{"id":494,"date":"2007-06-21T21:54:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-21T21:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/bibleandculture\/2007\/06\/dung--nab-it.html"},"modified":"2007-06-21T21:54:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-21T21:54:00","slug":"dung-nab-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2007\/06\/dung-nab-it.html","title":{"rendered":"Dung- Nab it!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We’re talking a lot these days about alternate fuels– ethanol for instance. But there is another natural resource that has long been used for fuel in the ANE, including at Haran where this picture was taken. Those little spherical objects in the picture. Well, that’s dung. More specifically its probably some combination of donkey, cow, and\/or camel dung. Nomads and the poor use it for fuel. They burn it to cook on, to keep warm, etc. In ancient times they likely used it for roasting sacrifices for whole burnt offerings to one deity or another. No wonder we hear in the OT from time to time that a sacrifice produced “an odor that was not pleasing to the Lord”, or to quote another Hebrew phrase “and it stank in the Lord’s nostrils”.<\/p>\n

It looks to me like we have a long way to go before we exhaust all the fuel possibilities produced naturally here in the U.S. Forget ‘clean’ coal, it’s about as clean as the ‘clean’ dung you are looking at above. I can just hear the nomads in Haran now complaining about their fuel options. One of them says “You know this fire doesn’t burn worth…..” You fill in the blanks \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re talking a lot these days about alternate fuels– ethanol for instance. But there is another natural resource that has long been used for fuel in the ANE, including at Haran where this picture was taken. Those little spherical objects in the picture. Well, that’s dung. More specifically its probably some combination of donkey, cow,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nDung- Nab it! - The Bible and Culture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2007\/06\/dung-nab-it.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dung- Nab it! - The Bible and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We’re talking a lot these days about alternate fuels– ethanol for instance. 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A graduate of UNC, Chapel Hill, he went on to receive the M.Div. degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Durham in England. He is now considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world, and is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. Witherington has also taught at Ashland Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt University, Duke Divinity School and Gordon-Conwell. A popular lecturer, Witherington has presented seminars for churches, colleges and biblical meetings not only in the United States but also in England, Estonia, Russia, Europe, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia. He has also led tours to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Witherington has written over thirty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. He also writes for many church and scholarly publications, and is a frequent contributor to the Beliefnet website. Along with many interviews on radio networks across the country, Witherington has been seen on the History Channel, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and the PAX Network.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/author\/bwitherington"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/199"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}