Enos's Name

My favorite insight about the Come Follow Me reading this week came from Jared Halverson, in the Unshaken podcast.  He thought it was interesting that Jacob called his son's name Enos. The only person named Enos in the Old Testament is the grandson of Adam and he is only mentioned a couple of times in the recitation of genealogies.  Brother Halverson noted several similarities between the Biblical Enos and the Book of Mormon Enos.  That, in turn, suggests that Jacob saw similarities between his father, Lehi, and Adam. I had never thought of Lehi as a new Adam, but in many ways he was. 

Adam: Righteous patriarch of his family.  Driven out of the garden of Eden because of his own transgression. Taught his children to follow the Lord. One of his sons rebelled against the Lord and slew his other son.  Adam and Eve had a third, younger son, Seth who followed the righteous ways of his father.  Seth, younger brother of the warring older brothers, has a son which he calls Enos.

Lehi: Righteous patriarch of his family.  Driven out of Jerusalem because of the wickedness of the people. Teaches his children to follow the Lord.  Two of his sons rebel against their younger brothers and tries to slay them. Lehi and Sarah have another younger son in the wilderness, Jacob, who carries on as religious leader after Nephi's death. Jacob, younger brother of the older warring brothers,  has a son called Enos.

The two stories are not exactly the same, but there are a lot of similarities, enough that Jacob may have seen them and decided to call his son Enos because of them.

There are those who think Joseph Smith came up with the Book of Mormon on his own.  If he did, either Joseph Smith, at age 21, was a genius and remembered that Adam's grandson was named Enos, realized there were a lot of similarities between Adam and Lehi, Jacob and Seth, and used the name Enos here on purpose to call attention to the similarities. The other option is that the parallel's between this Enos' life and the Enos in the Old Testament was a coincidence. Enos was just a name that Joseph Smith threw in there. It isn't super common as an English name in the 1800's, but it wasn't unheard of.  Still, if it was a coincidence, it was a pretty good one. 

Hebraisms in the Allegory of the Olive Tree.

 This week in Come Follow Me, we read the longest chapter in the Book of Mormon, Jacob 5, which contains the allegory of the olive tree.   This allegory has been extensively studied and analyzed.  Some people talk about how it represents the history of the House of Israel.  Others talk about how is demonstrates the Lord's untiring efforts to help and save his people. I think these are the most important interpretations of the allegory, but they have already been thoroughly explored.

I decided to take a historical/linguistical approach to the allegory for this blog post.  I am assuming here that this allegory is what Jacob stated it is, a copy of an allegory written by an ancient prophet named Zenos. I am also assuming it was written in Hebrew on the Brass Plates.  Here are a few guesses/observations I have about Zenos and his allegory.

First of all Zenos.  If I were guessing I would say that Zenos was probably a Greek convert to the Jewish faith , a kind of Jewish "Samuel the Lamanite". My only evidence for this is his name. Zenos, means "foreigner" ξένος in Greek.  In 600 BC, Greece had not yet become the world power it would 200 years later under Alexander the Great, but it was still a major player in the region. If a Greek converted to Judaism, and lived in Jerusalem, it seems probable to me that people might call him Zenos.  That might also explain why none of his prophecies or writing have survived except in the Book of Mormon.  Jewish people might not make an effort to preserve the writings of a non-Israelite, especially if his allegory suggested that they were rotten at the core.

Second, one of my podcasters observed that Jacob specifically mentions that the top of the tree was dying. The top of a tree was called its "head" or רֹאשׁ in Hebrew and this is also a term used to denote the leadership of the church.  No one understood better than the descendants of Lehi, that the leadership of the church in Jerusalem was becoming corrupt.  They had sought to kill Lehi, after all. 

Third, I was interested in the question why the olive orchard is called a vineyard in this allegory.  I wondered if orchard and vineyard were the same word in Hebrew, but no, there are two separate words.  orchards is גנות and vineyard is כרם.  Then I decided to look up each instance of each word to see how they are used.  גנות, orchard, is only used eleven times in the Old Testament and it sometimes also denotes a garden, or a cultivated area that was a pleasant place to hang out. Vineyard is כרם and it appears about 80 times in the Old Testament. In most of those cases it really does mean vineyard, i.e. a place to grow grapes for wine, rather than on olive grove. There is even one verse that mentions an orchard, a vineyard, fig trees, and olive trees in the same verse (Amos 4:9) so vineyard doesn't seem to be a general term.  

