Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

22:20 – Here we have another verse on apostasy, or at least shifting the focus of worship from Yehoveh to anything else. The concept of idol worship is really interesting because it can be so literal and also so figurative at the same time. Just from what I’ve read previously, the physical figurine representing the idol was very prominent and served multiple purposes, not just religious but also legal like we saw in the instance of Rachel stealing Laban’s idol. I personally never understood the belief in idols, it never made sense to me that an inanimate object has abilities to do anything other than just sit there. I don’t know if that’s just because I live now instead of 4,000 years ago. It’s an interesting thought experiment to think “if I lived anciently in a time when people literally believed that idols had power, would I believe that as well?” Because honestly, many people see our belief in God as just as unrealistic and delusional, so I guess it’s not that far out there. Idol...

22:19 - I feel like verses 18 and 19 should have been switched in order because verses 16 and 17 talk about sex, 18 talks about apostasy, 19 talks about sex, then 20 talks about apostasy too. Verses 16 and 17 talk about sex in terms of the obligations a man has when he convinced a woman to have sex with him outside of marriage, but 19 is different. Verse 19 says, “whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.” The word “beast” is cross referenced with D&C 59:6 which says, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Thou shalt not steal; neither commit adultery, nor kill, nor do anything like unto it.” While that’s a good frame of reference for most things, I’m not exactly sure what that has to do with bestiality specifically. Don’t get me wrong, I personally think having sex with an animal is gross and wrong, but I dont see why it’s a capital offense. TB has a tangent about how prevalent it was anciently in most cultures, but I contest it’s pretty common now too, peop...

22:18 - Kind of like I was talking about the other day, the seriousness with which the law of Moses took straying from the prescribed path, the laws continue, “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This of course, brings to my mind the Salem witch trials and all the other things that go into priestcraft, etc. but really, we can look back just a few chapters to see that while Moses was doing the whole song and dance with Pharaoh to get the people to be freed, Pharaoh had his own magicians and it was pretty standard religiosity. TB notes that sorcery and magic were pretty universal throughout the ancient world and the fact that Israel did nothing like that was very well known. Additionally, like we also discussed the other day, Sherem coming to Jacob and accusing him of not following the law of Moses was an accurate statement if we look at the differences between how the Nephites followed it and how the Hebrew in Palestine followed it. By this logic, that “witches” or people who try ...

22:16- 17- This next one is a little interesting, it says “if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.” I’m not going to read anything into this as far as whether or not the encounter was consensual and I’m just going to assume that it was because that’s how I read it. I’ve thought about this a lot throughout my lifetime because, as a woman, I watch people and society and situations and I have a teenage son and I don’t want him to grow up to be a douchebag and I want to protect my daughter. I would assume that this mostly involves younger people because as far as I know marriage usually happened in the mid to late teens so if a “man” or “teenage boy” convinced an unmarried woman to have sex with him, I assume that they would be in the mid to late teen stage of life. The only reason that I bring this up is because biol...

22:1-15 - Chapter 22 continues with the case law with an emphasis on stealing and one thing that TB noted that is that intent is very important in the considerations of punishment. Just as a note along with that, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t finished the lecture on chapter 21 when I finished it last night, so when I finally did finish it, TB made a point about the “eye for an eye” concept that changed a lot for me. When I discussed the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” concept of punishment, my question was “who could possibly be ok with carrying out that type of mutilation even if it was justified?” TB noted that, unlike the rest of the ancient world at the time, mutilation was completely forbidden in Israel so the “eye for an eye,” etc was supposed to be the ground level of what compensation would be sufficient. For instance, I would imagine they would have to ask themselves something like “this man was a carpenter before the perpetrator attacked him and he lost his eye, there...

21:24-27 - I don’t know if this punishment is specifically referencing a woman who is injured and loses her baby because of a fight or just is referring to general retribution, but the law continues, “eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” I’ve heard the saying “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” and I think that this is one of those concepts that definitely deals with the higher laws of the gospel. It’s also one of those things where sometimes someone does something so bad that they “deserve” to be punished brutally like that, but to be the one who carries out the mutilation with all the screaming and blood, that’s a lot, yeah maybe they deserve it, but I don’t want to be the one who carries it out. And I’m not squeamish about stuff like that. There’s also the part about that statement where the whole world is blind, and why is the whole world blind? Because we are all guilty of breaking ...

21:22-23 – Continuing on with case law, if two men are fighting and during the fight they “hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.” This goes back to, the woman was injured badly enough to lose her child, why is it up to the husband to determine what is adequate recompense? But again, these are ancient social issues and they were progressive for their time, I just couldn’t imagine. Interestingly, the lesson the IM makes about this specific instance is “the seriousness of abortion… if an abortion caused by an accident was to be punished severely, one can assume that deliberate abortion without justifiable cause was far more serious.” I was pretty surprised because in my mind a woman being assaulted to the point that her unborn baby dies and abortion are not even related in the slightest, except that a fetus is involv...

21:12-21 - This is the point now where we get into case law. The next bunch of rules are so circumstance specific that it makes sense that this is case law, or as far as I know, laws that were made based on incidents that arose and then how the judge dealt with them at the time. Kind of like a precedent that we have today. There are several key points brought up in these laws that are important in principle not just application. The first law is very straight forward, “he that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.” Very straight forward approach to “thou shalt not murder,” and that the consequences are so serious that murder=death. But, interestingly, there are many more cases that follow that show that intention is important as well, because as we know, especially anciently, death was much more common place and accessible than it is today. In fact the next law says “if a man lie not in wait, but God deliver him into his hand; then I will appoint thee a place w...

21:7-11 - The next part deals with a more complicated form of slavery… selling your daughter. This is a tough subject for me as a woman and as a woman who’s father would have sold her to the highest bidder the first chance he got. But it’s important to keep some context here, in that anciently in almost every society in the whole world, women were property and often not even valuable property, subject to any mistreatment and abuse that any man felt like he wanted to inflict on her without repercussions. So on the one hand, yeah my dad was a monster and I’m still suffering with the consequences of that, but on the other hand, didn’t I just have the same experience that 99.9% of women who have ever lived? It’s actually one thing that has comforted me, I hate that any one has ever suffered, but the fact that my suffering was just kind of par for the course for so many people, it actually makes me feel a little bit better. I just want to mention a few things off topic here, because I fee...

21:3-6 - Apparently the rest of the world treated slaves as the lowest form of property throughout the ancient world and they were to be enslaved indefinitely. However, when God gave the law of Moses, the first issue he addressed was slavery and instead of owning a slave forever, in Israel, the “servant” was to be freed during the 7th year of his service. TB notes that there were different rules for Hebrew slaves vs foreign slaves, but we will see here shortly that a non-Hebrew slave was to be permitted to convert to become an Israelite and then they were to be granted the same rights as the Hebrew slaves. If a slave is taken into a household alone, he will be freed alone, but if he came into slavery while married, then when he’s free, his wife is free too. If he comes in alone, but if given a wife by his master and they have children together, then on the 7th year only the man is free, his wife and kids are to remain enslaved. This really bothered me until I started thinking about i...