Eastern Manners and Customs: "Kick Against the Pricks"; "Scrip"

Acts 9:5  •  2 min. read  •  grade level: 7
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Pricks or goads are carried by every plowman in the East. They are long poles, with one end pointed as a prick, the other furnished with a sharp, flat piece of metal, like a chisel, which “is used to clear the share from earth and weeds, and to cut the roots or thorns that catch or choke the plow. It was to sharpen this part of the goads that the Philistines permitted the Jews to have a file in the early days of Saul.” The use of the goads, then, is to guide into the right path, to keep the right way, and to urge on to exertion. Hence “the words of the wise man are as goads,” (Ecclesiastes 12:11Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; (Ecclesiastes 12:1)). “To kick against the pricks” is said to have been “a proverbial saying, taken from the action of an unruly ox, which when pricked by the goads, kicks back in anger, and thus wounds himself more deeply, suffering for his folly and rebellion. R. A. W.
The “scrip” which our Lord directed His disciples on their journey to take with them, was probably like the “ shepherd’s bag even a scrip” into which David put his five smooth stones from the brook. To this day such scrips are carried by shepherds and farmers of the Holy Land, and in them they carry their simple provision, a little bread, a little cheese, and some olives. Their manufacture is not a complicated matter. “All shepherds have them,” writes Dr. Thomson, “and they are the farmer’s universal vane mecum. They are merely the skins of kids stripped off whole, and tanned by a very simple process.” R. A. W.