Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

Chapter 20 is another conglomerate of already discussed commands, but starts off with something a little unfamiliar which is giving of children “unto Molech.” We first heard about Molech just recently and It doesn’t say exactly what happens to these kids, like if they are given to serve Molech or if they are to be human sacrifices, which TB suggests that that is the case. Any one who gives their children to be given “unto Molech” or I would imagine any other type of god as well, are to be put to death, more specifically, “the people of the land shall stone him with stones.” It’s interesting that God prescribed the method of execution here and TB suggests that if it was like beheading or shot with an arrow or something like that, then it would only take one single skilled executioner to perform the task. But with stoning, it takes a whole group of people hurling stones at the person for a while before they actually die. The point, TB says, is to make sure that lots of people participat...

The IM classifies chapter 19 as the start of the section of “Laws of Mercy and Righteousness,” and while TB doesn’t do that, he notes that chapter 19 is special to the Hebrews because it’s considered a “Torah within a Torah,” because it reiterates laws that have already been discussed. Back in chapter 11, TB spent a whole lecture of what it means to be holy and why it’s important. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it because it’s such an abstract concept and to me it just means continuously seeking a closer relationship with God through small, consistent improvements in our behaviors through repentance and the atonement. It’s not a glamorous definition and it’s not quick or easy, it’s definitely a “slow and steady wins the race” kind of mindset. Anyway, chapter 19 starts with the command from God “ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy.” In the next few verses 6 of the 10 commandments are reemphasized, in addition to more practical commandments about fairness in your work, tr...

Chapter 18 covers everyone’s favorite topic… sex. TB notes that this isn’t really about sex, because like we’ve discussed previously, adultery was culturally only a sin that females could be found guilty of, it was about who a man was allowed to marry. He points out that in ancient middle eastern culture at that time, the most ideal spouse was to be a cousin, so God wanted a more diverse gene pool, therefore implemented all these rules about who a man could marry. The whole thing is really focused on who has the right to possess which woman, and I find it kind of irritating, but it is what it is. The IM notes that the phrase “uncover the nakedness” was a euphemism at the time to mean sexual intercourse, and if that’s the case then it might seem like God is saying that as long as the man doesn’t have sex with these prohibited women, then he has a full license to do whatever he wants, which some men might have taken to mean that but I reject it. The law is and was that sexual relations ...

Chapter 17 gives an interesting and, at least to me, unexpected commandment and that is that all animals that will be used for food must be first sacrificed at the tabernacle. This means that if a family is going to eat meat for dinner, they have to take the animal to the tabernacle first to be properly sacrificed. This is really interesting to me because I could only imagine the volume increase this one commandment made as far as the work load for the temple workers. As far as why God made this commandment, I could see it as being made so that all animal life could be respected, so if you wanted to eat meat then you had to offer that meat first to God. The IM also notes that this might be because the Hebrews at this point had 400 years of being immersed in Egyptian religious traditions and apparently there were a lot of rituals that involved blood. So if God could control when and where that blood was shed, then it set the conditions for what the blood could be used for and deny the b...

Chapter 16 is covers what is the most holy and important day in all of Israel, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. When this was revealed by the Lord to Moses, it happened right after Aaron’s sons were killed for the thing that they did wrong so the first time that Aaron went into the Holy of Holies, he was probably terrified and felt like he was taking his life into his hands. To properly participate in the day of atonement, the people were, as TB put it, “abstain,” or “deprive” themselves of anything pleasurable. The IM focuses on the fasting aspect of it, but he also suggests that it would have been happy gatherings, food, drink, sex, games, anything like that. This was a very solemn occasion. TB also notes that Yom Kippur was contingent on everything being done in the temple so when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD, the Jewish leadership started making up all sorts of rules to try to make the event work in a way that they thought was close to the original meaning, even...

Chapter 15 is interesting because it now talks about ritual purity for people when they experience “discharges” both normal and abnormal. It was funny, during TB’s lecture on this chapter he said that the audience was probably going to be uncomfortable with this chapter and that he could probably skip it but he pointed out that Leviticus was the first book of scripture studied by Jewish children when they start school, so he said “if Jewish 6 year olds could learn about this chapter then you guys can too.” The first 18 verses address men and all their “discharges” and I’m going to rely on TB’s version here because the KJV is just too abstract. TB describes the first issue as “there are two basic forms: the first is that the discharge is a flow… a liquid that runs; and the second is a much thicker fluid that acts to block or seal an opening. A male with this condition is unclean.” Even though I work in medicine, I don’t really know which disorders these two situations could be talkin...

