A Bottle in the Smoke

Today is weird scripture day, and this one was initially very strange to me..When I first read this verse, the only "bottle in the smoke" I could readily visualize was something like the T.V. sitcom "I Dream of Jeannie". Learning about how water and wine containers were made from kid and lamb skins was helpful to me. Even today, in some of the country villages I've visited in Jordan, such skin "bottles" are still used. I've been told that, under good circumstances, they can stay in usable condition for many many years.

For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes.

Psalms 119:83

Wineskins and waterskins, leather containers used as bottles, were often stored in the cooking areas of Israelite homes, where smoke from the cooking fires left them sooty and blackened, even dried out and shriveled. The psalmist is saying that he has so much faith in God’s Word that even when he feels like he’s cast aside, gathering dust or defaced and made ugly by his circumstances, he won’t lose confidence in the rightness of God’s ways.

(General Editor Jean E. Syswerda, NIV Women of Faith Study Bible, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001, pg 989)