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SundaySchool

I've been working on updating my blog, and spending so much time going back over my series on New Testament Seminary Scripture Mastery, the Scripture Mastery removed from the Old Testament, and my initial attempts at illustrating the deep and fundamental problems with Callister's “Blueprint of Christ's Church” book made me wonder: there have been some major changes to the LDS Sunday and Seminary schedules, is there any change in teaching materials for this change? And it turns out there is.

And it's terrible.

No, wait, hear me out! The older manuals spent time detailing exactly what the teacher should go over. It spelled out what scriptural passages to cover, offered possible questions that could be asked to the class, and offered many explanatory sections to help the teacher present the scriptural texts with at least some historical context. They were restrictive and constraining, and, as I've detailed in my explorations linked above, they often presented outdated or even incorrect information. That's all admittedly pretty bad, so why do I think the new ones are worse?

Because while they have (thankfully) gotten rid of the specified verses that should be read (which produced a patchwork of biblical literacy for most Mormons featuring large gaping holes), they have totally removed nearly all of the historical context. The entire aim is now to merely play the old “Apply This To Yourself” game with Every. Single. Passage.

This is the game that goes, “I don't really understand this, but the general gist makes sense to me. And it reminds me of that time in my life when I [fill in the blank], so I guess it's about that.” It's both a recipe for producing a wonderful connection with the Biblical text as well as a recipe for producing terrifyingly incorrect assumptions of the meaning of a two-thousand-year-old library. (There is nothing in what Jesus said that is about whether or not you should ghost someone on social media who has upset you.)

It's one thing to be incorrect about a book, but it's another to be incorrect about a book and also feel divinely justified in your incorrect assumptions. And because so much is centered around group discussions, this will only help to perpetuate all of the old culturally-upheld misinterpretations commonly assumed by Mormons about the Christian New Testament and Hebrew Bible.

The good ship Zion may no longer be driven by a constraining current, but now it's taking on water and instead of a captain everyone gets to put their hand on the wheel together. And once you realize that the same Bible has been used throughout history to defend slavery, defend segregation, and defend killing witches, homosexuals, and transvestites you begin to see that any system that reinforces only what the general community believes without enforcing anything better can easily result in real danger for those who do not belong to the community.

Hyperbole? Maybe. But if you were looking for the “Come, Follow Me,” resources to actually teach you anything about the Christian New Testament you'll continue looking in vain. And that's a shame.

#Mormon #SundaySchool #AcademicBiblical

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Released in the late 1990s, the LDS Sunday School manual cycle is almost 20 years old now (though it was undergoing development for a number of years prior to being released, so I tend to view it as roughly being of drinking age). Because it's only encountered once every four years (for a total now of four times only so far) that may seem surprising to many readers. Twenty years is a long time; a lot can, and has, changed in the LDS Church and in the population of active membership during that time. So it's interesting to me that some issues that seem to be much more of a problem to the Church in the 2010s are problems that this manual produces in the early 1990s is aware of. And, of course, there are some other issues that have become much more problematic since the initial publication, to the point that there are a number of points in lessons, not to mention two entire lessons themselves, that seem tone-deaf to the issues of the modern LDS Church. Together, this shows the ever-increasing problem presented by the age of the current LDS Sunday School materials: they exhibit none of the modern LDS Church's flexibility when it comes to dealing with its own internal problems.

Of course, these issues have been best highlighted to myself personally through the careful production of what I call the “Inverse Bible”: a hypothetical document that contains scriptures from the Hebrew Bible (which many Christians call the “Old Testament”) that will almost never be encountered in the average LDS Sunday School class. The production of such a collection of chapters and verses, however, has also involved the creation, on my own, of what I've begun to call the “Sunday School Bible” which is the inverse of the Inverse Bible: it is the Bible composed only of the scriptures you would encounter in the average LDS Sunday School. To put it another way, if you went to an LDS Sunday School carrying this heavily-abridged collection you would never encounter a situation where you could not read verses from your book to participate in the lesson's discussion.

It's in the dividing line between these two puzzle pieces of the full Hebrew Bible that I've found the most interesting issues.

Milk and Meat

First off the bat is the fact that the Sunday School Bible is composed mostly of easily-digested stories and narrative. There are few examples of difficult-to-parse symbolic language, few examples of foreign customs and ancient culture, and very little poetry and prophecy. Instead, the Sunday School Bible is a Bible of people (usually men, even more than the complete Hebrew Bible). The Sunday School Bible is not nearly as concerned with what God has to say than with who God has assigned to speak his words. Through this focus on narrative history, the Sunday School Bible is a book that is almost entirely ignorant of the exile from Israel and Judah, instead preferring to focus on stories. Because of this ignorance, even the few prophecies that remain within the work are easily re-interpreted into prophecies of a future second coming of Jesus ad/or the founding of the LDS Church.

In contrast, the Inverse Bible is heavy with difficult prophecy, prose, and arcana. Most of the thickest books of the Hebrew Bible (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job, for example) are present in the Inverse Bible, usually in long uninterrupted segments of multiple chapters. The Hebrew Bible is a library of works that is vastly influenced by the invasions and conquests of the Assyrians and the Babylonians who destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, respectively. The Inverse Bible is full of the prophecies by various prophets of Yahweh promising destruction and bloodshed, and statements of the anger of Yahweh against pretty much every country of the world known to the ancient Israelites, including their own. The destruction, and promised restitution, of these kingdoms occupies the majority of the text contained in the Inverse Bible.

Old Problems

There is at least one problem with the Sunday School Bible's dependence upon the use of stories and narrative: stories use details to ground them in the real world (to a certain extent), and one story often leads to another. The problem is that this connected chain of stories is much like a rocky river where one flat stretch of relatively calm water and quickly lead to a small cataract of trouble. The Inverse Bible is not fully absent of narrative, but instead has some stories or even small pieces of stories as the Sunday School Bible attempts to deftly step around these issues without anyone noticing. Of course, these attempts aren't always very successful.

The authors of the LDS Sunday School manual are aware of many of the aspects of the stories from the Pearl of Great Price and the Hebrew Bible that strain credulity in a modern audience. The Inverse Bible is full of stories of fantastical creatures like giants, stories of Yahweh's prophets and patriarchs doing disturbing things, and examples of Yahweh's often violent rhetoric against Israel's enemies. Even the Pearl of Great Price doesn't escape unscathed; only the Inverse Bible contains Enoch's people being threatened by giants, spontaneously emerging islands where humans settle, Abraham's astronomical explorations, the stories of the founding of Egypt after the flood, and, most obviously, Moses 7:22. This one verse sits all alone in the Inverse Bible, the Bible that your average LDS member is never going to read. The Sunday School Bible silently implores the reader to skip over this verse while reading along through the chapter. It's of little doubt why this would be.

This old problem of the Temple Ban against black members was obviously something the Church wished people would just ignore even back in the mid-1990s as the current manual cycle was being developed. The Sunday School Bible skips over the people of Cain being black, skips over how Pharaoh could not have the Priesthood due to his ancestry, and the cursing of Canaan by his grandfather Noah. On the one hand, this is a good thing. These are the scriptures that lay behind decades of racist thought and teachings in the LDS Church. On the other hand, just because they're not read anymore doesn't mean they're gone or repudiated. The fact that a racism-sized hole exists in the Sunday School Bible does not amount to an apology or repentance for the ecclesiastical sins of the organization. The existence of this hole amounts to nothing more than a hope, faint in the Internet age, that the Mormon Church will somehow, someday, just forget about the Temple Ban against black members. Until this issue is dealt with the hole will simply become more and more obvious.

Not helping matters is the Sunday School manuals complete blindness to other racist issues that failed to die and have persevered from 1978 relatively unscathed. The Sunday School Bible still makes use of the story of Abraham's servant being sent to obtain a wife from his estranged family instead of from the local Canaanite population as an example of the importance of “Marrying in the Covenant”. The only problem is that the scriptures in this lesson were used during the most extreme days of racist rhetoric from Church leadership as divine instruction against inter-marriage between blacks and whites. The continuing presence of this lesson and it's emphasis of the “right” way to court and marry (within the faith) is an unfortunate legacy from before 1978 and has become increasingly outdated in the modern LDS Church.

