Interestingly, the Lord’s Supper was not always kept in the way we may be familiar with today. Nowadays many people celebrate the memorial of the Last Supper and Jesus’ death with small, identical wafers of bread, and small measured portions or sips of wine for all the participants. But things were not always that way.
In the New Testament, we find that the apostle Paul reprimanded the church at Corinth for the way in which they celebrated the Lord’s Supper. Apparently, people took their own food and drink to the event – the rich taking much, and the poor very little. As Paul wrote: “when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk” (1 Corinthians 11:20-21). Paul tells the church they must eat together and indicates that restrained amounts should be available for all (verse 33).
This was the regulated form which became practice in the remembrance of the Last Supper that is the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in many denominations today. But although we may remember this New Testament story, another change that we may not be aware of has occurred through time relative to the Last Supper.
Although we may be conscious of the abundance that many people enjoy in the developed world today compared to many other areas, we may not be as aware of the abundance so many have in today’s world compared to what was available in the past. Fascinating but little publicized research conducted several years ago at Cornell University throws light on the abundance which many of us take for granted.
In a careful study published as “The Largest Last Supper: Depictions of Food Portions and Plate Size Increased Over the Millennium,” researchers Brian and Craig Wansink analyzed the amount of food depicted in fifty-two paintings of “The Last Supper” produced over the last thousand years. Each painting was analyzed in order to ascertain the content of the meals depicted, and changes which occurred over time in the size of portions in the paintings. Cleverly, the sizes of the loaves of bread, the main food dishes, and the plates were all compared to the average size of the heads shown in the paintings in order to gain a benchmark reference of size. A computerized CAD-CAM program was used to allow selected parts of the paintings to be scanned, then compared in order to get accurate size comparisons to calculate the food portion sizes with more precision.
As the researchers suspected, the number and size of the food portions in these paintings increased dramatically over time. From AD 1000 to the present, the amount of the food depicted in the paintings increased by 69%, and the size of the depicted plates increased correspondingly by some 65%. This is certainly not a matter of chance, the researchers say. There is no question that the amount of food available to people in much of the Western world has grown dramatically over the hundreds of years covered by the study and this is reflected in artistic representations. What was first shown as a simple meal has grown in artistic interpretations to more recent depictions of the Last Supper which suggest almost feast-like proportions compared to earlier paintings.
Today, many of us enjoy much greater abundance than our ancestors, as well as those less fortunate than us in other parts of today’s world. Representations of the Last Supper can remind us that we have much to be thankful for physically, as well as spiritually. Paul himself reminds us of this when he refers to the cup of the Lord’s Supper as “the cup of thanksgiving” (1 Corinthians 10:16) – something we can, and should, appreciate physically as well as spiritually.
And the king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, “You will not come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you off”—thinking, “David cannot come in here.” Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, that is, the city of David. And David said on that day, “Whoever would strike the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack ‘the lame and the blind,’ who are hated by David’s soul” (2 Samuel 5:6-8 ESV).
This passage in the book of 2 Samuel is puzzling at first sight. Did David really hate the lame and the blind? Some translations attempt to smooth out the statement – the NIV, for example, renders the verse “those ‘lame and blind’ who are David’s enemies,” but the translation “‘the lame and the blind,’ who are hated by David’s soul” found in the ESV is an accurate and a quite literal one.
First, we need to ascertain who “the lame and the blind” were. Most modern commentaries presume that the Jebusite inhabitants of Jerusalem believed that the fortifications of their city were so strong that even those who were mobility or visually impaired would be able to ward off David and his army. While this interpretation might seem very reasonable, it leaves unanswered why David would say his soul hated the lame and the blind. We also see that “the lame and the blind” could not have simply been a verbal taunt as David told his men that because of the situation they should secretly enter the city by way of a hidden watershaft. Finally, we see that David offered a large incentive – the rank of “chief and captain” (1Chronicles 11:6) – to anyone who would lead the way in attacking “the lame and the blind.”
Archaeology may perhaps help us to better understand the situation. There is some evidence that the ancient Jebusites were connected to, and perhaps associated with the Syro-Hittite peoples of the Near East. As a result, in 1963, the renowned Israeli soldier, archaeologist, and scholar, Yigael Yadin (1917–1984), noted that ancient clay tablets that have been found with texts written by these people include instances of a ritual known as the “Soldier’s Oath” that may be relevant to what David said (Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands: In the Light of Archaeological Study Volume 2, pages 268-269). These “oaths” were magical rituals made against enemies in which blind and deaf individuals were paraded before them and it was then said:
“Whoever …. turns his eyes in hostile fashion upon [our] land, let these oaths seize him! Let them blind this man’s army and make it deaf! Let them not see each other, let them not hear each other! Let them make a cruel fate their lot! … Let them make him blind! Let them make him deaf! Let them blind him like a blind man! Let them deafen him like a deaf man! Let them annihilate him, the man himself together with his wife, his children and his kin!” (quoted from James B. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, pages 353-354.)
This kind of sympathetic magic appears to be exactly what the ancient Jebusites were doing – placing a terrible curse on anyone who attacked their city. If this is the case, as Yadin suggested, the biblical text is certainly more understandable. This would perhaps explain why David told his men that because of the situation they should secretly enter the city by way of a hidden watershaft – perhaps to avoid the lame and blind “curse carriers,” and why he needed to offer a large incentive to anyone who would lead the attack under these circumstances. As for “hating” the lame and blind, David’s comments would most likely apply to the lame and blind curse carriers rather than to all people with these disabilities.
This certainly makes sense as the Bible clearly shows David did not hate such people – it documents in detail his love for and help of Saul’s lame son Mephibosheth whom he restored and invited to eat regularly at his table (2 Samuel 9:10-13).
Whatever the precise meaning of David’s words in 2 Samuel 5:6–8, it is clear that the king did not hate the disabled – and Yadin’s suggestion as to the king’s actual meaning is as good as any. In this case, as in many others, passages that seem to contradict what we know of plain biblical teaching are often better understood with historical background to illuminate them.
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