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Reconnecting on the Bow

Reconnecting on the Bow

Last updated on: July 12, 2025 at 12:49 am by Dan Peterson

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Reconnecting on the Bow 2025-07-12T00:49:28-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Samuel the Lamanite upon a Nephite wall, as depicted by Arnold Friberg (LDS.org)

Newly posted in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “Smooth Words and Slippery Things: Samuel the Lamanite’s Prophetic Use of Hebrew ḥlq,” written by Matthew L. Bowen

Abstract: Samuel the Lamanite expressly drew on the words of Isaiah (Isaiah 30:10) and possibly Jeremiah (Jeremiah 23:12) with a clever, powerful wordplay on forms of the Hebrew verbal root ḥlq: ḥălāqôt (“flattering words,” literally “smooth things”) and ḥălaqlaqqôt (“slippery [things]”) in Helaman 13:28–36. This wordplay established a genetic relationship between yielding oneself to those who “speak flattering words unto [us]” (Helaman 13:28) and material riches and treasures becoming “slippery that [we] cannot hold them” (Helaman 13:31, 36). This use of smooth/slippery, closely tied to the discussion in the Hebrew Bible of giving heed to false prophets over true prophets, is thus an apt marker of Samuel’s meaning, and perhaps also of his training. Samuel’s pronouncement of this unique curse, linguistically correlated with rejecting prophetic words, described a loss of worldly wealth and vividly depicted the accompanying spiritual desolation of slippery ways and dark places. Mormon and Moroni offered their latter-day readers a way out of the cycle of “slippery” possessions and destruction that befell the Jaredites and the Nephites: Jesus Christ, who showed us how to lay up treasures in heaven. Mormon’s preservation of Samuel’s prophetic wordplay stands as a significant, additional confirmation of the ancient provenance of the text.

And this just went up on the Interpreter Foundation’s website: “Interpreting Interpreter: Slippery Wordplay,” written by Kyler Rasmussen:

This post is a summary of the article “Smooth Words and Slippery Things: Samuel the Lamanite’s Prophetic Use of Hebrew ḥlq” by Matthew L. Bowen in Volume 66 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. All of the Interpreting Interpreter articles may be seen at https://interpreterfoundation.org/category/summaries/. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreterseries is available at https:/interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.

A video introduction to this Interpreter article is now available on all of our social media channels, including on YouTube at https://youtube.com/shorts/HAayuJs8IvM.

The Takeaway: Bowen highlights potential wordplay in Samuel the Lamanite’s sermon in Helaman 13—based on the Hebrew terms for “flattering words” and “slippery” treasures—that emphasizes how giving heed to false prophets can lead to a loss of worldly and spiritual treasures.

Construction on the new Lethbridge Alberta Temple, which will be the fourth temple in the province, began at the end of May. (LDS Media Library)

Another take on an important story: “Church of Jesus Christ sees record growth in global membership: Record-high convert baptisms during the past 12 months mark a milestone year for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

And an important milestone is coming on Sunday: “Watch the 5,000th Episode of ‘Music & the Spoken Word’ on July 13”

A winter view of the Bow River near Cochrane, Alberta (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

We traveled down to Cochrane, Alberta, late this afternoon — it’s about an hour from Canmore, back to the east, in the direction of Calgary — to have dinner and visit with a former student of mine and his family. (I omit his name, as I always do in such cases, so that innocent parties will be spared the tender mercies of my obsessive anonymous online critics.) Their home backs onto the Bow River, and we enjoyed a meal of barbecued meats — he’s a hunter, among other extremely interesting things — and corn on the cob outside, and then roasted marshmallows down below in their backyard. And there was good conversation.

He was one of the students in the intensive Arabic program that I led in Jerusalem many years ago, and he and my sons formed a very special bond during those months in Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. So it’s nice to run into him and his family from time to time, wherever they happen to be at any given moment. They’ve lived in multiple countries around the world — including a lengthy stint in Cairo, where he served as the president of the Latter-day Saint branch there. They are great people.

A NASA artist’s conception of a massive terrestrial meteor impact
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I don’t know whether you can access this 2018 article from The Atlantic or not, but I read it for the first time last night and really enjoyed it: “Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous: The strange, cosmic reason our evolutionary path will look ever luckier the longer we survive,” written by Peter Brannen. Here’s a passage from it that caught my eye:

[O]ur radio telescopes have reported only a stark silence from our cosmic neighborhood. Perhaps we’re truly extreme oddballs, held aloft by a near-impossible history—one free from deadly migrating gas giants and solar-system chaos, but also filled with freakishly favorable accidents, like a cataclysmic impact early in our history that created a strange, gigantic moon that stabilized our orbit and allowed complex life to flourish. As the solar system continued to shake out, we somehow ended up with just the right amount of water to lubricate plate tectonics, keeping the climate habitable over hundreds of millions of years and preventing a Venus-style planetary resurfacing catastrophe, but not so much water that we wound up on a lifeless water world.

But don’t let that passage mislead you. The article isn’t actually about cosmic fine-tuning or intelligent design. Not even remotely. In fact, I think it’s an article that might disturb or worry you. Give it a look, if you can.

It may upset some, but I’ve also chosen today to publicly announce my opposition to smallpox and to encourage others to join me in my opposition. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’m just barely old enough to dimly remember when polio was a very real fear for American children and when, although the desperate panic was beginning to fade, we were still required to receive vaccinations. I’m quite pleased with the fact that the disease never paralyzed or crippled me or put me in an iron lung. That’s one of the reasons that I’m not happy about the rise of anti-vaxxers in Utah and across the United States, nor about the rise of one particular anti-vaxxer to running the United States federal Department of Health and Human Services.

“Utah health experts alarmed by decrease in childhood vaccine uptake: Community Vaccine Forum sees risk of preventable diseases regaining foothold”

“Opinion: Don’t let old diseases regain strength”

Friends, let’s not surrender to pseudoscience. Let’s not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Posted from Canmore, Alberta, Canada

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