Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

Saul has forced his battle weary troops to make an oath of fasting for the entire day, “that I may be avenged on mine enemies” and it really sucked for them but they were obedient and didn’t eat at all. While the regular troops were forced into that vow, Jonathan was not there, however, and didn’t know of nor make that vow. When the troops pursued the Philistines into a grove of trees full of beehives and honey, the troops didn’t eat anything, but Jonathan did. After Jonathan had eaten some of the honey, another soldier told him about the vow his father had made about not eating and Jonathan replied that his father was wrong to do that and that felt so much better and had more energy after having eaten the honey. In fact, maybe they could have had even more success against the Philistines if the troops hadn’t been forced to fast. The fast was in force until the evening, and the Israelites pursued the Philistines all day “and the people were faint.” Finally, night fall came and the so...

The Philistines are creeping into Hebrew territory and Saul only has a contingent of 600 soldiers left. Apparently, the Israelites were on. One side of a valley and the Philistines were on the other side of the valley separated by about a mile. We met Jonathan last chapter when he killed the Philistine governor in the area in order to start a war between the two peoples. To me that seemed wreckless, starting wars, but both TB and the IM say that Jonathan was a man of firm faith in God and obedient in righteousness and who am I to argue with that? Since Jonathan killed the governor, the Philistines have been getting ready to make their move and Saul was waiting for Samuel, gathering his troops but Saul has just been kind of sitting there waiting, TB suggests that this is because Saul wasn’t really interested in a war that wouldn’t serve his purposes which was to unite all of Israel behind him and since all the other soldiers had left leaving only 600 men remaining, he knew that the peop...

The troops were leaving to go home and Samuel had not shown up within the 7 days that he promised, so Saul takes matters into his own hands and tells his people to bring him two sacrifices, a burnt offering and a peace offering. Saul knows good and well that only priests were authorized to make the sacrifices and the burnt offering specifically was only authorized to be made by the high priest, Samuel specifically. TB notes that in Gilgal, surely there were priests around who could have made the peace offering, and even if Saul had done that one himself, it wasn’t the super serious burnt offering and at that point was still sometimes being done at home by the oldest sons like had happened before the Levitical priesthood was organized. So it still wouldn’t have been great, but it would have been more understandable. The fact that Saul had the option to chose the one that was less serious but instead chose the very serious sacrifice that was explicitly commanded only for the high priest,...

Since Israel’s victory over the Ammonites and Samuel’s “farewell” address, Saul has risen in prominence but he still struggled with political support throughout the kingdom. Maybe it’s because the war with the Ammonites was so effective in uniting all the tribes behind him, but TB implies that Saul was seeking a war again to hopefully solidify his popularity and since he just brutally defeated the Ammonites, Saul seems to turn his attention to the Philistines. Saul doesn’t hear from God or Samuel about starting a war with the Philistines, that we know of anyway, but we know that God wants to severe the relationship with Israel has with the Philistines so it seems like Go dis in favor of a war between them and Israel and probably for the same purpose as Saul such as unifying Israel as a whole and getting Philistine influence out of the country, though Saul and God want this for different reasons. Chapter 13 starts by saying “Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years ov...

The people of Israel are still in Gilgal and have just coronated and accepted Saul as their king and because Samuel’s role as main judge in Israel is diminishing and Saul’s is rising, chapter 12 is known as Samuel’s farewell address, even though Samuel is not dying or leaving and will still be heavily featured in the future. Samuel stages this as a kind of courtroom type of scenario, and it’s quite legal from the ancient culture perspective. Samuel says that he has “walked before you from my childhood unto this day,” meaning that he’s served them and led them since he was a child. He says, basically, that there is the king in front of them all and if anyone has any accusations against Samuel of corruption, accepting bribes, defrauding or oppressing anyone, that this was their time to come forward and formally accuse him in front of the new king. No one came forward to accuse him and everyone agreed “thou hast not defrauded us, nor oppressed us, neither hast thou taken ought of any man’...

Chapter 11 seems pretty straight forward but there’s a lot of background information that makes it interesting. Samuel had just crowned Saul king and my assumption would be that Saul would now start doing kingly duties, but apparently not enough of the tribes supported him to make a unified country so Saul went home and started being a farmer again. The geography is important here because Saul is from Gibeah, and we’ve heard that name before, Gibeah is the town in Benjamin that 100 years ago, raped that concubine to death, and the husband cut up her body and sent it to the other tribes demanding that they come and avenge her death and they did and almost completely wiped out the tribe of Benjamin. So Saul is from Gibeah where this horrible event occurred. But we also need to remember that after they killed almost the entire tribe of Benjamin, the people felt bad so they went to the town Jabesh-Gilead because they refused to fight against Benjamin, and they killed everyone in that town ...

Samuel told Saul to go home and that he would encounter 3 specific signs. It’s not said explicitly but it is implied that these signs were meant to confirm for Saul that Samuel was correct and that God had chosen him to be the new king of Israel. I saw an IG video a couple of weeks ago talking about confirmations and that God will always send confirmations to us because He’s not a God of confusion. And I think the example they used was a random stranger coming up to them and saying something about what God wanted them to do that was pretty specific, so I think the context that they were talking about was that other people will confirm for you what God is telling you to do. While I do think that that is possible, I don’t necessarily think that that’s true, but it was an interesting concept to think about. But maybe it is true, we just need to temper our expectations about what constitutes a confirmation. I think if we are looking for something specific or obvious or showy, then we’ll pr...

