{"id":37566,"date":"2018-03-05T05:00:57","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T10:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=37566"},"modified":"2018-01-08T06:52:26","modified_gmt":"2018-01-08T11:52:26","slug":"driven-towards-the-promised-land-reading-nephi-181-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2018\/03\/driven-towards-the-promised-land-reading-nephi-181-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Driven Towards the Promised Land – Reading Nephi – 18:1-8"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This post is part of a series of reflections on I Nephi. If you’re interested, the introduction to the series is here.<\/a>\u00a0To peruse earlier entries, click the authors tab at the top of the page and then click on my name. I welcome your own thoughts on these specific verses (or on my reflections) in the comments below.<\/p>\n

* * * *<\/p>\n

I Nephi 18:1-8<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they did worship the Lord\u201d\u2014that\u2019s the conclusion to the whole row. I wonder at it. What was the change? Was it that here we get Nephi, perhaps even inadvertently acknowledging that Laman and his cohort did in fact worship God, regardless of everything else\u2014and that the change here is merely that in addition, they submitted themselves to Nephi\u2019s oversight in constructing the ship? The other obvious possibility is that their submission to Nephi and the work of the ship was accompanied by a change in Laman\u2019s cohort\u2019s religious practices. In this case, why were they reluctant to so worship the Lord before? Why was this the dramatic turn that went hand in hand with their willingness to submit to Nephi\u2019s leadership and help him to build the boat? Of course I don\u2019t know. But I strongly suspect that Nephi\u2019s political and ecclesiastical leadership went together. One plausible option is that perhaps Lehi\u2019s altar in Bountiful was overseen by Nephi. I imagine that bringing your sacrifice not simply to God but to your younger usurping brother would have been a hard pill for Laman to swallow. But perhaps after the dramatic events of the preceding chapter he did indeed swallow it or some such other pill.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s conspicuous that the text notes that Nephi did not build the ship after the manner of men. The implication, of course, is that Nephi knew and understood how \u201cmen\u201d built ships. He was self-consciously aware of the differences in his own construction. Since there were no shipwrights in Jerusalem, this argues strongly in favor of there being local shipwrights. I do not believe it changes the claim that God showed Nephi how to construct the ship to likewise claim that God did it through local shipwrights. This is especially true since Nephi wasn\u2019t creating a fishing or local trading vessel, but a vessel capable of a transoceanic voyage. The lesson seems to me to be that if you need miraculous teaching or if you desire to learn from God, you ought well to look around you to see what educational resources God has in fact already provided.<\/p>\n

Another curious phrase concerns the fitting out of the ship. They took their supplies, whatever they\u2019d brought with them, \u201cevery one according to his age.\u201d What one could take was determined according to age (as opposed to size, need, etc). Age mattered. This is another aspect that highlights the fault-lines in the political conflict between Nephi and Laman. It also argues for why\u00ad\u2014despite Nephi\u2019s visions that determined for the family that <\/em>they were moving, and despite the merit Nephi earned for having actually built an exceedingly fine ship\u2014it was Lehi and not Nephi who (at least formally) instructed the family when it was time to load up and leave.<\/p>\n

A sidenote: being a backyard beekeeper myself, I can\u2019t help but notice that they took honey \u201cin abundance.\u201d Since one couldn\u2019t go down to a local Arabian Peninsula supermarket to get the honey, this likely means they went during or just after the honey flow (i.e., the nectar flow). If it was Virginia, this would probably be sometime in July. After the nectar flow, the bees have to start eating their honey in order to survive until the next spring. Either they destroyed numerous bee colonies in order to gather many small quantities into an abundance, or they harvested at the typical time of harvest and left around mid summer. The other possibility is that they saved up honey over a period of years or that they traded for others\u2019 built up supply; in which case they might have left at any time.<\/p>\n

I love the final line here, a metaphor for life: \u201cand we did put forth into the sea and were driven forth before the wind towards the promised land.\u201d I hope that the winds of this world likewise drive me toward the promised land, or that the ship I\u2019m in is so designed as to take advantage of the winds\u2019 power, whichever way they blow, in order to move me in that direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAnd they did worship the Lord\u201d\u2014that\u2019s the conclusion to the whole row. I wonder at it. What was the change?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"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-37566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37566","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=37566"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37585,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37566\/revisions\/37585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}