Interestingly, while there is an entire lesson about this issue that uses Rebekah and Isaac as the main example, the strong pronouncements against intermarriage from Ezra, Nehemiah, and some of the minor prophets, for the Levitical priests are absent from the Sunday School Bible. Apparently, the Sunday School Bible wants its readers to be inspired to marry the right kind of person by Rebekah, but doesn't want it's readers to be inspired to fix incorrect marriages by Ezra. But in the end, it might be a better Sunday School if even this story about “marriage in the covenant” were removed into the never-read Inverse Bible.

New Problems

“The fastest growing Church” was the common rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s (in fact, it's still not uncommon to hear it repeated even in the mid-2010s). It may have been true at a few points in the 1980s, but that growth had technically begun to slow in the mid-1990s, and is now nearly stagnated when the actual activity and devotion of the membership is taken into account. Because it was produced at the end of this period of growth the Sunday School Bible is completely oblivious to the challenges faced by the LDS Church's growth rate.

Part of the common narrative during the period of accelerated growth was the attention given to Daniel's famous interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a human figure of various materials smashed by a rough stone that becomes a world (Daniel 2). Daniel interprets for the king that the materials of the figure represent a succession of nations which will culminate in a kingdom that will never be destroyed. Christians have often interpreted the rock “cut without hands” that fills the world as either the Christian movement or the Kingdom of God that accompanies the Parousia. Mormons similarly viewed the kingdom represented by the rock as the Kingdom of God, but extended the symbolism that the Kingdom of God is synonymous with the LDS Church and that the process of expanding to fill the earth was ongoing during the present time. The growth of the LDS Church was equated to Daniel's vision and was thus seen as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Of course, difficulties arise in this interpretation as the membership has gradually become aware that “all is not well in Zion”. In 2014 you are much more likely to hear people equate the LDS Church to other less-impressive scriptures, such as Christ's parable of the yeast that causes the bread to rise. The more-common narrative now is that the Church is small, will always be small, has always been understood to remain small before the Second Coming. Except for the lesson in the Sunday School manual that focuses on the book of Daniel. With some lip-service paid to Daniel's refusing the king's food and the LDS Word of Wisdom, the bulk of the lesson focuses on the king's dream and Daniel's interpretation with the LDS Church being specifically taught as the kingdom represented by the stone that fills the world.

This particular scripture has even been removed from the Seminary Scripture Mastery list, a collection of 100 scriptures that valiant LDS youth are expected to memorize. The modern LDS Church has already begun to adapt both officially and culturally to a rapidly deceleration growth rate, so it is more than odd to see an entire lesson meant to excite the membership about growth.

A Skewed Perspective

As I've said numerous times already, the largest problem presented by the Inverse and Sunday School Bibles is the skewed perspective a reader will come away from the texts with. The Hebrew Bible is an ancient library of many different texts by many different authors with many different purposes for writing. The Sunday School Bible has been correlated into a single book that gives the false impression of a unified voice speaking both in harmony with itself as well as together with other books of scripture such as the New Testament or the Book of Mormon.

This is unfortunate as often the original purpose of a particular book might be completely abandoned. Judges, instead of being a pro-monarchy propaganda piece focusing on the lack of control exhibited by the Israelites before the monarchy was instituted, becomes a collection of happy stories telling the same boring lesson as the first half of the Book of Mormon: that the righteous are blessed by Yahweh and the wicked are punished. The lack of stories from the Deuteronomistic history of 1 Samuel to 2 Kings that show Yahweh's unstoppable ability to directly interfere in the social structure of humans (sometimes violently, sometimes humorously) turns it in a collection of safe, little stories about safe, righteous people being led by safe, quiet revelation.

It's not that I think the Hebrew Bible contains truths that need to be heard, either true history or true theology. I don't think it does, for the most part. Most of the history has been rewritten, reinvented, or blatantly invented for the purposes of the authors, and I really doubt that the dense prophetic poetry of Isaiah and Jeremiah can be easily understood by anyone. But it is simply not fair to this artifact from the ancient world to treat it like a time machine for modern Mormonism to somehow exist in the ancient world. It's not unlike the caricatures often made of Mormonism by outside voices. It's not fair, it's not nice, and, above all, it is pompous and presumptuous to approach the Hebrew Bible without acknowledging its Hebrew origins.

A New Manual

To the astute it may appear that I have painted a picture of the Sunday School Bible where it is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. It has a racism-sized hole in it that need to be acknowledged, but it also presented doctrines and interpretations that no longer apply to Mormonism that need to be discarded. It may seem that the LDS Sunday School Bible just can't win.

In a certain sense, it can't. To make any attempt to cram a fair and thorough study of the entire collection of texts in an hour (often less than an hour) a week for 52 weeks means failure before you even begin. You're going to have to make difficult choices as to what gets covered and what does not. I understand that.

My problem isn't so much in the holes and the unnecessary parts represented by the Inverse Bible and the Sunday School Bible: it's in the presence of the Inverse Bible itself. Why has this project been possible in the first place? Why do we have a system of study that has remained unchanged with the four-year cycle for decades? Why are there verses that will never be read or explored?

I understand that the process of creating a manual like this can be difficult, but in my opinion avoiding the drawbacks of assembling and translating lessons is not worth the end result where the majority of believers in a biblical religion are completely and utterly illiterate when it comes to the majority of the Hebrew Bible. As a people, Mormons have lost more than just an understanding of the Hebrew Bible as it stands. They've lost the ability to explore their scriptures communally. The modern LDS Church has forgotten how to debate, inquire, and read their scriptures with each other as individuals and as fellow believers. They have little cultural ability to explore multiple points of view about their texts simultaneously and without argument. They have very little patience for questions with no good answers. We've lost this, and I think one of the reasons that devout Judaism, whether orthodox or reform, has held onto this culture of discussing their scriptures instead of just reading them is because they spend time on all of the books they have, even the messy ones that simply cannot be easily read.

Imagine how the LDS Sunday School would be made more interesting if they had to cover the Inverse Bible as part of their lessons. They can read about Yahweh sending a lying spirit into the prophets of Israel and discuss the implications. They can read about Saul prophesying so hard that he loses all control and instead of continuing on his quest to destroy David is instead sidetracked for a time as he strips off his clothes and helplessly issues prophecy. They can talk about the land raised up out of the water for the giants in the days of Enoch and wonder what the hell any of that means. They can read the apocalypticism of Daniel and Ezekiel without having a pre-existing interpretation which they may or may not agree with upon further personal thought handed to them to simply accept as given.

My problem with the Inverse Bible is that there is an Inverse Bible. The LDS people believe the Bible to be the Word of God, but they simply do not read it. The main culprit for this is that the pre-written chunks of scripture for the lessons were chosen years and years ago and have remained unchanged. We need a dynamic approach to all four years of study where every year will yield new treasures to discover (and sometimes new trash to deride).

#Mormon #SundaySchool #HebrewBible #AcademicBiblical

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Daniel is an apocalyptic book with some stories as well. Apocalypticism is a viewpoint that arose in Judaism after the Babylonian Captivity (probably due to influence in Babylon/Persia by Zoroastrianism) that is defined by the idea of a great cosmic war between good and evil with a time-line from a beginning to an end. Named for the Greek term “apokálypsis”, which means “uncovering from”, the idea is that the secret purposes of universal forces have been revealed. Apocalyptic literature portrays God as the highest representative of good battling against the forces of evil (often personified in the form of great earthly rulers or even a supernatural equivalent to God, such as the devil). This war has echoes in the physical world around us in the forms of injustice, violence, and wealth disparity, all of which will experience a great reversal after the war ends and those who were upheld by the evil side are brought down low and the righteous oppressed are upheld. After the Babylonian captivity, apocalypticism became an energetic thread of Jewish thought influencing such famous thinkers as the author of Daniel, the Essene community that wrote and hit the Dead Sea Scrolls, John the Baptist, the historical Jesus, Paul of Tarsus, and the John who wrote the book of Revelation (actually called “apokálypsis” in Greek).

The few parts of Daniel that the Latter-day Saints are familiar with only just barely cover any of these issues. The stone cut out of the mountain without hands that will destroy the nations and fill the whole world is an apocalyptic vision that fits right in line with other writings. The Latter-day Saints have appropriated themselves into the apocalyptic time-line such that they are preparing the world for the final upheaval, and as such view themselves as that stone. Or at least they used to. This interpretation has been removed from the Seminary Scripture Mastery verses for LDS youth to memorize, videos expressing the idea have been abandoned to be forgotten in old Stake Center libraries, and on the whole the message has become far more non-denominational in recent years. But the Sunday School manual has become more and more of an antiquated relic from the early 1990s and is unrepentant about have en entire lesson on the subject (with some random attention given to the bizarre “Ancient of Days” = Adam interpretation thrown in). Unfortunately, because of this, no attention is given to the rest of Daniel, leading to the false idea that the book of Daniel is a collection of stories of faith instead of a collection of stories where good overcomes evil through supernatural means in a reflection of the apocalyptic visions that cover the non-narrative parts of the book. King Nebuchadnezzar, as one of the world's supreme monarchs, is made insane and acts like an animal for “seven times” in similitude to how the rulers of this world will eventually be overthrown and brought low. Daniel sees visions of beasts and horns and fights. He sees a vision of Alexander the Great and the various Greek rulers that arose after his death, including Antiochus Epiphanes,the infamous ruler oppressing the Jewish nation in 1 Maccabees, followed by the arrival of the Messiah to overthrow the nations oppressing the righteous people of the earth (which gives something of a clue as to when Daniel was probably written as we can match the vision against history rather well up to the point where the Messiah comes, which hasn't happened yet even over two thousand years later).

Hosea and Amos as prophets who pronounce doom on the northern kingdom are not really viewed much in their context. In Hosea a lot of attention is given to Hosea's forgiveness of his adulterous wife, symbolic of Yahweh's forgiveness of his people who have gone after other gods. Yet the Northern Kingdom is utterly destroyed by the Assyrians; there are no more Israelites that can be brought back into a worship of Yahweh.

The minor prophets are strongly present in the Inverse Scriptures, yet again showing the preference for narrative over poetics and prophecy for the Latter-day Saint Sunday School bible. Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Zechariah are present almost completely in the Inverse Bible.

The presence of Malachi is an interesting combination of items. The book begins with a condemnation against Judah for not offering their sacrifices correctly and promising their destruction because of it. It then moves on to speak against the priests who offer sacrifices and who have married foreign wives and pronouncing doom. My guess is that these chapters aren't meant to be read in combination with the following chapters because they contextualize those chapters to the Jerusalem Temple and the rituals of it.

Perhaps it is a small blessing that the minor prophets are present in the Inverse Bible and not in the Sunday School Bible. Mormon doctrine is strongly apocalyptic and tends to reinterpret all prophecies of doom by various Hebrew prophets as relating to the modern world the LDS Church inhabits. If these books were to be studied in an LDS Sunday School the ancient, Near Eastern context would almost certainly be destroyed beyond all recognition as various calamities prophesied upon Israel and Judah are extended as prophecies against modern, First-World countries.

This ends my read-through of the Inverse Bible. The only thing left in this series is a final post detailing my conclusions in pursing this study. See you there!

Notable Verses and Pericopes

Daniel

  • Nebuchadnezzar's first-person account (so you know it must be true!) of how he had a dream about a tree and went crazy for “seven times” (Daniel 4:1-37)

  • Daniel sees the Ancient of Days (Adam, according to LDS thought) judging millions from the books; he's described in godlike terms that might cause someone to think that Adam is God or something silly like that (Daniel 7:9-10)

Joel

  • Woe to those who desire the day of the Lord! (Amos 5:18) (see also Isaiah 5:18-19)

Obadiah

  • Saviors on Mount Zion, in context, rescue the land by destroying their neighbors. Or through doing their temple work, I guess. (Obadiah 1:17-21)

Habakkuk

  • Habakkuk doesn't understand being a prophet to an all-powerful deity in a world where evil exists (Habakkuk 1:1-4)

Haggai

  • Haggai tells Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah after the return from exile, that in only a “little while” God will shake all the nations and the Temple will be awesome again, with his chosen servant Zerubbabel as his signet ring (Zerubbabel pretty much disappears from history after this point) (Haggai 2:1-9, 20-23)

Zechariah

  • The only possible reference to Satan as a personified representative of opposition to God as the high priest, Joshua, is seen as standing between an angel of God and the Satan. (Zechariah 3:1-5)

  • Zerubbabel is against proclaimed to become so great and famous. (Zechariah 4:6-10)

  • God is so great: he makes the young men cheerful with beer, and the young women with new wine (which is not the same as grape juice, sorry) (Zechariah 9:17)

#Mormon #SundaySchool #HebrewBible #AcademicBiblical

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This post covers a huge chunk of the Inverse Bible. This is because the actual Sunday School Bible covers so very little over the same spread of books. The regular Sunday School Bible continues to show preference for stories and narrative as opposed to the poetry and prophecy of the Hebrew Bible, so the Inverse Bible is full of complicated theological reasoning (in Job), poetic structure (Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes), and prophecy (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel). In a way this is understandable: the average reader tends to have their eyes glaze over if they ever encounter most of this material. Separated from the historical, eastern context it is difficult for most western readers to engage with these texts and most Latter-day Saint Sunday Schools are boring enough.

There are two downsides to skipping so much material, however. The first is the missed opportunity for collaborative exploration. Judaism, for instance, has a very strong tradition of discussion and argument over the foundational texts. And ancient eastern prophecy tends to use strong figurative images which means that many multiple viewpoints can be held on their contents. Early Mormonism used to have a similar culture of exploration, even if it sometimes led to conflict. In 1843, Pelatiah Brown was called before the Nauvoo High Council because they disagreed with his reading of Revelation 5:8. In response, Joseph Smith put an end to the issue, saying something like “[I] never thought it was right to [call] up a man for erring in doctrine... [I] want the liberty of believing as I please, [it] feels so good. [It] don't prove that a man is not a good man because he errs in doctrine.” (William Clayton's Report of the General Conference of the Church, 8 April 1843). Joseph then proceeded to explore his own conclusions on the same text. There used to be room in Mormonism for such exploration. Covering these difficult texts in a Sunday School setting would almost demand such exploration.

The second downside is that, once again, by only covering texts like a stone skipping across the surface of the water we emerge without an accurate understanding of the texts in question. I can think of few texts that suffer as strongly from this approach as Ecclesiastes and Job, both of which are present nearly in their entirety in the Inverse Bible.

Job, especially, is omitted. Instead, preference is given to the narrative frame of the story beginning with the downfall of Job and all he possesses and ending with the final verses where Job regains all he once had. The interim is almost entirely skipped, and possibly with good reason. Mormons are quite fond of the “Pride Cycle” of the Book of Mormon, where righteousness is rewarded with blessings, which causes pride, which results in punishment, which causes humility and righteousness, which is rewarded with blessings, and so on. The Book of Job takes this view and analyzes it directly. In the characters of Job, his wife, and his friends various points of view on the justice of God in light of the evil of the world are approached. Sunday School only focuses in the barest details on the arguments of Job's friends, who argue that his current troubles must be the result of sin, and Job's response that he knows he is righteous. The lessons ignore entirely, however, that Job hates his life so much that he wishes to die, and that he views God as being unjust. Job doesn't follow his wife's urging to “curse God and die” but he doesn't shy away from accusing God of acting unfairly towards him. The famous exclamation of “I know that my Redeemer lives” is not a statement about a later messiah or an atonement, but rather is an expression of Job's faith that eventually God will redeem him from his current troubles (the next part about how “in my flesh I shall see God” is actually very difficult to translate and could just as easily mean “without my flesh I shall see God”). And the lesson entirely ignores the arguments of Elihu, who argues that both Job and his friends have everything wrong and that God cannot be limited to human concepts of “justice” and “morality” and that it is wickedness to try and confine God to these human ideals. I find the exclusion interesting as Elihu's arguments are probably the most logical response to the hypothetical of a suffering righteous human (which is why many scholars view Elihu as a later addition to the parable). Finally, God responds to Job by comparing the extent of Job's wisdom and Job's accomplishments with that of God. Basically, God's repose amounts to “Am I being unjust in punishing you Job even though you are righteous? I'm not going to answer that; I'm God, and I'm incredible!”

I'm not surprised that Jeremiah is ignored: his viewpoint often seems excessively vindictive and violent to a modern, western audience. The study of Ezekiel is also limited, too. If it wasn't for the desperate attempts to interpret his vision of the stick of Joseph and the stick of Judah as the Book of Mormon and the Bible I'd doubt they'd focus much on the book. People have found it to be confusing and insane for over two thousand years. I do find it surprising that the LDS Sunday School focuses on Ezekiel's description of the war of Gog and Magog as though it applies to the future, and their interpretation of a spring of fresh water emerging from the restored Jerusalem Temple “healing” the waters of the Dead Sea is surprisingly literal when it makes just as much sense when read figuratively (Ezekiel is all about having the “proper” people in charge of the Temple, so when the Temple is restored to what it should be, the blessings will flow into the Israelite people who have become dead and stagnant).

