Posted on 04/21/2008 3:57:10 PM PDT by Between the Lines
The remains of a burnt beetle found in a grain of wheat about 3,500 years old provided a group of researchers from Bar-Ilan University with a key to a question the Bible left without a definite answer: How did Joseph the Dreamer, who became the viceroy to the king of Egypt, succeed in preserving the grain during the seven lean years and prevent Egypt's population from starving?
According to the description in the book of Genesis, during the seven years of plenty in Egypt, Joseph had all the wheat collected in silos. "And he gathered up all the food of the seven years which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities; the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. And Joseph laid up grain as the sand of the sea, very much, until they left off numbering; for it was without number" (Genesis 41, 48-49).
The stores of wheat and barley served the inhabitants of Egypt during the period of drought and hunger that followed. But how did Joseph and the people of Egypt succeed in preventing pests from destroying the inventory they had accumulated, without any means of pest control and without being able to completely seal the storehouses? In order to answer that question, Prof. Mordechai Kislev, Dr. Orit Simhoni and Dr. Yoel Melamed from the laboratory for archaeological botany in the Life Sciences department of BIU used the burnt corpse of the beetle from the grain of wheat.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
Very interesting article. Thanks for posting it!
You have to read all the way to the end to find the answer.
They treated the grain with “fine sand” which scratched the beetles in storage.
Diatomaceous earth. I have some around here somewhere. I am supposed to have one of everything :)
I love articles like this. Thanks for posting it!
Cool.
or if you prefer food quality Diatomaceous Earth: Perma-Guard
For those who don’t know, diatomaceous earth is made of the skeletons of microscopic protozoa. Cool, huh?
That's supposed to kill cockroaches by getting through the joints in their exoskeletons and tearing up their internal organs.
Diatomaceous earth ping.
Note: this topic is from 4/21/2008. Thanks Between the Lines.
Rohl (in "Pharaohs and Kings") follows Kenneth Kitchen that Zaphnath-paaneah translates as "he who is called Pa'aneah", and that Pa'aneah was really Ipiankhu, a name common in the Middle Kingdom but "'not any later.'" His Biblical wife Asenath was named "Ius-en-at ('she belongs to you')". [p 350]Joseph and Potiphar[R]ealizing that the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt took place not during the New Kingdom but during the preceding Middle Kingdom, in order to find out whether the personality of Joseph or the patron of the early stage of his career, Potiphar, is referred to in the historical documents, we have to look into those of the Middle Kingdom. The task appears simple. According to the Book of Genesis Potiphar was "an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard." In the register of the private names to the Ancient Records of Egypt by James Breasted, we find the name Ptahwer. Ptahwer was at the service of the Pharaoh Amenemhet III of the Twelfth Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom. According to an inscription of Ptahwer at Sarbut el-Khadem in Sinai dated in the forty-fifth year of Amenemhet III, his office was that of "master of the double cabinet, chief of the treasury." ...Since there is only one Ptahwer in the historical documents, and since he lived in the time when we expect to find him, we are probably not wrong in identifying the biblical Potiphar with the historical Ptahwer... In the days of Amenemhet III there occurred in Egypt a famine enduring nine long years... Thus it seems that the Pharaoh in whose days was the seven years' famine was the successor of the Pharaoh in whose days began the rise of Joseph's career (if Yatu is Joseph). Potiphar, who lived under Amenemhet III, probably lived also under his successor. The inscription which deals with Ptahwer mentions a man whose name is transliterated by Breasted as Y-t-w. Among the monuments of Amenemhet III's reign is one of the Storekeeper who was honored together with two other persons... If we remember that according to the Scriptural narrative Joseph was appointed storekeeper of the State (Gen. 41:40-41) in anticipation of the seven lean years, with the powers of a chief Minister of State or Vice-King, we may suspect in Yatu the Biblical Joseph. In the Scriptures it is said that his name was changed by Pharaoh to Zaphnath-paaneah, but still his original name may have been in use until he became next to the Pharaoh in importance.
by Immanuel Velikovsky
Good thing Egypt didn't have a PETA group out there - or they would've shutdown Joseph's operation for using such 'cruel' practices.
Either that, or Joseph and/or the Pharaoh would've just lopped off their heads...
Yes! DE is wonderful stuff. It saws the bugs in half by lodging in the joints of their exoskeletons!
I ran a test on diatomaceous earth to see if it really works. With a teaspoon of the stuff in one container of rice and none in the other container of rice, I added bugs to both. The next morning, all of the bugs in the diatomaceous earth container were dead - zero survivors. Rice with DE tastes just fine; I tested that too.
Then there was the God thing, too. Duh.
Liberals should be very afraid.
It’s a good idea to wash the grain before cooking to rinse away the diatomaceous earth.
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