It's been a while since I picked up the Book of Mormon or wrote anything in this series. Today, though, I was contacted out of the blue by some Mormon missionaries who somehow got my phone number, so I decided to open it up and remind myself of what I was dealing with, starting in 1 Nephi 18. Here Nephi's remarkably descritionless ship is completed and launched. Nephi and company board, with provisions, and set sail for the "promised land"—by which we mean the Americas. They follow the winds and the magic compass mentioned earlier for "many days" and everything seems to be going well, but then the company falls into a terrible sin. Nephi says he "began to fear exceedingly lest the Lord should be angry with us, and smite us because of our iniquity, that we should be swallowed up in the depths of the sea" (1 Nephi 18:10).
What is this horrible sin? Jonah faced a similar dilemma and fate after ignoring God's command to go to Nineveh and trying to flee in the opposite direction (Jonah 1:1-16). What terrible thing had happened on Nephi's ship to cause him to fear a similar fate? 1 Nephi 18:9 helpfully tells us:
What is this horrible sin? Jonah faced a similar dilemma and fate after ignoring God's command to go to Nineveh and trying to flee in the opposite direction (Jonah 1:1-16). What terrible thing had happened on Nephi's ship to cause him to fear a similar fate? 1 Nephi 18:9 helpfully tells us:
And after we had been driven before the wind for the space of many days, behold, my brethren and the sons of Ishmael and also their wives began to make themselves merry, insomuch that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness, yea, even that they did forget by what power they had been brought thither; yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness.The verse lists several things that Nephi's brothers and in-laws did that troubled him:
- making merry
- dancing
- singing
- rude speech/actions
- forgetting what power got them this far in the first place
Of these five items, only the last can be taken seriously as a sin. Forgetting God's power and provision does have a track record of being a very effective way of angering Him (Hosea 2:6-13). However, that's not what Nephi fixates on, nor is it really revisited anywhere else in the chapter. His main concern, the only one that is repeated twice, is how these merry-makers have lost their manners and delved into the "iniquity" of "exceeding rudeness."
The Bible says a lot about sin, and the Bible lists a great many sins, some of which our society today is not keen on acknowledging. However one "sin" the Bible never addresses is this: the sin of rudeness. The word "rude" is very hard to find in the Bible, in fact. In the KJV (the version of Joseph Smith Jr's day) the word appears only once, in 2 Corinthians 11:6, where Paul defends his apostleship against accusations from the Corinthian church. Here he acknowledges that he is "rude in speech" (that is, his speech is common and unsophisticated) but dismisses it as unimportant because he knows what he's talking about. In modern translations this reference to rudeness is replaced with the translation "unskilled in speaking." In such translations only one reference to rudeness remains, 1 Corinthians 13:5, which says that love is "not rude" (or, in the KJV "doth not behave itself unseemly"). Aside from this brief reference and the Bible's positive affirmations that we are to be kind to one another (Ephesians 4:32), the Bible does not seem to consider rudeness a serious infraction, or even a sin. Jesus, who is explicitly without sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), broke social conventions almost habitually and did a number of things even we today would consider extremely rude (driving merchants out of the Temple with a whip and flipping over their tables, refusing service to a Gentile woman, calling His opponents the spawn of Satan, etc). He did so without sin.
So why was the rudeness of Nephi's brothers and the sons and daughters-in-law of Ishmael such a big deal? No firm connection is built between their rudeness and forgetting god. They are not said to have blasphemed. The biggest connection is between their celebratory antics, "making merry," "singing," and "dancing." While it's popular in religious communities that are more about following rules than following God to believe that god is opposed to the egregious sin of having fun. Of such societies its sometimes joked that couples will never have sex standing up because someone might see it and think they were committing the unpardonable sin of dancing. The Mormon religion is famous for its many rules, including prohibition on caffeinated beverages (which is nowhere in the Bible, in case you were wondering), and falls solidly into this category. God however, does not. He gives us dancing, singing, and merriment, and enjoys us enjoying Him and the things He's given us (Jeremiah 31:13).
But despite Nephi's fears, it's not this sin of merriment and rudeness that almost dooms the travelers. Instead it's when Nephi's brothers respond to his preaching of restraint by tying him to the mast for four days. This caused the Liahona, the faith-driven god-given compass to stop working. As I mentioned in the post when the Liahona was first introduced, I've been suspicious of the compass from the beginning. Sure, God can use anything he wants to direct people (he used a cloud for the Israelite exodus), and he could make a compass if He wanted to, but the whole concept of a compass as the group's source of direction and guidance seemed suspiciously modern. I've been waiting for some sign that the Liahona is a modern idea, originating from a culture spoiled by hundreds of years of reliance on compasses, to the point where navigating without them is virtually unthinkable to the average man. Sadly, my suspicions were confirmed. The compass stops working in verse 12 and in the very next verse—at the very beginning of the verse—the crew of the ship completely loses all sense of direction and blunders into a storm. This is a hallmark of a plot hatched in an age dependent on magnetic compasses, for such a thing would have been implausible as late as the 17th century, at which time sailors were still navigating by the stars, as all travelers did in the time before the compass. If Nephi and his companions were really ancient Israelites who'd navigated by the sun and stars their whole lives, they would have never become lost by the failure of their compass. They simply would have fallen back on more familiar means of finding their way. That they did become lost immediately is a telling sign that The Book of Mormon has a modern author (Joseph Smith, who was born into a 19th century already hopelessly dependent on the magnetic compass).
