RELIGION FOR RENT
by Steve Zeisler
Luke 6:46 records a penetrating question from the lips of Jesus. He says,
"Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord' and do not do what I say?" He
means it as a question primarily, not as a rebuke. He is asking us to think
through why it is that we so often quickly say, "Lord, Lord,"
as we pray to him with our requests, honor him with our words, and sing
his praise-yet don't do what he says.
I know very few Christian charlatans-double-dealers who deliberately use
the name of Christ, knowing there is no responsiveness to him in their heart.
But I know a great many hypocrites, including the person who wears my shoes
every day-people who describe their faith with their words, but don't live
up to it in reality. And we don't understand why it is that we say, "Lord,
Lord," and yet treat him as if he weren't Lord at all. What makes that
reality our experience? The section we've come to in the book of Judges
will give us some insight into this.
Most of us do not often give the flesh, our rebellious old nature, anywhere
near enough credit. Deep down, we don't believe that our estrangement from
God, our self-love, is as serious an issue as it is. I think the virus that
causes AIDS is a powerful metaphor of our spiritual condition. Perhaps one
of the reasons God has allowed it to exist is to remind us of the virulent
spiritual disease that exists at a very deep level within us. Scripture
says that our life is in the blood; if there is anything that is central
to our physical existence, it is our circulatory system. That is where the
HIV virus, this life-threatening disease that is dangerous to others and
dangerous to oneself, is carried.
When I was a little boy, I had a group of friends, and we decided to form
a club. We thought of ourselves as the Young Boys Valiant or some such thing,
and we were going to take on life together. We'd seen a cowboy movie about
Indians being blood brothers, so we made little cuts in our wrists and put
our blood together so we would all be blood brothers. How unlikely it is
that anyone here would commingle his or her blood with that of any other
adult in this room without asking some very serious questions, given the
dangers involved today.
The virus that causes AIDS is a disease that exists at the core of our physical
existence. Our sin nature exists at the core of who we are without Christ.
As we encounter the issues in the book of Judges, we are reminded of how
wretched we are without the Lord, how even our best intentions will do us
no good at all. Jesus had to die for what's best in us, if you will. Our
greatest accomplishments are riddled with sin without him, let alone the
base things that we've done. If we lose sight of that, we've lost sight
of a very important truth. God caused the book of Judges to be written to
help us keep that truth in view.
Let's begin reading at Judges 17, verse 1:
Now there was a man of the hill country of Ephraim whose name
was Micah. And he said to his mother, "The eleven hundred pieces of
silver which were taken from you, about which you uttered a curse in my
hearing, behold, the silver is with me; I took it." And his mother
said, "Blessed be my son by the LORD." He then returned the eleven
hundred pieces of silver to his mother, and his mother said, "I wholly
dedicate the silver from my hand to the LORD for my son to make a graven
image and a molten image; now therefore, I will return them to you."
So when he returned the silver to his mother, his mother took two hundred
pieces of silver and gave them to the silversmith who made them into a graven
image and a molten image, and they were in the house of Micah. And the man
Micah had a shrine and he made an ephod and household idols and consecrated
one of his sons, that he might become his priest. In those days there was
no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.
The narrator of this story (some claim it was Samuel, but scholars don't
really know who wrote the book of Judges) was a brilliant storyteller. There
are subtleties in the way he presents his material, and if we think about
them, they will help us step back and see things that we might not otherwise
see.
The tone of this story as it begins in chapter 17 is very upbeat. You have
Micah returning the money, the mother invoking God's blessing, and so on.
The tone suggests reconciliation, God, and positive things, but, against
our expectations, this is really the story of all kinds of treachery, double-dealing,
and manipulation. One of the reasons for that is that the narrative begins
in the middle, with Micah returning the money; what we don't see is Micah
stealing the money.
At the beginning of the story Micah rips off his mother for eleven hundred
pieces of silver. When she finds out it was stolen, she pronounces a ringing
curse, tellingly enough in the presence of her son (probably staring him
in the eye). As the narrator implies, we ought to assume that she suspects
it was her son who stole the money. Micah gets scared to death; he's superstitious
enough to believe that if God is going act on this curse, then he's in big
trouble. So he returns the money to her. Her pronouncement of blessing on
him is really removing the curse (their belief in those times was that the
person who uttered a curse could cancel it with a blessing).