Finally, I'm a little surprised that the ends of Ezra and Nehemiah are ignored. Abraham's wishes for Isaac to not marry a Canaanite were not skipped over, but were rather transformed into a lesson on the importance of marriage within the covenant. Ezra's cleansing the Israelites of their foreign wives would seem to fit right in alongside this approach. Perhaps when the story involves putting away existing wives—-and children!—-it becomes a bit harder to spin it as a positive thing. The LDS Church is so focused on the importance of families, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that they'd prefer to ignore that one of the righteous leaders in the Bible actively encourages his people to break up their existing families along racial lines.

Notable Verses and Pericopes

Ezra/Nehemiah

  • Ezra asks God for forgiveness for his people who have intermarried with non-Israelites (Ezra 9)
  • Ezra demands that the Israelites put away their non-Israelite wives and children to regain God's favor (Ezra 10:1-12)
  • Nehemiah plucks off the hair of people who intermarried with non-Israelites (Nehemiah 13:23-27)

Job

  • Entire Book of Job is approached in a non-contextual way; the arguments of Elihu are completely ignored

Psalms

  • Even in the midst of killing children, Pharaoh, and various kings, God's mercy endureth forever (Psalm 136:10-26)

  • Happy shall he be, who dashes the little ones of the Babylonians against the stones (Psalm 137:9)

  • Praise ye the Lord by singing a new song, playing instruments, and using your swords to execute judgment upon kings and nobles. Praise ye the Lord. (Psalms 149:1-9)

Proverbs

Ecclesiastes

Isaiah

  • God will destroy the leviathan, the dragon that is in the sea, and this in no way echoes earlier Mesopotamian creation myths involving a divine battle between the king of the gods and the primordial sea of chaos (Isaiah 27:1)

  • There was no god formed before God and there will be no god formed after him (Isaiah 43:10)

  • Why are your clothes so red? Because he has trodden the wine-press alone and it is the blood of his foes that he trampled in his fury as he crushed the nations (Isaiah 63:2-6)

Jeremiah

  • Because the men of Anathoth seek the life of Jeremiah, God announces that he will kill their sons and daughters (Jeremiah 11:22-23)

  • Even if God's favorite prophets somehow pleaded for mercy for the people, God would cast those prophets out of his sight rather than show mercy (Jeremiah 15:1)

  • Jerusalem is destroyed because people carried stuff around on Saturdays (Jeremiah 17:21-27)

  • The Prophet of God requests that God kill the loved ones of people who don't listen to him with famine and sword (Jeremiah 18:21-23)

  • God brings evil on the city called by his name and calls for a sword upon everyone on the earth (Jeremiah 25:29)

  • God is able to replace a collection of lost scriptures and even puts in new material as he does so; the lost scriptures are only a single scroll, however, not anywhere near 116 pages long, so it's no big deal (Jeremiah 36:22-32)

  • God will curse any of those soldiers who holds back from slaughtering the Moabites (Jeremiah 48:10)

  • Israel is God's battle ax that he will use to destroy kingdoms such as Babylon (just ignore the fact that Babylon kicks their butt in the next chapter) (Jeremiah 51:20-26)

  • The Book of Jeremiah was written to be thrown into a river (Jeremiah 51:60-64)

Ezekiel

  • Ezekiel begins his ministry by seriously tripping out and sees wheels within wheels and bizarre creatures (Ezekiel 1:1-28)

  • Wicked yet efficient Israelites create dual-purpose idols and sex toys (Ezekiel 16:17)

  • Sons do not bear the iniquities of their fathers (don't tell Ezekiel about Exodus 20:4!) (Ezekiel 18:20)

#Mormon #SundaySchool #HebrewBible #AcademicBiblical

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First off the bat, the Inverse Bible contains the story of Hannah's vow. It's a shame that a story featuring a proactive woman who is an active participant in a story gets skipped over so we can talk about how God speaks to a little boy.

I am amazed by the LDS Sunday School lesson that covers 1 Samuel 15! Most Latter-day Saints are familiar with the verse, “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22), but the lesson actually goes into the full context that where Saul disobeyed was in not killing every single living thing in a city of the Amalekites. He killed the men, the women, and even the children, but he had neglected to kill their livestock or their king. When Samuel the Prophet rectifies the situation by hewing the Amalekite king “in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal”, the manual misses a great opportunity to talk about prophetic fallibility. It is a horrible, disturbing story with really very little redeeming about it. I am surprised in the extreme that the entirety of chapter 15 is part of the lesson, but it is. And, oddly, it is thus not present in the Inverse Old Testament.

I find it interesting that the story of Uzzah, who is killed while trying to steady the ark, is skipped as the phrase “steadying the ark” is often used with a negative connotation by members of the Church. Perhaps they don't want to address that Uzzah's death freaks David out so that he doesn't finish moving the ark the rest of the way to Jerusalem for three months and performs constant sacrifices as it moves and dances “before the lord with all his might” to prevent further problems.

Also, the rebellion of David's son, Absalom, is a major part of the story of David as told by the author of Samuel-Kings as it is something of a reversal of the story of David's guerrilla war against Saul. It also highlights some of the failings of David as a leader because he loves his son too much to treat him properly as a rebel and a danger to his rule.

I'm not surprised that the subsequent centuries of warfare between the divided kingdoms after Solomon are not covered: they're repetitive and rather boring. However, there are a number of oddities regarding the “prophets” and the actions of so-called “righteous” kings that would lead to some disturbing Sunday School classes for many LDS. The actions of the prophets in particular paint a picture of prophecy that behaves almost like a mental disease like epilepsy or something: it sometimes seems to take people by force and make people say and do things they might not otherwise do. Which is very different than how Mormons view their current leadership who are led so subtly that they sometimes make mistakes.

It's also somewhat disturbing how often the Temple Solomon built at Jerusalem is despoiled, sometimes by attacking nations and other times by the Judean kings themselves so they can use the treasures as bribes for other nations. Usually Mormons view Jerusalem as a stronghold that was never successfully attacked until the Babylonians attack after Lehi leaves Jerusalem, but the facts as presented in the biblical history paint a very different picture of a much weaker, more-often attacked Jerusalem. Jerusalem is sacked and plundered right before Zedekiah is made king (whose first year of reign begins the Book of Mormon).

Notable Verses and Pericopes

1 Samuel

  • Eli thinks Hannah is drunk as she prays for a son which she promises to God (1 Samuel 1:1-28)
  • Hannah's psalm of praise (1 Samuel 2:1-11)
  • Eli's sons use the ark to scare attacking Philistines, but it gets stolen instead and most everyone dies (1 Samuel 4:1-22)
  • The ark dismembers a Philistine idol and causes deadly hemorrhoids (1 Samuel 5:1-12)
  • The Philistines placate God by making golden mice and golden hemorrhoids and returning the ark (1 Samuel 6:1-12)
  • God kills over fifty thousand people because some of them looked in the ark (1 Samuel 6:19)
  • Jonathan is sentenced to death by King Saul because he ate some damn good honey after Saul decreed a fast even though Jonathan didn't hear the decree (1 Samuel 14:24-30, 38-45)
  • Saul has some trouble with a case of incapacitating (and denuding) contagious prophecy (1 Samuel 19:19-24)
  • David eats the showbread of the tabernacle (1 Samuel 21:1-6)
  • David levels up his weapons with Goliath's sword (1 Samuel 21:8-9)
  • David pretends to be crazy to avoid being killed by Philistines (1 Samuel 21:10-15)
  • David gains the wife and property of Nabal through divine means that were in no way suspicious (1 Samuel 25)
  • Unlike Saul, David has no problem with genocide (1 Samuel 27:8-9)
  • Saul talks to the ghost of Samuel through a necromancer (1 Samuel 28:3-25)

2 Samuel

  • David performs constant sacrifices and dances to prevent further death after God kills Uzzah while moving the ark (2 Samuel 6:6-15)
  • David's wife is upset at David's dancing because he exposes himself while doing so (2 Samuel 6:16, 20-21)
  • David executes prisoners of war using precise measurements (2 Samuel 8:2)
  • Absalom insults his father by publicly having sex with his father's concubines (2 Samuel 16:20-23)
  • Absalom dies because his hair gets caught in a tree (2 Samuel 18:9-15)
  • God kills 70,000 men because he inspired David to perform a census of his people (2 Samuel 24:1-15)

1 Kings

  • David is given a young girl in bed to keep him warm in his old age (1 Kings 1:1-4)
  • Nathan the prophet starts some political intrigue with Solomon's mom to ensure he inherits the throne instead of another of David's numerous sons (1 Kings 1:5-34)
  • David's dying counsel to his son Solomon is to wrap up all the loose ends of people he never got around to killing in vengeance before he died (1 Kings 2:5-10)
  • The righteous Solomon marries the daughter of Pharaoh, long after the Exodus (1 Kings 3:1)
  • The righteous Solomon sacrifices in “high places” like Gibeon (1 Kings 3:2-4)
  • The cloud of God is so thick in Solomon's new temple that the priests can't even do their jobs (1 Kings 8:10-13)
  • Solomon enslaves the Israelites' ancestral enemies (1 Kings 9:21-22)
  • A prophecy of an awesome later Judean king to come, which is in no way a possible editorial insertion by later scribes trying to curry favor with said king, is given to a wicked king (1 Kings 13:1-3)
  • The same prophet is tricked into offending God and the liar that tricked him is made to prophesy the death of said prophet, which then occurs (1 Kings 13:11-32)
  • It is mentioned almost in passing how Egypt is able to plunder Solomon's temple of all of the golden riches during the reign of the righteous Rehoboam so that they have to be carefully replaced with brass items (1 Kings 14:25-28)
  • Righteous King Asa of Judah, while besieged, uses the treasures of the temple to bribe the Syrians into attacking Israel (1 Kings 15:16-20)
  • God assists the wicked King Ahab in defending against the Syrians multiple times to defend his reputation (1 Kings 20:1-34)
  • A prophet commands his neighbor to wound him with a sword; the neighbor refuses and is killed by a lion (1 Kings 20:35-36)
  • The same prophet asks someone else and we find out the entire reason is for an object lesson from God to prophesy the death of King Ahab for not killing the King of the Syrians (1 Kings 20:37-43)
  • Lady Macbeth Jezebel, wife of Ahab, convinces him to man up and steal ownership of a nice vineyard (1 Kings 21:1-16)
  • After he humbles himself, God changes his mind about punishing the wicked King Ahab and instead decides to send the punishment onto Ahab's son (1 Kings 21:25-29)
  • God asks for volunteers of the heavenly court to go down and give false prophecies to the prophets to convince Ahab to take deadly action in war (1 Kings 22:19-23)

2 Kings

  • Elijah burns 101 soldiers with fire from heaven to prove he's a “man of God” (2 Kings 1:9-12)
  • Israel is besieged and goes so hungry that Israelites begin eating their young children (2 Kings 6:24-29)
  • Elisha gives a self-fulfilling prophecy worthy of the Matrix Oracle (2 Kings 8:7-15)
  • A chapter from Game of Thrones randomly appears in the Bible, complete with multiple kings, betrayal, arrows through the chest, and the bodies of royalty being consumed by dogs (2 Kings 9)
  • Jehu continues his bloody, HBO-friendly rampage through the kingdom of Israel (2 Kings 10:1-28)
  • King Azariah of Judah, who “did that which was right in the sight of the Lord” is emitted with leprosy by God (2 Kings 15:1-5)
  • The Assyrians destroy the kingdom of Israel and replace the people with foreign nations (2 Kings 17)
  • Hezekiah is prophesied to die but is able to change God's mind about that, instead getting an extra fifteen years added to his life (2 Kings 20:1-7)
  • The Babylonians capture Jerusalem, despoil it and the temple, carry away to Babylon everyone except the poorest people, and set up Zedekiah as a puppet ruler (2 Kings 24:10-17)
  • Zedekiah rebels, is captured, and all of his sons are killed (2 Kings 25:1-7)

1 and 2 Chronicles

  • It's actually rather boring to list anything here because Chronicles is a later re-telling and whitewashing of the books of Samuel through Kings and thus has a LOT of duplications with those works while also leaving out many of the more odd or disturbing aspects (such as David's adultery with Bathsheba, for instance). Also, some stories are covered by LDS Sunday Schools in the study of Chronicles that are skipped in the study of Kings, such as the discovery of a book in the reconstruction of the temple by Josiah and the subsequent consultation about it by the Prophetess Huldah (2 Kings 22).

#Mormon #SundaySchool #HebrewBible #AcademicBiblical

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What is the LDS Inverse Old Testament?

I explained the basic idea in the first post, but I'll summarize it again. This is, based on a number of relatively safe assumptions, the collection of scriptures that almost all Latter-day Saints are going to be unfamiliar with as they have almost never read and studied them. The Seminary and Institute programs are an obvious exception to this collection, but these programs are really indented for the youth and the young single adults. Regular Latter-day Saints are unlikely to approach a thorough study of the Hebrew Bible on their own initiative and so their only real exposure to it is going to be through the weekly hour of Sunday School once every four years.

It's a far counter-argument that there is only one hour (often less) a week to devote to Sunday School, and that with less than sixty full hours to devote to the subject it is not reasonable to expect Latter-day Saints to exhaustively cover the Old Testament. And I agree fully. Except that the manual of study has remained almost completely unchanged since the mid-90s. That means that the LDS Church has had at least five full iterations of covering the Old Testament using the current manual. Once or twice I could agree with to spend only covering a small amount of the scriptures, but I find it to be very unsettling that the current curriculum has remained unchanged for so long. Two decades worth of attention to the scriptures covered in Sunday School has more than solidified the LDS conception of this ancient record, but this conception is flawed as the LDS Inverse Old Testament has also solidified during that same time as a sealed book that is often utterly alien to the average Latter-day Saint. The fact that the Inverse Old Testament is often more messy when it comes to other LDS scriptures and doctrines means that many Latter-day Saints have a false impression of cohesion and cleanliness between the various book of their scriptures. This may lead to promoting faith, but it is at the expense of authenticity and a fair understanding of the foreign aspects of an ancient Near Eastern body of literature.

Hopefully, bringing the existence and contents of the LDS Inverse Old Testament to light will help impel the LDS Church to adopt actions that will help expose more Latter-day Saints to more of their scriptures for a richer, deeper, and more complex understanding of their personal and official faith.

Moving On Past Leviticus

The project now continues from the Book of Leviticus, which is present in the Inverse Old Testament in its entirety, to the Book of Ruth, which is fully covered by LDS Sunday School attention and is thus absent from the Inverse Scriptures.

I'm not surprised that Leviticus is skipped. It's too full of uncomfortable questions in regards to its usefulness after Jesus Christ “fulfilled” the Law of Moses; since the Church still uses many aspects of the Torah in its doctrines the line dividing old law from law still in force becomes fuzzier the closer you examine it.

Numbers is, the name aside, an interesting book. Yes there are a lot of genealogies (why it's called numbers) but there are also a lot of stories, too. It's rather odd that people tend to view Exodus in the abstract as a book of the story of leaving Egypt with only a little bit of boring law material and Numbers as a book with tons of boring law material and only a few stories when the inverse is pretty much true.

Some of the stories I can understand being skipped as they show a very merciless God and prophet, but some of the others that are skipped could have been put to great used, such as the story of Zelophehad's daughters. Interestingly, the divine command to attack the Midianites in Numbers 31:1-16 is covered in LDS Sunday Schools. They are commanded to kill everyone, but they take as prisoner the women and children. The Inverse Scriptures contain the rest of the story, however, where Moses commands them to kill the women and male children and to keep the young virgin girls for themselves, as well as the immense list of booty the Israelites took from their slaughtered foes.

I also think some attention to the varied ingredients and types of sacrifices would be useful for a Mormon audience who seem to think that the sacrifices in the Tabernacle and Temple always consisted of the blood sacrifice of lambs. There are offerings of grains, offerings of wine, offerings using cows, goats, birds. There are even offerings of hair as part of the Nazarite vow that even early Christians such as Paul continued to perform (Acts 18:18). Mormons, like Christians, like the symbolism between Jesus's execution on the Cross and the death of the lamb as part of Passover, but good symbolism is no reason to obscure the depth and complexity of an ancient culture.

