings

Skits-n-Such

Wolx Werx

The Secret Place

Pastor's Prattle

Check this box to download the document you click on as a PDF file instead of viewing as a web page.

Biblical Splutterings

by Alan R. Wolcott

98% of the time I celebrate every attempt to open and read the Bible. (2% is reserved for those “scholars” whose attempts to demythologize the text display mostly 21st century preconceptions and prejudice rather than sane exegesis and literary acumen—but that’s another axe!) Of course, this makes me doubly proud to report that my 14-year-old daughter gives herself regularly to devotional reading. I welcome her questions, usually. Apparently she has lately been reading of young David’s exploits in the text of 1 Samuel 18. Just before bedtime when she closed the book as I was meandering by she wanted to know, “Dad, what’s a foreskin?”

Witless I gulped and looked for a diversion. “Why do you want to know that?” I parried.

“Well King Saul told David that if he wanted to marry his daughter Michal, the dowry would be 100 foreskins.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to know what a dowry is? I’m good at explaining that.”

“Daaad!”

This meant several things simultaneously:

1. “Health” class was less descriptively explicit than we feared (that’s good!)
2. Perhaps she just hadn’t been paying that close attention in health class (that would be Sara’s fault... heh, heh. Thanks, Sara!)
3. Maybe we should have given her a paraphrase Bible with less literal translation
4. She now knows more about ancient Hebrew customs than most Gentiles
5. I was impaled on the horns of a dilemma.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Daaad!”

“Okay, okay. It’s the...” well, I told her.

“Eeew! Why would anyone want that?”

“Since the Philistines were Israel’s enemies it meant King Saul wanted David to kill 100 of them and bring back proof. No man would let that be cut off while he was alive, now, would he?”

“I guess not”, shuddering. “I thought that it was some part of their foreheads.”

“That might work, too. I should have thought of that.”

“Daaad!”

Fortunately I was able to meander on away before we had to project techniques of extraction, transportation, enumeration and the like. Nor did we have to speculate about David’s enthusiasm—he got 200! Some good has come of this. I now have an answer when she wonders, “What’s circumcision.”

“Remember when you asked me about David?”

Enough said.