Ether 15

15:1-13 - Reading this last chapter was like reading the last chapter of the Hunger Games, in that at the end, I was just so down in the spirit about it, it was just a basic reflection of the horror and misery that Satan so eagerly leads us into, and the willingness that we have to follow him. Coriantumr has a very interesting awakening as he “recovered of his wounds, he began to remember the words which Ether had spoken unto him. He saw that there had been slain by the sword already nearly two millions of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart; yea, there had been slain two millions of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart… He begun to repent of the evil which he had done; he began to remember the words which had been spoken by the mouth of all the prophets, and he saw them that they were fulfilled thus far, every whit; and his soul mourned and refused to be comforted.” He’s reflecting, seeing the awfulness of what he’s done and what he’s caused his people to do, and what’s interesting to me, I realized today while reading about king Noah with my kids, is that usually when the people are still salvageable as far as being able to be turned around to righteousness, only the more part of the wicked people are destroyed and the wicked leadership displaced. It’s really kind of like on an individual basis, I was thinking about the difference between the people of King Noah, when they were chastened by the sword of the Lamanites vs. the Jaredites when they weren’t chastened by the sword but they were completely destroyed. I thought, what’s the difference here? Especially since Coriantumr began to repent, why wouldn’t the people have been spared? It doesn’t say explicitly, but I can only think that it’s because the people, as a whole, were so wicked that they would not have repented, but killed the prophets, like they tried to do with Ether. The Lord knew that with King Noah’s people, once he was removed and once they were sufficiently humble that they would become a righteous people again, which is an interesting commentary on a wicked king turning a righteous people bad, and a repenting king having absolutely no influence for good on his people whatsoever. As I thought about this chapter, when Coriantumr writes the letter to Shiz “desiring him that he would spare the people, and he would give up the kingdom for the sake of the lives of the people. And it came to pass that when Shiz had received his epistle he wrote an epistle unto Coriantumr, that if he would give himself up, that he might slay him with his own sword, that he would spare the lives of the people.” I thought “a good king, a leader who truly cares about his people would have given up his own life in order to save the lives of his people, but Coriantumr is just too selfish for that.” But what shocked me was when I read the next part, and I saw that that wasn’t the case, “And it came to pass that the people repented not of their iniquity; and the people of Coriantumr were stirred up to anger against the people of Shiz; and the people of Shiz were stirred up to anger against the people of Coriantumr; wherefore the people of Shiz did give battle unto the people of Coriantumr.” This says nothing of Coriantumr’s acceptance or rejection of Shiz’s proposal, it sounds to me like he didn’t even get to make a choice, the people were so infuriated by Shiz’s audacity that they were stirred up to anger, they went to battle, there doesn’t seem to be any input from Coriantumr here. I’m not saying that he was suddenly a saint and would sacrifice himself for his people, but it just doesn’t seem to be a blanket judgment on him as a coward. The people of Coriantumr are attacked by the people of Shiz, and they fight and fight and fight. Then the people of Coriantumr win, and there’s an endless back and forth until finally the people of Shiz “did pitch their tents in a place which was called Ogath. And it came to pass that the army of Coriantumr did pitch their tents by the hill Ramah; and it was that same hill where my father Mormon did hide up the records unto the Lord, which were sacred.” In the October 1975 general conference talk entitled “America’s Destiny” President Marion G. Romney told of his journey to Palmyra, New York near the hill Cumorah, saying, “On July twenty-fifth of this year, as I stood on the crest of that hill admiring with awe the breathtaking panorama which stretched out before me on every hand, my mind reverted to the events which occurred in that vicinity some twenty-five centuries ago- event which brought to an end the great Jaredite nation… Thus perished at the foot of Cumorah the remnant of the once mighty Jaredite nation, of whom the Lord had said, ‘There shall be none greater… upon all the face of the earth.’ As I contemplated this tragic scene from the crest of Cumorah and viewed the beautiful land of the Restoration as it appears today, I cried in my soul, ‘How could it have happened?’ The answer came immediately as I remembered that some fifteen to twenty centuries before their destruction, as the small group of their ancestors was being divinely led from the tower of Babel, the Lord ‘would that they should come forth even unto (this) land of promise, which was choice above all other lands, which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people. And he had sworn in his wrath unto the brother of Jared (their prophet-leader), that whoso should possess this land… from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when the fullness of his wrath should come upon them.” And now here we look at ourselves, in this same country, ripening in the same conditions, looking at the fate of the Jaredites and the Nephites and we have to ask ourselves, are we not a Nephite nation? Slow to remember our God, slow to keep the commandments, hard hearted and materialistic? And Ether “did behold all the doings of the people.” I couldn’t imagine how awful that life would have been for him, watching the people he loves die, and even worse watching them wallow in sin and misery, like the prophets have said, “there’s no tragedy in death, only tragedy in sin.”

