The chapter begins with a pep talk of sorts (which further cements the image in my head of Nephi as a geeky and overzealous glee club type ... like Patty from Grease except with more muscle) by Nephi to his downcast brothers. He says they should be strong like Moses, who "truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither." I don't know why he picked that analogy. Why not use one a little more relevant to their situation, like when the Children of Israel broke down the walls of Jericho? I guess parting the Red Sea must have been an act of faith on everyone's part: Moses had to believe that something would happen when he put his staff in the water, and the rest of them had to have faith that the water would stay that way as they crossed and they wouldn't get drowned in the depths of the sea. Faith, chums. Maybe is it sort of relevant, then.
There can be miracles ... when you believvvvvve...
Anyway, pep talk doesn't seem to help much, but they all follow Nephi towards Jerusalem anyway. Once arrived, Nephi wanders into the city with no plan, trusting the Spirit to lead him to do whatever he needs to do. Which, my friends, is a great deal of trust. My my my.
He comes across a drunk dude in a gutter--hold it! That's not just any drunk! It's Laban! What an unbelievable coincidence! Yeah right. There is no such thing as coincidence. Homeboy is so drunk he is completely passed out (don't forget he was drunken with wine, not the hard stuff ... meaning he must have had either a very low tolerance or a very large stomach ... or both). The Spirit constrains Nephi to kill Laban. Understandably, he is afraid. I could be wrong, but I think this is the only time when Nephi admits any level of fear or potential cowardice. Although, really, who can blame him? I can't imagine what I would do if the same thing were to happen to me ...
Spirit: See that girl over there who's dating the guy you like?
Me: The blond?
Spirit: That's the one. Kill her.
Me: Say what?
Spirit: Kill her. She's unconscious and wasted. She won't feel a thing. No witnesses. Kill her.
Me: Oh no. I'm going crazy. I should never have gone on the Pill.
Spirit: I'm telling you, this is the will of the Lord!
Me: Listen, I've never killed anybody before! This cannot possibly be right! I'm checking myself into an institution, stat!
Spirit: IF YOU DO NOT KILL THIS PERSON, YOUR POSTERITY WILL BE DOOMED!!!!
Me: I AM HAVING SOME SORT OF HORMONALLY INDUCED NERVOUS BREAKDOWN!!!
Spirit: Listen, sometimes a wicked person has to die so hundreds of thousands of righteous people can live. She has what you need to raise a righteous posterity. It is God's will that what she has belong to you. So kill her, and then you can get it. I'll help you.
Me: If you're wrong about this ...
Spirit: Have I ever been wrong before?
Me: Well, no.
Spirit: Look, she's got a sword. Kill her now. Use that.
Me: Why the frick does she have a sword?
Spirit: Less talk. More beheading.
Mother. So glad it wasn't me. I think the above conversation pretty much sums up Nephi's internal dilemma, as well as the Spirit's reasoning with him, that ends with his killing Laban.
The rest of the story is familiar: Nephi puts on Laban's clothes, pretends to be him, gets the plates from the guards and escapes to Jerusalem, gaining a friend/servant in the process (Zoram). Brothers are first afraid, then mollified, all return to Jerusalem. Cue happy music.
2 comments:
I love your dialogue. It's hilarious and brings out how difficult of a story this is. How could Nephi be that sure that the spirit he was listening to was of God? Laman and Lemuel had a hard time believing the angel they saw. Up until now the faith battle has been faith against worldly prudence. The family has given up things that are nice and useful to them, but they haven't done anything you could call evil. Now Nephi has to do something that by worldly standards is evil. This is a much higher level trial of faith. Faith vs. ethics.
Of course, the Spirit alleviates the dilemma a bit by giving him an untilitarian justification for what he's about to do. But still, God is asking him to make a big step in his trust relationship: trust me more than your initial intuition about right and wrong. Which is something that a lot of us face today. The church has asked us to do some things that by others' standards are not just imprudent, but in some cases wrong. Think of the church's Prop 8 policy or its men only priesthood. Now these are admittedly not simple issues and not necessarily like Nephi's situation, but this scripture seems to be telling us that we'd better be open to the possibility that our moral sense is misleading us.
One interesting thing about Nephi comparing himself to Moses is that, to the modern, secular eye, this story is not very miraculous at all. The miracles are that Nephi found Laban in a drunken stupor (hardly a miracle) and that he impersonated him well enough to get the plates (more surprising, but not close to as shocking as the miracles of Moses). Anyway, this is the sort of miracle that the pious mind sees everywhere and the secular eye sees nowhere.
Another reason that Nephi might bring up parting the Read Sea but not the walls of Jericho is that he sees himself in that phase of the journey. He is still escaping the land of their servitude, so it makes sense for him to compare himself to a story from the beginning, rather than the end of the Exodus.
The story of Zoram makes an interesting metaphor for covenants and the atonement, but it's always made me a little uncomfortable. Zoram is given no real choice. It seems like a forced baptism. But I suppose that in some sense we are all in that situation. We have a choice: death or salvation. It doesn't seem like a real choice when you put it like that, but because the world conceals that choice by disguising the consequences of our actions we are led to believe that salvation is one choice among many.
Also, check out Val Larsen's interesting article, “Killing Laban: The Birth of Sovereignty in the Nephite Constitutional Order.”
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