Norman
Defender of Truth
The Stick of Judah and the Stick of Joseph
"Ezekiel is probably referring here to an institution which flourished among the ancient Hebrews but was completely lost sight of after the Middle Ages until its rediscovery in the [nineteenth] century. That is the institution of the tally-sticks. . . . When a contract was made, certain official marks were placed upon a stick of wood in the presence of a notary representing the king. . . . The stick was split down the middle, and each of the parties kept half as his claim-token. . . . When the time for settlement came and the king's magistrate placed the two sticks side by side to see that all was in order, the two would only fit together perfectly mark for mark and grain for grain to 'become one' in the king's hand if they had been one originally."
Discoveries in Iraq shed light on biblical prophecy of the Book of Mormon!...
* TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION... "Stick" as rod or scepter. They conclude, uniting these two tribal scepters vividly symbolizes the reunification of the divided tribes.
* LINGUISTIC POINTS...Both Stick, in the English King James Version, and rod, in the Greek Septuagint Version, are very unusual translations of the Hebrew word Etz in this place in Exekiel, whose basic meaning is Wood. Etz appears 300 times in the Hebrew text, but the King James scholars translated it as stick only fourteen times, and seven of those times are in Ezekiel 37. Usually they translated Etz as either tree [162 times] or wood [103 times].
It gets even more interesting when we look at the Greek Septuagint translated by Jews for Jewish use in the third century B.C. These translators knew Hebrew and had a feeling for their mother tongue. They translated Etz as Wood [Ksylon] 249 times, but as Tree [Dendron] a mere 15 times. Obviously they saw wood as the primary meaning of Etz.
It's doubly surprising, then, to discover that these translators of the Septuagint did not use wood in that crucial chapter 37. Instead they used Rod (Rabdos). What's really peculiar is that this is the only instance in the whole Greek Bible where Etz is translated as Rabdos.
WHY DID THEY DO IT? The answer is vital since this unique translation is the one that the majority of
our modern interpreters depend upon for their understanding of this passage.
LEAD TO ANSWER: Scholars have hypothesized that the translator was influenced by the story in Numbers 17:2-3, where the Lord required each tribal leader to write his own name upon his staff (rabdos) and leave it in the tabernacle overnight. The tribal name connection is obvious. And there is that prophecy at the end of Ezekiel 37 concerning the reuniting of the Kingdoms. The one flaw in this explanation is that the word translated as Rod in Numbers is not Etz, but Matteh, a perfectly good Hebrew word that literally means staff. So if that's what Ezekiel really meant, why didn't he also use matteh?
Modern nation of Iraq included almost all of Mesopotamia, the homeland of the ancient Kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia. In 593 B.C., when Ezekiel was called to be a prophet, he was living in exile in Babylonia among the many Jews taken there by Nebuchadnezzar. The typical scribe pressed a wedge-shaped stylus into moist
clay tablets to make the complex writings familiar to us as cuneiform (wedge-shaped). But scholars today know that other kinds of records were being made in Mesoptamia: papyrus, parchment, and wooden tablets.
Modern archaeologists knew what papyrus and parchment were, but what were these wood tablets? How could cuneiform be written on wood? The scholars tentively concluded that the Mesopotamians must have painted the cuneiform signs on the wood.
This conclusion was abandoned some years ago, however, when San Nicolo discovered two clay tablets in the archives of the Eanna temple in Uruk in southern Babylonia, one dated at 596 B.C. and the other at 582 B.C.
Their writers both mentioned drawing beeswax (and some other substance unknown to San Nicolo) from the temple storehouse to make a filling from their wooden tablets. A filling? San Nicolo remembered that Romans & Greeks both made wooden wax tablets for record-keeping purposes out of boards whose surfaces had been cut below the edges in order to hold a thin coating of wax. The raised edges protected the inscribed surfaces when two tablets were put together.
Could the Babylonians have done the same thing? San Nicolo realized that for a cuneiform writer, writing upon wax with a stylus would be much like writing upon clay, whereas painting on a wooden tablet would have involved
a entirely different process. He concluded that the Babylonian wooden writing tablet was a wax writing board and published his conclusions to the scholarly world in 1948. He said that the reason no such wax tablets had ever been found was that they must hve been highly perishable.
But five years later this theory was confirmed, Archaeologist Max Mallowan made a discovery in a well in Nimrud, a city known as Calah in the Bible. They found fragments of two complete sets of tablets, one of Ivory and of Walnut, each composed of sixteen boards. Boath sets were made of the same size boards: 13" x 6" x
1/2", wax. The inscription on the cover of one of the wooden books reads: 'Palace of Sargon, King of the world, King of Assyria'. He caused Enuma Anu Enlil to be inscribed on an Ivory tablet and set in his palace of Dur-Sharrukin. When Sargon died in 705 B.C., the palace was plundered and the boards were ripped apart, probably to get to the hinges, which may have been made of gold. The boards were then thrown into the well. The whole work made such an extensive record that Mallowan could announce his discovery as the oldest known example of a book.
