Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

17:1-14 - Ishmael is born and suddenly there is a flash forward 13 years and we find that “the Lord appeared to Abram.” He gives Abram the command to be perfect. I’ve never really liked this because it implies that perfection is possible in this life or that some people might be born perfect or close to it. But I like the IM’s quote saying, “Salvation does not come all at once; we are commanded to be perfect even as our Father in heaven is perfect. It will take us ages to accomplish this end, for there will be greater progress beyond the grave, and it will be there that the faithful will overcome all things, and receive all things, even the fullness of the Father’s glory.” Perfection isn’t commanded like it is our only goal to get there as fast as possible, but it’s a complex and complicated concept that takes eons of time to achieve. God also promises, by covenant, that he shall “be a father of many nations.” There is an extensive JST from verses 3-12 which gives a lot more insight i...

Abram and Sarai are old, and even though the Lord promised Abram that after 400 years his descendants would inhabit the land of Canaan, they still don’t have any children. Probably seeing that her childbearing years were behind her, Sarai gave her “handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar” to Abram and basically told him to have sex with her so that she can get pregnant and have a child, “that I may obtain children by her.” This seems weird to us, but anciently, this was a very standard practice, the IM comments, “According to the custom of the time, Sarah’s giving her handmaid, Hagar, to be a wife to Abraham was an expected and logical act.” Abram does what Sarai asks and Hagar gets pregnant, “and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.” I always thought that Hagar was bad because of this, she should have just known how important Sarai was and calmed down, but at this point, I can’t ever in any way condemn someone’s reaction to their enslavement...

After returning from rescuing Lot and being blessed by Melchizedek, Abram has a vision in which God says, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” Maybe it’s a just a different want of speaking, but if someone told me “don’t worry I am your reward for obedience,” I would be very skeptical about the whole deal. But this could also be similar to God promising eternal life with Him, in fact, that’s probably exactly what it’s like. But Abram’s concern about this promise is that he doesn’t have any kids and the main steward of his house “is this Eliezer of Damascus.” Abram has just come back from being blessed by Melchizedek and has already been blessed by God with a Promised Land that is currently inhabited by several groups of people and “seed as the dust of the earth in number.” He’s probably thinking “I have a small group of soldiers and no kids and my wife and I are getting old how is all of this going to be fulfilled?” So he’s asking God is this Eliezer is ...

Circling back to Melchizedek, there is another 15 verses about him as a JST for chapter 14. It’s difficult for me to understand the much about this guy because there is no set record about or by him, so we can’t really get specifics except indirectly. In fact, it seems like so much of what is recorded about him was lost so we only here references to things that were talked about before, so it’s really abstract. What is interesting about this though is that even though he’s not given personal writings in the scriptures, he’s discussed in each and every single book of scripture that we have. If nothing else, this indicates that he is just as important as the other patriarchs that are mentioned in all the books of scripture such as Abraham, Moses, Noah, and Adam. In fact, Elijah isn’t mentioned in all the books and he was/is a major player, so it just goes to show that Melchizedek is a big deal too, even though we don’t know a ton about him, or at least I don’t. The JST about Melchizedek...

After parting ways with Lot, Abraham finds himself in a bit of a pickle. There is a list of kings and cities that these kings are in charge of and all their fighting each other, I’m not exactly sure what their army make up was, as far as how many soldiers they had, what kind of weaponry, etc. but it turns out that when Sodom and Gomorrah are conquered, Lot and his people and “his goods” were captured as well. One of Lot’s people managed to escape and went to Abram for help. Abram heard this and “armed his trained servants, born into his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan.” Again, I don’t know the make up of these enemy armies, but my guess is that they have significantly more than 318 guys, so it probably would have been a terrifying prospect to go up against these armies that far outnumbered you. It seems like Abram knows this so he uses a sneak attack similar to that of Teancum, in which he “divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, a...

3:1-13 - I’ve been not super interested in the next chronological step, which is Abraham 3, because it talks so much about astronomy and lots of concepts that I can’t really follow. I find it fascinating though, that all these prophets like Alma, Joseph Smith, Moses, and Abraham get lessons in science at some point. I wonder if pondering creation is a natural progression of spiritual learning, like if eventually everyone who grows spiritually will get to a point where learning about the science behind everything is the next logical step. Because I’ve been so reluctant to do a deep dive into this chapter, I’m just going to briefly skim over the parts that stood out to me. First is that the Lord told Abraham that he’s teaching him all this stuff before he goes to Egypt because God wants Abraham to teach them this stuff. If I recall correctly, a lot of our current scientific knowledge has grown over the thousands of years and a lot of it stemmed from what the Egyptians knew, which is int...

With the Egyptians believing that Sarah is Abraham’s sister, she’s put in the Pharaoh’s harem and “he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels.” It’s a difficult pill for me to swallow that Sarah gets put into a brothel and Abraham gets rich and somehow that’s ok with everyone, but I’m going to look at it from the perspective that Jesus is the ultimately champion of women and accept that I don’t know or understand everything. But there is an interesting result of Sarah being in Pharaoh’s harem and I’ve always wondered how Pharaoh put all of this together because “the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abram’s wife.” If I remember correctly the plague is widespread infertility, Pharaoh figures out that this is a curse from God on him because Sarah isn’t actually just Abram’s sister but also his wife. Pharaoh is not pleased and makes it sound like, if only ...