She says nice things about God in the course of all this and decides to
commit idolatry in his name. She creates an idol that is to honor him, against
the express statements by the Lord that idolatry was anathema, never to
be considered. At the beginning of the Ten Commandments was the insistence
that the Jews should never worship another god and should never make an
idol in God's name.
In this opening episode in verses 1-4, there's an interesting play on words
in Hebrew. The name Micah is actually a contraction, and through the rest
of the chapter the contraction is used. The long form of the name in verses
1 and 4 is Miciahu, which is the statement,"Who is like the Lord?"
or, "Who is like Yahweh?" One helpful translation of it is "Yahweh
the Incomparable." So in verse 1 when we meet a man whose name is Yahweh
the Incomparable, we expect much of the story; again, it's a positive beginning,
but the story turns out to be much less than we expect.
After Micah and his mother work out this business about the money and the
making of the idol, we're told in verse 5 that Micah then has this shrine
in his house. He consecrates one of his sons to be a priest; that is, he
simply invents a priest out of his son. And worship is to go on in his backyard
shrine with the idol, the ephod, the household gods, and the priest.
Verse 6 makes the point: "In those days there was no king in Israel;
every man did what was right in his own eyes." This is the first time
we encounter this statement in the book of Judges. Now, I've mentioned it
throughout this series because it's really a theme for the whole book. The
fact that there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in
his own eyes, was the problem. No one was greater than the individual. They
had not bowed the knee either before a king who was the representative of
God or before God himself. Every person consulted only his own heart, only
his own interests, in determining what was right. There was spiritual anarchy.
It's important to note in chapters 17 through 21 that these final stories
in the book of Judges are more or less addenda and probably would fall chronologically
earlier in the book, not after the story of Samson, which we just covered.
This is a series of stories in which there is no external enemy in place.
You'll recall that whenever a judge was raised up to save his people, it
was because somebody from outside the covenant people had attached them
and made their life miserable: Moabites, Midianites, Ammonites, Philistines,
or somebody else.
These last stories are terrible and heart-wrenching. When you read them,
especially the final chapter, you feel they shouldn't even be in the Bible.
"What in the world is this doing here?" you wonder. In every case
it is not an external oppressor that has ruined life for them; they are
doing it to themselves. The people of God are oppressing themselves, killing
themselves, manipulating themselves, and degrading and lying to themselves
because there's something wrong inside. It reminds us again of the metaphor
of the HIV virus, the disease that is in the bloodstream, not airborne from
outside. The problem is in their heart: There is no sovereign, no Lord,
no one greater than the individual. Everyone does what is right in their
own eyes.
Let's read the rest of chapter 17, and then we'll talk about the people
we encounter. Verses 7-13:
Now there was a young man from Bethlehem in Judah, of the family
of Judah, who was a Levite; and he was staying there. Then the man departed
from the city, from Bethlehem in Judah, to stay wherever he might find a
place; and as he made his journey, he came to the hill country of Ephraim
to the house of Micah. And Micah said to him, "Where do you come from?"
And he said to him, "I am a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah, and I am
going to stay wherever I may find a place." Micah then said to him,
"Dwell with me and be a father and a priest to me, and I will give
you ten pieces of silver a year, a suit of clothes, and your maintenance."
So the Levite went in. And the Levite agreed to live with the man; and the
young man became to him like one of his sons. So Micah consecrated the Levite,
and the young man became his priest and lived in the house of Micah. Then
Micah said, "Now I know that the LORD will prosper me, seeing I have
a Levite as priest."
You get a feel for Micah's orientation in life in the final sentence in
verse 13. Everything he's done up to this point has been for his own prosperity.
He stole the money from his mother to gain prosperity. He's created a priest
in his son, knowing he was really cheating when he did that. Then a good
deal comes along in the Levite, one of the people who are supposed to be
priests, so he throws his son out of the priesthood and installs this man,
saying, "Now that I have a Levitical priest [magic dust] serving at
my [idolatrous] shrine in the back yard, God will be forced to prosper me."
Prosperity was his great desire in life.
