{"id":35257,"date":"2016-05-22T04:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T09:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=35257"},"modified":"2016-05-15T19:28:23","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T00:28:23","slug":"reading-nephi-131-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2016\/05\/reading-nephi-131-9\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Nephi – 13:1-9"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"068-068-the-liahona-full\"<\/a>A consistent feature that distinguishes the Book of Mormon from the Bible is its pan-human focus. Nephi does not strike me as very cosmopolitan\u2014rather the opposite. He cares about his family and posterity, and his overriding focus even there is not love and loyalty but theology; he cares that they\u2019re tied into God\u2019s covenant with the House of Israel, that their history is sacred and thus legitimate. It\u2019s easy to see Nephi as exactly the sort of overzealous man who devotes his time and attention to his calling at the expense of his personal family (which he never<\/em> mentions outside of confessing that he took a wife; maybe this is, as Hardy speculates, a form of coping with his failures as a husband and father; or maybe this was Nephi\u2019s form of coping with the pain of having lost his family, the way that church service functioned originally for Brigham Young). Nephi is single-mindedly focused on his tribe and their health within the House of Israel.<\/p>\n

But the Lord doesn\u2019t let him get away with that, because the Lord isn\u2019t inspiring Nephi to write simply for his family and posterity. Rather, Nephi\u2019s writing for a global audience in a thoroughly cosmopolitan era.<\/p>\n

And so once again the angel tells Nephi to \u201cLook!\u201d It\u2019s interesting that in deciding how to structure his narrative for a some-decades-old vision, Nephi breaks it up into discreet \u201cLook!\u201d segments. As I\u2019ve noted, there are rich possibilities for interpreting these various looks and their connections\u2014as here, with the establishment of a local pattern in tribal history, which then transitions into how that pattern plays out in larger history. It\u2019s also fascinating that Nephi doesn\u2019t merely have <\/em>the vision. At times the angel explains things, but the angel\u2019s main function is not<\/em> to explain what Nephi sees but to point out those things that Nephi fails to see <\/em>on his own. It\u2019s almost as if our visionary protagonist can\u2019t be trusted to notice what\u2019s salient on his own (just as Nephi condescendingly makes excuses for his father for not noticing the filthiness of the water at one segment in the vision of the Tree). But it\u2019s not only Nephi\u2019s attention that gets focused with each \u2018look.\u2019 It\u2019s our<\/em> vision too. It\u2019s visceral; I feel a minor jolt and almost jump each time the angel issues that divine imperative.<\/p>\n

And I wonder\u2014how much of this vision am I<\/em> sleeping through? What of the rest of the Book of Mormon? How much do I miss without this heaven sent angel there to direct my gaze?<\/p>\n

And now we get to one of the most wrested passages in the whole book: that great and abominable church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A consistent feature that distinguishes the Book of Mormon from the Bible is its pan-human focus. Nephi does not strike me as very cosmopolitan\u2014rather the opposite. He cares about his family and posterity, and his overriding focus even there is not love and loyalty but theology; he cares that they\u2019re tied into God\u2019s covenant with the House of Israel, that their history is sacred and thus legitimate. It\u2019s easy to see Nephi as exactly the sort of overzealous man who devotes his time and attention to his calling at the expense of his personal family (which he never mentions outside of confessing that he took a wife; maybe this is, as Hardy speculates, a form of coping with his failures as a husband and father; or maybe this was Nephi\u2019s form of coping with the pain of having lost his family, the way that church service functioned originally for Brigham Young). Nephi is single-mindedly focused on his tribe and their health within the House of Israel. But the Lord doesn\u2019t let him get away with that, because the Lord isn\u2019t inspiring Nephi to write simply for his family and posterity. Rather, Nephi\u2019s writing for a global audience in a thoroughly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":34019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/068-068-the-liahona-full1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35258,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35257\/revisions\/35258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}