After four days in the storm, Nephi's brothers fear for their lives because of the storm and release him. At this point I do have to give credit to Smith for one accurate detail: when released in verse 15, after four days of being lashed to the mast, Nephi's wrists and ankles are said to have swollen and been very sore. While I couldn't find any concrete evidence of this, it does strike me as realistic and I seem to recall people trying to set records for longest time standing upright (which is essentially what anyone tied to a mast for four days would have been forced to do) facing similar problems.
But if this was a stroke of genius on Smith's part, he immediately spoils it. The narrative has just reached the point of greatest tension, where the wicked brothers have repented in fear of the storm and freed Nephi, who may or may not be able to do anything to save them all, when it suddenly jumps backwards. Why? Because the narrator forgot to tell us what Nephi's parents, wife, and children were all doing during these four days and felt the need to explain to us why they couldn't have just freed him sooner. It's a fair question, to be sure, but the solution presents more problems to the narrative than it resolves. First of all, it completely wrecks the flow of the narrative. More damaging, it introduces a major problem: it states that the reason that Nephi's parents (who were also the parents of Laman and Lemuel) didn't intervene was because they were on their sickbeds, very near death. It goes on for two verses about how frail and how close to death Lehi and his wife are...and then forgets about them. There is absolutely no mention of them either dying or recovering. Skipping ahead, I can see that they do live on, since Lehi's death is mentioned as taking place in the Americas after a long speech in 2 Nephi 4, but the narrative in chapter 18 does not make that clear. Before, I might have glossed over the question of why Nephi's parents (who are probably old and badly outnumbered) did not try to free Nephi themselves, but now I'm transfixed by a question of whether or not these very important characters will even survive the trip—a question which the writer leaves totally unanswered. After telling us how sick they are and adding in a note about why their younger children (Jacob and Joseph, added to the family earlier in this chapter) and Nephi's own wife and children didn't intervene, the narrative skips back to the point where Nephi is freed and calms the storm with a prayer.
Many days and one verse later, the party lands on the shores of the "promised land" (which is so called twice in the same sentence). They pitch their tents, plant crops brought as seeds from Jerusalem, and discovered a wealth of animal and mineral wealth in the forests surrounding their landing site. This is where the final problem of the chapter presents itself. While the last verse says that Nephi and his family found "beasts in the forest of every kind" it specifically names four species: cattle ("the cow and the ox"), horses, donkeys ("the ass"), and goats ("the goat and the wild goat"). Now I have heard from other sources that The Book of Mormon had problems regarding anachronistic animals in pre-Columbian America, but I hadn't expected anything so severe. As it turns out every one of the species listed here is an anachronism: cattle, horses, donkeys, and goats were all introduced to the Americas centuries later, following European contact. One species might be a fluke of translation or a mistake of modern archaeology, but all four? That's a dead giveaway that, unlike the Bible, The Book of Mormon is fiction, not history.
After four days in the storm, Nephi's brothers fear for their lives because of the storm and release him. At this point I do have to give credit to Smith for one accurate detail: when released in verse 15, after four days of being lashed to the mast, Nephi's wrists and ankles are said to have swollen and been very sore. While I couldn't find any concrete evidence of this, it does strike me as realistic and I seem to recall people trying to set records for longest time standing upright (which is essentially what anyone tied to a mast for four days would have been forced to do) facing similar problems.
But if this was a stroke of genius on Smith's part, he immediately spoils it. The narrative has just reached the point of greatest tension, where the wicked brothers have repented in fear of the storm and freed Nephi, who may or may not be able to do anything to save them all, when it suddenly jumps backwards. Why? Because the narrator forgot to tell us what Nephi's parents, wife, and children were all doing during these four days and felt the need to explain to us why they couldn't have just freed him sooner. It's a fair question, to be sure, but the solution presents more problems to the narrative than it resolves. First of all, it completely wrecks the flow of the narrative. More damaging, it introduces a major problem: it states that the reason that Nephi's parents (who were also the parents of Laman and Lemuel) didn't intervene was because they were on their sickbeds, very near death. It goes on for two verses about how frail and how close to death Lehi and his wife are...and then forgets about them. There is absolutely no mention of them either dying or recovering. Skipping ahead, I can see that they do live on, since Lehi's death is mentioned as taking place in the Americas after a long speech in 2 Nephi 4, but the narrative in chapter 18 does not make that clear. Before, I might have glossed over the question of why Nephi's parents (who are probably old and badly outnumbered) did not try to free Nephi themselves, but now I'm transfixed by a question of whether or not these very important characters will even survive the trip—a question which the writer leaves totally unanswered. After telling us how sick they are and adding in a note about why their younger children (Jacob and Joseph, added to the family earlier in this chapter) and Nephi's own wife and children didn't intervene, the narrative skips back to the point where Nephi is freed and calms the storm with a prayer.
Many days and one verse later, the party lands on the shores of the "promised land" (which is so called twice in the same sentence). They pitch their tents, plant crops brought as seeds from Jerusalem, and discovered a wealth of animal and mineral wealth in the forests surrounding their landing site. This is where the final problem of the chapter presents itself. While the last verse says that Nephi and his family found "beasts in the forest of every kind" it specifically names four species: cattle ("the cow and the ox"), horses, donkeys ("the ass"), and goats ("the goat and the wild goat"). Now I have heard from other sources that The Book of Mormon had problems regarding anachronistic animals in pre-Columbian America, but I hadn't expected anything so severe. As it turns out every one of the species listed here is an anachronism: cattle, horses, donkeys, and goats were all introduced to the Americas centuries later, following European contact. One species might be a fluke of translation or a mistake of modern archaeology, but all four? That's a dead giveaway that, unlike the Bible, The Book of Mormon is fiction, not history.
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