One of the things we can easily see in this story is that relationships
in which you would expect trust, beauty, and life-giving are exactly the
opposite. There are two such relationships. First, in the Scriptures and
in our experience the essential human relationship characterized by caring
and giving is that between mother and child. In Isaiah 49:15 where God is
making a point about his commitment and love for his people, he says, "Can
a woman forget her nursing child, and have no compassion on the son of her
womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you." In order to
underline the greatness of his love, he points to the greatest of relationships
between humans, that between a mother and her child, and says, "I love
you even more than that." And if mother and child is the relationship
we expect to be most trust-filled, the relationship between a spiritual
shepherd and a seeker of God stands out as well, in which an individual
has taken the responsibility to speak for God and give life to those whose
hearts are broken, who call out for compassion, and who want to worship.
Surely that relationship ought to be one in which there is giving, trust,
honesty, and hope. Mother and child, and priest and seeker are the two relationships
that are exactly in focus here, and they are filled with manipulation and
self-serving. They are the very opposite of what they ought to be. We are
being made to face the human predicament, the tragedy of the human heart,
by seeing these two relationships gone awry.
You might very well have a boss who is cruel. That's unfortunate, but life
goes on. Your neighbor might be difficult; everybody periodically has a
difficult neighbor in their life. You might even meet a dishonest cop. You
can imagine all sorts of relationships in which people shouldn't treat you
badly, but if they do you can manage without too much difficulty. But when
the relationship between a mother and a child or between a spiritual shepherd
and a seeker has become filled with self-serving, then we're pretty near
the bottom of things. And that's exactly what we find in this story.
Everyone is a user. Let's start with the mother. The mother is going to
use her son Micah to her advantage. He steals the money from her, she suspects
it was him and pronounces this frightening curse that terrifies him into
giving the money back. She never once confronts him with the theft or goes
to him with any kind of honest appeal. She doesn't expect him to change
his evil ways. She just scares him into giving the money back. Once he's
done that, although she takes the curse off by announcing the blessing,
she then uses Micah to gain nine hundred pieces of silver for herself. She
says all the money will be dedicated to the Lord, but she takes two hundred
of it and has an idol made, gives Micah the idol, and keeps nine hundred
pieces-perhaps she is off to the race track or something. She's brought
God into the picture and handed Micah the responsibility of keeping him
happy by having a shrine in the back yard, and thus she's protected from
having to worry about Micah or anyone else taking the money again. There
is nothing loving, up-front, or life-building about her relationship with
Micah.
What do we know about Micah from this story? Well, he's a thief to start
with. We don't know how he does it, but he sees his mother's wealth and
makes off with the money. When he has to give the money back, he gets an
opportunity to create a "God center" in his back yard. He goes
for that and puts his son in place in the priesthood. As soon as he has
a chance to get a better priest, he throws his son out and installs this
other man. He would use his mother, his son, the Levite from Judah-whomever
and whatever he can get his hands on-all for the business of creating prosperity
for himself. That's his goal as we see in verse 13. So he's a user; he probably
learned it as his mother's knee from an early age.
What about the Levite, the third person in the story? He is a man who has
the mantle of spiritual leadership because of his heritage. The Levites
were the tribe in Israel who were not given a territory to inherit; they
were to be sown throughout the nation to serve as spiritual leaders for
their people. Some would serve in the temple and take care of the sacrificial
system. Others would live out in the countryside and be a pastoral encouragement
to people. This man, whose name we will finally uncover at the end of this
story, has absolutely no sense of serving God. He has the religious vocation,
the name Levite, the opportunity, and the standing to do it, but all he
is interested in is finding a place of security for himself. He has not
been called by God to act; he also is acting in his own self-interest. He
jumps at the opportunity to live in Micah's house: "Oh sure, I'll run
your idol worship in the back yard. No problem. I'm glad to do that."
But you can imagine him striking for higher wages later on if the opportunity
that is about to come up were not to present itself. He's there for the
money. He will abandon Micah at the drop of a hat, steal all of his religious
articles, and take off with the group that offers him a better deal in chapter
18.
Every one of these people is a user on the make in this story. There's nothing
healthy about the way they relate to each other. The greatest tragedy in
this, perhaps, is that every one of them invokes God to help them use the
other people. Everybody is talking about God all the time. The mother is
calling on God to curse and to bless, and she builds an idol in God's name.
Micah gets his shrine and wants to make God happy with him, installs priests
and takes out priests, and makes ephods and more household gods. He's got
a molten image and a graven image. He's really interested in God and talks
about God all the time. There are prophecies, priests, and shrines throughout
the story. The Levite is a God-person and he's supposed to do God-things.
