Whitewater rafting the Mediterranean Sea, circa 950 BC. Courtesy of The Casual English Bible.®
HOME DEPOT could not have delivered the cedars of Lebanon to King Solomon. He bought the raw logs to build the Jerusalem Temple and a palace.
Delivery of the lumber required Timber Jockeys—loggers on call to the King of Tyre, a city kingdom on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Lebanon.
They stepped aboard temporary rafts lashed together from massive cedar trees. And they rode that timber down the coastline, from Tyre to Joppa, at what is now Tel Aviv.
That’s about 90 miles (140 km).
Cussing uphill
Then it was up to Solomon’s people to roll, haul, and perhaps cuss those timbers 40 more miles (60 km) across the coastal plain and up into the rugged Judean Hills.
I know they were making the Temple, and they shouldn’t say nasty words. But it was insane work, against gravity, and they didn’t volunteer. They may not have been Israelites at all. Solomon drafted immigrants.
“Solomon took a census of non-Israelites living in the land. There were about 153,600 of them. He drafted every one of them” (2 Chronicles 2:17, Casual English Bible).
Kings got away with stuff like that. They still do.
Mapping 2 Chronicles red in the face
I finished the first pass at paraphrasing 2 Chronicles. Now I’m creating the maps to illustrate the stories.
I created the above “timber rafting” map this week. It took several days and a few dead ends. Not all my maps see daylight, for which everyone but me should be grateful.
We’re at around 900 maps for the Casual English Bible® now. We’ll probably add a couple dozen or more for 2 Chronicles. Lots of Bible stories going on there, and with plenty of geography.
Hackers for the Bible
I apologize that the resolution quality of the online map isn’t higher. That’s because of piracy. PDF downloads of the maps we provide are nice, though.
Some people seem to want those maps a lot, based on the hammering we’re taking from hackers: 17,000 attempts to hack the Casual English Bible® website this month; 4,500 this week.
But now I need to get back to mapping 2 Chronicles. I’m probably about half finished.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep.
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