Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

30:37-43 – I’m not exactly sure how the arrangement between Jacob and Laban was made, I know that all the white sheep and black goats belonged to Laban and Jacob took ownership of all the spotted and speckled goats and sheep. What I don’t understand is that if new animals were born, did they split up the animal again giving each all white sheep and all black goat to Laban and Jacob kept the rest? We see that in the rest of chapter 30 there is an elaborate ritual spelled out that Jacob did while breeding the animals so that the animals would look at spotted sticks and give birth to spotted animals. There are several things that we can infer from the inclusion of these events in the narrative. First, we can infer that indeed, every generation of animal births were redistributed between Jacob and Laban. Say there originally was 100 animals and Laban kept 70 and Jacob kept 30, then Jacob or Laban could relocate and just keep the animals that they have and breed them however they want and ...

Today is Memorial Day, and while so many people remember those military service members who have died, I recognize it as something more personal. For Memorial Day weekend 10 years ago, a guy I had hired as a virtual personal trainer who I ended up becoming friends with had issued his clientele a personal challenge. The challenge was something like “what in your life are you not getting enough out of, and what can you do about it?” He was approaching it from a health stand point, but the need I had was spiritual. A couple of weeks before this question came up, I thought to myself that I wasn’t getting enough out of my scripture study. At the time, I was reading when I went to bed and just read until I fell asleep and that was it. I had been studying this way for a couple of years and while I had outgrown it’s usefulness, when I started that method, it was definitely a step forward from not reading at all. I wanted to find a study guide that went through the Book of Mormon verse by vers...

30:22-24 - There are just so many kids running around at this point, and I’m not exactly sure who is raising which ones and even all those that aren’t mentioned, specifically the girls. And it’s difficult for me to understand just how much time has passed because it’s just a few verses but so much has happened. After all these years, just like for the other matriarchs, Sarah and Rebekah, “God remembered Rachel… and opened her womb. And she conceived, and bare a son.” Of course God had not “forgotten” Rachel because God is all knowing, but it’s put like that probably because that’s how people spoke back then, I guess it would be kind of awkward to say, “and then God’s will appointed that it was now time for Rachel to have a son,” because it begs the question, “why”? Rachel’s son is born and she names him Joseph, because “The Lord shall add to me another son.” I was/am confused about what this means, is she saying that Joseph was another son because she was raising Bilhah’s boys as her ...

30:14-21 - Between his two wives and their two handmaids, Jacob is creating quite a brood of kids. Leah is sitting at 4 boys, Rachel has none, Bilhah and Zilpah each have two boys, making the total to 8 boys and who knows how many girls. It’s interesting to think about the human condition that we have here which gives a wife the right to take away the child of her handmaid because she wants to raise it herself. The lecturer from the Torah Class series said that while both handmaids had given birth to sons, and those sons had been taken to be raised by Rachel and Leah, they surely were left some children of their own to raise because it would have been shameful for the handmaid to not be left with any of her own children. When I heard that, I thought, how did we get here, to the point where children can be removed from their mothers because of a social construct like servitude, it’s just baffling to me. Anyway, there’s all this moving around of kids and maybe they all raised all the ki...

30:1-13 - At the end of chapter 29, after Leah had given birth to at least 4 sons, she “left bearing,” which has been suggested means that she stopped being able to get pregnant. During this whole sister struggle for children and legitimacy, Rachel hasn’t had any babies yet and is losing her mind, and is insanely jealous of her sister. Don’t get me wrong, I get it, not having a baby when you want one is one of the fastest ways I know to make a woman go absolutely insane, but Rachel goes to Jacob and demanded, “Give me children, or else I die.” This is the first time that we see that maybe not everything is happy in paradise. Jacob is angry with Rachel and responds, “Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?” This is a fair question, I don’t really know what she expected him to do, he is not in charge of anyone’s fertility and surely they were “trying” for a baby, so he was doing everything that was in his power to give her what she wanted. In a call back ...

29:31-35 - The interesting part about Jacob having two wives and clearly favors one over the other, he still is knocking up the less loved wife pretty consistently, so he’s still having a lot of sex with her. Verse 31 is hard for me to get behind because there’s a lot of implications that I don’t like, but overall, I can see why the writer might make these conclusions based on the history. The verse says that “when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.” Ultimately, fertility isn’t something that anyone can really control, meaning both Leah and Rachel could have reasonably been expected to have fertility that was consistent with other women at the time. The fact that Leah was super fertile and that Rachel was not was completely beyond the control of either woman. I don’t like that characteristics like fertility, which can’t be controlled, are being attributed to how much a man loves the women, which can’t be controlled either. It would be like sayi...

29:24-30 - It comes in the middle of wedding celebrations, but Zilpah was given to Leah as a handmaid by Laban, which meant that Zilpah was now Leah’s personal property, not Jacob’s. I have often wondered just what Zilpah and Bilhah’s thoughts and feelings about being given as handmaids and then accessory wives. It’s definitely a testament to God’s ability to take unfortunate circumstances, such as slavery or servitude, and use them to accomplish his purposes, such as creating several of the tribes of Israel. And it’s also important to note that while God doesn’t want or need these unfortunate circumstances in order to accomplish his will, he still greives for anyone’s pain or suffering and that all will be made right in the end, I know that sounds glib, but it’s a vital principle to know and understand as much as possible. Jacob takes Leah into the tent, thinking that she is Rachel, and they consummate their marriage, but “in the morning, behold it was Leah.” Jacob is understandably ...

I think what I’m going to have to start doing is just doing little segments everyday instead of a few gigantic posts a month. I’m busy at work and there is just SO much content that I get overwhelmed with it. So I’m just going to write for a short period of time everyday just to keep everything flowing. 29:20 - One thing that I failed to notice when reading Jacob and Laban’s interaction about Jacob’s wages was how it only focused on the two men. That should be self-explanatory, but I had always imagined that Rachel loved Jacob just as much as he loved her, but there is nothing that states that, in fact, there’s nothing at all talking about Rachel’s love for Jacob. For all we know, she could have been a completely unwilling participant. When Laban asked Jacob what he wanted to be paid, Jacob’s answer “I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter,” this was a completely inappropriate response for that time. Rachel wasn’t consulted about her wishes, the traditional cus...