Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

The main concept covered in chapter 13 is pretty standard that we’ve heard before but for some reason spoke to me a little bit more forcefully this time. The concept is that anyone who tried to lead you away from worshipping God should be put to death, even if it is your brother, son, daughter, wife, or best friend. Just saying it like that sounds a little bit weird and it’s not meant to just be like “if you think someone is a bad influence on you then kill them,” that’s obviously not it. This first part is that it doesn’t matter who it is, anyone trying to lead you away from Christ can not, under any circumstances, remain in your life. This is a hard concept because cutting family and friends out of your life is very difficult. And again, this doesn’t mean that if someone you know leaves the church then you cut them out of your life, but it’s about boundaries. In the chapter specifically it says if this person raises themselves up to be a “prophet” or “a dreamer of dreams, and giveth ...

What’s interesting about chapter 12 is that TB has 3 one hour lectures on it and the IM doesn’t say a single thing, so it will be interesting to go through and see what we can come up with. Moses is prepping the people to change their lifestyle from that of Bedouin shepherds to a permanent settled society. He tells them when they take over these cities that God is going to win for them, they are to “destroy all the places” that were used to worship other gods. From listening to the lectures from TB, the feeling I got was that God wanted a structure to His worship. He didn’t want anyone to do whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted, with who ever they wanted. Very similar to today, church services and ordinances are very highly structured in that they are all the same every time and they can only be done by the church approved authority, with the exception of covid. One of the reasons why all these religious cultural aspects are to be destroyed is because God wants a centralized rel...

Chapter 11 is very much a parallel and expansion of the consistent promise in the Book of Mormon, “if you keep my commandments, you shall prosper in the land.” Moses reminds the people of the miraculous ways in which God had preserved them previously. The IM implies that this might be because a lot of the people that Moses was speaking to at this point didn’t know about a lot the miracles that happened on their way out of Egypt. However, TB said that there were probably a lof of the people who were between the ages of 45 and 60 who were old enough to remember a lot of what happened in Egypt. Moses tells them of the “miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of Egypt unto Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and unto all his land.” One anecdote that I wanted to share was again, some video that I saw on Instagram that I thought was interesting. This video suggested that Moses, while living as a prince in Egypt as a child and young man, had been trained as a priest in Heliopolis, which wa...

The part about chapter 9 at the end that I didn’t cover is Moses telling the people that he begged God to let them live twice and both times he had to go into the mountains fasting, without food or water, for 40 days each time. Both of these times he went into the mountains fasting was to secure God’s covenant and commandments for the people and so Moses continues his narrative that he took the tablets to the mountain to get God’s commandments, and made an ark “of shittim wood” to keep them in. Interestingly, I just watched a video on Instagram that talked about the ark of the covenant being symbolic of the temple because it holds the commandments and covenants from God for the people. I thought that was an interesting comparison. Moses also recounts a little bit of their journeys in the wilderness, Aaron’s death, and asks an important question, “now Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve ...

Chapter 9 is a basic rehashing of some of the concepts that have been discussed repeatedly. The first is that God will go in and destroy their enemies before Israel has to fight them. There is a phrase used here that sounded familiar to me in verse 2 which says, “Who can stand before the children of Anak!” This phrase is used a couple of times in the Book of Mormon as well, once in Mormon 9:26 when Mormon asks, “who can stand against the works of the Lord?” A second time is in Ether 14:18 which is where I remembered it from, which says, “Who can stand before the army of Shiz?” It was just interesting to me that this specific phrase was used in both the Book of Mormon and the Deuteronomy and it makes me wonder if this was a common phrase used among ancient peoples in the middle east to the point that it would have been carried with the Jaredites and used a thousand years later as they were destroyed. Or was this just a common sense phrase that I’m reading too much into? The concept th...

One thing that I didn’t really understand until today is that if Israel had been obedient initially, they would have been able to receive the promised land only a couple of years after they left Egypt. I was always under the impression that the first generation couldn’t inherit the promised land because they were wicked but that God just instinctively knew that and walked them around for 40 years until they died. The reality is that they were given opportunities to inherit the promised land but rebelled against God repeatedly and were therefore banned from entering. It was just something I think about in my life like am I not receiving promised blessings because of my disobedience or because it is not God’s timing. Are bad things happening to me and my family because we rebelled against God like the Israelites or just because this is God’s will for it to happen? It’s been interesting to reflect why things have played out certain ways and what the consequences have been of those events,...