15:14-22 - Both the camps of Shiz and Coriantumr spend the next four years “fathering together the people, that they might get all who were upon the face of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it was possible that they could receive.” This was a really an interesting idea to me because I’m trying to think of our modern wars and if we’ve rounded people up to fight for us, yes we definitely have, our enemies did the same thing, and it makes me wonder just how willingly these people joined up with either army or if they were compelled for fight or be put to death. But I guess that verse 15 says that “every one to the army which he would” indicates to me that they had at least a choice of which army to join. And it’s not the Lord’s way to destroy a whole people while there are still even just a righteous few without leading them away to safety, so I’m going to assume that those who joined up to fight, which was everyone, were wicked enough that they were not entitled to the Lord’s favor any longer. Now it wasn’t just the men of fighting age that joined these armies, “both men, women and children being armed with weapons of war, having shields, and breastplates, and head-plates, and being clothes after the manner of war- they did march forth one against another to battle; and they fought all that day, and conquered not.” I couldn’t even imagine being in a place, mentally, where I could put armor on my children and tell them to go fight. I mean they had to know that there was no winning this war, what did Coriantumr and Shiz tell these people that they were fighting for? Where they fighting for their lands back? Where they fighting so that they could go home and farm and raise their families in peace? Because clearly when you are arming your women and children, it’s mortal combat, there’s nothing to win because there will be no survivors. Now just to clarify, I was in the army, I’ve been to Iraq, so I’m not saying that I couldn’t imagine donning my own armor and wielding a sword of my own, because I could and I would again if I had to, but in fact, some of my worst nightmares are of me being ready to deploy and them telling me I have to take my kids with me, that they will be engaged in combat as well. No lie, I dream about that happening and it’s so terrible, even in sleep, that I can’t stand it, I couldn’t imagine living it, especially without the backing of God to at least give me a little bit of hope of coming out of the whole mess for the better, either way, through life or death. The first day of battle is over, and they went to sleep and “they took up a howling and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people; and so great were their cries, their howlings and lamentations, that they did rend the air exceedingly.” I can’t even imagine, I’m so beyond comprehending the mindset of these people, at what point on this whole journey do you stop and say, “I’ll do anything to get out of this situation?” Then the next day they go to battle again, and go to bed again the next night and “did rend the air with their cries, and their howlings, and their mournings, for the loss of the slain of their people.” Brutal. After two days of intense combat, “Coriantumr wrote again an epistle unto Shiz, desiring that he would not come again to battle, but that he would take the kingdom, and spare the lives of the people.” Coriantumr trying to stop this madness, which I appreciate, but again, the people wouldn’t allow it, “be behold, the Spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them, and Satan had full power over the hearts of the people; for they were given up unto the hardness of their hearts, and the blindness of their minds that they might be destroyed; wherefore they went again to battle.” What were these people thinking? How could they have look straight into the eyes of peace and said, “oh no thanks, we’ll just die a horrific death and let our wives and children be slaughtered too.” At this point it had to be pure blood lust, blinding hatred and complete insanity, the idea of “if I’m going to die, I’m going to take as many people with me as I can.” I also want to point out here that this is how Satan upholds his followers. There’s a part in the movie Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters in the end where this kid betrays all that he knows and is to resurrect his flaming rock monster grandfather to seek revenge on his dad. What’s the first action that the resurrected grandfather takes? He eats the very grandson who gave up everything to resurrect him. I looked at that and said, “you know what? That’s exactly what Satan does to his followers, there is no loyalty, he wants your destruction just as much as he wants mine.” They fight all that next day and the day after “and when the night came they were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine; and they slept again upon their swords.” Interestingly, the insight here is brought to us by the Addiction Recovery Manual Step 10 “Daily Accountability.” The manual quotes Ether 15:22 and teaches, “In these verses, people are described as drunken but not with wine. Recovering addicts often refer to this kind of situation as being on a ‘dry drunk’ or ‘an emotional bender.’ Write about any tendency you might have to hold on to anger or other hurtful emotions. How does taking an inventory at the end of each day help you overcome this tendency?” This made me think a little bit, doing a daily inventory helps us keep our emotions under control. Anger, hate, self-loathing, any negative emotion, really, can make you “drunk” and like any drunk, angry drunk makes poor choices, can’t see anything more than what’s right in front of our faces. I do something similar to a daily inventory, pretty informal, and really more frequently than daily, I try to go encounter by encounter, I really try to keep a handle on how I’m feeling every little while. If I’m getting too loud, sometimes I can hear the Spirit tell me to take it down a notch. In fact, I’ve been feeling off for the last few days, not as close to the Lord as I usually am even though I was doing to same things that I usually do, and finally I prayed asking what was going on, and my answer was that I was being super aggressive, that I needed to refocus myself onto other. In other words, I needed to not think less of myself but just think of myself less. I try to do immediate course correction after I feel that I’m getting out of hand, because if I don’t I go into a downward spiral of self-loathing, I will really go into “oh I did it again, I’m such an idiot, I’ll never get married again because no one will ever like me this way, I’m so stupid, I can never go back, I’ll never get this right.” Yes, I say those things to myself, and I recognize that this is Satan trying to stop me from repentance, and I’ve found that the only way to circumvent this cyclone of hate is to just say, “ok, I’m not going to act like that anymore, I’m changing it now.” Then I spend my energy focusing on acting differently instead of how much I hate myself. It sounds stupid but that’s the method that I’ve figured out, I try to stay really close to the Spirit so that I can know immediately if I’m doing something wrong, or could be doing something better. I’m not perfect at it, sometimes I feel like it’s a flawed system, or that I’m not doing it right, but that’s what I’ve come up with.

15:23-34 – They fight again the next day “and when the night came they had all fallen by the sword save it were fifty and two of the people of Coriantumr, and sixty and nine of the people of Shiz.” I can’t imagine fighting in hand to hand combat all day for 4 days in a row, that’s crazy exhausting. They fight again the next day “and when the night came there were thirty and two of the people of Shiz, and twenty and seven of the people of Coriantumr.” Imagine how physically strenuous it would have been to fight all day long and only reduce your small number by half, the people left must have been the best fighters, the most fit, the biggest and the strongest. In fact verse 26 tells us that the remainders “were large and mighty men as to the strength of men.” So there are 32 Shiz fighters and 27 Coriantumr fighters when that 6th day ended and “they ate and slept, and prepared for death on the morrow.” How horrible is that? Like I understand it when you get to a point and your mission is pretty much suicide and you come to terms with your own mortality, an acceptance, like I understand that, but this is so much darker because they are fighting for no mission, there is nothing that their deaths are going to accomplish. In other instances, your death, your sacrifice for this mission makes a difference, saves the lives of others or gives freedom to those who are oppressed, but these guys? They woke up with the only purpose of their existence to be blood and carnage and death to the other army. What were they going to do if they won? If they had gone out there and killed all the army of the enemy and been victorious, what would they have won, what would their lives have been like? We already know that they were all men, so they couldn’t have continued the nation, they couldn’t have started over. No, they would have been a bunch of dudes with no families and no purpose for living other than to wait for death. My guess is that they would have started, probably immediately, killing each other because that’s all they lived for at this point. They went back on the field of battle and “fought for the space of three hours, and they fainted with the loss of blood.” This brings up another point, statistically, there are always more wounded than dead, so what happened to those who fainted from blood loss, when they woke up and were trying to stand up, they had to have been killed. In a real war, with a real mission, that wouldn’t have been acceptable, even though prisoners can be a burden, there’s always valuable intelligence that can be gained through interrogation (good interrogation, not the barbarism that we do.) There’s the hope that they can be contributing members of society again once the war was over, but the fact that there were no recovering wounded means that they were “dead checked” meaning