365 Pearls of Wisdom

This second of the trilogy, Touching God, provides a daily short saying from the ancient sheik, Job, from King David's psalms, and from his son King Solomon's Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs. Job lived some thousand years before David and Solomon; yet we see the same wisdom of God shines forth in every millennium of mankind. Since it is illegal to copy long passages of modern translations, I spent many hours carefully paraphrasing all the ';Wisdom Literature' taken from the King James Translation which is not copyrighted. I updated the vocabulary used in 1611 Middle English to modern words. We no longer say thee, thou, hast, knowest, so those words all had to be modernized. Middle English vocabulary was sometimes different also. For example, ';froward' does not mean to go ahead; it means difficult. In 1611, words were spelled much differently, many letters of the alphabet shaped much differently, and numerous commas were inserted every few words. Their sentences were often in reverse order. For example, the text would read, ';I beheld not the moon,' and I reversed it to ';I did not see the moon.' We, today, have great difficulty reading English written four hundred years ago. Here is an example:'; In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earthe. And the earthe was without forme, and voyd; and darkeneA A e was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters. And God A aid, Let there bee light: and there was light. And God A aw the light, that it was goode: and God diuided the light from the darkeneA A e. And God called the light, Daye, and the darkneA A e he called Nighte:. and the euening and the morning were the firA t daye.'The beautiful cover is an original by famed watercolorist, Betsy Kemp Thompson.