The New Heaven's Children!—Chapter 37!DFO 22869/86

1. SO, LET'S GET BACK TO OUR STORY! WE WERE TALKING ABOUT CORN, & I told you that you could even eat raw corn! When it's fresh off the corncob it's nice & tender & fresh! It's sweet & it tastes good, although it's a little hard to chew. So that's one kind of grain. We got into all this talking about how to mill grains.

2. BUT THAT KIND OF MILL WHERE THE HORSE OR THE COW PULLED THE MILL AROUND WAS NOT THE FIRST KIND OF MILL. It was the first kind of automatic mill, you might say‚ that you didn't have to do by hand. Otherwise men would get out there, like Samson. They made him turn the mill, remember, & he was blind. (Judges 16:21) Then before that, if you were just a small farmer & you just grew your own grain you didn't have a great big grain mill, a flourmill‚ you just had a mortar & pestle.

3. WHY DO THEY CALL IT A FLOURMILL?—If you grind the grain down real fine like powder, what is it called? (Children: Flour.) Right! So you had a little apparatus that probably one of you older folks know of, but I wonder if you know the name of each of these tools? How would they grind the grain before they invented flourmills? (Children: A pestle?) That's the name for the long round thing that kind of looks like a big [club] with a handle.

4. (DAVID: A MORTAR & PESTLE!) Right! David got it! What is a mortar? (David: That's the little bowl.) Yes, a thick stone bowl, usually made out of thick stone. So you had a little mortar about the size of a serving dish, if you had a small family, & it was shaped like a bowl & it was made out of big solid heavy stone. Why? (David: So it wouldn't tip over!) Yes, so it wouldn't tip over, but what else?—If you take one of our big serving dishes & smack it like that, what would you do? (David: Break it.) Yes, break it all in pieces. You had to have a big, tough‚ thick‚ heavy stone that wouldn't break when you banged your pestle down.

5. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE PESTLE IS? It's kind of a big homemade hammer, shaped sort of like a [club]. … You put the whole grain in the mortar, the bowl. (Techi: Do you move it around or is it attached to the ground?) It's just sitting on the ground or on a table. They're so big & heavy that they don't move much. They had to be real thick, usually about six inches to a foot thick & a foot in diameter. (Techi: Oh, I thought you meant a little bowl.) Well, the smallest ones I've seen are about the size of a serving dish. Do you know what a serving dish is?—It's the biggest dish that you put on the table for the whole family to get their food out of. But a mortar was a very thick stone bowl at least about five or six inches thick & hollowed out in the middle.

6. YOU PUT THE GRAIN IN THE MORTAR & YOU TAKE THIS BIG PESTLE, A KIND OF A MALLET. it's a round piece of wood usually about three or four inches thick that is either flat or slightly rounded on the bottom, & the top is shaped into a handle that you can hold with your two hands like this, & then you pound the grain like this. You can still see'm in pictures or movies of Africa & places like that where they still live very simply, & you can pound the grain down like that until you finally pound the grain down into flour.

7. A MORTAR & PESTLE WAS THE FIRST GRAIN MILL. (Maria: We'll do that in the Millennium?) We can. The more work the Humans have to do, the less trouble they'll get into! That's why bad people were so good in the days when everybody lived on a farm, there was so much work to do, they could hardly get into any trouble! They didn't have time to get into mischief! As Grandmother used to say whenever she'd see us kids idle & not working, "Idleness is the Devil's workshop!" So that was the first flourmill, a mortar & pestle.

8. THEN THEY GOT THIS GREAT IDEA OF HAVING THESE TWO GREAT BIG MILLSTONES. One is stationary‚ on a platform or table or something. It had to be stronger than a table, usually it was some big strong block of wood like this—solid wood all the way to the ground‚ because those two big stones were heavy & they were about a meter or more across! They were bigger around than a barrel! The bottom stone stood still & the top one rotated by man power‚ animal power & later on they figured out how to use water power & wind power. (David: They're so small that you can turn them by hand?) Yes, with a handle. If they have a long handle that turns the upper millstone. You could do it that way too.

9. YOU PUT THE WHOLE GRAIN INTO THE MIDDLE HOLE OF THE TOP STONE & then you keep grinding it & gradually it grinds the grain as it moves out from that hole out to the edges of the stones & then the ground flour falls out through the crack between the two stones into a trough that is around the bottom stone to catch it. A small hand mill stone like David is talking about is about a meter wide & it has a little trough about so wide & shaped about like this to catch the flour. It comes out through the crack between the two stones & the little trough would be there to catch it. By the time it gets from that hole in the middle out to the edge it's no longer grains‚ it's flour, it's powdered like dust.