everyone who fell never got back up again. There was no intelligence that would have aided the war effort, there was never going to be any society to go back to in which one could be a positively contributing member, and they knew that from the beginning. There were no wounded, only alive and dead, and that’s the most telling sign of the real intentions of this war, it was annihilation, complete slaughter, and nothing else. Finally, FINALLY someone has enough sense to say “oh my goodness, we’re all going to die for absolutely no reason whatsoever,” because “when the men of Coriantumr had received sufficient strength that they could walk, they were about to flee for their lives.” My question is, after almost a week of constant murder, they finally feel like their lives are valuable enough to try and escape, but what about the lives of their wives and children, the ones they literally fed to the wolves, were their lives not valuable enough to try and run away before this mess even happened? Are these guys so selfish that the chance to kill their enemies was more rewarding then the lives of their families? Sick, and this is what Satan does. Of course the men of Shiz weren’t about to let their enemies escape, so Shiz “did pursue them, and on the morrow he did overtake them; and they fought with the sword. And it came to pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were Coriantumr and Shiz, behold Shiz had fainted with the loss of blood.” Just these two guys left, the two who wouldn’t leave it alone until every single person around them was dead. Moroni gives us some pretty intense details, “and it came to pass that when Coriantumr had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz. And it came to pass that after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised up on his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died,” and Coriantumr fell down as if he were dead. I wonder why Moroni gave us all that graphic detail. I guess it would be kind of anti-climactic if he just said, “and Coriantumr killed Shiz,” so yeah I can see the literary beauty in the description of his death. Imagine seeing this awful scene of death and destruction, how awful would it be. And here, like at the end of any war torn movie, we have the final scene “and the Lord spake unto Ether, and said unto him: Go forth. And he went forth, and beheld that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished his record… Now the last words which are written by Ether are these: Whether the Lord will that I be translated, or that I suffer the will of the Lord in the flesh, it mattereth not, if it so be that I am saved in the kingdom of God.” I have often wondered if Ether went and nursed Coriantumr back to health, I would imagine that he did, if for no other reason than to have someone else to be with so that you weren’t so completely and utterly alone for the rest of your life. With Coriantumr seeming to have started seeing the error of his ways towards the end there, I think that he would have welcomed Ether’s company. If they spent years as the last two men in the land, I wonder if they became close friends, I wonder if Coriantumr cried when Ether died, I wonder if Coriantumr was able to repent or if he even truly wanted to, now that everything was gone. The IM sums up “The Final Jaredite Battle” quite nicely when it says, “Coriantumr and Shiz allowed all of their followers to be killed without ending the conflict. We cannot fully comprehend the horror of the final Jaredite battle in which even women and children were armed and sent to war. This does, however, provide a graphic picture of what people become when the Spirit of the Lord withdraws and no longer strives with them.” And as a final nod to the Jaredites, I want to share one of the most profound thoughts I’ve ever heard, from the Latter-day Saint Voices section of the July 2009 Ensign. The author told about her struggle to decide to pay tithing or rent, while praying about it she said, “I found myself bearing testimony of convictions I had long held firm and sacred. My voice broke the silence of the kitchen as I declared that I would rather lose the water source to my house than lose the living water offered by the Savior. I would rather have no food on our table than be without the Bread of Life. I would prefer to endure the darkness and discomfort of no electricity than to forfeit the Light of Christ in my life. I would rather abide with my children in a tent than relinquish my privilege of entering the house of the Lord. The burden of worry immediately lifted. My love for the Lord overcame the weakness generated by my fears. Our Heavenly Father is our deliverer, our benefactor, and our protector. He truly does supply all our needs. His promises are sure and unfailing. He commands us to pay tithing on our increase so that He may shower down blessings from heaven- including peace of mind, freedom from worldly and material worry, and confidence in his holy name. From that day forward I have counted it a joy to pay my tithing, without reservation or fear, to Him and for Him who first loved me.”