Episode 195: D&C 92 – Section 121
Brigham Young is leading the exodus of the Mormons from Missouri to Illinois while Joseph twiddles his thumbs in jail. Joseph feels his power slipping away and pens an epistle to his followers.
God is either loving or wrathful, the priesthood authority comes from that love/wrath, so priesthood authority is always love. Wait, what?
Drink count – 8
Patron Bonus: Amanda sleuthed at the ward house, and a missionary update!
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My Book of Mormon 
February 17, 2018 at 4:29 pm
You’re correct. That verse about priesthood is important and cited a lot. We had to memorize it in seminary class.
February 17, 2018 at 6:12 pm
Hi Marie and Bryce,
So to help you out a bit with deciphering Biblespeak, in the ancient world the bowels were considered to be the source of human emotions, not the heart. Thus Genesis 43:30
“And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother: and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and wept there” or the sexier (?) Song of Solomon 5:4 “My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.” Ooooh la la! – Oh wait, Joseph Smith said that Song of Solomon wasn’t canonical. 😦
Of course my favorite instance is from (Deutero-) Isaiah 63:15 “Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory: where is thy zeal and thy strength, the sounding of thy bowels and of thy mercies toward me? are they restrained?” 😀 😀 😀
The first shifts toward the heart being the source of emotion appear in Jeremiah 4:19
“My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me” and Lamentations 1:20 “Behold, O Lord; for I am in distress: my bowels are troubled; mine heart is turned within me” (note that Jeremiah and Lamentations are by the same author). Lam. 1:20 gives a good example of the Hebrew literary device called Parallelism, in which two successive statements are equated, giving a more nuanced meaning to what the author is portraying. In this instance ‘bowels’ are paralleled (and equated) with ‘heart’ because the second paralleled phrases – ‘troubled’ and ‘turned within me’ – mean the same thing (There is also Antithetical Parallelism, but we’ll save that for another day.) 🙂
The heart really becomes connected to emotion with the rise of the concept of Romantic Love during the Medieval Age of Chivalry, and eventually all the emotions move there, although the original meaning still lingers in our language with expressions like “a gut feeling” or literally in the word ‘visceral’. When I lived in New Zealand, I found it interesting that the local expression meaning “heartbroken” was ‘gutted’ (e.g. “My boyfriend left me; I’m gutted!”). How ironic that the brain is almost never considered as the source of emotion, and in fact is usually considered to be in opposition to it, i.e. the “head vs. heart” dichotomy.
My bowels were filled with joy listening to this episode and I will sound them toward you – or at least in your general direction. 😉
February 18, 2018 at 12:27 am
The Lord’s bowels still haven’t been moved with compassion after all this time?
I think it’s conclusive that, cosmologically speaking, at least, God does his BM in the PM…