This may not be worth a full post but I just noticed that in a comment on WJT’s blog a couple days ago, I called the two lazy lions “rude and disruptive”. Today I was reading through the comments again and the word “rude” stood out to me in light of my prior post about L&L. It dawned on me that they were also called rude in the BoM and upon searching I was right. Nephi and Lehi both discuss L&L’s “rudeness”:
And after we had been driven forth before the wind for the space of many days, behold, my brethren and the sons of Ishmael and also their wives began to make themselves merry, insomuch that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness, yea, even that they did forget by what power they had been brought thither; yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness.
Nephi’s pretty annoyed, even as he writes this tale years later, emphasizing that it wasn’t just plain old rudeness at work here. It was “much” and “exceeding” rudeness, reader. Nephi wants you to know that these two were really annoying!
You could chalk this up to little brother syndrome, but Lehi gets in on the action while on his deathbed:
And now, Jacob, I speak unto you: Thou art my firstborn in the days of my tribulation in the wilderness. And behold, in thy childhood thou hast suffered afflictions and much sorrow, because of the rudeness of thy brethren.
Unless Nephi is massaging Lehi’s words I think we now have two witnesses. These two brothers are pretty frickin’ rude! Add that to lazy, but since we’re working with the letter L here we need to use loutish instead of rude: “Lazy Loutish Lions, Laman and Lemuel, Lounging in the Local Library”.
If the shoe fits…
WW
I don’t see the Laman and Lemuel thread at this point, but I find your use of rude and later interest in and focus on that word choice interesting for two reasons.
First, it is a word and name that can mean Red, so we have that symbol again.
Second, rude can mean “Unlearned” (per Etymonline). Unlearned and books go together in that 2 Nephi 27 chapter you have always been interested in, and here we have lions that you called unlearned surrounded by books.
LEE
Amrod and Amras were both red-haired.
WW
True… but lots of characters were known for their red hair.
Rugus, for example, comes to mind:
“Yet here stooped over a crevice of earth, we return to Joseph ZK Tal-Elmar of Ruel’s writings, and he glancing now over to Rugus, even as he descended into the slender shaft, and sank as it were into the earth, his russet hair high standing, alit by some nether glow…”
It is interesting for me to note that you wrote a few posts about a “hollow earth” and were particularly focused on this at least for a time (don’t know if you still are). Rugus was also obsessed with what was inside the Earth, with the passage above one example of him descending into the Earth. He had plenty of experience exploring the depths below its surface and knew firsthand of its ‘hollowness’ in the sense that there were things and Beings to be found down below. He eventually established his colony of people below ground even, in that ‘cut in the floor’. You’ve written or guessed about people living under the surface of various planets like Earth or Mars.
Interestingly, Rugus sounds very much like Rufus, which is the word that some people assume “Rude” is based on, and means “Red/ Red-Haired”.
Rugus also called his favorite maid “Lioness”, implying that he was the Lion (and he certainly had a full Pride of women!).
The Lion theme might also come into play tangentially in our Indiana Jones and the Stone Lion Head symbolism, just thinking about it now. It would be Rugus who led Zhera and Izilba and their group through the desert and even (according to Doug’s story at least) played a ruse to get the Brother of Jared to ask for light in the ships. In a sense, that group would have stepped from the Lion’s Head on their journey, as it was with Rugus’ knowledge, guiding, and influence that they were able to do so.
LEE
Yes, fair, they aren’t the only redheads. There aren’t many, though. You’re right, Rugus could come into play if the red hair even means anything.
I do like the hollow planet concept but I admit it is tough to make it work. My attempt to do so was mostly driven by the difficulty of making space work with the travels of the Lehites/Jaredites. I hoped hollow earth would give us a way to match their non-celestial travel descriptions with the idea that the promised land is a place apart from what humans here have as yet discovered. Essentially it was borne out of desperation b/c I hate the idea of the promised land being North America. I have to suspend rational thought either way (space or hollow earth), however, so I am still leaving room for the space idea.
WW
Just to be clear, I don’t believe in space travel, either, at least in the way that you have been writing about it.
Maybe think less of it as ‘space’ and more as ‘spacetime’? This isn’t typical outer space/ sci-fi/ astronaut stuff, but the actual manipulation of the very fabric of which our current universe is made in order to cover otherwise untravelable distances.
To me, much of that “Warp and Woof” symbolism was meant to point to this fabric (space and time together), and the possibility to navigate it in a much different way than we currently do, which doesn’t have to have anything to do with space ships or launching into outer space.
LEE
I’d like to understand this more, as in what it looks like in practice. Are you imagining a scenario where they set sail on an earthly sea and then at some point, a portal or black hole opens through which they sail into a sea on Eressea 2? Something like we see in Stargate maybe. If so, the benefit is you don’t have to make them astronauts on spaceships, which is a big bonus. The downside is we have to assume they left out a pretty important piece of info as it relates to their journey. Although that’s not too hard to imagine if they had any concept of their future audience and what they’d be willing to consider as realistic. Or are you imagining something else entirely?
WW
It could be that they were entirely unaware of what was really happening around them. In other words, from their perspective they set sail in the sea and landed on a new continent, but in reality they had just travelled along an unimaginably massive bend or warp in spacetime.
I think there are a few clues that at least support this as a possibility, from the nature of the ship that Nephi was asked to build without knowing why (I don’t think it was for sailing or propulsion, which would have been ‘after the manner of men’ or how Men thought about travelling from point a to b) to the storm that came on when the Stone-Liahona stopped working.
We don’t have any good models or visualizations for what the experience would have looked like for a traveller within a massive warping of spacetime, like the Lehites would have been. It may have been business as usual as Nephi described (until the storm). It might not have. I don’t know.