WHAT DID THIS PROVE & SUPPORT: This one discovery confirmed San Nicolo's hypothesis. Scholars had known from cuneiform references to Is Le'U that wooden tablets had been used in the Old Babylonian kingdom
as far back as 1700 B.C. And a thousand years later were being used in Assyria for making 'religious texts', rituals, reports, royal orders, registering names of individuals, registration of details of an estate, bill of lading of a ship, and record of oil distributed.
Once a set had been identified, scholars recognized that Assyrian bas-reliefs provided visual evidence of their use. They also popped up on equally ancient monuments among the Aramaeans of northern Mesopotamia. No examples for the Hittites are yet known, but San Nicolo noted that the Hittites, who also used a cuneiform scrip, mentioned writing some of their records on wood and had a special term for the scribe who did it.
Classical Scholars have long known that Greeks and Romans used wax tablets. Zacharius wrote the name of his infant son, John the Baptist, on such a tablet [Luke 1:63]. They continued to be used in Europe at least into the fourteenth century A.D. In short, using wax boards for writing was a rather common ancient practice extending over thousands of years [c. 1700 B.C. to A.D. 1400] and through many cultures.
ANSWER: Interpretation of this passage must be consistent with what we know of the language, & also must be in harmony with what we know of the context of the prophecy, for context determines meaning. Ezekiel's context is the
Babylonian world with its customes & practices; his language is Hebrew, a sister language to the Babylonian. The Babylonian Is, is cognate to the Hebrew Etz, both of which mean Wood. The fact that the ivory tablet is called in the Akkadian text, An Is Le'u made of Shin Piri-a " wooden tablet made of elephant ivory, "which seems an absurd contradiction-indicates that Is Le'u no longer meant "wooden tablet"; it meant "writing tablet", no matter what it was actually made of. Similarly, the Latin word for book, Liber, originally meant 'Tree Bark". Yet a librarian today is not a tree bark specialist!
Ezekiel 37:16...Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, for Judah (records of what we call the bible) and for his children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim (book of mormon) and for all the house of Isreal his companions….
"Ezekiel is probably referring here to an institution which flourished among the ancient Hebrews but was completely lost sight of after the Middle Ages until its rediscovery in the [nineteenth] century. That is the institution of the tally-sticks. . . . When a contract was made, certain official marks were placed upon a stick of wood in the presence of a notary representing the king. . . . The stick was split down the middle, and each of the parties kept half as his claim-token. . . . When the time for settlement came and the king's magistrate placed the two sticks side by side to see that all was in order, the two would only fit together perfectly mark for mark and grain for grain to 'become one' in the king's hand if they had been one originally."
Discoveries in Iraq shed light on biblical prophecy of the Book of Mormon!...
* TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION... "Stick" as rod or scepter. They conclude, uniting these two tribal scepters vividly symbolizes the reunification of the divided tribes.
* LINGUISTIC POINTS...Both Stick, in the English King James Version, and rod, in the Greek Septuagint Version, are very unusual translations of the Hebrew word Etz in this place in Exekiel, whose basic meaning is Wood. Etz appears 300 times in the Hebrew text, but the King James scholars translated it as stick only fourteen times, and seven of those times are in Ezekiel 37. Usually they translated Etz as either tree [162 times] or wood [103 times].
It gets even more interesting when we look at the Greek Septuagint translated by Jews for Jewish use in the third century B.C. These translators knew Hebrew and had a feeling for their mother tongue. They translated Etz as Wood [Ksylon] 249 times, but as Tree [Dendron] a mere 15 times. Obviously they saw wood as the primary meaning of Etz.
It's doubly surprising, then, to discover that these translators of the Septuagint did not use wood in that crucial chapter 37. Instead they used Rod (Rabdos). What's really peculiar is that this is the only instance in the whole Greek Bible where Etz is translated as Rabdos.
WHY DID THEY DO IT? The answer is vital since this unique translation is the one that the majority of
our modern interpreters depend upon for their understanding of this passage.
LEAD TO ANSWER: Scholars have hypothesized that the translator was influenced by the story in Numbers 17:2-3, where the Lord required each tribal leader to write his own name upon his staff (rabdos) and leave it in the tabernacle overnight. The tribal name connection is obvious. And there is that prophecy at the end of Ezekiel 37 concerning the reuniting of the Kingdoms. The one flaw in this explanation is that the word translated as Rod in Numbers is not Etz, but Matteh, a perfectly good Hebrew word that literally means staff. So if that's what Ezekiel really meant, why didn't he also use matteh?