And they are all serving themselves in the name of the Lord. They're not
just using each other, but in the process they're trying to use God.
Perhaps most sadly of all, every one of them is doing what is right in their
own eyes. None of them set out to be a "sleaze;" they didn't wake
up and said, "I'm going to do something terrible today." Every
one of them was trying to do what occurred to them was the best thing to
do. You can imagine Micah, for example, thinking of his mother. Micah is
old enough to have grown children, and his mother is probably much older.
He thinks, "Ah, she's going to die pretty soon, and I'm going to inherit
the money anyway. I can use it. She's a tightwad of an old bag, and she
hasn't treated me very well. I might as well just steal the money and make
off with it now. She'll never miss it. It's going to be mine and I deserve
it." You can hear him running this whole argument through his mind
as he takes the money. He's a thief, but presumably he's doing it because
it's right in his eyes; it makes sense for him to do it. If you faced each
of these people with their actions and told them that what they were doing
was sinful and antagonistic to the purposes of God, they would just give
you a blank look.
I had an experience this week that is reminiscent of this. I was really
taken aback when I saw myself. If you had asked me early in the week, "Steve,
are you the kind of person who would deliberately and loudly humiliate another
individual who had never even done anything to you in front of any number
of onlookers?" I would have said, "No, I'm not that kind of person.
I wouldn't do that." But I was at a high school baseball game this
week. And I remember saying, in front of a whole crowd of other people,
fifteen feet from an umpire, "Hey, blue, punch a hole in that mask.
That was a terrible call!" I was trying to humiliate the umpire, who
had never done anything to me. He was doing the best he could. (It wasn't
his fault that he was incompetent.) I wanted him to feel bad and to act
differently, so I was denigrating him out loud in front of all these people.
The custom allows for that; it's the way baseball fans act, etc., etc. I
was doing what was right to me, but I was hurting another person, unless,
hopefully, he'd gotten thick-skinned enough over the years that he paid
no attention.
The tragedy in this story is that these people think what they are doing
is right, but it is filled with unrighteousness. Our predicament apart from
Christ is so great that what we do best makes us deserve hell. Our noblest
accomplishments are riddled with self-service. The kindest thing we'll ever
do has huge measures of wanting to be appreciated or approved of or something
else in the midst of it, if only we could see it from God's perspective.
The problem is vicious, deadly, awful! Perhaps it's only when we encounter
it in accounts like this in the book of Judges that we're able to see ourselves
as we are in fact; it serves as a mirror for us.
I want to add one word of parenthesis here before we move on to chapter
18. The Levite in this story scares me personally, and I'm asking for your
prayers. The opportunity to use spiritual leadership, spiritual standing,
the respect and so forth associated with a Christian office, to get rich,
to serve yourself, to advantage yourself is a temptation that everybody
in Christian ministry faces. Pray for our pastors, elders, and everybody
else who has any kind of responsibility in this church. It comes easily,
without even the realization that you're doing it, to use the role of a
shepherd to benefit not the sheep but the shepherd. I urge you to ask hard
questions about anybody in any setting you're in who aspires to spiritual
leadership. Ask whether they are motivated because they love God and have
been called by him to the ministry they're in, whether (not perfectly, but
essentially) their ministry is one of responding to what God has asked them
to do. This Levite is using God's name for his own interest; we'll see it
in spades in chapter 18. It's something that you don't want to see in the
Christian leaders of your church. Anybody in leadership needs to be the
kind of person who wants to please God more than he or she wants to do anything
else. Only that desire allows for resistance to the temptation that comes
up.
Let's pick up the story at chapter 18 verse 1:
In those days there was no king of Israel; and in those days
the tribe of the Danites was seeking an inheritance for themselves to live
in, for until that day an inheritance had not been allotted to them as a
possession among the tribes of Israel. So the sons of Dan sent from their
family five men out of their whole number, valiant men from Zorah and Eshtaol,
to spy out the land and to search it; and they said to them, "Go, search
the land." And they came to the hill country of Ephraim, to the house
of Micah, and lodged there. When they were near the house of Micah, they
recognized the voice [the accent] of the young man, the Levite; and they
turned aside there, and said to him, "Who brought you here? And what
are you doing in this place? And what do you have here?" And he said
to them, "Thus and so has Micah done to me, and he has hired me, and
I have become his priest." And they said to him, "Inquire of God,
please, that we may know whether our way on which we are going will be prosperous."
