The Book of Mormon begins with a man named Nephi writing eleven years before the fall of Jerusalem to the army of Babylon. Does he write in Hebrew? No, Nephi writes in Egyptian, which is remarkable because you would think the Jews left all that behind with the Exodus centuries prior to all this.
Nephi describes a vision that his father Lehi had in the first year of the reign of king Zedekiah, king of Judah, after which his father went around as a prophet declaring that Jerusalem would be destroyed and its inhabitants carried away captive.
Well, that wasn’t too much of a stretch, because just prior to that vision, in March 597 B.C.E., the neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II had already captured Jerusalem and took eighteen year-old king Jeconiah into captivity after a reign of only three months and ten days. Then Nebbie installed Zedekiah as king over Jerusalem.
At any rate, Lehi takes his family down to Saudi Arabia, and they camp near the banks of a river that continually runs into the Red Sea. This river is reached after just three days of attaining the Gulf of Aqaba. Traveling on foot with a family and livestock, you can make at best fifteen miles per day. This previously undiscovered and unknown river, which was subsequently named the River Laman after one of Lehi’s sons, must therefore be within fifty miles of the twin cities of Eilat, Israel a nd Aqaba, Jordan. So scarce is water in this hot, arid region that today Eilat relies on desalination. Even the valley where Eilat and Aqaba lie, the chief population center of this region, is a wadi, a dry gulch that only carries water on the very rare occasion that it rains, and only for a matter of days, if not hours. A river that continually ran into the Red Sea, so near the ancient trade routes between east and west, would have been a prize, a true gem, and the site of a great city. There’s nothing in history, outside of the book of Mormon, that says such a river ever existed. And a look at Google Maps shows that there’s no valley to speak of, certainly nothing with big enough britches to have been carved by a river.
The whole journey is a test by God to see if people would believe that Lehi, a punk off the street with no credentials, really could tell the future. Because that’s all a prophet is in the book of Mormon, not a social reformer, not a commentator on the current zeitgeist and one who tries to get people to see the inevitable consequences of their actions, but just somebody who was given a dream by God of the future. And the crux of the test is to believe, beforehand, that a man from the fringe of society is chosen by God, with no other sign than the very destruction that he’s predicting as punishment for not believing in it.
The people of Jerusalem did not believe the city would be destroyed. They even tried to kill Lehi just for even saying it would be sacked, so they were cursed. Then God punished them for rejecting Lehi as a psychic by letting Nebuchadnezzar destroy Jerusalem and frog-march the elites to captivity in the Babylonian capitol.
Lehi’s sons Laman and Lemuel also did not believe that Jerusalem would be destroyed, so they were cursed by God, and this curse took the form of dark skin for their descendants, because the Book of Mormon was written by a racist who thought the human adaption of melanin to deal with the harsh light of the sun was a bad thing.
But Sam and Nephi did believe that Jerusalem would be destroyed, so they were blessed with white skin. A land flowing with milk and honey was prepared just for them far over the sea.
Nephi describes a vision that his father Lehi had in the first year of the reign of king Zedekiah, king of Judah, after which his father went around as a prophet declaring that Jerusalem would be destroyed and its inhabitants carried away captive.
Well, that wasn’t too much of a stretch, because just prior to that vision, in March 597 B.C.E., the neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II had already captured Jerusalem and took eighteen year-old king Jeconiah into captivity after a reign of only three months and ten days. Then Nebbie installed Zedekiah as king over Jerusalem.
At any rate, Lehi takes his family down to Saudi Arabia, and they camp near the banks of a river that continually runs into the Red Sea. This river is reached after just three days of attaining the Gulf of Aqaba. Traveling on foot with a family and livestock, you can make at best fifteen miles per day. This previously undiscovered and unknown river, which was subsequently named the River Laman after one of Lehi’s sons, must therefore be within fifty miles of the twin cities of Eilat, Israel a nd Aqaba, Jordan. So scarce is water in this hot, arid region that today Eilat relies on desalination. Even the valley where Eilat and Aqaba lie, the chief population center of this region, is a wadi, a dry gulch that only carries water on the very rare occasion that it rains, and only for a matter of days, if not hours. A river that continually ran into the Red Sea, so near the ancient trade routes between east and west, would have been a prize, a true gem, and the site of a great city. There’s nothing in history, outside of the book of Mormon, that says such a river ever existed. And a look at Google Maps shows that there’s no valley to speak of, certainly nothing with big enough britches to have been carved by a river.
The whole journey is a test by God to see if people would believe that Lehi, a punk off the street with no credentials, really could tell the future. Because that’s all a prophet is in the book of Mormon, not a social reformer, not a commentator on the current zeitgeist and one who tries to get people to see the inevitable consequences of their actions, but just somebody who was given a dream by God of the future. And the crux of the test is to believe, beforehand, that a man from the fringe of society is chosen by God, with no other sign than the very destruction that he’s predicting as punishment for not believing in it.
The people of Jerusalem did not believe the city would be destroyed. They even tried to kill Lehi just for even saying it would be sacked, so they were cursed. Then God punished them for rejecting Lehi as a psychic by letting Nebuchadnezzar destroy Jerusalem and frog-march the elites to captivity in the Babylonian capitol.
Lehi’s sons Laman and Lemuel also did not believe that Jerusalem would be destroyed, so they were cursed by God, and this curse took the form of dark skin for their descendants, because the Book of Mormon was written by a racist who thought the human adaption of melanin to deal with the harsh light of the sun was a bad thing.
But Sam and Nephi did believe that Jerusalem would be destroyed, so they were blessed with white skin. A land flowing with milk and honey was prepared just for them far over the sea.
