Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

As a short introduction to the next book of 1st Samuel, TB notes that the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel, as well as 1st and 2nd Kings used to only be one book. It wasn’t until I think he said the Septuagint was compiled that the books of Samuel and Kings were separated and then again in the 1600s, Samuel was split into 1st and 2nd Samuel and Kings was split into 1st and 2nd Kings. I guess this make sense because all these books have a lot of chapters in them, so this makes for a nice ease of use. The way he does his lectures, I think, is that they do one lecture per week and each lecture can contain one chapter and that one chapter can be stretched out into multiple lectures, like I think chapter 2 takes 4 lectures to cover. So when he said that he was going to take the next two years covering just these four books, it made sense timing wise, but I hope it doesn’t take me that long. TB also notes that a main issue that arises with these 4 books is the translation issues and that there’s...

Chapter 4 ends the book of Ruth and is very technical about ancient Israel land rights. Boaz sends Ruth home in the morning and promises to get this matter squared away in the morning, so when morning comes, Boaz parks himself at the city gate and waits for the kinsman that is nearer to Naomi than Boaz so they can talk business. When the guy shows up Boaz calls him over and also asks 10 “elders of the city” to listen as witnesses so this can be a formal legal meeting. Boaz explains that Naomi is trying to sell the land that belonged to her dead husband and this other guy has the first right of refusal, and does he want to redeem it himself? The guy answers, “I will redeem it.” Boaz says, “great, not only do you get to buy the land, but you have to marry Ruth and raise up a son in the name of her dead husband.” I bet Boaz knew that the guy would be interested in the land, but once you have to start talking about raising kids that aren’t your own, then people have to stop and think for a...

Now that Ruth and Naomi have figured out that Boaz is a kinsman and a potential marriage possibility, they get to work. There’s a lot that goes into the kinsman redeemer concept that we discussed earlier in the Torah, and I don’t really want to go through it now but it has to do with buying and selling land that belonged to God but that the people used, and when a family sold their land, a close relative was obligated to buy it back for that family. Naomi was trying to sell the land her husband’s family had and Boaz, as a kinsman redeemer, was obligated to buy it to keep it in the family. Similarly, the tradition was the same for widows who did not have living sons to take care of them, a close relative was supposed to marry them, give them sons, and keep the land and bloodline in the family. That’s basically what the premise is here, I just thought that Boaz and Ruth got married because they loved each other and it was probably that too but according to tradition, he had an obligation...

When Naomi and Ruth come back to Bethlehem, it’s right as the barley harvest was starting and they were hungry, so Ruth offers to go to the fields and start “gleaning” in order to get some food for them. I think it’s important to mention here that Ruth could have stayed in Moab and gone back to her parent’s house and lived a life without the responsibility of caring for Naomi, who had almost certainly no way to care for herself financially. It’s a testament to her character that, for whatever reason, Ruth decided to take on Naomi’s care as her responsibility when she didn’t have to. Verse 1 notes that Naomi’s dead husband had a kinsman “a mighty man of wealth,” who’s name was Boaz. The implication of this is that maybe Naomi came back to Bethlehem with the intention of Ruth marrying Boaz and him taking care of them but later verses make me think that wasn’t the case. Verse 3 says that when Ruth went to glean grain, “her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz.” Th...

Around the time of Gideon, in the area that the tribe of Judah inhabited, there was a famine. The northern area of Israel was where most of the other 10 tribes lived, but in the south, where Judah lives, the IM says “the people eof Judah regularly battled another sort of enemy: the climate. Judah occupied a rugged plateau in the semiarid lands west of the Dead Sea. Normally, the land was fertile enough to sustain fields of wheat and barley, grape vineyards, and groves of olive and fig trees. But occasionally the rains failed, the crops withered and there was famine.” It was during one of those famine times that the story of Ruth starts. There’s a man who lives in Judah named Elimelech, and his wife Naomi, and his two sons Mahlon and Chilion. TB notes that the names of the sons, and probably also of Ruth and her sister-in-law Orpah were almost certainly invented by the writer of the book and points out that the names Mahlon and Chilion means “weak” and “failure” and said that no parent...

