Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

Chapter 19 has a story in it that has always horrified me and so I’m glad we’re getting into it because there’s been a lot of clarity for me. Again, I always thought that if it was in the scriptures then it was good and I could not for the life of me see how this was good, but now I see that it’s not good and it’s included in the scriptures to illustrate just how evil parts of Israel were at this time. It’s also important to note that this event occurred before Micah, so again, not in chronological order. There was a Levite how took a concubine. The story refers to her as the concubine and him as the husband but those words don’t make sense to me because she’s not his wife, but in that time the woman wasn’t just a mistress, she had some rights as a companion but not the full rights of a wife. He was the husband regardless, but getting those two roles straight was harder for me. This Levite and his concubine had a fight and she left the city that they lived in and went back to live wit...

Chapters 17 and 18 are about one story, so we’ll be studying them together. A couple of things about the rest of the book of Judges, consisting of chapters 17-21. First, these are known as the Appendices chapters because they aren’t about Israelite judges at all. Second, they happen chronologically BEFORE any of the other incidents in Judges that we’ve already gone over. In fact TB notes that the story from chapters 17 and 18 actually happened about 200 years before Samson. Thirdly, the IM notes “In the closing chapters of Judges the writer turned from stories of Israel’s heroes to two incidents that illustrate the low state of religion and morality in the days when Israel forsook her covenant with the Lord and everyone ‘did that which was right in his own eyes.’ The stories… are samples of Israel’s worst days. Nothing in the stories show the Israelites doing what was right.” I almost wish that these chapters were at the beginning of the book of Judges just so that we could see how far...

Here is our final chapter with Samson, and again, like everything he does, it’ wild. The 20 years of judging Israel mentioned at the end of the last chapter doesn’t indicate how the judging went, it if was done righteously (doubtful by his history) or if it was just something else. What is clear though is that it seems that neither he nor the people of Israel did what God wanted and severed their relationship with the Philistines. Case in point, Samson goes down to Gaza to find a prostitute to have sex with and he does and falls asleep. The Philistines find out that he’s there and wait outside so that they can kill him in the morning. Samson must have felt that something was off and so he leaves in the middle of the night and takes the doors to the gate of the city off their hinges and carries them out of the city. I didn’t understand why he would take the doors off, why not just leave, but it must be that Gaza was a gated city and those gates were locked at night so he had to open the...

What’s really fascinating to me about the story of Samson is just how psychopathic he seems, like genuinely unhinged, it’s wild. I’m not saying his parents were perfect, but he seems to have been raised in a strong Hebrew household by good parents, and he turned out this way, it gives a little bit more perspective about when kids turn out so wildly maladjusted even though they had a good upbringing. Remember, Samson did not consummate the marriage to this girl that he wanted so badly, and she was given in marriage to another man, so technically not only was Samson not married to her, but she was the wife of another man. Samson left the wedding and went home after killing all those men for their clothes to give to the wedding guests after they “solved” his riddle after threatening the girl and her telling them the answer. After waiting quite some time, Samson shows back up at her house and demands, “I will go in to my wife into the chamber,” meaning her personal bedroom chamber. Obvio...

There is a lot going on here in chapter 14 and we’ll be using a lot of cultural context here to understand what’s really going on. According to TB, Samson lived up in the foothills at about 800 feet elevation in a town named Tzorah. Below them was a Philistine city called Timnah and one day while Samson was down in the Philistine city, he saw a woman and saw one of the “daughters of the Philistines” and wanted her to be his wife. Interestingly, TB suggests that the phrase “saw a woman” “means more than to notice her existence; it means he saw her unveiled face, meaning from typical Middle Eastern cultural norms this was an immodest girl.” I’m not the expert on these matters, and he clearly knows more than me, and I put this out there because I thought that it was interesting because it possibly speaks to her character, but I’m going to take it with a grain of salt. I’m always wary of a man condemning a woman as being immodest, regardless of who either party is, it could be true or it c...

Samson’s story starts like many in the Bible, but he is the only judge who starts this way, and that is with an angelic announcement to his barren mother of his miraculous birth. An angel appears to an unnamed woman who is barren and she is promised that she will bear a son and that that son will bear a Nazarite vow for his entire life which consists of not consuming any grape products, not cutting his hair, and to never touch a dead body. We’ve talked about Nazarite vows before when they were prescribed in the Torah, but the IM summarizes it saying, “The primary meaning of the Hebrew verb nazar is to separate. Hence the nazir (Nazarite) is ‘the separated,’ ‘consecrated’ ‘devoted’. A Nazarite, therefore, was one who was separated from others by a special vow of self-dedication to Jehovah. The term ‘set apart’ is used to mean that one has been given a special calling or position and is thus separated from others.” If I recall correctly, the Nazarites often worked in the temple assisting...