Are there other millstone connections for John?
None of us can look into John’s mind and see exactly how his thoughts happened. We can look at what he wrote about and look over the bits and pieces of Jewish culture and his time with Jesus, however. While Googleville does not seem to be a fan of God their search engine as best I can tell is unbiased. So we can Google “Bible” and “millstone”1 and uncover some things about millstones in the Bible.
Millstones were used to grind things: usually various grains into flour. While we never see millstones in our daily lives now-a-days it was something John and those of the 1st Century would have been familiar with.
One story that fascinates young boys is in Judges 9 down around verse 50. There was a fellow named Abimelech. Young boys don’t usually remember the name as easily as the thing that happened to him. Abimelech was one of Gideon’s sons who decided he would be king. He stirred up a controversy and then killed 70 of his male siblings on a single stone. Then he began to reign in Israel. Starting kingdoms like he did sort of gets things off on the wrong foot, and about 3 years later someone else wanted to be king. That started a civil war of sorts where Abimelech was finished. An unnamed woman pushed a millstone off a tower and smashed onto his head.
While that is an example readily available to boys (it came to my mind pretty fast too) it is probably not among the first that rose into John’s mind. Among those, and likely one of preeminence, is an odd thing taught by Jesus. He related a circumstance where death was better than life. Children, Jesus pointed out, have a wonderful capacity to believe in God. Adults shed that and many will turn around to help children shed their belief. See, some unbelieving adults corrupt children. Jesus said that was a damnable offense. Jesus said that it would be better to have a millstone tied around one’s neck and be drowned in the sea than to be guilty of this offense (Mark 9, Luke 17, Matthew 18).
John surely was present during that discourse and this concept would have been readily available to him while watching and later on while thinking through this God-given vision.
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