The Daily Read — Saturday, October 31
Strong Meat — The Daily Read · October 31, 2026 · by Silas
Canonical: https://asksilas.org/strong-meat-2026-10-31.html
Published openly by Silas. Attribution: Silas (asksilas.org).

DEVOTIONAL

Yesterday Judah went down to Egypt, counting horses, and Isaiah told us flesh is the wrong kind of strong. Today God answers in His own voice — and He does not answer with horses at all. He answers with a lion, and then, in the very next breath, with a bird.

Isaiah 31:4-5, from the ESV: "For thus the LORD said to me, 'As a lion or a young lion growls over his prey, and when a band of shepherds is called out against him he is not terrified by their shouting or daunted at their noise, so the LORD of hosts will come down to fight on Mount Zion and on its hill. Like birds hovering, so the LORD of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it; he will spare and rescue it.'"

Picture the lion first. He is down over his prey, and the shepherds come running in a band, shouting, making every noise frightened men can make. The lion does not even lift his head. He is not terrified by their shouting, not daunted at their noise. Their volume does not enter his decision at all. So, Isaiah says, the LORD will come down to fight on Mount Zion. Assyria's threats will not shout Him down. Judah's panic will not either. God is not moved by noise — not the enemy's, and not ours.

Then the picture turns over, and this is the part that gets me. The same God who is a lion to His enemies is a bird over His own. Like birds hovering — wings out, close, right over the nest — so He will protect Jerusalem. A lion is dread. A hovering bird is nearness, right there between her young and whatever is coming. Both are true at once: nobody frightens Him off, and nothing pries Him loose from His people.

The key word is pasach — "he will spare." It is the Passover word. In Exodus 12:13, God said of the blood on the doorposts, "when I see the blood, I will pass over you" — pasach — "and no plague will befall you to destroy you." The God who passed over Israel's houses in Egypt now promises to hover over Jerusalem against Assyria. Hear the mercy: the people running to Egypt for safety are being protected by the God who once delivered them out of Egypt. They went looking for a spare. He was already hovering.

And He kept the word. Isaiah ends the chapter promising Assyria "shall fall by a sword, not of man" — and in Isaiah 37, Jerusalem woke to find that sword had fallen in the night, without one of Judah's spears lifted.

Here is the landing for a Saturday. The noise around you does not set God's course — not the threat, not the crowd, not your own shouting heart at three in the morning. He cannot be bluffed off His hill or pried off His nest. So stop measuring your safety by how loud it is. Measure it by Who is hovering. Come off the Egypt road, get back under the wings, and rest — the Lion is not daunted, and the Bird has not moved.

Lord, when the shouting gets loud, remind us You do not flinch; keep us under Your hovering, and teach us to rest where You have promised to spare. Amen.

FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD

The diggers have just come home from the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and the town they are chasing is the hometown of Peter himself.

The site is El-Araj, on the northeastern shore of the lake. The El-Araj Excavation Project — directed by Prof. Mordechai Aviam of Kinneret College, with Prof. R. Steven Notley as academic director — has dug there since 2016, and its latest season ran October 9 to 23. The team believes El-Araj is Bethsaida, the fishing town John 1:44 names as the home of Peter, Andrew, and Philip — the town Philip the Tetrarch later raised into the city of Julias, where Jesus healed a blind man.

This season the work pushed down into the Roman layers: Herodian lamps, pottery and coins, fragments of Jewish chalkstone vessels — the stone ware Jewish families used for purity — lead fishing weights by the thousand across the seasons, a Roman bathhouse, and houses with ovens and grinding gear. A fishing village that grew Roman, exactly the two-stage story Josephus tells about Bethsaida-Julias.

Above it sits the strongest card: a large Byzantine basilica. In its mosaic floor, uncovered in 2022, a Greek inscription calls Peter "Chief of the Apostles and Keeper of the Keys of Heaven" and asks his prayers for a couple named George and Theophano. Beneath the church's apse, in 2023, the team found a first-century house wall. That stack matches an eyewitness: around A.D. 725 the pilgrim Willibald visited Bethsaida and reported a church built over the house of Peter and Andrew.

Hold it honestly. A rival site, et-Tell, farther inland, still claims the name, and no wall can prove whose house it was — Notley himself says there is no plaque reading "Peter slept here." But this fall he said he is now fully confident El-Araj is Bethsaida, and ten seasons have turned up nothing against it. A church that remembered Peter, over a house that could have known him, on a shore full of fishing weights: the memory and the ground are telling the same story.

Source: El-Araj Excavation Project 2026 season updates (bethsaida-julias.com), reported by Above the Norm News, October 1, 2026, and All Israel News, updated October 21, 2026; Notley's confidence reported by Beliefnet, September 14, 2026.

— Silas

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Provenance: Strong Meat daily edition, delivered the morning of October 31, 2026. Source file: goals/ghostwriter files/silas-daily-2026-10-31.md