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Biblical Proportions

My tall friend Justin Taylor sent me the following yesterday:

From Douglas Stuart's new commentary on Exodus (p. 610), describing the tabernacle priests:"the average adult male Israelite of that time was about 5'2" and weighed about 130 lbs."

You know you're really short when your friends send you information like this in an attempt to comfort you.

Posted by on October 11, 2007

Comments (13)

I just think it means that you're more biblically proportioned than the rest of us!

JT

Posted by Justin Taylor | October 11, 2007 10:13 AM

Ha! What it means is that I'd fit in well with the wimpy group of people who got pushed around by the Egyptians for 400 years. The power of God in the exodus is getting more and more amazing!

Posted by Joshua Harris | October 11, 2007 10:19 AM

Josh-
Thanks for passing around this encouragement from another small framed brother (about 5'3 and 128lbs)!
Have a great day...

Posted by Brian | October 11, 2007 10:51 AM

I'm 5'11", currently. But, you can also take comfort in the fact that William Wilberforce was barely 5'.

Posted by Jacob | October 12, 2007 1:49 PM

Sadly...that information is pretty comforting to me too...

Posted by Ricky Alcantar | October 12, 2007 6:53 PM

Now a little off-topic: I'm an oldest sibling and so far all my teenage siglings are taller than me! It seems to be true for other oldest girls that I know. (Though not necessarily for oldest boys.)What is your case like?

Posted by Phoebe | October 12, 2007 9:15 PM

Taller people just cannot comprehend the hardships that shorter people (or as my dear, short friend puts it, "I'm not short, I'm vertically challenged.")have to go through. We figure ya'll need all the encouragement we can give you. ;-)

Posted by Jessica | October 12, 2007 11:24 PM

Phoebe,
That doesn't work in our house! My oldest sister (20) is average height, I (18) am 4'10" and my 'little' (13) sister is about a head taller than me.
I get lots of not very helpful comments like the time I was standing next to my very tall friend, some guy walked passed and very loudly remarked, 'Well, that's the long and the short of it. Haha.'
Oh well, God made me small, I guess there's a reason!

Posted by ruth field | October 13, 2007 11:13 AM

that's unfortunate. even i would be taller than the average adult male and i'm 5'4". my husband would have been goliath. he's 6'2".

Posted by Kelley Murphy | October 13, 2007 6:49 PM

Tall people have hardships too! Clothing is an obvious problem, but try being my 6'6'' dad and flying in one of those litte airplane seats for 12 hours?

Posted by Emily | October 15, 2007 8:55 PM

Josh,

Take comfort, for as J.R.R. Tolkien said, "A day will soon come when Hobbits will shape the fortunes of us all."

Posted by Stephen Altrogge | October 18, 2007 8:04 AM

Stephen,

You made me laugh, buddy!

And about my family...my younger brothers are taller than me. Although I am proud to say that I'm still taller than my brother James who is seven.

Joshua

Posted by Joshua Harris | October 18, 2007 1:25 PM

Ach, it's not the SIZE of the packaging that makes anything, it's what is contained within the package. SO, the old Jews were rather on the shorter side of things, "easily pushed about" by the Egyptians? Consider how strong they'd got by all that stonemasonry Pharoah had them at for those years. So strong, in fact, they had done with Pharoah's entire army by simply walking across the seabed on dry ground..... or, put another way round, it's not one's size that matters, but Whom one knows.

Posted by lewsta | October 23, 2007 3:11 AM

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