followHIM - 2 Nephi 3-5 Part 2 • Dr. Jan J. Martin • Feb 12 - Feb 18 • Come Follow Me

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

Dr. Jan Martin discusses modern research and study on several difficult passages in the Book of Mormon, while bearing testimony of the Savior Jesus Christ and the Book of Mormon as the word of God.Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/book-of-mormon-episodes-1-13/Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/follow-him-a-come-follow-me-podcast/id1545433056YouTube: https://youtu.be/zjXfUoK9bDwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/15G9TTz8yLp0dQyEcBQ8BY00:00 Part I–Dr. Jan J. Martin00:07 2 Nephi 5 Covenant and prayer01:25 Taking problems to the Lord04:49 Separation and boundaries08:20 The pain of Nephi’s separation12:03 The group left behind13:11 2 Nephi 5:19-20 – the Lord’s promises to Laman and Lemuel16:04 2 Nephi 5:21 - Breaking a covenant20:38 Different verse breaks and careful teaching23:44 Cursing or covenant breaking28:28 Unpacking difficult topics 30:21 Darkness is metaphorical32:42 Historical research regarding skin color and bias36:24 Teaching with caution39:10 Additional resources40:03 Righteous vs unrighteous not Nephite vs Lamanite42:27 2 Nephi 5:22 and making assumptions45:09 Letting go of past assumptions46:31 2 Nephi 5:25 covenant keeping and happiness50:19 Dr. Martin shares her testimony of Jesus and the Book of Mormon54:17 End of Part II– Dr. Jan J. MartinThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Cofounder, Executive Producer, SponsorDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignAnnabelle Sorensen: Creative Project ManagerWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com

Welcome to Part 2 with Dr. Jan Martin, 2 Nephi chapters 3-5. Jan, we have been keeping you for a while, but we don't want to miss out on chapter 5, another important chapter in this lesson. Very important chapter. I would like to just keep our covenant focus here, because I believe Nephi, who's writing about all of this later on, he comes back and writes about it from hindsight, but he's really purposely trying to keep the focus on the covenant. One of the interesting things about his prayer in chapter four, if you look at verse 31, is he wants to be delivered from the situation with his brothers. But like all good vassals, he takes the problem to the suzerain and says, I need you to do this for me, but I'm not going to tell you how to do it because that's your job. But I would like to be delivered from this situation. And then when you hit chapter

five, it's really important to help readers see that it doesn't get better right away. Now, Nephi's in a better place emotionally because he's worked through that. But when you hit verse one, we have, I, Nephi, did cry unto the Lord my God. So he keeps having to pray about it. And the anger of his brethren is increasing when you look in verse two. That's not what I asked for. Yeah. An important principle here about adversity is take your problems to your God and lay them at his feet, but realize it may take a little bit of time for the solutions to come. And sometimes things get worse before they get better. And you have Nephi doing that. But the important thing I

want to point out is if he is the vassal in this relationship, which he is, he has to wait until the suzerain decides it's time to solve it. Notice that he sits in it. He sits in the anger. He sits in the contention. He stays there. It gets worse and worse. But a good suzerain will give him the word when it's time for him to do something different.

And Nephi needs to wait for the direction from the Lord. Sometimes we have to put up with hard things for a while until the solution becomes evident. And so Nephi obediently sits in it and he waits. And then when it becomes very clear that Laman and Lemuel are not going to accept him as the prophet of the family and they're going to kill him, then the suzerain will say, okay, I need you to take people that want to follow you and I need you to leave. But I love that Jehovah gives Laman and Lemuel every possible chance to change before he separates the families. And that's really important, but poor Nephi has to depart.

So you'll see that in verse five. And again, with a covenant perspective, this is what's fun. Verses six through, I'd say until you hit about verse 18, you have Nephi recording the consequences that come to his group because they kept their covenants. We're led to a new land. Verse 7, we take our tents. We journey many days. We find a new land. Verse 8, we call it the land of Nephi. They take upon themselves the name people of Nephi. And then look at verse 10. We're going to keep our covenants. We're observing to keep the judgment statutes and commandments of the Lord in all things. We're following the law of Moses. And then remember in a suzerainty treaty,

we have a blessing section. He's talking to you about that. Verse 11, the Lord is with us. He's prospering us. We're sowing our seeds and they're reaping in abundance and our flocks are producing in the way that we want. We have the records. We have the compass. We're sowing our seeds and they're reaping in abundance and our flocks are producing in the way that we want. We have the records, we have the compass, we have all this revelation that we can do. And then you hit verse 13, we're prospering. We're going to make these swords, which you can tell that Nephi's preparing for some negative reactions to the separation he's preparing. And then you look at verses 15, 16, 17, again, very positive. I'm educating my people. I'm teaching them to work. We actually build a temple. We're really living according to that other verse that's over there across the column