14:33-57 - The rest of chapter 14 deals with “leprosy” or “infections” within someone’s house. The interesting aspect of this is that this law was given only a year after the people left Egypt while they were still living in tents. So they would have looked at this law as only something that was going to apply to them in the future, something that demonstrated to them that they were going to, at some point, experience the fulfillment of God’s promises to them. This is pretty applicable in my own life, I need to focus more on the promises that God’s made and look forward to them being fulfilled instead of being angry or bitter than they haven’t been yet. Something I definitely needed to think about today. There are some characteristics of this “iinfection” that were required to qualify it as that, like the color which I think was pink or green, the depth of the spots infected, it had to be seen on at least 2 bricks, and it had to be a certain size. Interestingly, according to TB the si...

14:1-32 - Chapter 14 is really long but again, mostly instructions that I don’t find all that interesting. TB does almost 2 full lectures on it and the IM has a very long instructive piece, but we’ll see how much we go over. Chapter 14 is most instructions on how the priest is to cleanse the healed “leper” once their skin afflictions are gone. It starts with the priest going outside of the camp walls to see if the skin afflictions are healed. Once it’s determined that the skin lesions are healed, the person is to take two birds, “one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water.” I guess that means that the bird is drowned, which is interesting because in the TB lecture he talks extensively about Christ on the cross having water gush out of his chest after he died and the spear was stabbed into his side. He said that this, and apparently the bird thing, is symbolic of Christ being the “living water.” The person is then pronounced clean while dipping the bird and the c...

Chapter 13 is long, but covers how the priests were to deal with those who had skin diseases. The word “leprosy” is used throughout this chapter but TB says that this is a mistranslation. He says that the actual Hebrew word used is “tzara’at” which was more accurately translated to mean just abnormal skin conditions in general. We’ve covered pretty in depth here what leprosy really was and the nature of it. As far as I can remember, 95% of the human population is naturally immune to leprosy and of those 5% who can contract it, it is not a very contagious disease. There are 4 types, the first two are the most common and resolve themselves within a year. The last two types are the ones more commonly thought of when the word leprosy is heard which is the disfigurement and all that and they too can resolve themselves, that’s why the Israelites had a process in place for people who had their leprosy resolve to come back into society through showing themselves to the priests. And it’s a bact...

Chapter 12 is very short, only 8 verses, and deals with the “law of purification of women after childbirth.” After a woman gives birth she’s considered “unclean” because she’s bleeding. There’s several aspects of this that are interesting. First is the fact of why she’s considered unclean while bleeding. I always assumed that this was just like all the other misogynistic rules surrounding the hatred of women by all societies throughout human history, and there still might be some part of that but there’s more. When I was in my Hawaiian studies class in college in Hawaii, we talked about ancient Hawaiian culture which had a similar rule about women being sent away to isolated “menstrual” shacks for them to stay at during their periods. My professor was not a wilting flower by any means, but she changed my view on the subject. She said, “I know that this rule seems like a punishment for women, but think about it, when aa woman is on her period, she doesn’t want to stay in the house and c...

I was really surprised by chapter 11 because TB does 4 ½ lectures on this one chapter alone so I thought that it was going to be something completely different than it ended up being. TB notes that chapter 11 starts the third and final section of the Torah, the law so I guess he wanted to do a lot of background and context about what there was going forward and it got swept up into the chapter 11 lessons. There was a lot about what it means for something to be holy vs unholy, clean vs unclean, godly vs ungodly. It was interesting but I’m not going to really get into it here very much because it seemed pretty straight forward to me. One of the biggest difference between TB’s natural audience of generic Christians and us is that we have the Book of Mormon as a comparison to see how a population of native Jews handled the law of Moses both before and after Christ. Even Nephi said that he didn’t teach his people all the ways of the Jews because they were too rigid in the structure and not ...

I’m not sure on the exact timeline but it seems like as soon as the 7 day initial inauguration of the tabernacle ordinances were done by Moses, Aaron and his sons take over and start to do them. This is when the fire comes from the sky and ignites the ashes of the sacrifices and this is the fire that is to be guarded day and night to keep it lit. I’m not exactly sure how much, if any, time passes between God’s fire coming down to the altar and when Aaron’s first two oldest sons “took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord.” The word “strange” here is explained to mean unauthorized, so these two men did something that they weren’t supposed to do and paid for it with their lives. It seems pretty overboard to kill people because they did the ordinance wrong because I think we can all relate to acci...

One thing to note about chapter 8 was that it was the inaugural sacrifices that happened when the tabernacle was first dedicated. It was a 7 day event where Moses preformed all the sacrifices because Aaron and the other priests weren’t ordained to the priesthood service yet. Chapter 9 begins with Aaron and his sons and other relatives starting to perform the sacrifices. After performing all the sacrifices on the 8th day “there came a fire out form before the Lord, and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat, which when all the people saw, they shouted, and fell on their faces.” It's interesting to consider why God would send down the fire to consume the ashes of the sacrifices at the end of the sacrifices and not at the beginning. Consider the way it would have made the people feel if he had sent down the fire right when Moses started, right when Aaron started, and right when Aaron finished. If He had sent down the fire right when Moses started, it would have felt ...