10. THAT'S WHAT THE LORD WAS THINKING ABOUT WHEN HE SAID, "HE THAT FALLS UPON THIS STONE SHALL BE BROKEN." If you just fell on top of it, it wouldn't hurt you much, would it? But He said, "He upon whom this stone shall fall, shall be ground to powder!" (Mat.21:44) If the stone falls on you, what happens? (David: You get ground into powder!) Yes! He was comparing Himself to a millstone!

11. THEN THEY GOT SUCH BIG, HEAVY MILLSTONES THAT A MAN COULDN'T TURN THEM & EVEN ANIMALS WEREN'T STRONG ENOUGH TO TURN THEM. (Techi: So what turned them?) So they figured out a flourmill. They always build them beside a good stream where the water flows very rapidly, a nice full stream of water‚ or a windmill where there is lots of wind. (Techi: I thought they had two millstones in the room to grind them.) Yes, but I'm talking now about a big flourmill where they've got big millstones & nobody could turn them‚ they were too big & heavy. (Techi: So they just broke down the whole thing?) No, they built it into a flourmill.

12. THEY PUT THE TWO MILLSTONES INTO WHAT THEY CALL A FLOURMILL. It's a big shed like a barn, & it's right beside a fast-flowing stream or a windmill with lots of wind. This is very interesting because we'll probably have a lot of them in the Millennium, so it can be part of our Story! You've got all kinds of power in the Millennium—you've got man power, you've got animal power, you've got water power & you've got wind power, & those different kinds of power do most of the work. And because you have wind power & water power, you also have some electric power generated by those big generators or dynamos being turned by water or by windmills. When you turn a motor by some other kind of power then it produces electricity.

13. SO HERE'S YOUR FLOURMILL: This table here is just about the right size for a millstone, only it would have to be twice as wide & big & round, & about a foot thick. But did you see the picture of the flourmill in our Heaven's Children Chapter? It showed the miller with this grain trough. He could just open the little door at the top of the grain trough & the grain would feed down the little grain trough into that hole in the middle of the upper millstone. (See Chapter 16).

14. AROUND THE BIG TOP STONE THEN THEY HAD THESE GREAT BIG WOODEN PEGS STICKING OUT. They bore holes into the stone all the way around the sides & the pegs were about so far apart, like this. See my fingers sticking out of the millstone? That's called a gear. Then they had another gear like this & these are called the cogs, like my fingers are the cogs. My hand is the millstone & my fingers are the cogs. I'd get another cogwheel like this, & when this wheel turns what happens?—It turns my hand, right? (David: And it grinds the grain!)

15. BUT HOW DO I MAKE THIS COGWHEEL TURN? (David: By the water coming down!) Right! From the middle of this cogwheel here there's a big shaft made out of wood. It's a big beam about six inches thick or more. It is attached to the middle of this cogwheel here so it would turn‚ & it was attached outside the mill to the center to this great big water wheel, & the water wheel was taller than this room‚ a big tall thing!

16. IF THE STREAM MOVED FAST ENOUGH & WAS POWERFUL ENOUGH, they would just bury the bottom part of the water wheel into the stream, & the stream moving along would turn this big wheel around which would turn this big shaft around, which would turn this cogwheel around, which would turn the millstone around! Do you get the point?

17. WHERE THE STREAM WASN'T VERY STRONG—even a small stream would work on this kind—they would direct the water from the stream to the top of the water wheel. The water wheel was this great big wooden wheel that had little wooden paddles or buckets on it. See these little paddles? It was a big wooden wheel with little paddles on it like this sticking out all over the water wheel to catch the water, & its weight would turn the wheel. So if they didn't have much of a stream, they would make the flourmill & the big paddle wheel low enough so that they could feed the water by gravity feed. Because they didn't have pumps in those earlier days, it would flow through what they called a sluice, which was just a long wooden box like a channel, & the water would flow through the sluice to the top of the water wheel so the weight of the water would turn it.

18. HERE COMES THE SLUICE HERE LIKE THIS, with the water shooting along the sluice & it would hit this paddle & the water wheel moved down here & it hit the next paddle. It had paddles all the way around, so it just kept this great big water wheel moving around like that, see?—Or some had little long buckets instead of paddles to catch the water.

19. THEN THE BIG BEAM OUT HERE, THE AXLE OF THE PADDLE WHEEL‚ would go into the mill with the cogs on the end of it like this. Put out your hand! Give me a cogwheel! You're the millstone & here comes my cog & my fingers fit down between your fingers like that & then it turns you around like that! So that's the way a flourmill works! In the Millennium we're going to have a lot of those!—And no pollution! Praise the Lord!

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family