The book of Ruth is very short, only 4 chapters and only 85 verses total. We’re going to do an introduction because honestly, I didn’t want to listen to 2 more hours of lectures about chapter 1 today, I was tired and wanted to listen to music, so this will be short. There are a couple of interesting tidbits that TB discussed about the book of Ruth that I thought were noteworthy. First, Ruth is only one of two books in the Old Testament about gentiles, the other being Job. I didn’t know that Job was a gentile so that will be interesting to discuss when we get there. Secondly, Ruth is only one of two books about women in the entire Bible, the other being Esther. TB made some interesting comparisons between the two. Ruth was a gentile who lived among the Jews, Esther was a Jew who lived among the gentiles. Ruth eventually married a Jew, whereas Esther married a gentile. This was interesting, “God’s name is mentioned a number of times in the book of the gentile Ruth, but it is not mentione...

The last two chapters of the book of Judges has a lot going on and are honestly just horrific. They deal with what happens after the concubine of the Levite is raped to death in Gibeah and he cuts up her body and sends it to the leadership of each tribe. After the leaders get their body piece and find out what happens, they decide that something needs to be done and calls the Levite to them and ask him what happens. He lies and says that the men of Gibeah were trying to kill him and they took his concubine and raped her to death. That’s not what happened, they wanted to rape the man so he GAVE his concubine to them to save himself. Interestingly, I think the tribal leaders would have probably been more upset if he had told the truth that they wanted to rape him because men like that get real upset over gay stuff. Anyway, the leaders all agree that this is abhorrent behavior and now something needs to be done about it. It's important to remember that Gibeah, where this evil was com...

Chapter 19 has a story in it that has always horrified me and so I’m glad we’re getting into it because there’s been a lot of clarity for me. Again, I always thought that if it was in the scriptures then it was good and I could not for the life of me see how this was good, but now I see that it’s not good and it’s included in the scriptures to illustrate just how evil parts of Israel were at this time. It’s also important to note that this event occurred before Micah, so again, not in chronological order. There was a Levite how took a concubine. The story refers to her as the concubine and him as the husband but those words don’t make sense to me because she’s not his wife, but in that time the woman wasn’t just a mistress, she had some rights as a companion but not the full rights of a wife. He was the husband regardless, but getting those two roles straight was harder for me. This Levite and his concubine had a fight and she left the city that they lived in and went back to live wit...

Chapters 17 and 18 are about one story, so we’ll be studying them together. A couple of things about the rest of the book of Judges, consisting of chapters 17-21. First, these are known as the Appendices chapters because they aren’t about Israelite judges at all. Second, they happen chronologically BEFORE any of the other incidents in Judges that we’ve already gone over. In fact TB notes that the story from chapters 17 and 18 actually happened about 200 years before Samson. Thirdly, the IM notes “In the closing chapters of Judges the writer turned from stories of Israel’s heroes to two incidents that illustrate the low state of religion and morality in the days when Israel forsook her covenant with the Lord and everyone ‘did that which was right in his own eyes.’ The stories… are samples of Israel’s worst days. Nothing in the stories show the Israelites doing what was right.” I almost wish that these chapters were at the beginning of the book of Judges just so that we could see how far...

Here is our final chapter with Samson, and again, like everything he does, it’ wild. The 20 years of judging Israel mentioned at the end of the last chapter doesn’t indicate how the judging went, it if was done righteously (doubtful by his history) or if it was just something else. What is clear though is that it seems that neither he nor the people of Israel did what God wanted and severed their relationship with the Philistines. Case in point, Samson goes down to Gaza to find a prostitute to have sex with and he does and falls asleep. The Philistines find out that he’s there and wait outside so that they can kill him in the morning. Samson must have felt that something was off and so he leaves in the middle of the night and takes the doors to the gate of the city off their hinges and carries them out of the city. I didn’t understand why he would take the doors off, why not just leave, but it must be that Gaza was a gated city and those gates were locked at night so he had to open the...

