"Stoning": an Updated View

Stoning ... actually a rather peaceful sound. Listen!

After working 8.5 hours picking field stones with my father driving the tractor & wagon, Steve (my brother) and myself picked & ditched 9 loads of field stones with only a half hour for lunch and a quick nap. Steve later estimated that our efforts removed about 18 tons of stones from a field that will provide a grass/alflafa mix of hay for Steve's Belted Galloway beef cattle for years to come.

Loading x 9

Unloading x 9

Since picking stones is a physical activity, it allows the mind to comtemplate and sometime stray into the abstract. That is how I came to review the act of 'stoning', a retributive act, sanctioned by the laws of Moses and by other stone age "cradles of civilization?".

A quick Google of 'stoning' images shows how uncivilized this activity is TODAY!

I would like to suggest that this traditional destructive stoning could be replaced by a more civilized "picking stones"; a constructive activity that would allow all parties to improve the seed beds for "future crops/civilizations" as well as provide an abundance of inexpensive building material for:

• access roads


• wall construction in non-earthquake prone areas


• the "Genesis 22: Sacrificial Grill"; as mentioned in my previous blog entry


• stone walls for long term fencing projects

• Archeology, a secondary benefit of the new stoning concept - Steve, displays evidence of the "iron age" or was that "bronze"?
  

Finally...

..by the end of a long day of picking and unloading stones, all parties involved in the dispute [the stoners and the potential stoned] would be in unanomous agreement:

"What's for supper?"

...and the traditional stoning concept could be left to the stone ages!

Oh well! ... as sister-in-law Linda says: "You have too much time on your hands!"

Chendrashaker