Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

25:1-6 - After Sarah had died and Hagar had been banished, “Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah.” It goes on to list 6 sons that Keturah had with Abraham as the father. It’s easy to view the adding of Keturah and her sons as chronological, but the lecturer from the Torah Class podcast I listen to had some very interesting insights, though I’m not sure how important they are. First he suggested that the timing doesn’t line up for Abraham to have married Keturah and have at least 6 children with her by the time he died based on when Sarah died. He says that it’s more likely that Abraham had multiple concubines but only one true, legitimate, legal wife, Sarah. As far as the children of Keturah are concerned, he also notes that it’s unlikely that she would have six sons in a row and those be her only children. He suggests that the most likely scenario is that she gave birth to many children, both boys and girls, but the six mentioned here are the only ones important to the narra...

24:50-67 - The whole purpose of Eliezer’s long journey has been laid out on the table and he’s patiently waiting for an answer. To be fair, it is a really big decision so I would expect the answer to be “let me think about it for a while,” or even “tell us more about this man you want to cart my daughter off to marry and never return?” Nope, Laban and Bethuel immediately answer “the thing proceedeth from the Lord: we cannot speak unto thee bad or good. Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her, and go.” I was hoping they would have at least pretended to think about it for more than half a second, but they didn’t, and their answer seemed just so flippant, especially when we consider that Laban demonstrates repeatedly later in life that he doesn’t care about the One True God and in fact worships many gods and idols. So this guy who isn’t really religious anyway says, “sure sounds like this is the infinite plan of the One True God, take my sister,” it’s a little disheartening, but I guess...

24:32-49 - When all the men get to the house, a man takes care of the camels, gives them food and water, and then washed the feet of the men in the traveling party. What is difficult to grasp with this is who is doing all this work? Verse 31 portrays Laban as being the main actor there, but then verse 33 shifts the focus to Eliezer, so I don’t know exactly who verse 32 is referring to. I don’t know very much about ancient hospitality etiquette, so I don’t know if it was proper for the traveling people to go through the stuff of the residence to find food and water for their camels or if it was customary for the residents to stop whatever they were doing to take care of the needs of their guests, I guess I can see it both ways. Regardless of who did all the work, when Eliezer sits down to eat with the group, he stops everything and says, “I will not eat, until I have told mine errand.” I don’t know exactly what the significance is here, why he put off eating until he told of his missio...

24:22-31 – Instead of proclaiming that he had found the girl he was going to take back with him to marry his master’s son, Eliezer goes at his task another way. Rebekah had just spent a lot of time and energy drawing water from the well for him and his camels, and presumably the other men in his group. I don’t think that she expected anything other than heartfelt “thank you,” but instead, probably to her great surprise, he “took a golden earring of half a shekel weight, and two bracelets for her hands of ten shekels weight of gold,” and asks her “whose daughter art thou? Tell me, I pray thee: is there room in thy father’s house for us to lodge in?” I read a historical fiction book once about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by Orson Scott Card, I think, and when describing this scene, the author implied that by accepting these gifts, whether for payment for her service in the water or not, Rebekah was creating an obligation to Eliezer, meaning that she was making a large commitment to him t...

24:7-21 - I don’t know what kind of tasks Eliezer had done for Abraham in the past, but being his chief servant guy, I’m sure that they were extensive and he had to fly by the seat of his pants and hope that Abraham would approve after the fact. But surely these matters were about animals and stuff like that, so of course in Abraham’s mind there’s no one better to go find a wife for his son than Eliezer, but man that was probably the most pressure he’d ever felt in his life. It’s interesting that Abraham is content that the task will be satisfied because he believes that God “shall send his angel before thee, and thou shalt take a wife unto my son from thence.” Eliezer is less confident in his abilities and asks basically “well what if she won’t come with me?” The answer is simple “then thou shalt be clear from this my oath.” The lecture on this chapter from the Torah Class website notes the difference, “Abraham was not worried, for he knew God was preparing the way for this. The worr...

24:1-3 - One thing that I haven’t considered until very recently, and impacts my evaluation of the Old Testament greatly, is that this isn’t a historical chronology of early Judaism, this isn’t a textbook of facts and events. It’s not like the Book of Mormon, with a clear theme and multiple writers with one single person overseeing it’s composition. The Old Testament is a narrative designed to convey a message to a specific audience at a specific time, so while I have follow up questions, it’s really about moving the reader through the account to see the whole picture. This is something I’ve struggled with because the whole book just seems so staggered, there isn’t a lot of follow through like what happened to who and when. Maybe it’s because I’m so much more familiar with the Book of Mormon where Mormon tells us “and Alma died,” etc that it’s just so hard for me to follow the OT. The lecturer on this chapter from the Torah Class podcast series notes that this is the point where the st...

23:1-20 - The timeline we have is that Abraham is older than Sarah, but they are both very elderly, and it gets to a point where no matter who is older, longevity can’t be quantified. Even though he is older, it is Sarah who dies first, when she “was an hundred and seven and twenty years old.” The tradition is that Sarah was so distraught over the ordeal with Isaac being sacrificed that the stress killed her. The place that they were living at the time that she died was Hebron, and I don’t know why there is a whole chapter about this, but Abraham wants to bury her in Hebron where they were staying. I’ve listened to a lot of discourses on this chapter and why it’s important, and there are some interesting points made about why there is so much documentation about thus purchase of land. The first point made was that we have to remember that even though Abraham has been promised his own land, a very special one at that, he still hasn’t received it. Wherever he’s lived he’s been a strange...