Isaiah 54:12 And I will make your windows of agates, and your gates of carbuncles, and all your borders of pleasant stones. This precious stone is found in the East Indies, in colour is an intense scarlet, and held up between your eye and the sun it is a burning coal. The poet puts it into rhythm as he writes — "Like to the burning coal whence comes its name; Among the Greeks as Anthrax known to fame." God sets it high up in Bible crystallography. He cuts it with a Divine chisel, shapes it with a precise geometry, and kindles its fire into an almost supernatural flame of beauty. Its law of symmetry, its law of zones, its law of parallelism, something to excite the amazement of the scientist, chime the cantos of the poet, and arouse the adoration of the Christian. No one but the infinite God could fashion a carbuncle as large as your thumb-nail, and as if to make all ages appreciate this precious stone He ordered it set in the first row of the high-priest's breast-plate in olden time and higher up than the onyx and the emerald and the diamond, and in Ezekiel's prophecies concerning the splendours of the Tyrian court, the carbuncle is mentioned, the brilliancies of the walls and of the tessellated floors suggested by the Bible sentence, "Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire!" (T. D. W. Talmage, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. |
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