there after the manner of happiness. We're really having that here, but it's because we've kept our covenants. Really important that you see Nephi trying to help anyone who's reading this see that it is a better way forward if you keep covenants, even when you have to do something hard like separate from the family. Jan, can I ask you about something application-wise? You see this separation happening, and it is a major separation. Chapter 5, verse 5, we did flee into the wilderness. This changes everything. The rest of the Book of Mormon is shaped by this separation. Sometimes we teach that being Christ-like is you don't give up. You stay, you stay. You just don't give up on people. And that is a good principle. And yet we have Nephi separating from them. And I think probably knowing that many of his nieces and nephews, he's leaving behind. This would be a very difficult decision. What do you see here that can help our listeners? Well, I would say that you see the setting up of healthy boundaries. Nephi's life

is in danger. That's abusive. It's not okay. And all this contention, I'm imagining there's angry words and there's arguments and there's some other kinds of abuse. There may be emotional abuse. There may be verbal abuse. And then there's this physical threat of abuse. There may be emotional abuse, there may be verbal abuse, and then there's this physical threat of abuse. Now, I don't know if there's other kinds of altercations where people are beating each other up or anything physically, but certainly you can see there's some problems in the way Nephi and his brothers are interacting, and they're negative and contentious and hurtful, and you could see abuse coming in there in any form. I think this chapter is a great one to say at a point with relationships, you may have to put a separation, a healthy boundary, and that way you're protecting yourself from being treated poorly, and the other person then can

carry on believing or doing whatever they want, but you're not being hurt by it. We need to be mature enough and courageous enough to recognize that some relationships you need this kind of boundary. And boundaries are different for every relationship you have. But in this case, there's a distant boundary and we're no longer living with you. And we're going to have two separate societies and we're going to agree to disagree, but you don't get to take my life. You don't get to keep hurting me. I've heard certain speakers that were marriage counselors and family therapists and things talk about this chapter as there may come a time where you have to go. I'm glad this is in here to say, well, I know they're trying to kill you, Nephi, but just stick it out a little bit longer. You've got in verse five, the Lord did warn me that I, Nephi, should depart. So even the Lord

told him, no, you got to go. You don't have to put yourself in danger. Like you said, Jen, you don't get to hurt me. Probably a good moment to quote Elder Holland, the ministry of reconciliation, a talk given in October of 2018. Forgive and ye shall be forgiven, Christ taught in New Testament times. And in our day, I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men. It is, however, important for some of you living in real anguish to note what he did not say. He did not say you are not allowed to feel true pain or real sorrow from the shattering experiences you have had at the hand of another. Nor did he say in order to fully forgive, you have to reenter a toxic relationship or return to an abusive, destructive circumstance. offenses that might come to us, we can rise above our pain only when we put our feet onto the path

of true healing. And it sounds like that's what Nephi was doing. That path is the forgiving one walked by Jesus of Nazareth who calls out to each of us, come follow me. I think this is a difficult, healthy decision. I absolutely agree. And I think Nephi has to have some indication that there's going to be a lot of resentment created. We notice the things that he, not only does he leave beloved nieces and nephews and cousins and people behind who may have really been hurt by the departure, like how could you leave? Like How could you abandon us? But then if you jump over and look at verse 12, Nephi took the brass plates, he takes the liahona, and he takes the priesthood with him, he takes the knowledge of the temple with him, everything. He takes the education. Nephi's a talented guy and he knows how to do a lot of things. He's built a big ship and he does work with metal and then he's got the scriptures and he's good at teaching those and he's taking all of it. So imagine how hurtful that would be for the people left behind. Like

I don't even have access to the brass plates anymore. And presumably Lehi left a record and Nephi's keeping his own record and he took all of the records. And boy, is sometimes setting up boundaries has some things about it that can be quite hurtful. And when you set the boundary, you have to be willing to face that and realize that there may be some misunderstanding and some people feeling like you don't love me anymore or you don't want to be involved with me. And that's not true, but I do need to protect myself from being hurt. Therefore, I'm going to engage with you differently

than I have in the past. And there's going to be some boundaries, but you've got to have people grow into that and learn and drop their resentments. I think Nephi was well aware that there was going to be a lot of hurt and anger towards him. It sounds like Nephi in verse 6, that it was Zoram and Sam, his elder brother and his family, and Jacob and Joseph, my younger brother and also my sisters. And then he adds this, and all those who would go with me, he says, and all those who would go with me were those who believed in the warnings and the revelations of God. So it'll be interesting someday to know if maybe there were some of those cousins that went with him, those who were believers. That was the separation from the believers and non-believers.

Yeah. And imagine, let's say that maybe one of Laman or Lemuel's sons or daughters was a believer and went with Nephi. Like, talk about parental hurt. Like, you took my child away from me. Or what if there were some spousal separations here? Like, we don't know about Nephi's sisters. There's some scholars who've argued that they were married to Ishmael's sons, but that's not something we can prove. So maybe they were unmarried sisters, but maybe they were married. And well, does the husband come if he's an unbeliever? Whoa.

