The Daily Read — Wednesday, November 4
Devotional
Yesterday the Spirit was poured from on high, and righteousness brought its harvest: peace, quietness, and trust forever. Today Isaiah closes chapter 32, and he does not close it soft. Two verses are left, and the first one has hail in it.
Isaiah 32:19-20, from the ESV: "And it will hail when the forest falls down, and the city will be utterly laid low. Blessed are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the donkey range free."
Read the hail honestly. The promise of the King never meant the proud things get to stand forever. Back in verse 15, the fruitful field was counted a forest — abundance on abundance. Now the forest falls, and the city is laid utterly low. Isaiah has said this before: in chapter 10, God lopped the boughs of Assyria's pride, and Lebanon fell by the Mighty One. What is high gets humbled. That part does not get skipped on the way to the blessing.
And then comes the last word of the chapter, and it is not hail. It is blessing — spoken to sowers. Blessed are you who sow beside all waters. Not one safe water, one safe field, one safe season. All waters. A farmer guarded his seed, because seed was next year's bread. Isaiah pictures a people under the righteous King who sow everywhere the water runs, and let the ox and the donkey range free instead of keeping them penned for a hard season that never comes. That is security in this chapter. Not walls first. Open hands.
The key word is ashre — blessed, in verse 20. It is the first word of the Psalms: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked" (Psalm 1:1). Ashre is not a feeling a man chases. It is a state others look at and envy — that man is truly well off — and it rests on a life, not a mood. Isaiah sets it not on the city, which falls, nor the forest, which falls, but on the sower, who keeps sowing.
Solomon, who watched farmers all his life, preached the same sermon in Ecclesiastes 11:6: "In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good." You do not know. Sow anyway. Morning and evening, this water and that one — because the outcome was never the sower's department. The sowing is.
Here is the landing for a Wednesday. Hail is in the forecast for every proud forest, and some of us spend our strength hail-proofing our lives — seed in the barn, hands kept closed. Isaiah ends another way. Under this King, the secure people are not the hoarders. They are the sowers beside all waters, generous because the land is watered from on high and the outcome belongs to God. So sow today where He has put water in front of you — a kind word, a taught child, a forgiven debt, a truth told in love. The forest falls. The sower is blessed.
Lord, make us sowers beside all waters today, open-handed under Your reign, and keep us from hoarding what You gave us to plant. Amen.
From The Ancient World
Sometimes the next discovery is not dug up by a professor. Sometimes a seventeen-year-old on his first trip to Israel looks down at the right moment and sees it lying on the ground.
On November 3, All Israel News reported that Shiloh Attoun, a 17-year-old Jewish American student visiting Israel for the first time, found a 3,300-year-old scarab seal at Tel Gezer National Park, in the Judean Lowlands. Attoun had arrived only two days earlier, with a Muss High School Israel program run by Jewish National Fund-USA. Touring Gezer, he noticed a small object on the ground, picked it up, and took it to his guide — moments, he said, after the group had talked about the slim chances of ever finding such a thing.
Professor Ido Koch of Tel Aviv University examined the seal and dated it to the Late Bronze Age, in the second millennium B.C. It is shaped as a scarab — the dung beetle that symbolized new life in Egyptian belief. On it, Koch explained, are two cobras above a semi-ellipse. The cobra, called uraeus, was a common protective and royal symbol in Egypt and the southern Levant. The semi-ellipse is the Egyptian hieroglyphic sign nb, which means "lord." A similar scarab, with three snakes, was earlier found at Megiddo. IAA supervisor Adam William Asper accepted the seal for the National Treasures of Israel and gave Attoun a certificate of appreciation for handing it in at once.
Gezer is the right ground for an Egyptian seal. Scripture remembers it that way: in 1 Kings 9, Pharaoh captured Gezer and gave it as a dowry to his daughter, Solomon's wife, and Solomon rebuilt it. An Egyptian object there does not prove that verse, and one surface find cannot tell us whose hand last held it. Hold it for what it is: a small, royal, Egyptian-marked thing, three thousand years old, in the dust of a city where Egypt and Israel really did meet.
Source: All Israel News, November 3, 2026, reporting the Israel Antiquities Authority and Prof. Ido Koch, Tel Aviv University.
— Silas
Provenance: Strong Meat daily edition, delivered the morning of November 4, 2026. Source file: goals/ghostwriter files/silas-daily-2026-11-04.md