The Lord's Blessing

Introduction

The Tiny Window into The Past

Archeologists have got to be some of the most patient and persevering people in the world. They are not to be considered treasure hunters but anything and everything that would give them a window into past cultures is considered a treasure. They are respectable scientists in how they are looking for evidence of what it was like to live in those ancient days. As they dig not only with shovel but also with a teaspoon, their eyes are trained to spot clues that might lead to other clues and facts about the past.

In the city of Jerusalem, in Israel, “David’s City,” is a small section of land going south from the Temple area. There you will find several tombs which were surprisingly untouched by centuries, even millennia of previous generations of God’s people.

On that hot, cloudless day in July 1969, Dr. Gabriel Barkay and his team were examining a burial site and a few empty tombs long ago plundered of any interesting artifacts. Usually that meant arrowheads, ivory pieces of jewelry, and pottery pieces. On this day he was working with his team of assistants and helpers, some of the volunteers being teenagers.

He uncovered the remains of a Byzantine church with a mosaic floor and a few tombs cut out of the rock with roofs that had collapsed. Looking carefully, he saw that the tombs had already been robbed of anything valuable. Among the team members there was a 13-year-old boy named Nathan who had been sent off to clean one of the tombs from the rubble. Dr. Barkay told young Nathan to clean the area because the photographer was going to come and take pictures.

After Nathan was finished cleaning, he got bored and started to

bang randomly with his hammer on the rocks. To his great surprise the stone floor gave way and revealed that he had broken into the ceiling of another tomb below. He went back and told Dr. Barkay. The two were joined by a whole team of people, and together they found two feet of accumulated artifacts: There were semi-precious stones, arrowheads, ivory, glass, gold and silver. Then came the discovery of an ancient pendant or amulet containing some rolled up silver scrolls.

Unrolled, one amulet is nearly four inches long and the other is an inch and a half long and about a half inch wide. On the smaller one there is more detail in addition to the famous blessing. It reads. “May he/she be blessed by YHWH, the warrior /helper and the rebuker of evil.” “YHWH keeps the covenant and graciousness towards those who love (him) and keep (his commandments)….for YHWH is our restorer and rock.” Then follows the blessing we are studying. YHWH are the four letters which abbreviate the Hebrew word for Yahweh, which stands for Jehovah, the name of Almighty God.

Obviously, these scrolls were not intended for reading. The letters are far too small, and the writing is concealed inside the scrolls. There are about 100 words arranged in 12 lines of text. The person who did the writing was able to fit all of that onto a silver sheet the length of a matchstick!

This begs the question: If these tiny inscriptions were not meant for reading, what purpose did they have? They were designed to create a sense of intimacy between the god or goddess and the wearer. As they dangled comfortably from the neck, the wearer had the feeling that their god was close to the heart. It was easy enough for Hebrews to adapt that same idea to amulets of their own making and to texts from the Bible. The words would come to mind constantly. The Psalmist put it this way: