You are singing Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee and idly check the notes in the footer.  Translated in the 1800s from a medieval text by St. Bernard of Clairvaux.  The weight of years comes crashing down you, hundreds of years between you and the translation, hundreds more years to the monk in his cell, and a thousand years from him to Christ, like you are looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

* It’s odd how casually and offhand we get a few verses in Chapter 28 mentioning a horrific war with bodies piled up all over.

Read carefully the switch to the reign of the judges was a disaster.

the fifteenth year of the reign of the judges is ended.

10 And from the first year to the fifteenth has brought to pass the destruction of many thousand lives; yea, it has brought to pass an awful scene of bloodshed.

11 And the bodies of many thousands are laid low in the earth, while the bodies of many thousands are moldering in heaps upon the face of the earth; yea, and many thousands are mourning

This is a fact. The fact does not mean that the switch was wrong or that Monarchy is the One Perfect System. But it is a fact and when or if we turn to the Book of Mormon for political insights, it is a fact we need to take into account.

Nephite Modernity–https://www.jrganymede.com/2024/06/12/32551/

(If you do decide to use the reign of the judges to guide your beliefs about politics, you should also take into account that the reign of the Judges was not The Republic of the United States except with more feathers and turquoise).

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There are two frames I’ve found for understanding the Mosiah-Alma transition in the Book of Mormon and all the political and social change that comes fast and heavy until Christ appears to them.

1. Nephite modernity
2. Nephite cultural conquest —  the Nephites effectively brought the Lamanites into their cultural sphere at this time. With a little help from the priests of King Noah, the Amalekites, and other Nephite dissenters.

It’s striking that Ammon and the 4 Sons of King Mosiah were able to convert Lamanites at this point which had never really happened before.   This is less an act of cultural conquest and more a result of it already happening.  It’s interesting that in Alma 22 Mormon stops describing all the Lamanites as idle nomads and only describes “the more idle part” that way.  In contrast, there is a newly urbanizing population that is also Nephitizing that seems more susceptible to conversion.

Which brings us to

3.  Partly as a result of 1 and 2, the Lamanites are also going through some kind of state formation transition around this time.

The Book of Mormon is for our day.

Modernity and cultural conquest are defining elements of our own era.

One of the original appeals of looking for chiasmus is that it is a form of poetry that would survive translation, even arguably if the translator didn’t know there was a poetic structure there.

And obviously that is true or we wouldn’t know about it.

That said, we sh0uldn’t overrate our ability to always discern a chiasmus.  A lot of the poetic art is going to lie in taking an established form where people *expect* what’s going to be coming next, but then replacing it with something unexpected.  In other words, the chiastic form allows for metaphors (equating two dissimilar things) without explicitly saying so.

There would likely also be a repertoire of established metaphors, things we don’t consider to be in the same category but that the ancient writer would have, which we know nothing about.

Some of this we might be able to figure out, using judgment and intuition (both alas fallible).  Some not.

There is a very interesting shift from the kings to the judges that  involves a shift in religious authority and an outbreak of religious entrepreneurialism.  Grant hardy’s ethnic breakdown thesis may be correct but I think it obscures more than it reveals.

Nephite modernity; Lessons from Nephite history ; Nephite civilization cycles

Let’s take a look at some more of the interesting questions and insights from this period.

• Did Abinadi have authority?

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Curse words get all their power from us. Any one who uses them is derivative of us. And to think they make fun of us for it? Its like making fun of the farmer for selling some of his food instead of eating it all himself. It’s like making fun of the generator for transmitting all its electricity.

What is the significance of the Nephite monetary system in Alma 11?

We cannot say for sure. Perhaps Mormon was just male-brained and liked esoteric trivia for its own sake (the system he describes does not seem to have been his own). However, we should probably assume that it has symbolic significance.

Why should we assume that?

The Book of Mormon is an extract from a copious collection of sacred and historical records. Our default assumption should be that everything was selected with a purpose by the editor. In fact, the section on the monetary system has every appearance of Mormon adding it in personally.

Recall that ancient societies were almost all massively more inclined to symbolism than ours is.

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(with an unusual insight into the sacrament along the way.)