Giving up, I googled "vineyard vs orchard in the book of Jacob."  It turns out someone from Book of Mormon Central, John A. Tevdtnes,  had the same question as I did.  He did some linguistical digging and brings in a bunch of other ancient languages to show why the word for vineyard might have been used to describe this olive orchard. The article is interesting and very technical, but I thought maybe he was trying a bit too hard.  I think what is most likely is that Joseph Smith had read the Old Testament enough to sense that vineyard was a much more common word in the Old Testament, so that was the one that came to mind as he was translating the allegory. 

Jacob 1-4

 This week we read Jacob 1-4.  Jacob is Nephi's much younger brother who takes over the ministry after Nephi's death. Jacob says he is writing 55 years after Lehi left Jerusalem, and that probably puts Jacob at about 50 years old. Jared Halverson from "Unshaken" podcast has a whole theory that Jacob suffered  from anxiety due to childhood trauma during the Lehites' journey to the promised. land.  He makes a few good points, one of which is that Jacob actually uses the word "anxiety" more than any other Book of Mormon writer.  It comes up in 2 Nephi 6:3 which is Jacob's sermon on Isaiah, Jacob 1:5, Jacob 2:3, and in Jacob 4: 18 he uses the term "over anxiety".  

Another argument is that even though Nephi made Jacob the religious leader of the society, he didn't make him king. Nephi was seen as both king and religious ruler and he seemed to function actively in both roles.  He built a temple (2 Nephi 5:16) and wielded a sword in his people's defense (Jacob 1:10). Before Nephi dies, he chooses some unnamed man to be king (Jacob 1:9) and Jacob becomes the religious leader.   Why not continue having someone play both roles?  Why the separation of church and state? 

The final evidence is that while Jacob is talking very bluntly to his people, particularly about the sin of adultery, he keeps reminding people that he is speaking for the Lord.  (Jacob 2). Halverson suggests that he has to rely heavily on the Lord because broaching the topic is so difficult for him.  

I think he has some good arguments, but I am not totally convinced. Yes, Jacob had a rough childhood, but the scriptures suggest that Jacob was very young when they were on the boat, young enough that he depended heavily on his mother for food (1 Nephi 18:19).  How much would he have remembered about their trials in the wilderness? How much did he understand as a child the conflict between his older brothers?  I also think that all the talk of anxiety for the welfare of his brethren, the separation of church and state at Nephi's death, and Jacob's refences to the will of the Lord could have easily arisen from other causes.  We just don't have enough information. 

Jacob is clearly sympathetic to the victims of the Nephite men's bad behavior.  I find it interesting that he fully targets the men because of their wish for multiple wives and concubines, forgetting that whenever a man has an illicit relationship with a woman, (except in the case of rape) there is woman having an illicit relationship with a man. It wasn't just the men behaving badly. Still, Jacob comes across as very tender hearted and caring of his people.  He also has a lovely literary style and seemed to carefully craft his writings.  He seems to have a very extensive understanding of Jesus' forthcoming mission on the earth. Even though we only have less than a dozen chapters written by Jacob, he is one of the great prophets of the Book of Mormon. 

The Doctrine of Christ

 This week we finish the book of 2 Nephi, and in so doing say goodbye to the prophet Nephi, son of Lehi.  One of my goals this year in my scripture study was to pay attention to mentions of the Savior in the Book of Mormon.  If you have been following my blog, you will know that I have been tracking how much Nephi and Lehi knew about Jesus at different times in their lives and travels.  When Lehi first saw a vision of God, he saw the Messiah, but didn't know who he was. (1 Nephi 9-10). Gradually, over the next decades, Nephi gradually learned that Jesus would come, suffer for our sins, die, and be resurrected (2 Nephi 11).  By the end of his life, Nephi understands the whole "doctrine of Christ".  Moreover, he has seen a vision of the future of not only his descendants, but also of the gentiles. 

It is interesting that Nephi seems to get this very vital information primarily after his people have separated from the Lamanites. I think we can guess that, by Nephi's death, the Lamanites are still trying, in some way or other, to live the Law of Moses.  We know that Nephi took that brass plates with him when he fled from his brothers, so it is possible that by this time they have already strayed from the worship they had experienced in Jerusalem and are now fully integrated in the culture and belief of the  native peoples of the promised land. In either case, they probably know very little if anything about Jesus and the atonement. As evidence of this, later when Ammon preaches to the king of the Lamanites, he doesn't have a clue about Christian worship. 

