JOSEPH #46 | JOSEPH IN EGYPT#28 | LAST WORDS OF JACOB #17
Pastor Christopher Choo
Lesson 3642
JOSEPH #46
JOSEPH IN EGYPT#28
LAST WORDS OF JACOB #17
9. ASHER #2
THE PROPHECY OF MOSES REGARDING OIL
Before Moses died, he blessed the children of Israel. Of Asher he said, "Asher is most blessed of sons; let him be favored by his brothers, and let him dip his foot in oil. Your sandals shall be iron and bronze; As your days, so shall your strength be" (Deut. 33:24,25).
The boundaries of Asher's territory are given in considerable detail in Joshua 19:25. Only a few of the places named can be identified with certainty.
The allotment of Asher formed a strip of land from 8 to 10 miles wide running northward along the Mediterranean shore to the neighborhood of Sidon, touching Issachar, Zebulun, and Naphtali on the East. Asher seems to have taken possession of the territory by a process of peaceful penetration, not by conquest, and as we have seen, he never drove out the Phoenicians from their cities.
It is clear from the context of Moses' prophecy that the oil in this passage is olive oil. The Hebrew word "Shemen" is used 190 times in Scripture for "generally olive oil whether pure or prepared for various uses as perfume or ointment."
As a result, some scholars insist that the blessing of Moses to Asher should be understood in the light of its ancient Near Eastern context. Asher was literally blessed with an abundance of olive oil and he would crush the olives with special shoes made of iron and/or brass in order to allow the oil to run out.
But the discovery of an onshore oil site was made in 2010 in northern Israel by the exploration company Givot Olam. The company based its search for oil in Israel on Scripture. This Meged 5 field site, located near Rosh Ha’ayin, has the potential of huge quantities of oil. Drilling continues to develop a commercially viable way to extract it.
Further advances were made when the process by which natural gas could be liquefied was invented. Liquefaction of natural gas made it easier to transport and less susceptible to sabotage attempts.
In early 2009 a huge find of natural gas was discovered fifty-five miles west of the port of Haifa in the Mediterranean. It was called the Tamar field. This was followed a few months later by a find twice as large in the Mediterranean between Israel and Cyprus called Leviathan.
To put these discoveries into perspective, they are near twice the size of what the British have found in the North Sea.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented in a CNN interview with Piers Morgan in March 2011, that Israel might forego building nuclear reactors and rely on generations of natural energy instead.
What is our lesson today?
We may tie down Moses' prophecy over Asher literally to mean olive oil. But petroleum and natural gas that could be liquefied were not known words in the currency then.
The tantalizing challenge remains: do we limit God's prophetic words only to its literal meaning or it has more meaning than what we can define with our limited use of human words?