Now that Samuel had discovered Saul, by the hand of God, and had him at the special feast, and they have walked and talked about God’s word, “Samuel took a vial of oil, and poured in upon his head, and kissed him, and said is it not because the Lord hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance?” Both the IM and TB note that anointing with oil was significant in that it was done to priests to set them apart and also represented the Spirit of God. The IM says, “Anointing with oil in priesthood service is as old as Adam. And, since the Lord set up the kingdom of Israel and revealed the laws that were to govern their kings, it was altogether fitting that these kings be anointed with oil.” The IM has a large paragraph about the significance of anointing with oil for the kings as well as the symbolism between the anointing of priests to their duties and the anointing of a king for his job. The IM also notes that the use of the word “captain” here is significant, saying, “But Samuel ...

Israel has decided that they want a king, and I think it’s because they want to become like the nations around them, the powerful ones. They don’t want to be the way that God wants them to be, they want to be like the other nations, powerful militarily, rich, financially prosperous. Ironically, if they had lived the way that God wanted them to live, they wouldn’t have had to devote resources to the military, and they would have been prosperous like they were promised in the law of Moses. But they didn’t want it that way, they wanted it their own way, they wanted to be seen and envied by other nations. I think that that was the main difference between the way God wanted them to do it and the way they wanted to do it. God’s way meant taking care of everyone, they wanted to be rich themselves and at best, didn’t care if it affected others, and at worst, they wanted a system in which they could become rich by exploiting the vulnerable of their community. God’s way would have had them be hu...

Samuel has judged Israel as a whole for several decades and he’s getting old and he was hoping to pass on his position to his sons, I think like most fathers want. Unfortunately for Samuel, like Eli, his sons were not righteous, nor were the people. Specifically, his sons “walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgement.” TB says that the translation of the word “lucre” specifically indicates that they made money through illegitimate and ill-gotten methods. The elders of Israel met together and decided that they didn’t want Samuel’s sons to become their judges and that they wanted a king “like all the nations.” The IM says that the fact that Samuel’s sons were not righteous was just an excuse used by the elders to advocate for a king over the theocratic system that they were currently living under. I tried to think about why they would do this, why would they want a king instead of a righteous judge, and some of the thoughts that I had w...

The people of Beth-shemesh were terrified of the ark after the 70 people were killed by God for their mishandling of it and called for someone from Kirjath-Jearim to come and pick it up, and a man named Abinadab did just that and took it to his house. The fact that Abinadab was not killed by God for taking the ark to his house indicates to me that he was authorized to handle the ark in the way prescribed by God. Abinadab “sanctified Eleazar his son to keep the ark of the Lord.” So the son seems to have been given the job of looking after the ark and taking care of it and he did just that for 20 years. TB notes that it’s probable that there was no sacred place like Shiloh or the tabernacle to keep the ark in at that time due to the defunct nature of the priesthood at that point, and again, to me, the fact that no one else was killed while caring for the ark in his house for 20 years indicates to me that that was probably true. Verse 2 says “all the house of Israel lamented after the Lo...

At the end of chapter 5, the Philistines were afflicted with a serious disease process in all the cities where the ark of the covenant was taken. The KJV just says “emerods” which is footnoted to mean tumors or boils which is an interesting description. It would be weird to have the people erupt in tumors, boils would make more sense, but the IM gives a pretty good suggestion. Later in chapter 6 we learn that this plague was also accompanied by rats or mice, which lends credence to this suggestion. The IM notes “many died, and those who did not seem to have endured great suffering.” The IM also says that Josephus indicates that is was a “very destructive disease’ involving dysentery, bleeding, and severe vomiting… There severity of the disease and the fact that rodents were involved lead many scholars to conclude that what smote the Philistines was bubonic plague.” Whatever it was, it was severe enough that the people of these cities knew something was wrong and suddenly, to the point ...

The Israelites are devastated that the ark of the covenant has been captured by the Philistines, and maybe it’s partially because they have a quasi legitimate view of their God because it’s been so warped by centuries of apostasy that I think they are more equating the ark with the pagan idols that everyone else worships. In their mind, I would imagine, this is no different than when Rachel stole her father Laban’s idols and he came after them so fiercely. I think that they saw the ark as their idol representative of God and it being captured was the same as their God being captured. Yesterday I talked about why God would command Israel to go to war knowing that they were going to be slaughtered and have the ark captured, and I think there maybe two different reasons for that. The first might have been that maybe the 34,000 soldiers who were slain were a especially wicked part of Israel that would have impeded their turn back to God. It’s interesting to note that in the Book of Mormon ...

Now that Samuel was recognized as a prophet throughout all of Israel, which had not been united for a while, “the word of Samuel came to all Israel.” We don’t know what the word was nor do we know what God said to Samuel beforehand to cause him to put this word out. The result of Samuel’s word, though, was that “Israel went out against the Philistines to battle.” Presumably Samuel told Israel to go to battle against the Philistines because presumably the Lord told Samuel to tell them to do that. TB reminds us that the Philistines were seafaring people so the fact that they had a military presence so far into Israel’s territory was proof that Israel had not only lost significant territory to them but just how entrenched the Philistines were in Israelite society. He also reminded us that the Philistines had a professional, skilled military whereas the Israelite army was most goat herders and farmers, so militarily, without God, it was going to be a bloodbath and the only reason why the H...