Some Stories and Pericopes contained in the Inverse Scriptures So Far

Numbers

  • God claims the Levites as his own instead of claiming all Israel's firstborn as his because he didn't kill their firstborn when he killed the Egyptian firstborn during the Exodus (Numbers 3:12-13, 45-51)
  • A magical ritual to prove the guilt or innocence of wives, though not of husbands, accused of adultery (Numbers 5:11-31)
  • The ritual requirements for a Nazarite vow, which even Paul performed post-conversion (Numbers 6:1-21)
  • Moses talks with an invisible God (Numbers 7:89)
  • Moses changes God's mind by implying he'll look bad to other nations if he kills all of the Israelites (Numbers 14:13-20)
  • Moses leads the camp in stoning a man who picked up sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36)
  • God puts down internal rebellions against Moses through earthquake, fire, and disease (Numbers 16)
  • Moses begins the conquest of Canaan (Numbers 21:32-35)
  • Aaron's son takes charge in ending wickedness by throwing a javelin really, really hard (Numbers 25:1-15)
  • Zelophehad's daughters make an impressive feminist argument about inheritance rights to Moses (Numbers 27:1-11, 36:1-13)
  • God tells Moses that he is going to die just like his brother Aaron died (Numbers 27:12-13)
  • Moses tells the Israelites to kill all of the enemy survivors of a battle except the young virgin girls which they can keep (Numbers 31:13-18)

Deuteronomy

Joshua

  • Joshua circumcises the Israelites who'd been born in the wilderness (Joshua 5:2-8)
  • Joshua is visited by the captain of God's army (Joshua 5:13-15)
  • Joshua burns the body, family, and possessions of Achan because he stole an idol from a ruined city (Joshua 7:24-26)
  • The Israelites take the city of Ai by stratagem and kill everyone, man and woman, and burn the city (Joshua 8)
  • The Israelites merely enslave the Gibeonites instead of slaughtering them because the Gibeonites trick them (Joshua 9)
  • God holds the sun and moon in the sky to give the Israelites enough time to defeat and kill the Amorites (Joshua 10:12-14)
  • The death toll of merely the kings of the cities that the Israelites destroyed (Joshua 12:7-24)

Judges

  • Left-handed Ehud kills the very fat King Eglon with a homemade sword (Judges 3:14-30)
  • Shamgar kills six hundred Philistines with an ox goad long before the more-famous Samson (Judges 3:31)
  • Sisera is killed by Jael by lulling him into a false sense of security and nailing his head to the ground (Judges 4:17-22)
  • Gideon makes a golden coat that becomes an idol and has 70 sons from his many wives (Judges 8:22-32)
  • Jephtah makes a rash vow to God and sacrifices his daughter (Judges 11:29-40)
  • Samson's wishes to marry a Philistine, which vex his parents, is inspired of God (Judges 14:4)
  • Samson carries away the doors of the gate of the city, posts and all, on his shoulders (Judges 16:3)
  • A Levite's concubine is cruelly raped and killed, so he cuts her up and sends her to the various tribes around (Judges 19)
  • Because of this, the other tribes begin a war that nearly wipes out the tribe of Benjamin (Judges 20)
  • Because so many of the Benjaminites died, new wives are provided by killing the men of the city of Jabesh-Gilead as well as by kidnapping from the city of Shiloh (Judges 21)

#Mormon #SundaySchool #HebrewBible #AcademicBiblical

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What is the LDS Inverse Old Testament?

I am assuming that most Sunday School teachers are both lazy and fearful of doing things wrong. For this reason, even though the manual itself suggests that teachers use it merely as a guide and not as the lesson itself, most teachers are just going to use the lessons as written. I am assuming that when the manual says “read Moses 4” referring to an entire chapter that this directive is usually not going to be followed. It takes a long time to read a full chapter and it'd be easier to just summarize it, which introduces our own biases and assumptions far more easily. Scriptures that are more likely to be read are the smaller snippets the manual lists in the catechism-like questions to be read and discussed. From these assumptions it is easy to create a list of scriptures that are likely to be read and discussed by any typical LDS Sunday School class. And from this list of scriptures it is easy to create the inverse of such a list and produce a list of scriptures that are not likely to be read and discussed by any typical LDS Sunday School class. And, assuming that most Latter-day Saints do not read the Old Testament voluntarily or closely as they do the Book of Mormon or the New Testament, it is likely that this inverse list contains chapters and verses that the average member of the Church is likely to never read or discuss.

So I've begun to do just that. I've gone through the lesson manual, highlighted the suggested scriptures, and then inverted the highlighting. I've only spent about two hours on the project so far and have gotten to the Book of Numbers. I'll keep posting more as I get further along.

You can click here to see the actual list of scriptures in the Inverse Old Testament.

My Thoughts So Far

There is a ton of time spent in the Pearl of Great Price and Genesis compared to the rest of the Bible.

All of Abraham's astronomy is skipped except where it's useful. A few verses about pre-existent intelligences are read from within the midst of conversation about Kokoabeum and how the sun and moon gets their light. And the polytheistic renderings of the creation account in Abraham might as well as not exist since they receive no attention whatsoever in comparison to Moses/Genesis.

The genealogies are skipped (okay, that's actually not very noteworthy, I'd do the same). Also skipped are the lists of instructions on how to build the Tabernacle in Exodus.

There are a number of stories that are skipped, probably because they are either 1) weird, 2) racist, or 3) show someone held up as a moral figure in a bad light.

Some of the verses that are skipped are ones that seem to stretch credulity in regards to these ancient stories by being too physical and real, such as the land that arises out of the ocean that the evil people opposed to Enoch's people retreat to, giants seeking the life of Noah, the angel wrestling with Jacob, or Moses's face shining so brightly that he has to put a veil over his face.

Moses 7:22 is such an obvious omission that I find it laughable. Seriously, the reading of the verses before and after is meant to be a very close reading in class, but the verse itself is 100% absent from the readings suggested by the materials.

While it is recommended to “teach and discuss” the entirety of Moses 4 (the temptation of Eve by the snake) I find it notable that the scriptures listed to read are all about the results of the fall. There is nothing recommended to read in class, unless it's the entirety of chapter 4, that covers the actual mechanics of the snake tempting Eve. My personal speculation is that it is more than a little disturbing that the “Inspired Version” still presents this temptation as occurring through a snake even after introducing Satan as the force of evil trying to thwart the Creation. This flies in the face of the LDS Temple drama where there is no snake and Satan himself does the temptation directly. I think they don't want people to begin messing with the thorny questions of which of these two chapters, both revealed by the Prophet Joseph Smith, is the “more real” and “less symbolic” account of things.

I am surprised that the story of Judah and Tamar is meant to be discussed and even possibly read, but it is, along with the rape of Dinah (though, oddly enough, the following retaliatory murders by the sons of Jacob aren't really the focus of the story as presented in the manuals).

The attention paid to the Ten Commandments is somewhat sad when you consider that these commandments begin a series of several chapters of additional commandments, including such gems as “Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon” and “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day”. The entire Book of Leviticus is also apparently useless for any attention by any given Sunday School.

Some Stories and Pericopes contained in the Inverse Scriptures So Far

Moses

  • Lamech, the son of the infamous Cain, is betrayed by his wives (Moses 5:53-54)
  • The baptism of Adam (Moses 6:64-68)
  • The retreat of Enoch's enemies to a land that arises out of the sea where they fight with giants (Moses 7:14-16)
  • The seed of Cain is black (Moses 7:22 all by its lonesome)
  • Enoch sees all things long before the Brother of Jared (Moses 7:67)

Abraham

Genesis

  • God commanding Noah not to eat blood or murder (Genesis 9:1-7)
  • Noah getting drunk and cursing Ham's son Canaan (Genesis 9:18-29)
  • Abraham, not told by God to do so, tells a king that his wife is his sister (Genesis 12:11-20)
  • Abraham performs sacrifices and sees a smoking furnace pass between the pieces (Genesis 15:7-17)
  • Hagar runs away from Sarah's abuse and is told by an angel to go back (Genesis 16:4-9)
  • Abraham is commanded to circumcise his household (Genesis 17:10-14, 23-27)
  • Three very physical and hungry men arrive to say Sarah will have a son (Genesis 18:1-15)
  • Lot and his family are physically carried out of Sodom by the messengers (Genesis 19:16)
  • Lot has unconscious, incestuous sex with his daughters (Genesis 19:30-38)
  • Abraham tells another king that his wife is his sister (Genesis 20)
  • Isaac is born (Genesis 21:1-8)
  • Sarah kicks our Hagar and her young son (Genesis 21:9-21)
  • Abraham buys a grave for his dead wife (Genesis 22)
  • Abraham marries again, doesn't give anything to his concubines' sons, and dies (Genesis 25:1-10)
  • Isaac tells a king that his wife is his sister (Genesis 26:6-17)
  • Jacob has kids with his two wives and with their two servants (Genesis 29:29-35, 30:1-24)
  • Laban tries to cheat Jacob, instead Jacob cheats Laban with bad biology (Genesis 30:25-43, 31:1-16)
  • Rachel steals her brother's household gods and hides them by sitting on them and claiming she's having her period (Genesis 31:17-35)
  • Jacob meets the angels of God (Genesis 32:1-2)
  • Jacob wrestles all night with God demanding a blessing (Genesis 32:24-32, except for verse 28 which is read)
  • Rachel dies (Genesis 35:16-20)
  • Everything after Jacob arrives in Egypt to see his long-lost son Joseph (Genesis 47-50)