There's some pretty painful potential separations here that could have escalated the resentment and the hurt depending on who went with who or who stayed. What if some of Nephi's kids stayed with Laman and Lemuel as well? What if they didn't come? There's hurt on both sides. This is not an easy thing. And all of this reminds me to go slow when I read and to think if it's just black and white on the page, I might not think, wow, these are real people going through very difficult things. And what's averse to me could be a lifetime of pain. Yeah. And for us to pause there and really experience the humanness, this family is very

well connected and intertwined and they have a shared history. So Jan, you've already given us a little preview. They separate and they set up a new society, a new system where things sound pretty good. What do you want to look at next? What I'd like to do is take a moment to look at the verses that talk about Laman and Lemuel and what Nephi describes as happening to the group that he left behind. Now, because we've been talking about the covenant structure, so I'd want to remind the audience that the beginning of chapter 5, 2 Nephi 5, shows Nephi being blessed because he kept his covenants in spite of all the pain that this brought. These choices are hard, but Nephi goes through everything the Lord does for them that's positive

and tries to illustrate the treaty, that covenant that they have with Jehovah is being kept. They kept their covenants, they followed the Lord's directions, and he is blessing them. In Jewish thinking, for God to be just, it's not just about the positive side of things that happens all of the negative consequences that he's promised to the covenant need to be seen as coming to pass as well so if everyone wants to come to second nephi 5 verse 19 i hope this will now help you make sense why nephi writes it the way he does he says and behold the words of the Lord had been fulfilled unto my brethren. We've seen how the words of the Lord have been fulfilled unto Nephi, but we now need to see how the words of the Lord in the covenant will be fulfilled unto Laman and Lemuel.

And I think verse 19 is a really incredibly helpful clue of Nephi's perspective of what you're going to read. This is covenantal in Nephi's mind. I'm just going to tell you how the cursing section of the treaty is coming to pass in my brother's lives because they didn't keep their covenant. I've shown you how the blessing side of it came to pass in my family's life because we kept our covenants. It's helpful when we hit some verses that might be troubling to people to give them a solid lens at which to look at that likely is Nephi's perspective. I'm excited to look at this as the separation and what is this kind of the outcome of breaking the covenant in 19 and 20. Yeah, I'll walk you through it here. Verse 19, we see the beginning of the

reference to the words of the covenant being fulfilled. Then Nephi gives you the details. Let me read verse 19 again. Behold, the words of the Lord have been fulfilled unto my brethren, which he spake concerning them, that I should be their ruler and their teacher. Wherefore, I had been their ruler and their teacher, according to the commandments of the Lord, until the time they sought to take away my life. This is now the breach of the family and the ending of the joint family covenant. Like Laman and Lemuel are making a very clear decision to not have Nephi be the prophet,

to not accept the covenant that Lehi entered in with Jehovah. We're going to separate. We're going to have two totally different ways of proceeding. We can see the covenant lens here that Nephi has. Then verse 20, wherefore the word of the Lord was fulfilled, which he spake unto me, saying that inasmuch as they will not hearken unto thy words, they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord, and behold, they were cut off from his presence. Lots of scholars have looked at these verses, and there's a number of ways to see them, but because we're using the covenant perspective, I'd like to introduce you to the legal language

of a suzerainty treaty. When the treaties are written, they use words like we do. If you've ever read your phone contract or your internet contract, you never read those things because they go on for days, but because you can't understand them, they use legalese. It just has English in there, but it's used in a way that's incomprehensible to the average person. So we just sign the bottom, but we have no idea what it said. And suzerainty treaties have that similar thing. They're a legal contract and there's language in them that means different things than it would normally mean when you're speaking. The word cutoff in Hebrew covenant language is the prominent word for ending a covenant. Laman and Lemuel have made

a choice in wanting to kill the prophet that they don't want to be part of the covenant anymore. And as you know, covenants, if you keep them, bring you into the presence of God, ultimately. That's the point of them. The covenant path brings you right back into God's presence. If we read this through the covenant lens, we see the cutoff as the ending of the official Lehiddic covenant for Laman and Lemuel. They've chosen to come outside of it. And that's important because we don't want anyone to feel like Laman and Lemuel are being picked on, that God doesn't love them, but he does honor their agency and says, okay, you don't want to

accept my prophet and you don't want to follow what he says. I get it. We'll let you end the covenant and I will let you guys be a separate group. Of course, with any covenant, we can always re-engage with it if we want to repent. Covenants with the Lord are always open-ended. So if we choose to end it, we can end it. But if we want to re-engage, we can repent. And that's the beautiful thing. If Laman and Lemuel want to come back into the covenant, they certainly can. John, could I ask you to read verse 21? Okay.

