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Blessed & Highly Favored - Deuteronomy 15

Chapter 15 is short and just reviews the policy forgiving debt and freeing indentured servants. From what I remember, I thought that debts were forgiven and servants freed only every 50 years, on the year of jubilee but this chapter says that it’s every 7 years. What TB pointed out was the while previously it had been discussed that it would be every 50 years, in practice, it became a problem because every 7 years the land was supposed to rest which meant that servants or debtors couldn’t repay their debts because there was no food to be harvested from the fields. So this new 7 year rule was implemented as to not further indebt someone because they couldn’t pay back their debts during that year. They were already going to be hungry enough, compounding debt on top of that would have been catastrophic for the very poor among them. They are also to be given gifts, and this whole thing is a reminder that everything they had belonged to and came from God, so if someone had a lot, then that ...
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Tithing - Deuteronomy 14

Chapter 14 is all stuff that has been discussed previously, such as a prohibition on self-mutilation and dietary restrictions. Interestingly, I just saw a Reddit post asking, from an LDS perspective, if self-harm was a spiritual defect. All the responses, which I agree with, was that this was a mental health issue and not indicative of a spiritual problem. If I recall correctly, when this was discussed previously, TB noted that anciently the pagan worships of the people around the Israelites at this time would do extensive decorative cutting of themselves and tattooing and this was God saying not to do that, for various reasons but also to set Israel apart from the pagans surrounding them. As far as self-mutilation in these days, obviously it’s not ideal, but does that extend to piercings and tattoos? I have tattoos and I know there has been counsel from the pulpit several years ago against tattoos, I personally don’t think it’s the end of the world, I thought about getting more, but s...
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Influences - Deuteronomy 13

The main concept covered in chapter 13 is pretty standard that we’ve heard before but for some reason spoke to me a little bit more forcefully this time. The concept is that anyone who tried to lead you away from worshipping God should be put to death, even if it is your brother, son, daughter, wife, or best friend. Just saying it like that sounds a little bit weird and it’s not meant to just be like “if you think someone is a bad influence on you then kill them,” that’s obviously not it. This first part is that it doesn’t matter who it is, anyone trying to lead you away from Christ can not, under any circumstances, remain in your life. This is a hard concept because cutting family and friends out of your life is very difficult. And again, this doesn’t mean that if someone you know leaves the church then you cut them out of your life, but it’s about boundaries. In the chapter specifically it says if this person raises themselves up to be a “prophet” or “a dreamer of dreams, and giveth ...
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All the Meat You Want - Deuteronomy 12

What’s interesting about chapter 12 is that TB has 3 one hour lectures on it and the IM doesn’t say a single thing, so it will be interesting to go through and see what we can come up with. Moses is prepping the people to change their lifestyle from that of Bedouin shepherds to a permanent settled society. He tells them when they take over these cities that God is going to win for them, they are to “destroy all the places” that were used to worship other gods. From listening to the lectures from TB, the feeling I got was that God wanted a structure to His worship. He didn’t want anyone to do whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted, with who ever they wanted. Very similar to today, church services and ordinances are very highly structured in that they are all the same every time and they can only be done by the church approved authority, with the exception of covid. One of the reasons why all these religious cultural aspects are to be destroyed is because God wants a centralized rel...
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Blessings & Cursings - Deuteronomy 11

Chapter 11 is very much a parallel and expansion of the consistent promise in the Book of Mormon, “if you keep my commandments, you shall prosper in the land.” Moses reminds the people of the miraculous ways in which God had preserved them previously. The IM implies that this might be because a lot of the people that Moses was speaking to at this point didn’t know about a lot the miracles that happened on their way out of Egypt. However, TB said that there were probably a lof of the people who were between the ages of 45 and 60 who were old enough to remember a lot of what happened in Egypt. Moses tells them of the “miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of Egypt unto Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and unto all his land.” One anecdote that I wanted to share was again, some video that I saw on Instagram that I thought was interesting. This video suggested that Moses, while living as a prince in Egypt as a child and young man, had been trained as a priest in Heliopolis, which wa...
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Widows & Fatherless - Deuteronomy 10

The part about chapter 9 at the end that I didn’t cover is Moses telling the people that he begged God to let them live twice and both times he had to go into the mountains fasting, without food or water, for 40 days each time. Both of these times he went into the mountains fasting was to secure God’s covenant and commandments for the people and so Moses continues his narrative that he took the tablets to the mountain to get God’s commandments, and made an ark “of shittim wood” to keep them in. Interestingly, I just watched a video on Instagram that talked about the ark of the covenant being symbolic of the temple because it holds the commandments and covenants from God for the people. I thought that was an interesting comparison. Moses also recounts a little bit of their journeys in the wilderness, Aaron’s death, and asks an important question, “now Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve ...
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Who By Fire - Deuteronomy 9

Chapter 9 is a basic rehashing of some of the concepts that have been discussed repeatedly. The first is that God will go in and destroy their enemies before Israel has to fight them. There is a phrase used here that sounded familiar to me in verse 2 which says, “Who can stand before the children of Anak!” This phrase is used a couple of times in the Book of Mormon as well, once in Mormon 9:26 when Mormon asks, “who can stand against the works of the Lord?” A second time is in Ether 14:18 which is where I remembered it from, which says, “Who can stand before the army of Shiz?” It was just interesting to me that this specific phrase was used in both the Book of Mormon and the Deuteronomy and it makes me wonder if this was a common phrase used among ancient peoples in the middle east to the point that it would have been carried with the Jaredites and used a thousand years later as they were destroyed. Or was this just a common sense phrase that I’m reading too much into? The concept th...
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