Here I have a confession. I also didn't really understand the Doctrine of Christ until recently.  Oh sure, I knew that 4th Article of Faith and the first four principles of the Gospel, but when I went to the temple made covenants during the Endowment, I wasn't sure what I was covenanting to when I promised to obey the Law of the Gospel.  I cast my mind for a meaning and decided that the Law of the Gospel probably referred to the "higher law" preached in the sermon on the mount. This was not a bad assumption.  Jesus did, after all, preach that sermon to both the old and new world saints, so it must have been important.  It wasn't until they changed the wording of the Endowment in February 2023 that I found out that the "Law of the Gospel" is the same as the "Doctrine of Christ" explained in the last 3 chapters of 2 Nephi.  I admit that it was a bit of a relief.  I understand that the Sermon on the Mount was given as much to comfort suffering saints as to encourage them to live a higher standard, but it still sets a pretty high bar for behavior that I knew I was daily falling short of. When I heard the new changes to the Endowment, I thought, "Is that really all it is: faith, repentance, baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost, obedience to covenants and enduring to the end?  I can do that." Of course, those are no small things, but they seem more attainable then never getting angry, or being a light to the world, or plucking out my right eye if it offends me. (Matthew 5: 22-30)  So yay for the new changes to the temple ceremony and yay for the last three chapters of 2 Nephi.

The Prophecy of the Scriptures from the Lost Tribes.

 In 2 Nephi 29:12-13 Nephi gives a prophecy that three different groups of people will write scripture that will eventually be known to all three groups.

"For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth, and they shall write it.

And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and Jews."

It is pretty clear that the words of the Jews is the Bible, and the words of the Nephites is the Book of Mormon, but there has been much speculation about the words of the lost tribes and how they might be discovered and distributed to the other groups. The podcasters I listened to this week alluded to some future day when the records of other people Jesus visited will be revealed and how wonderful that would be. That might be how this prophecy is fulfilled but I had another idea that I haven't really heard put forward before. 

What if this prophecy was fulfilled by Joseph Smith?  In my mind Joseph Smith's revelations recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants meet all the requirements of this passage.  Was Joseph Smith from one of the lost tribes?  Yes, he, like the majority of modern American members of the church is from the tribe of Ephraim, which is one of the lost tribes. Did the Lord speak to him?  Yes, Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus in his first vision and then received many revelations from Jesus throughout his life. Did Joseph Smith write the words that he received and are they now available to the descendants of Lehi, to the Jews, and to the whole world?  Yes, the words Joseph Smith received that have been canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants are now available world wide wherever they are allowed to be published and in many languages. 

The scripture ends with the promise, "and I will speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it."  As time goes on and the general leadership of the church becomes more diverse, this part of the prophecy is also fulfilled.  Right now in the the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, we have members from North America, Europe, and South America.  We have other general authorities from Asia and Africa and Australia that speak at conference and their words are written and made available freely to the world through the church website. 

I don't think we need to wait for a day when some long-lost ancient civilization is discovered that has records of Jesus visiting them in the meridian of time.  We just need to study the standard works and listen prayerfully to General Conference. 

A Note about Anointing

 In this week's lesson there are several passages that refer to the "anointed one".  In 2 Nephi 25:16 Nephi refers to both the Christ and the Messiah.  Both these titles mean "the anointed one"  In 2 Nephi 20 it says, "And it shall come to pass in that day his burden shall be taken away from thy shoulder, and his yoke from off thy neck, and the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing."  Of course, these are not the only scriptures that reference anointing.  The Old Testament accounts of temple worship includes several instances where people or things are anointed.  Kings and priests were anointed as part of their investiture. Jesus is repeatedly called either Christ or Messiah. 

I have long wondered how the tradition of anointing something got started, and why applying oil to something is a symbol of sanctification and empowerment.  It was clearly seen as beneficial to have oil put on something in the olden days, but why?  What did it accomplish in real life that made it a good symbol in a ceremony?

When I googled the question, I got a variety of responses.  One said that anointing something was a symbol of preparing it for burial.  Still another said that the presence of oil represented the presence of the Holy Spirit.  These may be all true, but they don't really answer my question. Why was oil used in burial? Why did oil represent the Holy Spirit?  Other pages said that oil was a symbol of prosperity and that it was sometimes used as medium of exchange, like money.  That is getting a little closer to my question.  Maybe by putting oil on something you are communicating that it is valuable.  But was oil really the most valuable thing in their society?  Why not call the Messiah the "golden one." instead of the "anointed one?" 

This week on one of my morning walks I hit upon an idea that may or may not be true, but it makes sense to me. (I haven't seen this idea anywhere else, so I may be totally off).  What if the main value of oil, beyond just as a calorie source, was as a lubricant. In ancient Israel all the simple machines they would have used in their day to day life were made out of either metal, stone, or wood--wheels, pullies, cranks, grinding stones, etc.  How much better would one of these things work if it were lubricated? If you had a wooden shaft with a wooden wheel, that wheel would not turn very well and would quickly wear out unless it was generously lubricated.  If you have a metal crank or pully, with metal against metal, how much easier it would work if it was lubricated.  They hadn't invented ball bearings yet. All these things would heat up or wear out, or be hard to turn if not lubricated.  