2 Nephi 5 verse 21. And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint. Wherefore, as they were white and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. Okay, so we need to unpack this verse. It's quite complicated. And for those who don't know about the way the Book of Mormon was published and structured,

it didn't have verses originally. They didn't versify it until later. We need to remember that this was a long paragraph and a long piece of text, and it's been put in verses by us. Sometimes with the versings, it kind of puts things together in a way that is maybe confusing. And so I'd like to take the first half of the verse and the second half of the verse and treat them separately. If I'd been versifying this, I probably would have done it that way instead of connecting the two. But we've got the verse that we have, but we just need to realize verses were not original in the text. Nephi says that Jehovah had caused the cursing to come upon Laman

and Lemuel, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. So that's really important for readers is to remember that the cursing is coming because of sin. It's not coming because God doesn't like them or because they're not his favorite. There's a real connection to their behavior. And if we understand the suzerainty treaty, we remember there's a cursing section in it, and that it outlines all the specific consequences that will come to Lehi's family if they don't keep the covenant. So when we use a covenant perspective, we don't just see a cursing as some random thing. We actually see it as, oh, remember the cursings in the covenant section? That is what's going to come upon you.

Let me remind all of you really quickly what's in that cursing section. It's back in 2 Nephi 1. When you go back and look at the treaty, you'll see it. But the land is going to be cursed. They will not be able to hang on to their lands. They'll always be threatened with other nations coming and taking away their lands. They'll be scattered, smitten. There'll be warfare, famine, hatred, and captivity to the devil.

When we use this covenant perspective, we can be really precise about exactly what the layman knights are going to experience. And it's everything outlined in the suzerainty treaty and nothing unexpected. So we remember God doesn't do things in secret. He doesn't unexpectedly send us things we haven't been told about. When we use the covenant perspective, it really helps us go, oh, what cursing are we talking about? It's those very things in the treaty that now they're not keeping it. Here come the consequences. If you were doing the verses, where would you put your divider in there? I'm just curious. Yeah, I would probably divide up this

whole thing a little bit differently because of the way it reads. But I'd certainly have verse 20 be its own verse. And then I'd have verse 21 up until the word iniquity. I'd probably have a little verse just so we can see that we have a cutoff and we have a cursing. And then we're going to talk about how the families are now going to relate to each other, which is a whole nother subject. I don't find the connecting of these two different ideas very helpful because then we equate the skin of blackness with the cursing. And suddenly you have all the trouble with your sounding like we have some racial ideology here.

And I don't believe a sense Nephi seems to have a covenant perspective. I don't think that that's how he would want this to be read. So I'd put a separation there. And also that phraseology for behold tells you I need to stop and pay close attention to something, which would make it a nice transition for a new verse. Jen, I really appreciate how you're introducing this to us. It'd probably be wise to tell anybody teaching this to go slow and be careful in the way you teach it. Because oftentimes I have found that when it comes to these verses, if you're too analytical

about it, then don't acknowledge the fact that people can be hurt by the reading of this. That kind of surface level, hey, let's just look at this. Obviously, it's not what you're reading, so let's move on. Where you just acknowledge that, oh, yes, this can be a difficult thing. The man who's writing this is the same man who wrote 2 Nephi 26, verse 33, where he wrote this Nephi, he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness. He denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female. He remembereth the heathen, and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.

This is the same prophet saying these things. Yeah, and that's why I like the covenant perspective so much, because if this is really describing how Laman and Lemuel ended the covenant, then we automatically know they can re-engage with the covenant. God wants all to come unto him, and the condition is on repentance. If I've ended the covenant for a while and went away and learned that maybe I'd be better off in the covenant relationship, I can come back and re-engage with Jehovah or Jesus Christ through repentance and renew my covenants. All is not lost here. I think what we're seeing is Nephi acknowledging Laman and Lemuel's choice to exit the covenant. They're angry. They're upset.

They don't want Nephi to be in charge, so they're going to do it on their own. But there's always hope, and you see that through the rest of the Book of Mormon with the continual missionary efforts the Nephites make to reach the Lamanites. We can be sensitive to people's choices and letting them learn, but also reminding us that it's possible for them to re-engage with the covenant. And I think that's what we're going to see as we look through here. I'm looking at page 33 on the Come Follow Me manual, and it says, What was the curse that came upon the Lamanites? In Nephi's day, the curse of the Lamanites was that they were cut off from the Lord's presence because of their iniquity. And it gives the reference we just read. This meant that the Spirit of the Lord was withdrawn from their lives.

