Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

24:1-3 - One thing that I haven’t considered until very recently, and impacts my evaluation of the Old Testament greatly, is that this isn’t a historical chronology of early Judaism, this isn’t a textbook of facts and events. It’s not like the Book of Mormon, with a clear theme and multiple writers with one single person overseeing it’s composition. The Old Testament is a narrative designed to convey a message to a specific audience at a specific time, so while I have follow up questions, it’s really about moving the reader through the account to see the whole picture. This is something I’ve struggled with because the whole book just seems so staggered, there isn’t a lot of follow through like what happened to who and when. Maybe it’s because I’m so much more familiar with the Book of Mormon where Mormon tells us “and Alma died,” etc that it’s just so hard for me to follow the OT. The lecturer on this chapter from the Torah Class podcast series notes that this is the point where the st...

23:1-20 - The timeline we have is that Abraham is older than Sarah, but they are both very elderly, and it gets to a point where no matter who is older, longevity can’t be quantified. Even though he is older, it is Sarah who dies first, when she “was an hundred and seven and twenty years old.” The tradition is that Sarah was so distraught over the ordeal with Isaac being sacrificed that the stress killed her. The place that they were living at the time that she died was Hebron, and I don’t know why there is a whole chapter about this, but Abraham wants to bury her in Hebron where they were staying. I’ve listened to a lot of discourses on this chapter and why it’s important, and there are some interesting points made about why there is so much documentation about thus purchase of land. The first point made was that we have to remember that even though Abraham has been promised his own land, a very special one at that, he still hasn’t received it. Wherever he’s lived he’s been a strange...