Exodus

  • Moses's wife circumcises her son to save Moses's life from an angry God (Exodus 4:24-26)
  • God declares that he will always have war with the people of Amulek (Exodus 17:14-16)

Leviticus

  • The entire book

#Mormon #SundaySchool #HebrewBible #AcademicBiblical

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See the first post for a fuller explanation, but these are the scriptures that your average LDS Sunday School, and thus your average Latter-day Saint as most do not read the Hebrew Bible (often called the Old Testament by Christians) is they don't have to, is not going to read and discuss. If for some reason you brought a Hebrew Bible to an LDS Sunday School that only contained the following scriptures you'd never be able to be called on to read aloud. Conversely, the inverse of this collection is the greatly shortened and abridged Hebrew Bible composed only of scriptures encountered during the weekly Sunday SChool class.

* = [this passage is covered technically by the manuals but in such a way that I'd still argue it will almost certainly not be read or discussed.]

Moses

Abraham

Genesis

Exodus

Leviticus

Numbers

Deuteronomy

Joshua

Judges

Ruth

  • (None of Ruth)

1 Samuel

2 Samuel

From the manual, summarizing 1 Samuel 25 to 2 Samuel 10: > Soon after David spared Saul’s life, Saul sought David’s life one more time. Again David had the opportunity to kill the king, but he refused to do so. Battles continued between the people of Judah and the surrounding nations, and Saul and Jonathan were killed in one of those battles. David succeeded Saul as king and became one of the greatest kings in the history of Israel. He united the tribes into one nation, secured possession of the land that had been promised to his people, and set up a government based on God’s law. However, the last 20 years of his life were marred by the sinful decisions that are discussed in this lesson.

1 Kings

2 Kings

1 Chronicles

(Due to the overlaps between Samuel/Kings and Chronicles not every chapter present here indicates a lack of attention and knowledge to what Chronicles depicts)

2 Chronicles

Ezra

Nehemiah

Esther

  • (None of Esther)

Job

Psalms

(The entire book of Psalms has probably been read by most LDS as with the Book of Isaiah)

Proverbs

(Proverbs contains a great deal of famous sayings and possibly is familiar to many LDS)

Ecclesiastes

Song of Solomon

Isaiah

(Much of Isaiah is quoted, with some changes, in the Book of Mormon, so I will be explicitly skipping those chapters as they almost certainly have been read, even if they're not usually understood, by most active members.)

Jeremiah

(I am surprised that chapter 16 is absent as the hunters and fishers being missionaries is laughably incorrect in context, but it's actually covered in the Sunday School manual as such.)

Lamentations

Ezekiel

Daniel

Hosea

Joel

Amos

Obadiah

Jonah

(None of Jonah)

Micah

Nahum

Habakkuk

Zephaniah

Haggai

Zechariah

Malachi

#Mormon #SundaySchool #HebrewBible #AcademicBiblical

So, it's been over half a year since I followed up on my experience teaching Sunday School. Let me quickly re-cap the rest of the year.

First off, the gift of the Bibles went over really well. Most of the parents thought the modern Bibles were just as awesome as the King James bibles (one of them even took the time to come over and thank me for it: “Oh, it even highlights everything Jesus said!”). But over the next few weeks, if the kids ever brought a pocket Bible, they brought their little King James Versions. Oh well, it's rather hard to study the Bible in an LDS Sunday School class using a different version.

Covering the smaller Pauline letters was nice. We were able to avoid the misogynistic passages of the Corinthians. About the only real trouble I had when I wasn't the teacher is when I said, upon reading 1 Thessalonians, that we were reading what was probably the oldest piece of writing in the New Testament, written before anything else in the New Testament was written. Some smart-ass in the class (I say that out of love, honestly) asked what the second oldest thing in the New Testament was, and I said that if Paul wrote 2 Thessalonians (and there were very few scholars, even among LDS scholars, who think that he did) then that would be next, but it was probably one of the Pauline epistles we'd already read (probably parts of the Corinthians). My team teacher didn't appreciate throwing doubt upon the authorship of any of the New Testament, but I think it's important that these kids realize just how complex and ancient this collection is. It's not just a book of scripture that gives them simple answers to simple problems, it's an artifact of the ancient world and carries with it the dust and damage of time.

Of course, my team teacher thought it was really cool when I explained that many scholars feel that 2 Corinthians got shuffled up a bit in it's transition to biblical collections. He'd been struggling a bit preparing for a discussion of 2 Corinthians, and said that after reading it in the suggested order things made a lot more sense that way. So biblical criticism wasn't always viewed as threatening.

I tried to cover some of the New Perspectives covenantal theology again with Romans, but again we only had one week (!) to cover the entire thing, so in the end it was just a quick review and a hammering down of Paul's supremacy of grace and faith over the covenant of Sinai. And everyone seemed to be okay with that.

However, in the end I realized that the closer we got to the Revelation, the harder it was going to be. Jude is just a mean polemic against Jude's theological enemies with little theological interest beyond a quotation from 1 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Moses. The Peters are fun, except again where I indicated that while a few scholars (really just a handful), feel that 1 Peter might have been written by the historical Peter, nobody views the other Peter as anything other than pseudepigraphal. Which wouldn't really be a problem as there's not much particularly important to Mormons in the Peters. I didn't end up teaching Hebrews, which is just as well as I'd probably start throwing terms around like “heavenly temple”, “platonic forms”, or “Levi being present when Abram gives tithes to Melchizedek by virtue of Abraham's fathering of Isaac fathering Jacob fathering Levi.” Again, I got into a small authorship tussle, but was able to resolve it by pointing out that some general authorities have referred to the “author of Hebrews” to acknowledge this issue and that the authorship has been questioned for longer than the New Testament has been in existence as a unified whole.

Before we reached the train-wreck of Revelation, I had a bit of trouble with James. Besides spending a little bit of time on James 1:5 (a favorite of Mormons as it led Joseph Smith to his first vision, though it's usually discussed by them a bit out of its context of dealing with persecution and troubles), we talked about James's response to Pauline grace and antinomianism (the state of being without laws). I don't usually have strong language for this stuff, but the typical Mormon approach to James is almost 100% apologetic shit. Seriously, James is nothing more than a mallet that Mormons think they can use to beat back people who want to use Paul and Romans against them. “Faith is what saves; works bring death!” “Oh yeah? Well, faith without works is dead!” It's like Mormons think the rest of the Christian world has never read and had to deal with James over the past few hundred years. It took a lot of work, but I think in the end I was able to overcome some of the seminary braindump to tell them that James is still saying that faith saves, but is saying that such faith should be accompanied by good works. James is not speaking against Paul in Romans (where, let's be honest, 98% of the epistle has Paul talking about how faith saves and works of the Torah are death and only 2% has Paul talking about being judged by our works) but is rather speaking against the idea of antinomianism, or the idea that since grace as saved us we should live a life of sin. James is nowhere in the epistle saying that works save a person, but merely that if we are not showing forth good works, then we don't really have saving faith. Paul is speaking against a similar common argument against his theology in Romans 6, namely that if we are miraculously saved from our sins by grace then if we are saved from even more sins when we die then the miracle of grace will be even more miraculous (kind of a reductio ad absurdum). Paul doesn't actually give much of a theological argument as to the incorrectness of this idea, but merely responds to the idea that we should continue to sin after entering into the saving covenant of grace with a strenuous “Hell no!” James eventually approaches this idea of mere belief saving a person by pointing out that even the demons of hell believe that God exists, but nothing happens to them (leading to the class coming up with the interesting theological question of whether or not a demon could repent and “change sides”; kinda hard for an agnostic to answer that one well!).