When Lamanites later embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ, then Alma 23.18 says, The curse of God did no more follow them. The Book of Mormon also states that a mark of dark skin came upon the Lamanites after the Nephites separated from them. The nature and appearance of this mark are not fully understood. The mark initially distinguished the Lamanites from the Nephites. Later, as the Nephites and Lamanites each went through periods of wickedness and righteousness, the mark became irrelevant. Prophets affirm in our day that dark skin is not a sign of

divine disfavor or cursing. President Russell M. Nelson declared, I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and his commandments. That's from his talk, Let God Prevail, October 2020, General Conference. And John, I know you have a paper copy, so there's probably not a video attached to your book like there is mine because I'm on a digital copy. There's a video with Elder Ahmed Corbett, who we've actually had on the podcast before. And the video is called Till We All Come in the Unity of the Faith. Jan, as I'm reading this and you said, remember that these are people and there's a lot of emotion involved.

Can I remember that with Nephi as well? That he's a real person and that there's emotion involved here for him as well. I can imagine he's still frustrated with his brothers. I think that he's trying to help us understand, if you're using the covenant perspective, that they were taught this, that they had plenty of information. I think if you even read 1 Nephi carefully, you see they come to gain their own testimony that Nephi is even the next prophet. But they really cannot relinquish this idea that the elder brother should be in charge. They really have to assert themselves, cannot submit to this other idea that a younger brother could be in charge.

I think Nephi senses that of just like, really? How many times have we tried to teach you that this was okay? There's even instances in the Old Testament where the younger brother becomes the birthright son and leads, and it's in their family history. And that's why I think when we continue looking at verse 21, he tries to use a metaphor to help us understand where Laman and Lemuel's hearts are and how come they're just not interested in the covenant. If everybody comes back to verse 21, we'll pick up where we ended three lines in, we have this because of their iniquity. And then we

get this next part, and this is the metaphor Nephi uses. For behold, they, that's Laman and Lemuel, had hardened their hearts against him, Jehovah, so the suzerain, that they had become like unto a flint. So let's stop right there. If we don't read the metaphor, if we don't pause and look at the flint, then I think we miss what Nephi is trying to say. So a flint, if you don't know, is a very hard, dark rock, or it can also be used proverbially to mean anything that's hard. And because of its rigidness, flint does not submit or blend with any other substances. Here's Nephi trying to explain what he's been dealing with. Their hearts are so hard that unity is not possible with them. One of the things I like to point out to my students, if you go back to 2 Nephi 1 and you

look at the actual Lehiddic covenant, you see Lehi outlining one of the stipulations was that the brothers work together in unity, be unified, be of one heart and one mind. If you remember those beautiful words, let me just backtrack and give them to you. Second Nephi chapter 121, that he says, arise from the dust, my sons, and be men and be determined in one mind and one heart, united in all things. And they just haven't managed to do it. And here's Nephi trying very hard to convey to us why the unity didn't happen. We have hard hearts. They don't want to submit to Jehovah. They don't want to be unified with me. And therefore being able to be one family is going to be very difficult. So then once we understand that, then we can look

at the rest of the things that follow and say, this is about hard heartedness and about interacting with the family when they're hard hearted. And what's that mean? And then we can start unpacking the skin of blackness thing as possibilities and how to read that. That metaphor really matters of what Nephi is dealing with. What I'd like to do is go back into verse 21 from where we left off, and we just hit the word flint. So we've spent time studying that metaphor, and we understand how hard-hearted they are.

And then comes this wherefore. What I'd like to suggest is Nephi now has questions about how he's supposed to interact with his other family members. This is helping him figure that out. So it says, wherefore, as they were white and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God, to cause the skin of blackness to come upon them. Over the many years, there's been numbers of ways of interpreting this. The most obvious way is literally in a reference to white and dark skin, and that's how most people interpret this when they read it.

And that can be very hurtful. It can. It can be really hurtful. But I'd like to suggest today that you don't have to read it that way, that there's lots of other very plausible and well-researched and based in Nephite context and ancient Israelite context ways of reading this. So let's start with white. Scholars who've looked at the use of white in the Book of Mormon have found that in every instance it's used metaphorically, and it refers to purity and the amount of

revelation or the amount of light and understanding somebody has, and that this actually isn't a reference to skin pigmentation. In like terms, they've often looked at skin of blackness as metaphorical. So this is not a reference to someone's skin tone it has to do with their lack of revelation their lack of understanding their lack of light knowledge their lack of closeness to god that is a really strong way of reading this and there's plenty of articles we can give you some in the notes of how to find scholars who are arguing for the metaphorical interpretation. There are also scholars who argue that the skin of blackness is self-inflicted, that this is something that the Lamanites added to their own bodies. So we can also give you the articles for these.

