Posted on 04/21/2008 3:57:10 PM PDT by Between the Lines
The remains of a burnt beetle found in a grain of wheat about 3,500 years old provided a group of researchers from Bar-Ilan University with a key to a question the Bible left without a definite answer: How did Joseph the Dreamer, who became the viceroy to the king of Egypt, succeed in preserving the grain during the seven lean years and prevent Egypt's population from starving?
According to the description in the book of Genesis, during the seven years of plenty in Egypt, Joseph had all the wheat collected in silos. "And he gathered up all the food of the seven years which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities; the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. And Joseph laid up grain as the sand of the sea, very much, until they left off numbering; for it was without number" (Genesis 41, 48-49).
The stores of wheat and barley served the inhabitants of Egypt during the period of drought and hunger that followed. But how did Joseph and the people of Egypt succeed in preventing pests from destroying the inventory they had accumulated, without any means of pest control and without being able to completely seal the storehouses? In order to answer that question, Prof. Mordechai Kislev, Dr. Orit Simhoni and Dr. Yoel Melamed from the laboratory for archaeological botany in the Life Sciences department of BIU used the burnt corpse of the beetle from the grain of wheat.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
Very interesting article. Thanks for posting it!
You have to read all the way to the end to find the answer.
They treated the grain with “fine sand” which scratched the beetles in storage.
Diatomaceous earth. I have some around here somewhere. I am supposed to have one of everything :)
I love articles like this. Thanks for posting it!
Cool.
or if you prefer food quality Diatomaceous Earth: Perma-Guard
For those who don’t know, diatomaceous earth is made of the skeletons of microscopic protozoa. Cool, huh?
That's supposed to kill cockroaches by getting through the joints in their exoskeletons and tearing up their internal organs.
Diatomaceous earth ping.
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