Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 28 · January 28
What Mean These Stones
“That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?”
Twelve wet stones in a heap at Gilgal, hauled up out of a riverbed on twelve men's shoulders, with nothing written on them.
That is the whole monument. No inscription, no name, no date, no carving of the priests standing in the water with the ark.
And the design brief is given before the stones are lifted: That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?
The memorial is built to be unintelligible on its own. It cannot work without a child asking and a parent answering, and the answer is scripted for them: Israel came over this Jordan on dry land. The stones store nothing. They start conversations, and when the conversation stops the pile is scenery.
The reason given runs a long way past a family keepsake: That all the people of the earth might know the hand of the LORD, that it is mighty. The audience for twelve rocks in a field is everybody.
Our own memorials work the other way round. A photograph is captioned, dated and located by the phone that took it. It explains itself, so it never needs a person, and no child asks. We have solved storage and lost the question.
The warning is on the site itself. Gilgal, where these stones were set up, is the place Amos later tells Israel to come and multiply transgression, and Hosea tells Judah not to go near. The stones were presumably still standing. The story had stopped being told there, and a monument nobody can explain does not go quiet. It gets a new meaning attached to it by whoever holds the field.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 28 is More Than (Romans 8:37).