How beautiful upon the mountains are their feet!

In his July 21 post "Twister, 'The Extreme', and Shine On," William Wright mentions a couple of Book of Mormon passages which he interprets as being about "Beings living on 'Mountains' with beautiful feet publishing Good Tidings." This language comes from Isaiah (52:7), and the priests of King Noah had used it against Abinadi, implicitly contrasting Abiniadi's message of wrath and destruction with the messengers of "peace" and "good tidings" praised by Isaiah. In his response to the priests, Abinadi repeats the language of beautiful feet upon the mountains again and again:

And who shall be his [God's] seed? . . . they who have published peace, who have brought good tidings of good, who have published salvation; and said unto Zion: Thy God reigneth!

And O how beautiful upon the mountains were their feet!

And again, how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those that are still publishing peace!

And again, how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who shall hereafter publish peace, yea, from this time henceforth and forever!

And behold, I say unto you, this is not all. For O how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that is the founder of peace, yea, even the Lord, who has redeemed his people; yea, him who has granted salvation unto his people (Mosiah 15:10, 14-18).

I'd never really paid much notice to this turn of phrase. I took it as a metaphor meaning something like "How welcome is their arrival!"  and never attributed any importance to feet as such. Feet have been very much in the sync stream of late, though, so perhaps they do have some deeper significance.

My poem "Concerning shoon" began as a riff on Tolkien's line "The Man in the Moon had silver shoon," but as I composed it, it unexpectedly began drawing in imagery from the Book of Daniel and ended with the adoration of the bare feet of the Ancient of Days:

And what of Earth?

Men there, they say,

Make do with shoon

Of miry clay

Until, the Ancient’s

Reign restored,

They may go barefoot

Like their Lord.

Sons of Michael,

He approaches.

Rise! The Ancient

Father greet.

Bow, ye thousands,

Low before him.

Minister

Before his feet.

Also relevant is my 2023 post about "An appearance of Jesus to some Ute Indians in 1920." I heard this story from Stan Bronson, who identifies Jesus with the Ute deity Sinawav, "he who leaves footprints of light," and the beautiful bare feet of Jesus were a point of particular interest to the Utes:

The men were fascinated by the feet of Jesus, because they were very smooth and clean, like pearly white, even though he was walking barefoot in the sandy roadway. They asked "Doesn't this hot sand burn your bare feet?" Jesus said, "It is not hot to me."

Jesus talked about other things, and then he held his hands out toward the men and showed them his crucifixion scars and said, "I want you to know -- you would not have done this to me here."

In that post, I note the odd discrepancy that Jesus had to hold out his hands to show his crucifixion scars even though the Indians had been staring at his bare feet, which would presumably have been scarred as well.

Or perhaps they weren't! Now that I think of it, Jesus' foot scars are also conspicuously absent from the story of Doubting Thomas:

But [Thomas] said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. . . .

Then saith [Jesus] to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing (John 20:25, 27).

I mean, why not? Presumably the Resurrection healed the majority of the damage done to the body of Jesus. If he wanted to keep a few scars as souvenirs, who's to say he had to keep the scars in his hands and his feet? If his feet were made perfect but his hands were not, this would perhaps tie in with what he said to Peter when he washed his feet:

Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, [wash] not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.

Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit (John 13:9-10).

Zechariah 13:6 is typically read by Christians as a reference to the crucifixion scars of Jesus, and it, too, neglects to mention any scarring of the feet:

And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.

On the other hand, the Book of Mormon does clearly state that when Jesus appeared to the Nephites, they "did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet" (3 Ne. 11:15). In this case, though, I'm almost inclined to think that the foot scars were supplied by the mind of Joseph Smith by the process postulated in "The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon."

My Rosary meditations tend to be highly visual in nature, and over time highly specific mental images (not visions, just mental images) have come to be associated with certain of the Mysteries. Some of these are quite detailed and a bit unusual. For example, the Annunciation: The Virgin is outdoors in a desert environment, tending to some sort of stone structure with shapes suggesting lancet arches. She becomes aware of something behind her, turns around, and is shocked to see a lily suspended in the air in front of her, defying gravity. A few seconds later, she receives a second shock when she realizes she is not alone. Standing a few yards away, so that the lily is halfway between them, is a short being, scarcely higher than her waist, wearing a pale gray robe with a hood: Gabriel.

The image associated with the Ascension is less detailed but maybe even more unusual. I mean, the Annunciation image is at least about Gabriel appearing to the Virgin. For the Ascension, though, my image is actually of Jesus landing: a closeup of a single bare white foot touching down on soft grass or moss. I guess this is consistent with my position, laid out in "From the Resurrection to Kolob," that the "Heaven" to which Jesus ascended was an Earth-like planet, but it's still odd that my image should have no ascending in it, and that it should focus on one foot rather than on the whole person. My mental image lacks the clarity for me to be able to say definitively that the foot is unscarred, but I think that is probably the case. I have certainly never noticed scars on it, and I didn't notice until today that that was a bit odd.