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Once upon a time, in the town of Beersheba, there lived a doctor. He was famous in the region, for being able to tell what was wrong with someone the moment that they walked into a room.
One Autumn, just before the rains, a man came in, carrying his very sick cousin. They had travelled a long way from one of the mountain villages , in the hope of a cure.
To their dismay, the doctor took one look at the sick man, and shook his head. "I can do nothing for him", he said. So, they went sadly home.
Their progress was slow, and as they were trying to cross one mountain pass, it started to rain. They took shelter in a cave, but it rained and rained, and rained! The man's cousin was rapidly getting worse, and there was no way that he could continue the journey, but the man had to get home , before the rains cut off the roads entirely.
As he was thinking what to do, he saw a nanny goat, and looking round, he found a really large broken eggshell. He decided to milk the goat, and leave the milk in the eggshell for his cousin to drink, should he wake up. So that is what he did. He then slipped away to his own village, thinking that he would return after the rains.
When he had gone, a snake slithered out from behind a rock, and not only drank some of the milk, but also spat some venom in it........>br> The next spring , the man was thinking about returning to the cave, when he saw his cousin walking up the track towards him. He could not believe his eyes! "You are supposed to be dying ", he said. "Well" , his cousin replied , "I drank some of that milk you left, and then I started to feel better".
They could not understand this, so they went to the Doctor again to ask why he had been wrong.
" I was not wrong", he said, after hearing their tale ."The goat from whom you got the milk must have been the seventh kid of its mother, and you must have drunk it from a stork's egg shell, tainted with snake venom". The men asked how this could be so. "I knew, when I first saw you that that was the only cure" , the doctor replied, "but I could not suggest that, could I?"
Early this century, Palestine was still aprt of the Ottoman empire, and the Turks decided to extend their railway line across the Negev desert to Jerusalem. This they did, but the Bedouins had not much clue what the railway was!
One chieftain, , seeing it there, and never having seen a train ,thought it must be a new road to Beersheba, so started to walk along it. Unfortunately, a train came along, and although the driver sounded the alarm, the chief still ended up in hospital with a broken leg!
Whilst he was in hospital, his wife, when she made the long journey to visit, (which she did not do very often), decided to do some shopping, and she bought a marvellous new cooking gadget.
When the chief came home, he was sitting round the fire , with the other men of the village, telling of his experiences. His wife was told to get the coffee ready, but she was in a corner, and he could not see what she was doing. Suddenly, the water in the whistling kettle that she had bought came to the boil. The chief leapt up, seized a piece of wood, and smashed the kettle to pieces! His wife, naturally was rather upset. "Whatever did you do that for?" , she asked. "Well," he replied, "if I had allowed it to grow up, it would have become another leg - breaking monster!"
