Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 19 · January 19
Broken Cisterns
“For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”
A man kneeling in a rock pit with a bucket of lime plaster, working it into the wall by hand, because the level dropped again in the night.
That is ordinary life in Judah. The country runs on limestone, limestone does not hold water, and so every household of any size cuts a cistern: a bell-shaped pit chipped out of rock, plastered inside, filled by the winter runoff off the roof. Honest work, and nobody is being mocked for it. A cistern was the difference between staying and leaving.
Two evils, Jeremiah says, and the first is the desertion: they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters. Living water in Hebrew means moving water, a spring, the kind that runs whether or not you are standing there. A fountain is not maintained. It is found.
The second evil is the labour. They have hewed them out cisterns. Somebody chipped that hole out of solid rock with hand tools over weeks. The sin arrives as effort, and from the outside effort looks exactly like diligence. Nobody drifts into cutting a cistern.
The flaw is named flatly: broken cisterns, that can hold no water. Plaster cracks. The crack is invisible in February when the rain is coming and the pit is filling, and you find out in August, which is the month you dug it for.
The man is still down there with his bucket.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 19 is The Blessing (Numbers 6:24-26).