But finally we got to the Revelation at the very end of the year. Thank God (or whoever) that I did not end up teaching this one, as we'd lost a week somewhere along the way. The team teacher tried to squish the two-week lesson into one week at the end of the year and it mostly worked. (As an aside, we only get to spend one week on Romans, but we spend three on the Corinthians and two on the Revelation?!) I mentioned at the beginning that I really didn't have much to add, as most Mormons (including the writers of the lesson manual) approach the Revelation far more literally than I was comfortable with. Again I also managed to bring up authorship again in mentioning that it was only tradition that the John of the Revelation was the same as the Apostle John (and again tradition that the Apostle John was the John mentioned as the author of chapter 26, and be extension of the entire gospel, of John, and that he was the author of the Epistles of John) and that we have no real clue who wrote it. At which point my team-teacher reminded me that the Book of Mormon said that the author was John the Apostle in 1 Nephi 14:18-27 (at which point I mentally face-palmed both that I'd forgotten that detail and that the author of the Book of Mormon felt the need to point out this sort of detail). So that was an awkward end to the year.

Well, the awkward end was that I had to take the time to let the Sunday School president know that I would not be able to teach Book of Mormon next year, but once that was out of the way I was released. I started attending the adult Sunday School class, complete with its face-palming comments and questions. I missed my class and the fun we'd had, but at this point I'm not sure I'll ever be back there again. It was a fun ride while it lasted.

#Mormon #SundaySchool #AcademicBiblical

I wonder if I'll be able to put a date to when I broke the camel's back: will it be September 4, 2011? I'm probably over-reacting, but if that's so, at least I'll be happy about what I did: I got the kids some Bibles. They've always really liked my little pocket-sized KJV that I bring with me to Sunday School. They like the red letters for whenever an author has Jesus speaking. They like the size. They like the self-pronouncing names.

So I went and got a bunch of KJV bibles from the Internet: they were cheap and seemed like a good idea. Then, as I was ordering, I thought a bit about what I was getting them and decided to order a handful of similarly sized NIVs. Yes, I know that the NIV isn't the most accurate translation (trying to determine what is would be an exercise in futility and argument about the purposes and limitations of biblical translation), but it's certainly the most popular English version and one that any non-Mormon Christian is going to be very familiar with. Besides, almost anything would be better than the KJV (well, possibly not The Message, but that's my opinion).

The lesson was on Galatians and some fun chapters in Acts, which really ticked me off. We're going to be spending three weeks on the Corinthian letters, which are mostly rambling letters that address a multiplicity of topics, but for Galatians and Romans, where genuine Paul attempts to explain his complex theological model of Jesus as Messiah we get less than a single class session each. Why is that? The cynical side of me is actually rather convinced that the grace message of both Galatians and Romans is troubling to the Correlation Committee. Both of them are rather unapologetic in their approach: faith is what Paul feels starts the whole process of justification and salvation. Works don't ever enter into it.

Being an agnostic does not mean that I somehow shouldn't spend time trying to puzzle out what Paul is saying. I may not view Jesus of Nazareth the same way as Paul, but that doesn't mean that it's a waste of my time to try and understand Paul. It's intellectually lazy for some to approach Paul as though their belief system (or lack of one) somehow informs them better of Paul's points before they even read him. Mormons are certainly guilty of this as well. The lesson on Romans, for instance, attempts to push the teacher to tell the students that Paul is all about grace and works, which is like saying that the American Revolution was all about taxes on tea.

My own research on Paul is strongly influenced by the recent “New Perspectives” movement, especially the writings of N.T Wright. In fact, Wright's most recent book about Paul, Justification, is a fantastic exploration of genuine Paul's beliefs about God's plan for humanity. I think that Mormons are missing a huge opportunity by refusing to deal with this grace/works issue. As I keep studying the New Perspectives, and especially as I read Wright, I am constantly surprised by how my Mormon upbringing helps out in dealing with concepts that are apparently more foreign to traditional Protestants. Wright in particular is a fan of approaching Pauls arguments from a “covenantal” perspective. Mormons are all about covenants, and yet I see Wright go through some detailed discussion of suzerainty contracts to explain the concept.

I hope the kids weren't too bored with my attempts to cover the material of Galatians from a New Perspectives perspective :–). We'll see if it was helpful at all when/if I teach the lesson on Romans, which is basically a continuation and expansion of the themes explored in Galatians. AS it was, I know they at least enjoyed my telling them that Galatians is the “angry” letter, that Paul at one point in it is so angry that he expresses a wish that his enemies in Galatia didn't just stop as circumcision but were themselves mutilated (I didn't mention, however, that the footnotes' explanation of the phrase “I were that they were cut off” as a reference to excommunication is quite anachronistic and not nearly as likely as Paul actually calling for his opponents to cut off their own penises), and Paul's description of his dressing down of Peter due to Peter's failure to continue treating Gentile Christians the same as Jewish Christians. Seriously, I love Galatians because the veneer of the stoic “Saint” Paul falls away and we see a human being who can get seriously ticked off (at the end of the letter he even grabs the paper from his scribe and finishes the letter on his own ending with a terse dismissal of his opponents and a plea to “let no one trouble me”).

During the discussion I made sure to mention how for Paul, entrance to the new covenant community between God and humanity is based upon faith in Jesus. It's not based on doing anything in particular, and when Paul does mention things that Mormons would call “works”, such as avoiding contention (ironically) being unified, he does so more from an honor perspective. In other words, entrance to the community of Christians is based on faith, and once we belong to this community we should act like it. Paul nowhere says that bad behavior within this community will eject us from it, but rather asserts that the faith necessary to truly enter into the community and enter a justified status before God is a transformative faith. Once we are dead to sin Paul encourages us to leave it alone. That's what all of the stuff about fornication and other stuff is about.

Paul opponents accused him of being an antinomian, or a person who encourages lawless living, because of his assertion that sin is conquered by faith in Jesus and not through ritual observances as found in the Torah. Paul agrees with them, but denies being an antinomian. His constant expression translated in the KJV as “God forbid”, or more modernly as “hell no!”, is applied to the idea that a person should expand the miracle of being saved as an unrighteous human by being even more unrighteous and thus making grace abound even more fully. Paul's response is to reiterate that entrance to the community of Christ should create a yearning to live better, but he does not ever say that his opponents are wrong in their reductio ad absurdum. For Paul, faith is an “is”, and works are an “ought”: faith is the principle of salvation for God's community, and good works are how members of that community ought to behave.

We'll see if this lesson is the one that finally gets me kicked out, which would then free me to actually speak my mind even more fully in the adult Gospel Doctrine class! (Hmm, maybe that's why the Bishop lets me stay where I am?) Oddly enough, I was telling the kids that Paul, in Galatians, is all about faith instead of works, but if this is the end, I'm pretty sure it'll be because of the Bibles. And yet, I only got them the Bibles because I want them to read the Bible and the KJV is crap. Besides, once they actually start to read the New Testament, especially one without the thought-limiting “study aids” found in the LDS standard works, they'll already be in a better position to evaluate the faith claims of the LDS Church. As I've said before, I'm not trying to produce a class of future ex-Mormons, but rather a class of future well-rounded Mormons with a tolerance for the beliefs of others. As the LDS Church continues to retreat more towards fundamentalist in regards to feminism and homosexuality I'm sure that such an approach will probably force more young people with such a view point to not comfortably remain within the LDS Church, but that's up to them.

So that's how the week went: explaining to the kids how the modern faith/works debate is influenced by 450-year-old arguments of the Protestant Reformation, what Paul's actually saying in Galatians (which is still faith and graced, but not so much anti-works as anti-Torah), and giving them pocket KJVs and NIVs.

I'll let you when/if the hammer falls. :–) I hope it doesn't fall before the end of the year. There's still so much to try and work into the class: the hopeful Christianity of Romans to combat the guilty, neurotic Christianity of modern Mormonism; the pseudo-Pauline letters and issues of Pauline authorship (I actually covered a little of this already when trying to get them excited about reading 1 Thessalonians, the oldest book of the Bible [“What's the second oldest?” “Well, if Paul wrote it, then 2 Thessalonians, but there's some serious doubt that Paul actually wrote that one”]); James and his misreading of Paul in trying to respond to Paul's apparent antinomianism; and of course the craziness of the Revelation of John (not to mention all of the equally-crazy Mormon cruft that has accumulated around the Revelation and is in the manual). I hope I can get to all of it.

Thanks for keeping up with the posts if you're out there reading.

#Mormon #SundaySchool #AcademicBiblical