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Walking through History

Walking through History

Last updated on: October 16, 2026 at 2:44 pm by Dan Peterson

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Walking through History 2026-10-16T14:44:08-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A Tiffany glass window in the Salt Lake Temple depicting the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, I don’t have an image in color. It’s one of four Tiffany windows in the Salt Lake Temple.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

A new article, written by Jeff Lindsay and Gale L. Pooley, went up today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 70 (2026): 91-128 under the title ““Enough and to Spare”: Economic Data Vindicate Once-implausible Prophetic Statements”:

Abstract: Despite frequently lacking material abundance in his life and living at a time when Malthusian concepts were becoming popular among intellectuals, Joseph Smith made a daring prophecy in 1834. He stated that God had designed the earth with abundant resources such that “the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare” (Doctrine and Covenants 104:17). While many in the world, and sometimes even in the Church, believe that the world is running out of many resources due to overpopulation, extensive economic data show that the opposite is true. Resources tend to become more abundant over time, as long as there is some degree of economic freedom. Here we examine those data, showing that our planet is not merely blessed with abundance, but with “superabundance.” The data suggest that Joseph’s daring prophecy has been vindicated. In fact, economic data further suggest that the most serious scarce resource the planet faces is arguably human beings who can create, innovate, and solve problems of scarcity, especially human beings who apply their agency for good. The teachings of the gospel can bring both spiritual and temporal abundance on this earth that is full, with enough and to spare.

I’m afraid that, being really busy over here and out of sync with American times and being still, rather incredibly, somewhat jet-lagged (perhaps because I’m also a bit under the weather), I’ve fallen behind on alerting readers of this blog to new materials from the Interpreter Foundation. So here’s another one: “Reprint: ‘This Thing is a Similitude’; A Typological Approach to Moses 5;4-15 and Ancient Apocryphal Literature,” written by David Calabro:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses — Inspired Origins, Temple Contexts, and Literary Qualities Volumes I and II, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, David R. Seely, John W. Welch, and Scott Gordon. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/ancient-threads-in-the-book-of-moses/.

“One of the most significant features of the Book of Moses is its account of the redemption of Adam and Eve following their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, an account that is completely absent from the parallel parts of the received text of Genesis. This account begins immediately following the notice of Adam and Eve working and having children, the portion of the text corresponding to Genesis 4:1a: ‘And Adam knew Eve his wife.’”

Golubac Fortress exactly as it appeared when we stepped from the boat (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Our visit this morning was to the extremely scenic and historically significant Golubac Fortress on the Serbian side of the Danube. I had no expectations, but I was delighted with it — not least because we docked very nearby and because our local guide was unusually fun and informative.

Stefan Lazarević (ca. 1377 – 1427) was one of those who possessed Golubac. My interest was caught by the fact that he was involved (as a vassal of the Ottoman Turks) in the catastrophic battle between the Ottomans, led by Sultan Bayezid I (aka Ottoman Turkish: یلدیرم بايزيد; modernTurkish: Yıldırım Bayezid or “Bayezid the Thunderbolt”; ca. 1360 – 1403). Despite his many brilliant military triumphs, Bayezid was defeated and captured by the Turco-Mongolian conqueror Timur-i Leng (Tamerlane) at the Battle of Ankara in 1402 and died in captivity in March 1403. Some reports indicate that Bayezid spent his last year or year and a half being transported around in a cage.

The Gūr-i Amīr in Samarkand (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

When I was in Uzbekistan in April of last year, we spent a fair amount of time on our first day at the Gūr-i Amīr, Timur’s mausoleum . The founder of the vast but relatively short-lived Timurid Empire, Timur is treated as a hero in Uzbekistan. (There is, for example, a larger than life-sized statue of an enthroned “Timur the Great” located in a park within easy walking distance of the hotel where we stayed.) In my opinion, though, Timur was probably a sociopath. While we were under the dome of the Gūr-i Amīr, listening to our local guide praise him, one of the Iranian scholars with whom we were to meet leaned over to me and whispered “He was a horrible person, you know.” I absolutely agreed, and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Timur took great and seemingly psychopathic pleasure in torturing and killing people. One of his trademark acts after capturing a city was to build large piles or towers of severed heads; one source that I recall reading in graduate school reported that, with the passage of time, the severed heads would decay and that, at night, they began to give off an eery greenish glow.

Once, when the Persian city of Isfahan — an important center of art and literature that I have visited — revolted against his oppressively high taxes, he ordered its citizens massacred; the death toll is estimated to have been between 100,000 and 200,000. An eye-witness counted more than 28 towers constructed of about 1,500 heads each, in Isfahan alone.

Here’s a charming story that I also recall reading while I was in grad school: A mid-sized city found itself in the path of Timur’s conquests and, hearing about the mass slaughters that had occurred in towns that had resisted him, decided to open its gates and surrender rather than to suffer the same fate. In fact, it went even further: When the conqueror approached, the residents of the city sent a large number of its young girls out to meet him, dressed in white and strewing flowers before him. Evidently, though, he wasn’t in a good mood. (Maybe he had a headache. Maybe his rheumatism was acting up, or he had a bad hangnail.) So he ordered his cavalry to trample the young girls to death.

One source suggests that, altogether, Timur was responsible for the deaths of approximately twenty million people. In the fourteenth century, a death toll of twenty million people would represent roughly five percent of the world’s total population. I lament Bayezid’s defeat.

Posted from Donji Milanovac, Serbia

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