Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 70 · March 11
One Generation
“And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.”
A grave on the north side of a hill in the mount of Ephraim, and a country that has stopped counting the years since the funeral.
Judges opens by burying Joshua, then reports the collapse in one sentence. There arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel. Two things went, and the order is worth holding. They did not know him, and they did not know what he had done. The works were public events. A river stopped. A city fell. Twelve stones were stacked at Gilgal for the stated purpose of making a child ask his father what they were doing there, so that somebody would be standing by to tell him.
Set that beside a house on your street without collapsing the two, because they are different sizes of problem. Israel lost a national memory inside one lifetime with the monuments still standing in the fields. What goes missing in a family now is quieter: the year the money ran out and something arrived, the illness, the answer nobody has mentioned since. Those are your stones, and they are stacked nowhere.
Judges never accuses the parents. It records the gap and leaves it unexplained, which is harder to sit with than a rebuke would be. The generation that ruined the country is described entirely by what it had never been told.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 70 is Already Blessed (Ephesians 1:3).