And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. Isaiah 58:11
"Watered gardens to which, for their wealth of fruitfulness and beauty, the prophets afterwards likened their happy life in the glorious coming age: “Their soul shall be like a watered garden” (Jer 31.12; see also Isa 58.11).
The burning rainless heat for six months running, from the end of April to the end of October, makes it impossible to have a garden of any value in Palestine unless it is thoroughly irrigated once a week; and possible, when thus supplied with “the water of life,” to have one that is green and fruitful all the year round, yielding no less than four crops, and the varied products of almost all temperate and tropical climes!
In these “watered gardens” the labourers, all of whose limbs are naked, work almost as much with their feet as with their hands. The ground is divided into little plots about 12 feet square, surrounded by tiny trenches, and, when turning the rills from the main stream into each of these, the gardener kicks a hole with his foot into the trench through the lightly turned-up soil, and after sufficient water has run past he stops up the breach in the same easy fashion.
Hence, when Moses, speaking of Egypt, says to Israel, “Thou wateredst it with thy foot, like a garden of green vegetables” (Deut. 11:10- an excellent 'weird scripture'), he simply alludes to the important fact, that, in the rainless land of the Pharaohs, farm-culture needs irrigation, natural or artificial, in the same way as garden-culture requires it in the more favoured climate of Palestine, where sufficient rain falls to raise the main crops."
(Neil, Revd James., Peeps Into Palestine, Stanley Martin & Co. Ltd, UK, ~1913)
Hi Donna -
ReplyDeleteI'm the mother in law of Shayla Edwards Taylor, April's best friend. She recommended your blog to me and it is wonderful. I've shared it with many of my LDS women friends and my 5 children. I hope they take advantage of your sharing the insights and understanding you have worked hard to gain!
This post is so on target! We lived 17 years in Higley (absorbed now into Gilbert - site of a new temple awaiting groundbreaking), AZ where we irrigated. We dug and maintained the irrigation ditches and worked with a shovel and our feet. We fought gopher holes nearly every cycle. I can so picture the ease with which water could be directed by the toes and feet of the workers. And our climate there (outside of Phoenix) was about the same as that in Egypt - HOT much of the year.
How nice to hear from you--we adore Shayla and have offered to make her an honorary Nielsen.
ReplyDeleteThat is fun for me to know that Biblical-style irrigation methods are used in Arizona.