Muxworthy's Musings

  Introduction. Before I go any further let us first look at some of the names that we find in this passage:   First of all we have the Canaanite city of Ai (pronounced Ay-eye) the probable meaning of this is  ‘The Ruin’ which it later became. Secondly, we have Beth-Aven meaning house of idols/nothingness/iniquity/trouble. Now we come to Achan which again probably meant trouble, which is also the probable meaning of the Valley of Achor. So, as you can see there is an awful lot of trouble in this passage, and this was to be the case for the children of Israel and ultimately Achan. Following the destruction of Jericho, God forbade Israel to take anything whatsoever from that city for themselves. However, Achan thinks that this either doesn’t apply to him or he thinks that with all this loot lying around it won’t be missed. It’s funny how human nature never changes as we often reflect in the UK of the great community spirit that existed during the Blitz of 1940/41, wha...

Proverbs 13 v12:  Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. I have just finished reading a book entitled The History of the Jews, it’s quite big book as it spans from Abram to the establishment of the state of Israel in the late 1940’s. One of the points the author makes early on is that outside of the Old Testament, Apocrypha and certain Jewish historians there is very little written history when compared with what we have for other civilisations of antiquity. The reason for this being the fact that because of the stateless nature of the Jews up until the 1940’s, added to the fact that because of persecution and being driven from various countries most history was learned orally with only the scriptures being written down. For me though the thing that comes through in this book is the fact that there have been many false messiahs in Jewish history, both before and after Jesus. This led me to consider the fact that when we look at the trial ...