What’s really fascinating to me about the story of Samson is just how psychopathic he seems, like genuinely unhinged, it’s wild. I’m not saying his parents were perfect, but he seems to have been raised in a strong Hebrew household by good parents, and he turned out this way, it gives a little bit more perspective about when kids turn out so wildly maladjusted even though they had a good upbringing. Remember, Samson did not consummate the marriage to this girl that he wanted so badly, and she was given in marriage to another man, so technically not only was Samson not married to her, but she was the wife of another man. Samson left the wedding and went home after killing all those men for their clothes to give to the wedding guests after they “solved” his riddle after threatening the girl and her telling them the answer. After waiting quite some time, Samson shows back up at her house and demands, “I will go in to my wife into the chamber,” meaning her personal bedroom chamber. Obvio...

There is a lot going on here in chapter 14 and we’ll be using a lot of cultural context here to understand what’s really going on. According to TB, Samson lived up in the foothills at about 800 feet elevation in a town named Tzorah. Below them was a Philistine city called Timnah and one day while Samson was down in the Philistine city, he saw a woman and saw one of the “daughters of the Philistines” and wanted her to be his wife. Interestingly, TB suggests that the phrase “saw a woman” “means more than to notice her existence; it means he saw her unveiled face, meaning from typical Middle Eastern cultural norms this was an immodest girl.” I’m not the expert on these matters, and he clearly knows more than me, and I put this out there because I thought that it was interesting because it possibly speaks to her character, but I’m going to take it with a grain of salt. I’m always wary of a man condemning a woman as being immodest, regardless of who either party is, it could be true or it c...

Samson’s story starts like many in the Bible, but he is the only judge who starts this way, and that is with an angelic announcement to his barren mother of his miraculous birth. An angel appears to an unnamed woman who is barren and she is promised that she will bear a son and that that son will bear a Nazarite vow for his entire life which consists of not consuming any grape products, not cutting his hair, and to never touch a dead body. We’ve talked about Nazarite vows before when they were prescribed in the Torah, but the IM summarizes it saying, “The primary meaning of the Hebrew verb nazar is to separate. Hence the nazir (Nazarite) is ‘the separated,’ ‘consecrated’ ‘devoted’. A Nazarite, therefore, was one who was separated from others by a special vow of self-dedication to Jehovah. The term ‘set apart’ is used to mean that one has been given a special calling or position and is thus separated from others.” If I recall correctly, the Nazarites often worked in the temple assisting...

Now we come to one of the most well known stories in the Bible, that of Samson, and it is a very different and unique story with lots of life lessons. There are a few important points to make here before getting too far into this. First is that when they talk about the judges in Israel, it’s not one collective Israel, these are different areas, very small geographical regions that deal only with a certain number of people and tribes. This means that while one judge is “saving Israel” and ruling in one area, another judge that is talked about in this book could be operating contemporaneously. Second, the Old Testament is not put together in chronological order, similar to the Book of Mormon. It follows a general path of increasing time but there are many deviations where side plots are discussed. In the Book of Mormon this happens with the people of Zeniff, king Noah, Alma, etc. and the story of Samson is another example, because this also happens around the same time as the prophet Sam...

After Jeph’s victory over the Ammonites, Ephraim is up to their old tricks and approaches Jeph demanding to know why he didn’t call them to go fight. This of course is a ruse because they don’t want to fight but they do want to be the first in line for honors and the spoils of war. They did this same thing to Gideon in chapter 8 and Gideon handled it masterfully with lots of diplomacy. This time however, they added a threat “we will burn thine house upon thee with fire.” They threatened the wrong man because he Jeph was not a diplomat and answered that he did in fact call for Ephraim to come fight and they didn’t send anyone so not only were they NOT going to be rewarded or praised, Jeph was going to fight them. He also interestingly cites God and being the reason why they won that victory. Another difference this time versus what they did to Gideon was that they apparently sent a huge army to come intimidate Jeph and his men, at least 42,000 men which will be important later. Addition...