{"id":37811,"date":"2018-04-23T05:24:31","date_gmt":"2018-04-23T10:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=37811"},"modified":"2018-04-22T19:28:58","modified_gmt":"2018-04-23T00:28:58","slug":"whats-in-a-name-reading-nephi-1823-191","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2018\/04\/whats-in-a-name-reading-nephi-1823-191\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s in a Name? – Reading Nephi – 18:23-19:1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This post is part of a series of reflections on I Nephi. If you\u2019re interested, the introduction to the series is\u00a0here.<\/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 18:23-19:1<\/a><\/p>\n

They arrive at the promised land. They pitch their tents. I can\u2019t help but picture elation and Hollywood scenes of the family kneeling to kiss wet sand as water rolls over their feet. They made it!<\/p>\n

Now what? At the end of years of travel, when one finally reaches one\u2019s destination, what does one do? As Nephi goes on to note, they\u2019re in a new land with new flora and fauna and resources\u2014but a land of which they\u2019ve zero knowledge. Particularly when it comes to survival, local knowledge is everything. I imagine a profound funk of \u201cwhat now?\u201d hung over them. After more than eight years, are they simply to stop? Do they stop and build right on the coast? Do they look around for a fertile valley? Do they have to try and find an uninhabited location? Are they sure that God doesn\u2019t want them to continue on further into the wilderness?<\/p>\n

Nephi makes no comment about these decisions and does not mention revelation here. It\u2019s unclear that the Liahona\u2014so integral to their ocean voyage\u2014could be of any use at this point (beyond serving as a talisman, which is precisely what it becomes; no other prophet is mentioned using it; much like Joseph\u2019s seer stone). How do they operate? Where do they build? How do they build? Every scriptural account of arriving in a promised land makes clear that arrival does not itself provide milk and honey. \u201cPromised Land\u201d denotes an action, a process. It is something we do. Notice that all of the \u201cfinds\u201d that Nephi describes are located in \u201cthe wilderness.\u201d What is there to distinguish the newly designated \u201cpromised land\u201d from the wilderness? Is it merely the perimeter of their own tents? Most clearly in these verses I see the specter of starvation\u2014that frequent, perhaps constant companion during the Lehite Exodus (maybe I see this only because<\/em> it\u2019s been such a constant aspect in their journey; but I\u2019m confident that learning the local for-food flora and fauna took at least some time).<\/p>\n

The beginning of their coping and acting, and what was surely a leap of faith, was, I believe, what Nephi first notes\u2014that they actually called this place the Promised Land<\/em>. And here is the magic of language, that supreme gift of our God. And here is the answer to Juliet\u2019s poignant question. Names are often bridges attempting to span existential chasms of dissonance. This wilderness is the<\/em> Promised Land. This life is the<\/em> pivot point of eternity and an imperative experience for which we shouted for joy. Names allow us to hold firmly to the reality of mortal travail and the promise of immortal glory at the same time.<\/p>\n

As part of his typical preoccupation with food, Nephi focuses on the miraculous: their seeds grew. It wasn\u2019t merely their growing that was the miracle, it\u2019s that the Lehites survived. Notice that they put ALL of their seeds in the ground\u2014hardly a prudent act. They weren\u2019t fools. I can only see this as a desperate act. I suspect they were facing starvation, and that planting everything was more an act of necessity than a leap of faith\u2014they didn\u2019t have enough grain or enough alternative food sources (remember: new land and very new flora and fauna) to only plant some and still survive. It was all or nothing. They needed all of it to grow. And it did. Their grain together with the wild animal population was enough. They had food and once again, they didn\u2019t starve.<\/p>\n

Pitching tents, securing food, creating a scriptural record. Nephi\u2019s narrative seems to follow Maslow\u2019s hierarchy: shelter, food, religion. It\u2019s striking that beyond shelter and food, the first thing Nephi mentions is finding ore and God\u2019s command to make a record. Looking closer, even the wild animals are there for the use of man<\/em>. As are the ores mentioned. Nephi offers an implicitly instrumentalist approach to nature. But undergirding it all is a religious outlook. Conspicuously, all of it\u2014Maslow\u2019s shelter, food, and religion, both the journey and the settling, the whole thing\u2014is oriented around their relationship with God. Nature as instrument for one\u2019s relationship with deity demands a kind of humility toward and gratitude for nature that we sorely lack today with our destructive, fetishized exploitation of all creeping and non-creeping things\u2014including ourselves. Humility and a deep reverence and gratitude for that which they used allowed for a promised land. Today, we have no promised<\/em> land; we have only an occupied, a possessed <\/em>land.<\/p>\n

This jubilation of landing and building, this process of Promised-ing the Land has one large lacuna: there is no mention of family relations or roles. Not until Lehi\u2019s death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part of a series of reflections on I Nephi. If you\u2019re interested, the introduction to the series is\u00a0here.\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. * * * * I Nephi 18:23-19:1 They arrive at the promised land. They pitch their tents. I can\u2019t help but picture elation and Hollywood scenes of the family kneeling to kiss wet sand as water rolls over their feet. They made it! Now what? At the end of years of travel, when one finally reaches one\u2019s destination, what does one do? As Nephi goes on to note, they\u2019re in a new land with new flora and fauna and resources\u2014but a land of which they\u2019ve zero knowledge. Particularly when it comes to survival, local knowledge is everything. I imagine a profound funk of \u201cwhat now?\u201d hung over them. After more than eight years, are they simply to stop? Do they stop and build right on the coast? Do they look around for a fertile valley? Do they have to try and find an […]<\/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-37811","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\/37811","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=37811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37812,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37811\/revisions\/37812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}