Back to school today for students in our community–perhaps in yours, too. Every morning I share a Bible verse meme with my grandchildren to start their day. Today’s meme featured Proverbs 24:13-14.
Honey. Wisdom. Bright Future. Enduring Hope.
Good words for all of us every day, they reminded me of other Scriptures:
The fear of the Lord is pure,
enduring forever;
the ordinances of the Lord are reliable
and altogether righteous.
They are more desirable than gold—
than an abundance of pure gold;
and sweeter than honey,
which comes from the honeycomb. ~Psalm 19:9-10 (HCSB)Pleasant words are like a honeycomb:
they drip sweet food for life and bring health to the body. ~Proverbs 16:24 (VOICE)
Many of us have a sweet tooth–not necessarily a healthy thing. Having a sweet tooth for God’s Word, on the other hand, a beautiful thing. (By the way, honey has health benefits for us, too. [Learn more about them here.]) Do you crave the sweetness of the Scriptures–God’s love letter to us, the most beautiful one we’ll ever receive, as sweet as the honeycomb? Unlike wishing for a bag of chocolate in the house to feed our sweet tooth, our techie tablets and cell phones put the Bible in easy reach for most of us all the time. As our students return to school many carry screens with them every day. They have God’s Word in their pocket or backpack to encourage them at any given moment.
Aware honeycomb formed the basis for early writing material, as a writer I dug deeper into the subject. Ancient civilization used honeycomb to create the great-great-great (times many more) grandparents to our modern techie tablets. Pliable warmed honeycomb (beeswax) poured in a wooden frame and left to set. The writer used a stylus to carve the words into the wax. Reheating allowed the surface to be “reset” and used again. This article on Scottish pollinators discusses the significance of beeswax in the development of writing tools. Interestingly, we derive the writer’s term “style” from the stylus used with the honeycomb tablet.
This blog post would be incomplete without a few fun facts about honey, too. I found these and many more here.
~According to one researcher, ancients such as Alexander the Great were sometimes buried in honey. After about a hundred years, candied corpses were supposedly dug up and eaten as medicine.
~Bees control the thickness and clarity of their honey by fanning their wings at ventilation points within the hive at varying rates to control evaporation of water.
~Beekeepers in France discovered blue and green honey, the result of bees foraging in the waste created in the production of M&Ms.
Copyright 2021, Lynn U. Watson
Photo used in meme is from Pixaby
Bee artwork from Pixabay
Scripture taken from The Voice™. Copyright © 2008 by Ecclesia Bible Society. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked HCSB are taken from the Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Holman CSB®, and HCSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.