Black - Moses 7:20-27

7:20-22 - Now that Enoch was only governing the people of God and God was dwelling among his people, “Enoch talked with the Lord,” and speculated that “surely Zion shall dwell in safety forever.” To me this statement is clear, surely God’s people will always be protected, but the Lord’s response doesn’t really match that because he says, “Zion have I blessed, but the residue of the people have I cursed.” The Lord then proceeds to show Enoch “all the inhabitants of the earth,” Enoch saw that the city of Zion would be “taken up into heaven” to be with God forever. It’s important to note here was “taken up into heaven” means, which according to the IM is “translation.” I’ve always been confused about this, but the IM gives a couple of really good explanations, first from President Joseph Fielding Smith who teaches, “Translated beings are still mortal and will have to pass through the experience of death, or the separation of the spirit and the body, although this will be instantaneous, for the people of the City of Enoch, Elijah, and others who received this great blessing in ancient times, before the coming of the Lord, could not have received the resurrection, or the change from mortality to immortality, because our Lord had not (yet) paid the debt which frees us from mortality and grants to us the resurrection.” This answers a lot of questions that I had about translation, most of it was me confusing being translated for being resurrected so I didn’t understand what was meant by Jesus being the “first fruits of them that slept.” Another excellent, though long, quote from Joseph Smith says, “Many may have supposed that the doctrine of translation was a doctrine whereby men were taken immediately into the presence of God and into an eternal fullness, but this is a mistake idea. Their place of habitation is that of the terrestrial order, and a place prepared for such characters He held in reserve to be ministering angels unto many planets, and who as yet have not entered into so great a fullness as those who are resurrected from the dead.” It’s like when Jesus was transfigured on the mount with Peter, James, and John and Moses and others appeared to them, I always assumed that they were resurrected but they weren’t, they had been translated so that they could perform that task when the time came before Jesus has been resurrected first. It’s actually quite an interesting idea to think about. Enoch also saw that all the children of Adam were mixed together “save it was the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain were black, and had not place among them.” Let’s just take a minute to speculate on the term “black” used here to describe the descendants of Cain. When Nephi, Jacob, and Mormon used the word “black” to describe the Lamanites, we learned that that characteristic simply referred to their spiritual darkness which came as a result from being cut off from the Spirit of God. But this can be a difficult definition to accept since one of the ways that the priesthood restrictions for black men was explained for the last 60 years was that black men couldn’t hold the priesthood because they were the seed of Cain and the seed of Cain was cursed. This never made sense to me because if everyone was killed except for Noah and his family, then how did that dark skinned blood line come out of that. It never made any sense. Another thought that I had was that Joseph Smith was the one who translated the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses back in the early 1800’s. But the term “black” wasn’t used to describe a person’s skin color until the 1950’s at the earliest. If Joseph Smith had meant to translate this description to mean that Cain’s descendants were dark skinned, the Lord almost certainly would have had him use the word that the people in his time were familiar with meaning dark skinned. According to the US Census as far back as 1870, which was the first census after the Emancipation Proclamation in which black people were recorded with names and personal identifying information. Under the column of “race” there is “white” “negro” or “mulatto” for persons with both African and white parentage. These are the descriptive terms that the people were familiar with when it came to skin color at the time these works were translated. All this is to say that describing someone as “black” back when Moses and the Book of Mormon were translated wouldn’t have given any information to the reader about someone’s skin color, and instead referenced their spiritual or emotional character as being devoid of light. 7:23-27 - After Enoch sees that Zion is removed from the earth, he sees all the rest of the nations, and “generation upon generation… the power of Satan was upon all the face of the earth.” He sees angels coming to earth to warn the inhabitants of their wickedness but Satan “had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness; and he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced.” These angels went to earth “bearing testimony of the Father and Son; and the Holy Ghost fell on many, and they were caught up by the powers of heaven into Zion.” This helps explain what happened to those who repented so that they didn’t drown in the flood.