Biblical Traditions Regarding Windows
This came in via the email transom this AM and we thought it was worth sharing. It is from Daily Wisdom.
Then Noah decided to check and see if there was dry land. He fired up his laptop computer which seemed to take forever to boot up and finally, “After forty days, Noah opened the window he had made”(Genesis 8:6). He was very frustrated that it took him forty days to open the window, but he was only using a 286 with 640KB of RAM, so what could he realistically expect?
Like Noah, others were also disappointed by early versions of Windows. 1 Samuel 19:12 records that David was let down by a window and he fled and escaped. (Who among us has not been let down by windows on occasions.)
You can almost hear excitement turn to disappointment in the young woman’s voice when she exclaims “My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look! There he stands behind our wall,…” then she realizes that he is distracted by his new Pentium system and she continues, dejected: “scrolling through the windows” Song of Solomon 2:9 (Slight paraphrase)
Early computer viruses were often referenced, for example, Jeremiah warns that “Death has climbed in through our windows…” Jeremiah 9:21. In later verses he attributes this to a woeful lack of prerelease testing. (Note: Some manuscripts omit these verses to avoid legal reprisals) Others had more success at using their systems, Elisha “Opened the east window”(2 Kings 13:17) and Jeremiah was renown throughout the land because “He makes large windows” (Jeremiah 22:14) and was able to use the tile facility so that “the windows were placed high, in sets of three”(1 Kings 7:4). Using the color feature he was able to make them “with cedar and decorated in red”(1 Kings 7:4 also).
However, most of the Old Testament windows users were not very productive because there was nothing in their windows until several thousand years later when Paul “shook the dust from his feet in protest and went to Iconium” (Acts 13:51) where first century icons were created. But even Paul himself had difficulty with the new systems. He was later put in prison because one of the icons named Eucalyptus fell out of the window and was “picked up dead” (Acts 20:9) which is not a good thing.
And finally, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the Bible also speaks to the future of Windows. How telling are the verses in Ecclesiastes 12:3-5 where the writer predicts: “the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men stoop and those Working With Windows grow dim… Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets.”(Emphasis mine) Some scholars see this as predicting that Windows will be the death of us all, but the original text is unclear on this. Some think that the reference to “grow dim” is referring to mental capability, not physical demise, I think both translations have an element of truth!
“Our mouths were filled with laughter…” Psalms 126:2