There's an argument that this might be a reference to clothing, that the skin is animal skin, not human skin, and that the Lamanites are dressing in a particular way to suggest that they're not part of the Nephite culture, and that they do things differently than the Nephites, which is an interesting argument. There's also scholars who've been arguing that this is skin paint, that they're painting themselves, again, to indicate that they're from a different group and that they're separate from the Nephites. And then one of the things that I argue with the covenant perspective is that this is possibly

tattooing and that the Lamanites want to identify themselves as separate from Jehovah, and they create an identity through a tattoo that the minute you see them, you know that they're not part of the covenant, and that they've done that on purpose to separate themselves from their Nephite brothers and sisters. I'd offer those out there for anyone who's curious of other ways to read this text that are very well written, and I'd invite people to do more study. We can have very good explanations that may not have anything to do with a literal change of skin pigmentation. Definitely no expert on this, but having done a little reading myself, I've seen that the terms for describing race by

color is not something that happens until the mid-1600s. And that's very true. White, black, red, all of these start coming up much later, much, much later than Nephi's time. That's one of the really strongest pieces of research context that we have is that racial prejudice as understood with skin tone does not exist in the ancient world anywhere. And there's many scholars who've come to the same conclusions over and over. If we approach the Book of Mormon as an ancient text and we accept it to be what it says it is, a record of the Nephites, then it is not likely that this has anything to do with a skin pigmentation change. Now, one of the things I found as I was doing my research has to do with language. And the Nephites are very good

at telling you that it's hard to write on the plates. They keep telling you that if they could write in their spoken language, which is Hebrew, that they wouldn't have this trouble. So anyone who speaks another language knows that writing in the second language is usually more difficult than writing in your native language. So if we go from this concept of Reformed Egyptian that we find out in Mormon that the Nephites seem to be using to keep their plates, you may run into a language problem of expressing what this really is. And when I was doing my research on tattoos, I found out that in Egyptian, there is no hieroglyph for tattoo. So you can't explain it

with its own image. Like those of readers that don't know, Egyptian is hieroglyphic, meaning you're writing with pictures. There is no word for tattoo. One of my arguments is, well, try being Nephi and explaining what happened when you don't have a word to use. So what would you do? You would try and describe it. Now, some of you might know that the word tattoo originates from James Cook, the great explorer of the 17th, 18th centuries. And when he went over to Tahiti for the first time and landed there, they have a culture of tattooing. And he writes in his journals about the first time he saw these tattoos and he didn't know what to call them. So I find his description of them really powerful.

In his journal, he said that he witnessed that these people inlaid the color of black into their skin. And that's the only way he could describe it. So then he has to start learning their language so he knows how to describe it. And he adopts their word, which was tatau, meaning to tap. So if you guys know about how you put tattoos back in those days, you use a little sharp bone or something and you'd make little holes in your skin and then introduce the soot from a fire by rubbing it into the hole. So there's this tapping motion. So that's what they call it, tapping. So that's how we got the word tattoo into modern languages was adopting it from the Tahiti word. So imagine being Nephi with no word to use. What would you describe it as in laying the color of

black into your skin, the skin of blackness? So we may just be dealing with a difficulty in expressing the idea here, and Nephi's doing his best. And when we translate it into English, it comes out as the skin of blackness. And then we interpret it from our kind of racially motivated perspective as something that maybe he never intended it to mean. We just need to be careful in how we interpret this. And I'd invite all the audience to do more study into some of these other interpretations and give you a wider variety of possibilities for what this might mean. Then we don't need to be hurtful in our conclusions or be insensitive to how these

passages can be very hurtful for people to read. Excellent. Really good, Jan. Really good stuff. Jan, this has been absolutely wonderful. I think as a teacher, since I'm not an expert in any of this, I would say I try to err on the side of caution. Wouldn't you agree that as we teach this, be very cautious. Don't go barreling into it. I would offer a number of resources. One, when I approach this with students, I like to say, no matter how we understand the Book of Mormon

and the history of the church, let's acknowledge where we are today. There's a wonderful gospel topic essay called Race in the Priesthood. Right at the very end of the essay, there's a section entitled The Church Today. The first paragraph says, Today, the church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life, that mixed-race a sin or that blacks or people of any race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form. That's where we are today. Of course, John and I would encourage anyone. We did an episode on this same topic with Brother Ahmed Corbett, now Elder Ahmed Corbett.

It's way back in our first year, episode 50, part one. We had a great time. And also a website that I send my students to, which is just a wonderful resource. It was started by a brilliant scholar by the name of Paul Reeve. It's called Century of Black Mormons. And it's a fantastic resource where you can see the faith of incredible men and women in the past. I would recommend anyone who's teaching this to approach it sensitively. Also, to try and approach it by giving people a number of opportunities to see different ways of interpreting it.

We have much better success with students when we provide them with a wide variety of possibilities rather than a teacher trying to teach one interpretation as the only interpretation. As the manual says, the Come Follow Me manual, we don't know what the mark is. It's not completely understood. But we have, as I've said, plenty of really well-grounded research possibilities, from metaphorical to self-inflicted. It's worth exploring them and then allowing students to explore them and exposing them to the many different interpretations rather than trying to declare one thing. That's been wiser in my experience. You have much better responses. And Jen, is there a resource that you would send people to? Can I get the Book of Mormon Academy's work on this?

