Ether

I was out of town and missed a couple of weeks so I am combining a bunch of thoughts about the Book of Either into one post.  

The Book of Ether is a short account of a group of people who came to the Americas more than a 1000 years before the Nephite exodus from Jerusalem.  The first part is in the form of an epic origin narrative, and there is a cursory account of the various rulers of the people, and then it ends with an epic destruction narrative. The whole story mirrors in miniature the account of the Nephite people. Here are a few things I found interesting in the story. 

The Brother of Jared was the religious leader at the beginning of the story. His actual name is never mentioned, but one of the podcasters noted that if you are writing in a pictorial language, like ancient Egyptian, (not that it says it was written in that language, but many ancient languages started out as pictorial) it is a lot easier to use a common idea, like "brother" than to come up with a sign that represents the phonetic recreation of someone's name. This is because each picture represents either a word, or a syllable. Common words have their own symbol, but an unfamiliar word, like a name, would be represented by symbols of words that sound like the syllables of the name. For example, if the language required that there be a picture letter for each syllable of Mohonri Moriacumer, it would have needed to use eight symbols each time the name was mentioned.  But if the language already had an accepted symbol for brother, then writing, "The Brother of Jared" would only take three symbols. 

The experience of the Brother of Jared seeing the finger of God is very much a temple experience. It resembles more the ancient temple experience than the modern one, but all three have the key element of being allowed to move through the veil to enter the presence of the Lord.  There is a good "Know Why" by Scripture Central about the imagery.

Even though this is an "epic" narrative, and is not trying to be historically accurate, there are ways that ancient peoples could have crossed into the Americas using boats.  It is unlikely that they would have been able to do it in one go, like is suggested by the text, because they would not have been able to store enough water and food, and deal with refuse from the animals and people, if they really did spend almost a year in the boat without reaching land.  It is not, however, impossible that they could have used boats to move in increments along the coast to get to the Americas.  I watched a PBS video that suggested that the first peoples to enter the Americas did come by boat, moving in stages from Asia to Alaska to Washington etc, camping on the beach along the way, rather than by walking across the frozen Bering Strait. 

The most impactful thing about the Book of Ether for me this month has been the metaphor of God sending someone on a difficult and uncomfortable journey to get them to a better place.  God wanted to give the people of Jared a promised land, but he knew they could only get there by making a frightening and uncomfortable journey.  Because they had faith, the people were willing to undertake the journey in hopes of receiving God's blessing.  In return, God gave the people what they needed to make the journey safely and even gave them whatever comfort he could to make the journey less arduous (e.g. the lighted stones in their vessels, and the strong wind that blew them across the sea more quickly). But he didn't remove the necessity of making the journey.  They had to make the journey to get where they needed to be.  Life is sometimes like that.  We have to go through the hard dark times for God to get us to where we need to be.  It takes faith not to back away from the hard stuff, but if we do have faith, and call on God for help, he gives us what we need to get through the journey.