And the priest said to them, "Go in peace; your way in which you are
going has the LORD's approval."
The Danites, in fact, were given a possession. When the Israelites conquered
the land, the Danites were told to occupy a region between Ephraim and Judah.
It was filled with enemies, and the tribes of Ephraim and Judah were much
more powerful than the Danites. The Danites didn't like the deal they were
given and were never very successful in taking it over. So now they have
decided that they want a different inheritance. They send out spies heading
north to look for a different place for themselves.
On their way, these five spies hear a man with an accent that suggests that
he is both not an Ephraimite originally and probably a Levite, and they
strike up a conversation with him. Once they realize he's a "rent-a-priest,"
they say, "Oh, go inquire for us and find out if our way is going to
be successful." Now, if they really wanted to find out, they would
ask somebody who knew them better-a Levite or a prophet in their own region
who would ask some hard questions of them. But they realize that this man
is a mercenary, and so he's the one they ask the question of. He doesn't
even bother to go into the back yard and consult the idol or do anything
else. He immediately says, "Oh sure, go on your way. You have the Lord's
approval." So they go trotting off to the north. As the story unfolds,
they find a region (at the foot of what is now known as the Golan Heights)
that is terrific and well-watered, and there's an undefended city there.
They go back and don't even allow for discussion, but talk six hundred men
into forming a war party. They're going to take this new region and move
the tribe up there.
Let's read verses 19 and 20 from the middle of that account. These six hundred
warriors are now on their way north to beat up the poor folks there.
And they said to [the Levite], "Be silent, put your hand over
your mouth and come with us, and be to us a father and a priest. Is it
better for you to be a priest to the house of one man, or to be priest
to a tribe and a family in Israel?" And the priest's heart was glad,
and he took the ephod and household idols and the graven image, and
went among the people.
They rip off all Micah's religious articles, and the Levite falls in
with these six hundred Danite warriors heading north. Of course it's a better
deal: a whole tribe rather than just one man. Micah comes after him and
says, "What do you think you're doing?" They laugh at him and
say, "There are six hundred of us, Micah. If you want to get rough,
we'll be glad to." So Micah, instead of prospering as he hoped, ends
up with less than he had.
The Danites go north with this priest and Micah's idols. Verse 27:
Then they took what Micah had made and the priest who had belonged
to him, and came to Laish, to a people quiet and secure, and struck them
with the edge of the sword; and they burned the city with fire. And
there was no one to deliver them, because it was far from Sidon and
they had no dealings with anyone, and it was in the valley which is near
Beth-rehob. And they rebuilt the city and lived in it. And they called
the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan their father who
was born in Israel; however, the name of the city formerly was Laish.
And the sons of Dan set up for themselves the graven image; and Jonathan,
the son of Gershom, the son of Moses [the New American Standard says
Manasseh, but it should say Moses], he and his sons were priests to
the tribe of the Danites until the day of the captivity of the land.
So they set up for themselves Micah's graven image which he had made,
all the time that the house of God was at Shiloh.
The story of the Danite migration ends here by making a number of tragic
statements. It's clear that the narrator is sympathetic to the cause of
the people in Laish. In the wars of conquest, when Joshua led the people
into the land of Canaan, it was said that the iniquity of the Canaanites
had risen to the point that God himself brought judgment upon them. They
had acted wickedly and deserved the treatment they got during the conquest.
They were armed cities, people who could fight back, and God led his people
(when they obeyed him) in either destroying or thrusting out the Canaanites
who were in the land. This group of people far in the north was not part
of the territory of conquest. They are, as the narrator describes them here,
"a people quiet and secure." Their city is undefended, and they
are causing no trouble to anybody. The Danites ruthlessly kill them, not
because God sent them on that errand, but because they didn't like the deal
they had in the south, which involved fighting tough enemies like the Philistines
and Ammonites. So they lay waste these innocent people in Laish. And then
in their pride at what they've done, they name the city after their great
ancestor Dan. It's as if they don't see what they're doing in the light
of history. They think they've done something good.