Yeah, what I will do is I will use all of the articles I give to my students, and I'll just make sure you get them all, and then they can go on your notes so that anyone in the audience just can come to get them all and then they can go on your notes so that that anyone in the audience just can come to your note page and say right I want to read these other articles I want to know what other scholars have said so I can be more educated and give my students more options and then they can study them and then provide those to their students as well it's all about educating and sometimes the good work that we do just doesn't get out. Nobody knows about it. And that's what we want to share.

Well, we can definitely help with that. We'll get those articles from you and put them onto our show notes, followhim.co. Go there, find Jan's episode. You should be able to find it easily. Just, you know, in our conversations, we said when Jesus appeared to the Nephites, what I've noticed was when Jesus came to the new world, he didn't appear. Well, it's true, but it's not complete. Jesus didn't appear to the Nephites. He appeared to the righteous. There were Nephites and Lamanites who died in the destructions, and there were Nephites

and Lamanites there when Jesus appeared. The privilege of seeing Jesus was not based on culture or race, but on righteousness. And that's an important distinguishing thing to make, and that's what I think is happening here in 2 Nephi 5. It was their going against the covenant that got them separated, nothing else. And God's not arbitrary about this race or culture or this or that one. Like you said, Hank, and it's in the footnote, 2 Nephi 26, 33, all are like, Nephi himself is going to write that all are like unto God, black and white, bond and free, male and female. And that helps me to think about when Jesus appeared, it was the righteous that he appeared to.

And Jen, would it be fair to say that it's a mistake to approach the Book of Mormon as if Nephites, good, Lamanites, bad? I think that kind of dichotomy, there's no one who is all good, and there is no one who is all bad. If we approach the Book of Mormon that way, I think we're going to read it in error. doing everything. Most of the Book of Mormon is about them needing to repent. If you honestly look at it, especially the Book of Helaman, the whole thing is about pride cycles and needing to repent and the terrible wickedness. And then you have all the destructions in 3 Nephi. So that one little brief moment in 4 Nephi where you have a Zion society is really great, but notice we don't have a lot of information about that. The Book of Mormon itself is about fallen people who need to repent and who are struggling. So that dichotomy

that Nephite's good, Lamanite's bad, I think is not helpful. And then when you come and look at this, if you can just approach it from the covenant perspective and realize we all struggle to keep our covenants, and we all have times where we're maybe not doing great with those. So we can have a lot more inclusive approach to Nephite Lamanites here when we understand that everybody's struggling with righteousness and wickedness. Jan, what else do we need to know about 2 Nephi 5 before we leave this topic? I'd like to focus on verse 22. It has some language in there that can be quite offensive, especially when you connect it to cursed skin of blackness.

And now you're going to add this loathsome word. I think the loathsome really can put it on people to be really offended here if they combine everything. I want to talk about how to read verse 22 because we need to be careful in the assumptions that we make. Let me read verse 22. It says, And thus saith the Lord God, I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities. And people often will say it's because of their appearance that they're loathsome. They'll go cursed, skin of blackness, and now you're loathsome. But if we read verse 22 backwards, we'll be able to get away from that. So let's just put the end phrase first, and we'll start with the word save. Save, they shall repent of their iniquities.

They will be loathsome unto thy people. Loathsome has nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with behavior. So you could understand this. If the Nephites are following the law of Moses, which is quite particular and covers every aspect of their life, even their dietary ways of preparing food and their ritual cleansings and all these things, they're going to be living a particular way. And then if the Lamanites are going to abandon that, or have trouble remembering what it is,

because they no longer have scripture to check, the Nephites are going to see different behavior. And they're going to probably find that behavior troubling, because the Lamanites are not doing what they should be doing. We need to make sure we understand loathsome as something behavioral and not something related to how people look. That way we don't need to add on to this kind of idea that the Lamanites are somehow less than. They're still great people. They just are going to develop a different culture than the

Nephites have. And you can understand why. They've lost their prophet, they've lost their scriptures, and they're going to do the best they can. And there may also be other people around in this world as well who are going to be influencing them. We can connect with loathsome on a more behavioral way and not on appearance. And I think the text is very clear that this is about what they're doing, not about how they look. Yeah, so good. Jan, John, one thing I would add is there may be theories from the past

that are still with us, that no longer need to be with us or should be with us. And that is the phrase, the dark skin was not the curse. It was just the sign of the curse. That's not something to teach. It's not something to say.

It's not something to perpetuate. That's what's in the new essay that you mentioned. The church disavows that it was a curse or a sign of the curse, it says right now. So yeah, that's right. Yeah, please don't teach that. Let's finish up here. Let's jump over to verse 25. This is maybe a verse that people just jump over.