I can imagine that in an iron age society putting oil on something could be associated with making it work better. Anointing could be synonymous with enabling. So if you want a king to be a good king and work well, without wearing out, you put oil on him.  You know it won't actually make him work better, like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, but the symbol is obvious and clear to you. Could it be that simple?

In ancient rituals in the Old Testament, olive oil was used.  Many have discussed the symbolic significance of olive oil. It is only produced under great pressure, and once created, it does not spoil or go rancid as easily as animal fat would. It is costly to produce and edible, so it is a symbol of prosperity and wealth. The symbolism is particularly apt if you think of Christ, suffering for our sins, as like the olive being crushed in the olive press to bring us healing, nurturing oil. 

In ancient as well as modern temple ritual, olive oil is symbolically applied to different parts of the body and a prayer is offered promising that that part of the body will function well.  In the ancient temple and tabernacle, it was applied to different parts of the temple so they would work well and be protected.  I like the idea of people putting oil on something and thinking, "there you go.  Now you will work better."  If Jesus is "the" anointed one, the Messiah (Hebrew) or Christ (Greek), then perhaps he works best of all.  His work is the most efficacious, like a well oiled instrument, at accomplishing his purposes.

A picture of the oldest oil flask ever found intact.

A New Look at the Isaiah Chapters

This week in Come Follow Me we are reading 2 Nephi 1-19, which contain the first of the Isaiah chapters.  Nephi quotes, with small variation, Isaiah 2-9.  The Isaiah chapters are difficult because they is so steeped in symbolism and references to current events.  If you don't understand the current events of Isaiah's times, it is almost impossible to understand his symbolism. If you do understand the historical context, you can begin to apply what was happening in Isaiah's time to what was happening in Nephi's day. 

In these chapters, Isaiah is in Jerusalem and the city is worried because they are being threatened by the Northern tribes of Israel who have united Syria. They want to capture Jerusalem and take over the temple. Jewish leaders are considering asking for help from Egypt to defend Jerusalem, but Isaiah is urging them to not rely on Egypt, but instead rely on the Lord. He promises them that within only a few years, Israel and Syria will no longer be a threat. 

So why did Nephi spend a lot of time and effort rewriting Isaiah passages as part of his sacred record, when they were already present on the Plates of Brass?  In 2 Nephi 11, Nephi gives four reasons for including the passages;

1. Prove the truth of the coming of Christ (v. 4)

2. Show the covenants God made with their fathers (v. 5)

3. That his people might lift up their hearts and rejoice. (v. 6)

5. That his people might liken them to themselves. (v. 2, 6)

A lot has been said about how these passages foreshadow the coming of Christ.  Many messianic prophesies can be found in these chapters. That is not going to be where I will focus today.  I am more interested in how the people of Nephi might have felt "like" the people at the time of Isaiah, and how the covenants of the Lord might give them comfort. 

I am going back to my idea mentioned a couple of weeks ago, that the Lamanites might have united with indigenous people.  We know from 2 Nephi 5:20 that the Nephite's felt threatened by the Lamanites and felt compelled to make swords for his people modeled after the sword of Laban. If the Lamanites had united with indigenous people, the situation of the Nephites would have closely mirrored the situation of the Jews in the days of Isaiah. Like the Jews, the Nephites would have been a smaller, more vulnerable force facing and enemy made of their kinsmen who had united with outside groups.  Maybe, like the people of Jerusalem, the Nephites were feeling pressure to also join with outside groups in order to defend themselves against the Lamanites.  I am proposing that Nephi included these specific chapters from Isaiah to try to convince his people to remain separate from the local cultures and instead rely on the Lord to defend them from the Lamanites. I think Nephi knew that in order for his people to maintain the worship of Jehovah and their cultural identity as the covenant people of Israel, they needed to stay isolated. He might have included these passages to give his people encouragement and show that God is faithful in defending his covenant people, even against superior forces. 

Of course, we know that in Isaiah's day, Jerusalem did survive the attack of the Northern tribes, and that those tribes were soon after taken into captivity by the Assyrians and ultimately lost their cultural identity.  Through Nephi's emphasis on the words of Isaiah, the Nephites were also able to remain true to their covenants and maintain their cultural identity as followers of Jehovah for many generations.