7:1-8 - Today we get to have an important in depth conversation that has been touched on previously but that is overdue. In chapter 7, Moses prepares the Israelites with the knowledge that in order to take the land of Canaan, they will have to displace the current inhabitants. The descriptive header says that “Israel is to destroy the sever nations of Canaan,” but the actual word phrase used in the text is that God, not Israel, will “cast out many nations before thee.” There’s two distinctions there, God will do the work, not Israel, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the inhabitants must be slaughtered, but instead removed. This is in line with what TB mentioned, that is the people just leave the place and give it up to the Hebrews, then they don’t have to be killed, only those who stand in opposition. In reality, however, I don’t think that very many civilizations will just walk away from their homes, especially if they think they have a chance at defeating the invading Israelites...

There are multiple overarching concepts that are important in chapter 6. The first is verses 4 and 5 which TB says is the basis of all Judaism as well as Christianity. It’s called the Shema and it says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one love: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” The IM has an interesting commentary about this saying that the Shema consists Deuteronomy 6:4-9. Deuteronomy 11:13-21, and Numbers 15:37-41 in that order. These passages are to be recited twice a day by devout Jews and it also the prayer that is supposed to be said by someone who is about to be martyrs. This passage is also important because it’s the basis for what Jesus says on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 22:36-37 which says, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” This is another instance of Je...

Chapter 5 is basically just a rehashing of the 10 commandments but there are a few points that are interesting. The first has to do with the reference in the last chapter when Moses asked the people if they heard God speak to them from fire. In verse 4 Moses reminds the people that when the original covenant was made with their parents at Mount Horeb 38+ years ago, “the Lord talked with you face to face in the mount of the midst of the fire.” Moses also reminded the people that when God spoke to them directly, they were afraid and asked Moses to intervene on their behalf and have God speak to him so that they wouldn’t have to. TB mentioned that after the people told Moses that they were too scared to hear God personally and that they wanted Moses to talk to God and just tell them what He said, the people did stick around to wait and hear what God had to say, they just packed up all their stuff and went home. That’s interesting to consider because if the God of the whole universe is spe...

Chapter 4 is very long and TB makes a significant claim about it saying that Deuteronomy 4 is one of the top 10 chapters in the entire Bible that shows the nature and character of God and lectures for 2 ½ hours about it. I personally didn’t take it to be that way and I think that one of the reasons for that is because TB interprets the scattering and gathering of Israel to mean the literal dispersal of Hebrews from the land of Canaan and then the return of their DNA descendants that specific geographic space. From that perspective, yes, this chapter is very important to that narrative, I don’t share that perspective and we can talk about it later but that’s probably why I disagree with his emphasis on this chapter’s importance and I didn’t realize it until just now. Moses remind the Israelites what happened when they rebelled by committing adultery with the foreign women that infiltrated them under king Balak. The punishments for that disobedience was severe and Moses wants them to re...

Chapters 2 and 3 are essentially Moses just rehearsing to the Israelites what they had just done as far as what their journey entailed recently. He talks about that they were supposed to pass by the Edomites and the Moabites because they are kin historically and God wasn’t going to give Israel that land anyway so don’t mess with the people. The problem became when Balak the king of Moab tried to curse Israel and ended up taking Balaam’s advice to infiltrate them and tempt them to commit sexual sin with his people so that God wouldn’t favor them anymore. To be fair, the Hebrew men shouldn’t have been tempted and shouldn’t have committed adultery with those women, but they were punished as well. The irony is that Balak was so worried about the Israelites conquering his people that he messed with the situation enough to get them destroyed even though it was never God’s intention to destroy them. Balak, with all his meddling, got his people destroyed when it wouldn’t have happened if he wo...

As we begin Deuteronomy there are a few important things to note as an introduction. First is that the name Deuteronomy is only the name of his book in the Christian version of the Bible. It means “the second law” because this is Moses giving the law again to the Hebrews before he dies. TB says that it’s because as they are about to go into the promised land, this is him interpreting the law for them once they get there because at this point they had only been living the law while wandering in the wilderness and things were going to change so they needed to know how to live the law once they settled. There was also a long discussion about how the first four books of the Torah, the 7th letters of the first 49 letters spelled out God’s name which indicated that those books were dictated by God to Moses, where as the book of Deuteronomy doesn’t have that. Instead it has the 7th letter of the first 48 letters spells out Torah. 48 letters instead of 49 indicate that this is from Moses becau...

The rest of Numbers, chapters 33-36, were mostly instructions on how to operated once in the promised land of Canaan and so we will go over them quickly. There are some interesting aspects of it, but for the most part it’s just names of people I don’t know and laws that we’ve already gone over before. The first part is a basic travel log of the journey taken by Israel from Egypt to where they are at that point. The significant part about that is that there are 42 points covered by this log, and TB points out that archeological evidence and other accounts don’t match up to this record and he hypothesizes that it is recorded this way because of the significance of the number 42. A quick google search says that the number 42 is significant because it “represents divine creation, transition, and spiritual journeys.” That makes sense that this record is less about where they physically were and more about the spiritual journey of Israel from disobedient freed slaves to the more subservient,...