We're told that the leader in the worship of the idol that would stay in
Dan and be a source of problems in generations to come was a descendant
of Moses. The ancient scribes were so embarrassed by this that they actually
stuck in a little letter at one point to make it look like the name was
Manasseh, but it's clear to every scholar who has ever looked at it that
the name is really Moses. Our narrator doesn't give us that until the very
end. This Levite is Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Moses. He is
a direct descendent of Moses himself, and he is the one who is leading this
people in the godless use of religion for self-benefit.
The last statement here is a chilling and sad note as well. It says that
all the time that these things are taking place, the house of God or the
tabernacle is at Shiloh. Now, Shiloh is in the hill country of Ephraim.
Micah's house could not be not more than a few miles from Shiloh. There
the idol is made, the Levite who has no place to go sets up his initial
business as a "rent-a-priest," and the events at the beginning
of this tragic story take place: theft, manipulation, and naming God while
denying his value in their lives. All of that happens within just a few
miles of the very place the tabernacle is located. If Micah's name, "Yahweh
the Incomparable," represented his heart, if anybody really cared about
God, they could easily go and worship God in the place where he said he
should be worshiped.
"Why do you call me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say?"
The answer suggested in this story in the book of Judges is that we have
a very serious problem: Our hearts are more desperately wicked, more self-serving,
more willing to use religion without encountering God than we will admit
to ourselves. Let me read the rest of the paragraph in Luke 6 that I quoted
from earlier:
"And why do you call Me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I
say? Everyone who comes to Me, and hears My words, and acts upon them,
I will show you whom he is like: he is like a man building a house,
who dug deep and laid a foundation upon the rock; and when a flood
rose, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because
it had been well built. But the one who has heard, and has not acted
accordingly, is like a man who built a house upon the ground without
any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed,
and the ruin of that house was great."
Jesus envisions a life that is stable because its foundation is on the rock,
and a life that is unstable and likely to be forfeit or lost in a moment
of difficulty. The tribe of Dan is going to be lost in the history of Israel.
There's a genealogy in Chronicles and later in Revelation in which it is
not even mentioned. It is not worth mentioning anymore. It is part of a
northern kingdom that was carried off and lost. It has forfeited its right
to a stable place among the covenant people of God. The house will come
down when the storm hits for them.
Jesus tells us about the man whose life is stable and obedient. There are
three steps to his life. First, that individual comes to him; secondly,
he hears his words; and thirdly, he acts on them. We need, first, to come
to Christ with a recognition of how bankrupt we are; we need to stop believing
that we can discover something of value in ourselves even in our best intentions,
our highest moment of doing what we think is right. We have to come to Christ
with a sense of our need for him. Secondly, we need to hear his words. We
need to let him tell us what life is like, what's valuable and what isn't;
to stop caring so much for the advantages of this world and the prosperity
that's offered us here; and to stop taking all our cues for life from the
world around us. We need to come in humility, hear him, and change our thinking.
Then thirdly, we need to act on what we've heard, to begin the process of
having a sovereign Lord who can command us.
The problem of the ancient Israelites in the book of Judges is that there
was no one greater than they. There's no possibility of having a stable
life that honors God without a commitment that Jesus Christ will be our
Lord: We come to him, we hear him, and we act on what we've heard. Spiritual
words, shrines, prophets, prophecies, priests, curses, blessings, religion
in all its glory, good intentions, doing the best I can-none of these will
accomplish anything worthwhile. We need to be sure of our conviction that
Jesus is Lord, that when we say to him, "Lord, Lord," we're also
willing to go through the process of learning to do what he says.
Catalog No. 4318
Judges 17:1-18:31
Thirteenth Message
Steve Zeisler
March 29, 1992
Copyright (C) 1995 Discovery Publishing, a ministry of Peninsula Bible Church.
This data file is the sole property of Discovery Publishing, a ministry
of Peninsula Bible Church. It may be copied only in its entirety for circulation
freely without charge. All copies of this data file must contain the above
copyright notice. This data file may not be copied in part, edited, revised,
copied for resale or incorporated in any commercial publications, recordings,
broadcasts, performances, displays or other products offered for sale, without
the written permission of Discovery Publishing. Requests for permission
should be made in writing and addressed to Discovery Publishing, 3505 Middlefield
Rd. Palo Alto, CA. 94306-3695.