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The Western way is to define a term.  The definition should be as exact as possible.  There is another way, though, which I got from the ancient Greeks.  You define something by looking at the ideal or the paradigm of that thing.  Then whether you call something similar but not quite ideal by the same term depends on whether making the connection in context is useful or not.

So lets talk about what a covenant is.  We usually casually define it as a contract, but it would be better to think of it as a  contract with enhanced features.  As opposed to the ideal contract, a covenant is a mutual agreement that

1.  is sacred
2. involves oaths
3. is long lasting
4. is goal-oriented, not task-oriented
5. involves a joint goal–there is an outcome that the parties all want to reach
6. creates or reflects a relationship–the parties aren’t arms-length commercial
7. and where the parties do not have to be equals

You don’t escape to Narnia

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-escape-to-narnia

An interesting juxtaposition of CS Lewis’s Narnia vs more modern media, like Harry Potter or Les Grossman’s The Magicians.

Throughout the whole saga, one point is made piercingly clear. There is no sense in which one loses themselves in Narnia. One does not go to Narnia in order to explore, out of a sense of sheer curiositas. Instead, one is meant to find something there, something beyond and beneath the surface level of experience, and the physical limits of Narnia all exist in service of that pedagogical end.

…

Narnia, that is to say, is not an escape. By its nature, it cannot be. Rather, adventures in Narnia are conditioning experiences by which individuals come to see reality properly. As The Last Battle concludes in eschatological splendor, the faun Mr. Tumnus remarks to Lucy that “you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.”^[18] Exactly so.

…

Indeed, I get the feeling, that too much modern fictional media has a seemingly unlimited world, with stunted limited viewpoints, while Narnia is a deliberately limited small world, where the people come out with more expansive views. That in fact, was the reason the children came to Narnia in the first place.

Fantasy at its best (Lewis, Tolkien, etc) is not an escape. It is a preparation for the real world.

King Mosiah institutes the rule of the judges in about 90 BC or so.   He does it because he believes that it is less common for a majority of the people* to go wicked whereas a ruler like King Noah can certainly go wicked and then drag a bunch of people down with him.  Therefore King Mosiah believes it would be better to have a system where the people were formally the ultimate backstop.

By somewhere in the range of 40-20 B.C., the Nephite system of government is totally corrupt and the majority of the people support wickedness.    The number of chapters in Alma obscure for us how little time has passed.  50 to 70 years.

In contrast, after King Noah’s death his people quickly rebounded to righteousness.

The baptism of Limhi, by George Ottinger

There’s a puzzle there.

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Ice gets less cold and less cold but is still ice. The changes are literally just a matter of degree. Than a degree or two more—and it is no longer ice. It’s water. That is called phase change.

You keep growing and changing throughout life, but sometimes you go through a phase change. A discontinuity. You look around at all the same things as before and recognize nothing.

Svalbard, Arctic Ocean.

The first time you go to school.

When you move out of the house.

When you marry.

Your first child.

And then as a parent you go through equal phase changes yourself when your children do these things, especially the first child. (more…)

For behold, after the Lord God sent our first parents forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground, from whence they were taken—yea, he drew out the man, and he placed at the east end of the garden of Eden, cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the tree of life

-thus Alma 42:2

Drawing out is an interesting phrase.  It suggests getting someone who is shy or inert to participate in an activity.    For a tool, like a sword, it means getting it out to use.  In the sense that ‘drawing out’ means unsheathing the Lovely One thinks there may be a sexual metaphor or at least a reference to Adam and Even discovering their ‘nakedness.’

In the sense of ‘unsheathing a sword,’ there may be a small chiasmus

• he drew out
  • the man
  • he placed cherubim
• and a flaming sword.

I would love to know more.

Its interesting to read old popular fiction.  You get a better feel for what makes popular fiction popular fiction.  (By popular fiction I mean fiction that is meant to appeal to the public taste, not necessarily fiction that sold well).

I just finished readering C.S. Forrester’s 3rd Horatio Hornblower novel.  Really good book, but also pretty informative about how such books work. (more…)

Inspired by the conference theme on wearing your garments–

To riff on Chesterton, everyone has an identity.   When they reject an identity, they don’t cease to have one.  They just start conforming to a different one.

You always dress to belong.  The only question is, to what group do you dress to belong

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