It helps us conclude our whole focus on covenants. For me, this is all about covenants, being in the covenant or out of the covenant. And right now, Laman and Lemuel have chosen to be out of the covenant. The Nephi and his followers are in the covenant, and we're trying to maintain our covenant. Hank, if I can have you read verse 25, let's finish our discussion of covenant here, and then we can look at the last few verses of the chapter really quick. Awesome. And the Lord God said unto me, They shall be a scourge unto thy seed, to stir them up in remembrance of me. And inasmuch as they will not remember me and hearken unto my words, they shall scourge them even unto destruction.

Well, as we look at verse 25, one of the positive outcomes of the Lamanite-Nephite interactions is that they can help each other keep the covenant. Lamanites can stir the Nephites up and remind them whenever they have abandoned their covenant that they need to return to it. And the Nephites can continually send missionaries to the Lamanites to stir them up to repentance and remind them to come back to the covenant. The family is still a family and they can still help each other on either side of this relationship to come be in the covenant. To end our discussion of covenant, we all need help keeping our covenants and we all need each other to remind us to keep them. And sometimes the interactions we have with other people can stir us up to remind us. Sometimes we're inspired by

other people. Sometimes we're reminded by other people to be patient and be Christ-like and that we need to keep our covenants. Verse 25 is really useful in seeing this positive thing. Let's help keep each other connected to the covenant. The Lord wants everyone in the covenant. Nephites, Lamanites, we all want to be here together in the covenant. Beautiful. Verse 27 is this nice ending to the discussion of covenants that we've had as well, that to live after the manner of happiness means to involve God in your life. Now, C.S. Lewis, who we love to quote, he has some great teachings on this, that humans cannot function happily without God in their lives. And he does a much better job expressing that than I do. And I think the way he worded it was to run on God. That's our nurturing. That's our lifeline.

Humans were meant to connect and be sustained and supported by God. The Nephites here, they're living after the manner of happiness because right now, at least, they're keeping their covenants. They're following Nephi. They're doing the things that they need to do. And in spite of the adversity they have, they're still able to detect God there and find that happiness to do hard things. As President Nelson said, happiness doesn't have anything to do with the circumstances of our lives, but it has to do with our focus. And covenants are there to focus you on Jesus Christ. If you remember your sacrament

prayers, to always remember him and keep him as your principal focus of your life. That's why we do what we do is to keep Jesus there. And when he is your focus, you can be happy in any circumstance. I've gone through chapter five and thought, what is it that could lead to happiness? And he talks about, we did keep the commandments. We worked hard. We had a temple. We were industrious. We built. I think you could search chapter five for some of these principles of happiness, things that kept them focused on the Lord. I'm sure both of you remember this, but there was an article in the February 2016 Ensign called, What Can the Book of Mormon Teach Us About Happiness? It was a great scholar, a great

scholar. I can't, let's see, it's right at the tip of my tongue. I don't know who it is, but we'll put it in our show notes. I think his name was Henry. Yeah. I honestly can't remember. I just remember the words were just exquisite. And Hank, you've written a book about happiness too. What's the title of that? It was called Be Happy. I wrote one called How to Be Miserable. You are a lot more positive than mine.

Yeah. Jan, we'd like to ask you a question before we let you go. And that is, here's someone who has had incredible education all over the world, a scholar of Scripture, and someone who loves the Book of Mormon. I don't know, if we were to sit down and say, Jan, how do you feel about this book? I love this book. I would talk about it as a very best friend. I remember so many times in my life where I've had a hard time like Nephi, and I've just opened it up, read it through the Book of Mormon. He comforts me. He directs me. He teaches me. It's such an amazing tool. So it's a friend. It's something I spend a lot of time in. And I know that it's true. And the reason I know that is because of the light and knowledge and

comfort and love and connection with God that it brings every time I'm in there. I will always be a fan. I've attached myself to this book, right? Where it goes, I go. Jan, as you've taught us here, the covenant comes with blessings and cursings. These people, that's the world in which they lived, blessings and cursings. But I'd say that having you with us is a blessing. It's a wonderful blessing. Thank you. I feel like the Lord has put you in a position and the brilliance that you have, you bless so many lives.

We're grateful for you and grateful for your time. Thank you. We loved having you. So with that, we want to thank Dr. Jan Martin for being with us. We want to thank our executive producer, Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors, David and Verla Sorenson, and we always remember our founder, Steve Sorenson. We hope you'll join

us. We have more of Second Nephi to come. We are going to start into more Isaiah chapters on Follow Him. Both books are full of short and powerful quotes and insights from all our episodes from the Old and New Testaments. The digital copies of these books are absolutely free. You can watch the podcast on YouTube. Also, our Facebook and Instagram accounts have videos and extras you won't find anywhere else. If you'd like to know how you can help us, if you could subscribe to, rate, review, and

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