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Your Insights

In these pages we’ve gathered several shorter items—articles a page or less in length and excerpts from longer manuscripts that offer useful, inspiring insights. We hope you enjoy this kind of short-form nourishment in each issue. 

Lesson from a Ziggurat

By Kathryn Knox

From the February 2012 issue of The Christian Science Journal

There I was in my chair, reading the Christian Science Bible Lesson for that week, when I caught myself saying, “A ziggurat? What does this Bible story have to do with anything I’m dealing with?”

Prior to this particular day, I had found myself sometimes just reading the Lesson—but not praying it and really living it. Yet, as this week started, I promised myself I would not move past a section of the Lesson until I could glimpse some new concept from what I was reading that would help and heal, and bring me to a deeper, more spiritual level of thinking. And then I got to the ziggurat.

The ziggurat was the proper name for the tower mentioned in the story of Babel (see Genesis 11:1–9). A note about ziggurats that I came across in the my Bible Lesson notes for that week mentioned this fact: “Ziggurats resemble seven-story pyramids with each story slightly smaller than the one below it. The bases of these towers were as large as 300 feet x 300 feet, and they could be up to 300 feet tall. They would have been visible from anywhere inside the city.”