The Mormon Monk

The book of Job begins and ends like a fairytale, but the middle reads more like philosophy, with endless disquisitions on the moral and ethical principles which have guided Job in the past and should guide him in the future. Because the "story" of Job differs so drastically in style from the philosophical substance of Job, biblical scholars have long thought of the first and forty-second chapters of Job as a "frame tale"--a literary excuse for telling the story (or, in this case, having the philosophical discussion) that you wanted to tell. For example, the pilgrimage in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a frame tale, whose main purpose is to enable to author to narrate the many unconnected stories that the pilgrims tell each other on their road to Canterbury. The notion of God conversing with Satan is so far-fetched, scholars have argued, that it obviously can't literally be true, or even theoretically "true" in the patronizing sense that the author ...

In each of the three classes that I'm teaching this semester, I've offered the same advice: Keep the Sabbath Day holy by, among other things not working (in this cause studying) on Sundays. As a carrot, I've held out the ( previously mentioned ) promise of the late President James E. Faust--that you can do more and higher quality work by laboring in six days than you can in seven. And then, a few days before class started, I discovered this remarkable passage in the little-read book of Jarom. Jarom informs us that the Nephites of his day were wicked: "Behold, it is expedient that much should be done among this people, because of the hardness of their hearts, and the deafness of their ears, and the blindness of their minds, and the stiffness of their necks; nevertheless, God is exceedingly merciful unto them, and has not as yet swept them off from the face of the land" (3). These Nephites clearly are not righteous, and yet Jarom informs us that they "had waxed...