wood

• early commerce in

79:1.4When cli­matic con­di­tions made hunt­ing un­prof­itable for the mi­grat­ing And­ites, they did not fol­low the evo­lu­tion­ary course of the older races by be­com­ing herders. Com­merce and ur­ban life made their ap­pear­ance. From Egypt through Mes­o­po­ta­mia and Tur­kes­tan to the rivers of China and In­dia, the more highly civ­i­lized tribes be­gan to as­sem­ble in cities de­voted to man­u­fac­ture and trade. Ado­nia be­came the cen­tral Asian com­mer­cial metropo­lis, be­ing lo­cated near the pres­ent city of Ashkhabad. Com­merce in stone, metal, wood, and pot­tery was ac­cel­er­ated on both land and wa­ter.

• rapping on w. perpetuates customs of tree worship

85:2.5The be­lief that wa­ter or pre­cious met­als be­neath the earth’s sur­face can be de­tected by a wooden di­vin­ing rod is a relic of the an­cient tree cults. The May­pole, the Christ­mas tree, and the su­per­sti­tious prac­tice of rap­ping on wood per­pet­u­ate cer­tain of the an­cient cus­toms of tree wor­ship and the later-day tree cults.

• Jesus was carpenter
• Jesus wrote on boards

126:1.6The im­proved eco­nomic con­di­tion of the Naz­a­reth fam­ily was re­flected in many ways about the home and es­pe­cially in the in­creased num­ber of smooth white boards which were used as writ­ing slates, the writ­ing be­ing done with char­coal. Je­sus was also per­mit­ted to re­sume his mu­sic lessons; he was very fond of play­ing the harp.

• Jesus was carpenter

129:1.2He spent one week at Tiberias, the new city which was soon to suc­ceed Sep­pho­ris as the cap­i­tal of Gal­i­lee; and find­ing lit­tle to in­ter­est him, he passed on suc­ces­sively through Mag­dala and Beth­saida to Ca­per­naum, where he stopped to pay a visit to his fa­ther’s friend Zeb­e­dee. Zeb­e­dee’s sons were fish­er­men; he him­self was a boat­builder. Je­sus of Naz­a­reth was an ex­pert in both de­sign­ing and build­ing; he was a mas­ter at work­ing with wood; and Zeb­e­dee had long known of the skill of the Naz­a­reth crafts­man. For a long time Zeb­e­dee had con­tem­plated mak­ing im­proved boats; he now laid his plans be­fore Je­sus and in­vited the vis­it­ing car­pen­ter to join him in the en­ter­prise, and Je­sus read­ily con­sented.

129:1.3Je­sus worked with Zeb­e­dee only a lit­tle more than one year, but dur­ing that time he cre­ated a new style of boat and es­tab­lished en­tirely new meth­ods of boat­mak­ing. By su­pe­rior tech­nique and greatly im­proved meth­ods of steam­ing the boards, Je­sus and Zeb­e­dee be­gan to build boats of a very su­pe­rior type, craft which were far more safe for sail­ing the lake than were the older types. For sev­eral years Zeb­e­dee had more work, turn­ing out these new-style boats, than his small es­tab­lish­ment could han­dle; in less than five years prac­ti­cally all the craft on the lake had been built in the shop of Zeb­e­dee at Ca­per­naum. Je­sus be­came well known to the Galilean fish­er­folk as the de­signer of the new boats.

• Jesus wrote on boards

187:1.2Ac­cord­ing to cus­tom the cap­tain led the pro­ces­sion, car­ry­ing small white boards on which had been writ­ten with char­coal the names of the crim­i­nals and the na­ture of the crimes for which they had been con­demned. For the two thieves the cen­tu­rion had no­tices which gave their names, un­der­neath which was writ­ten the one word, “Brig­and.” It was the cus­tom, af­ter the vic­tim had been nailed to the cross­beam and hoisted to his place on the up­right tim­ber, to nail this no­tice to the top of the cross, just above the head of the crim­i­nal, that all wit­nesses might know for what crime the con­demned man was be­ing cru­ci­fied. The leg­end which the cen­tu­rion car­ried to put on the cross of Je­sus had been writ­ten by Pi­late him­self in Latin, Greek, and Ara­maic, and it read: “Je­sus of Naz­a­reth—the King of the Jews.”