Modern nation of Iraq included almost all of Mesopotamia, the homeland of the ancient Kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia. In 593 B.C., when Ezekiel was called to be a prophet, he was living in exile in Babylonia among the many Jews taken there by Nebuchadnezzar. The typical scribe pressed a wedge-shaped stylus into moist
clay tablets to make the complex writings familiar to us as cuneiform (wedge-shaped). But scholars today know that other kinds of records were being made in Mesoptamia: papyrus, parchment, and wooden tablets.
Modern archaeologists knew what papyrus and parchment were, but what were these wood tablets? How could cuneiform be written on wood? The scholars tentively concluded that the Mesopotamians must have painted the cuneiform signs on the wood.
This conclusion was abandoned some years ago, however, when San Nicolo discovered two clay tablets in the archives of the Eanna temple in Uruk in southern Babylonia, one dated at 596 B.C. and the other at 582 B.C.
Their writers both mentioned drawing beeswax (and some other substance unknown to San Nicolo) from the temple storehouse to make a filling from their wooden tablets. A filling? San Nicolo remembered that Romans & Greeks both made wooden wax tablets for record-keeping purposes out of boards whose surfaces had been cut below the edges in order to hold a thin coating of wax. The raised edges protected the inscribed surfaces when two tablets were put together.
Could the Babylonians have done the same thing? San Nicolo realized that for a cuneiform writer, writing upon wax with a stylus would be much like writing upon clay, whereas painting on a wooden tablet would have involved
a entirely different process. He concluded that the Babylonian wooden writing tablet was a wax writing board and published his conclusions to the scholarly world in 1948. He said that the reason no such wax tablets had ever been found was that they must hve been highly perishable.
But five years later this theory was confirmed, Archaeologist Max Mallowan made a discovery in a well in Nimrud, a city known as Calah in the Bible. They found fragments of two complete sets of tablets, one of Ivory and of Walnut, each composed of sixteen boards. Boath sets were made of the same size boards: 13" x 6" x
1/2", wax. The inscription on the cover of one of the wooden books reads: 'Palace of Sargon, King of the world, King of Assyria'. He caused Enuma Anu Enlil to be inscribed on an Ivory tablet and set in his palace of Dur-Sharrukin. When Sargon died in 705 B.C., the palace was plundered and the boards were ripped apart, probably to get to the hinges, which may have been made of gold. The boards were then thrown into the well. The whole work made such an extensive record that Mallowan could announce his discovery as the oldest known example of a book.
WHAT DID THIS PROVE & SUPPORT: This one discovery confirmed San Nicolo's hypothesis. Scholars had known from cuneiform references to Is Le'U that wooden tablets had been used in the Old Babylonian kingdom
as far back as 1700 B.C. And a thousand years later were being used in Assyria for making 'religious texts', rituals, reports, royal orders, registering names of individuals, registration of details of an estate, bill of lading of a ship, and record of oil distributed.
Once a set had been identified, scholars recognized that Assyrian bas-reliefs provided visual evidence of their use. They also popped up on equally ancient monuments among the Aramaeans of northern Mesopotamia. No examples for the Hittites are yet known, but San Nicolo noted that the Hittites, who also used a cuneiform scrip, mentioned writing some of their records on wood and had a special term for the scribe who did it.
Classical Scholars have long known that Greeks and Romans used wax tablets. Zacharius wrote the name of his infant son, John the Baptist, on such a tablet [Luke 1:63]. They continued to be used in Europe at least into the fourteenth century A.D. In short, using wax boards for writing was a rather common ancient practice extending over thousands of years [c. 1700 B.C. to A.D. 1400] and through many cultures.
ANSWER: Interpretation of this passage must be consistent with what we know of the language, & also must be in harmony with what we know of the context of the prophecy, for context determines meaning. Ezekiel's context is the
Babylonian world with its customes & practices; his language is Hebrew, a sister language to the Babylonian. The Babylonian Is, is cognate to the Hebrew Etz, both of which mean Wood. The fact that the ivory tablet is called in the Akkadian text, An Is Le'u made of Shin Piri-a " wooden tablet made of elephant ivory, "which seems an absurd contradiction-indicates that Is Le'u no longer meant "wooden tablet"; it meant "writing tablet", no matter what it was actually made of. Similarly, the Latin word for book, Liber, originally meant 'Tree Bark". Yet a librarian today is not a tree bark specialist!
Ezekiel 37:16...Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, for Judah (records of what we call the bible) and for his children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim (book of mormon) and for all the house of Isreal his companions….