Famine

We're starting to see it.

So famine is a weapon.

Famine.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs declared famine conditions in northern Gaza by late 2024, a couple years ago.

Israel systematically restricted food, water, and medical aid entry at all of the crossings and all the entry points.

And I shared a series of teachings with my church at the time from the book of Ruth.

that I called After the Famine.

So some people might know the story of Ruth, that Ruth, this little tiny book in the Bible, in the first section of the Bible called the Old Testament, Before Jesus Comes, doesn't mention Jesus, but near the end it gets pretty close because we see her, she becomes part of the lineage of Jesus, which is amazing.

But the story of Ruth begins with a famine, and it says there's a woman named Naomi and her husband and her two sons, and they have to leave their homeland because there's a famine And then what happens is we read that Naomi's husband and her two sons, one of whom marries a woman named Ruth, die.

You have it's like incredible intrusion into the female body.

And if we can go back for a moment to think about that for just two seconds, if you go back to the famine and think back, the famine happened in 1960 as with most, Post-famine social stabilizations, you had a huge population boom that happens through the early 60s.

That's the generation that's now coming into their fertility in the 1980s.

And so that's the generation upon which, with the multiplier effect of population, if each of that baby boom generation has four or five children, you're into such explosive population growth that it becomes impossible to manage.

Yeah.

And you'll get something called famine fevers.

Right.

Famine fevers are from relapsing fever.

And one of the big ones is is typhus, not typhoid, but typhus, specifically epidemic typhus from from from lice.

Right.

I just want to know your thoughts on war.

Pandemic is one thing.

So now the Doom was wrought, O smouldering Orb, Speak from thy glooms! What art thou but a spark? My soul at thee once awed, it did absorb From thee conceptions of what eyes never mark; And it grew humble to thee, and did hark To visionary voices of thy will: Thou once wert God to me, avaunt, dead spark! Thou palest, but my soul by its own will Is overflowed with day, without thee revels still.

Thou wert my God, for at thy glance the earth Blushed like a maiden in her bridal night, And fruitful grew around its verdant girth: Thou spreadest a charm and wreathed a smile of light; Clouds formed and thundered at thy regal sight: Thou wert of Hope and Life and Love the nurse; Thy frown was Famine, and thy absence Night: Yet that which loved thy smile and feared thy curse Hurled thee in fuming haste through endless universe.

Thus, Gods! my soul shall seek no higher will: It is a God, its morn, its noon, its gloom; It seeks no skies, reveres no sacred hill, And hath no shudder at an open tomb: A sister-thread in one combining loom, The throb from pulse that bounds in many veins, Not one, but all: the flash within the gloom The same that glows in thunder-cloud that rains, That warms this breast, yon sun, and pales the moon that wanes.

The hollow ages sped in silent haste, And Ruin lolled and knew their spell in vain; On every hand the desolatory waste Darkled, nor dreamed what was would be again: Change neither moved nor breathed, lest such were pain: Forms poised in life thus hung exanimate; A fierce forgetting, a divine disdain Moulded their features all dispassionate But Kahla and dumb Night, who banqueted their hate.

We also have KV5, the largest rock-cut tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, and was built as a multi-generational family mausoleum for the sons of Ramses II.

Joseph's Rise and the Famine.

This is a fun part of it.

So I've broken the topics down basically biblically by the major events of the Bible.

They were all about Ireland.

The Famine,

I suppose.

Would there have been...

There's one song there about the Famine, but it wouldn't be very...

It's called The Boatish, actually, and that's a funny name as well.

Bear in mind, Father Hennebery did all the work he did.

Please enjoy responsibly.

Section 1 of On Famine Fever and Some of the Other Cognate Forms of Typhus.

This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Pamela Nagami, M.D. On Famine Fever and Some of the Other Cognate Forms of Typhus by Rudolf Virchow.

Part 1 Twenty years have passed since last that form clad in terrors, famine fever, appeared among us.

In vain do we seek to deny its presence now in one of our German provinces.

It was therefore a natural connection of ideas that the term famine fever or famine typhus, typhus famelicus, or famine plague should repeatedly come to be substituted in learned treatises or by the people for that of petechial typhus, exanthematic typhus, and spotted fever.

For more information, or to subscribe, visit historyireland.com. Well, uh, good evening, history lovers, and welcome to the latest History Ireland Hedge School, uh, with editor Tommy Graham in the chair.

So this evening the topic is Clare and America from the Famine to Parnell.

Now, in the 50 years after the famine, half of those born in Ireland ended up somewhere else, two-thirds of them in the USA.

Now, what was the experience of those who emigrated from County Clare? Now, to, uh, help us answer this question, I'm joined by Bernadette Whelan.