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Character, Literary and Otherwise

Character, Literary and Otherwise

Last updated on: October 26, 2017 at 4:04 pm by Dan Peterson

Character, Literary and Otherwise 2017-10-26T16:04:28-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Jaffa Gate (Sha‘ar Yafo; or, in Arabic, Bab al-Khalil [The Gate of (Abraham) the Friend (of God)], in Jerusalem). Our hotel is located near Jaffa Gate, and we passed through it several times today. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I may be in the Holy Land, but my vicious and mean-spirited lies in the Deseret News continue unabated:

“The lady Sariah of Elephantine”

***

From a work-in-progress, a brief passage on the Book of Mormon as literature:

Study of the literary character of the Book of Mormon is in its infancy, but it has already revealed the book to be far more sophisticated and complex than most readers—certainly more than most critics—have recognized. One of the areas of demonstrable complexity involves the concept of parallelism. Two lines of poetry or similar writing are said to be parallel if the elements of one line correspond directly to the elements of the other line in a one-to-one relationship. Such parallelism is extremely common in the Hebrew Bible. Consider, for example, the following four examples from the book of Proverbs:

A gentle response allays wrath;

A harsh word provokes anger.

The tongue of the wise produces much knowledge,

But the mouth of dullards pours out folly. . . .

A healing tongue is a tree of life,

But a devious one makes for a broken spirit. . . .

In the house of the righteous there is much treasure,

But in the harvest of the wicked there is trouble.

As the noted Berkeley scholar of comparative literature Robert Alter has observed with reference to the Hebrew Bible, “There would seem to be some satisfying feeling of emphasis, for both the speaker and his audience, in stating the same thing twice, with nicely modulated variations.” Parallelism, says the Harvard biblical scholar James Kugel, “is the basic feature of biblical songs—and, for that matter, of most of the sayings, proverbs, laws, laments, blessings, curses, prayers, and speeches found in the Bible.” Not surprisingly, therefore, similar simple parallel structures abound in the Book of Mormon, as well. Consider, for instance, the following to specimens, from 2 and 3 Nephi respectively:

Pray unto him continually by day,

and give thanks unto his holy name by night.

Wo unto him that spurneth at the doings of the Lord; yea,

wo unto him that shall deny the Christ and his works.

***

I’m very sad to see Jeff Flake’s decision to leave the United States Senate. I’m even more saddened by the rottenness in American politics that has obliged the Senator to renounce his political career.

I like these two articles, one from a liberal-leaning Latter-day Saint and the second — which makes much of Senator Flake’s Mormon upbringing and values — from a rather prominent non-Mormon conservative political commentator:

“As a fellow Mormon, I’m proud of Sen. Jeff Flake”

“Jeff Flake is the senator from the wrong state”

Quite seriously: The departure of Jeff Flake will be a loss to both the Senate and the United States as a whole.

***

Even the President appears to be concerned:

“Trump Signs New Travel Ban Preventing Republican Senators from Fleeing”

Posted from Jerusalem, Israel

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October 26, 2017

The power of poets and poetry (once upon a time in Arabia)

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October 27, 2017 Style in the Book of Mormon . . . and a Mormon style in politics

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