Malachi, and the Small Plates as Nephite pseudepigrapha

Over at my Book of Mormon blog, I try to account for a striking pattern in the Book of Mormon's use of Malachi, and arrive at the tentative conclusion that the Small Plates were written by Nephites of the Christian era rather than by Nephi, Jacob, and the others whose words they claim to be.

No, Babylon Bee, YOU forgot.

Doesn't anyone remember a little worldwide totalitarian coup a few years back, in which the United States certainly took part, or who was president at the time?

Just how high is the bar for "being Hitler," anyway? Do we only count people who actually grow a mustache, invade Poland, and turn Jews into lampshades?

A better headline: "Trump explains he was going to make America great again during his first term, but he forgot."

DF and recycling

On October 19, Bruce Charlton posted "Americans are *mental*, when it comes to politics," in which he for some reason repeatedly referred to Donald Trump as "DF." When I asked in a comment why he was calling him that (and guessed that it might be some kind of "Literally Hitler" joke), Bruce didn't explain, but just said he was changing it to "DT" instead.

The next day, October 20, he posted "The Texas Sharpshooter rides again...," several paragraphs of which are devoted to criticizing modern pseudo-environmentalism in general and the recycling craze in particular. The post ends with a footnote saying, "This applies to politics, as well," with a link back to the October 19 "DF" post. So the two posts are linked both by proximity in time and with a literal hyperlink.

This morning, October 21, I was taking a walk down an unfamiliar road in a small town when I passed this facility.

Next to the DF logo, it says "Da Feng Environmental Protection," and under that it says "We recycle iron, paper, hardware, plastic, household appliances, cars, and motorcycles."

But his heart is in the right place

When was the last time you ran across a reference to someone’s heart being on the right side rather than the left? Not every day, right?

Yesterday I happened to check Arts & Letters Daily, which I haven’t really followed since the 2010 death of its founder (and an occasional email correspondent of mine), Denis Dutton. There I found a review of the latest book by another big name from that era: Richard Dawkins. As cringe as that whole Nu-Atheist thing was, I still respect Dawkins as a biologist, and I clicked. The reviewer, a Tim Flannery, writes:

Dawkins believes that the placement of every nerve and artery (and other elements of bodily structure) is precisely sculpted by evolution. Yet he does not discuss the condition known as situs inversus, which can cause the heart to be on the right rather than the left, without causing medical symptoms or complications.

Today, in my regular scripture study, I read the second half of the Book of Ecclesiastes (which, incidentally, Dawkins has cited as his favorite book of the Bible, presumably because it’s the most nihilistic). There I found this:

A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left (Ecclesiastes 10:2).

So Michael Jackson had it all wrong, asking the man in the mirror to change his ways. Why should a wise man take advice from a fool?

See-more Glasses and passing as Jewish

I was in my study reading a commentary on the Book of Job when the name Seymour Glass (a J. D. Salinger character) suddenly popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere. Try as I might, I couldn’t trace its origin in my train of thought. I got to thinking about the name and connected it with Gotthard Glas, the birth name of Uziel Gal, inventor of the Uzi submachine gun, which made me wonder if Seymour Glass was Jewish. (Yes, I could remember the birth name of an Israeli firearm designer but not the ethnicity of a major literary character. Such are the vicissitudes of memory!) Looking that up led me to an article called “How Jewish was J. D. Salinger?” It begins thus:

In 2018, I wrote a book about the Jewish-American writers — Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and the others who powered the golden age of Jewish writers in post-war America. I thought of including Jerome David Salinger, known to the world as J.D. Salinger, but I quickly realized his Jewishness was a complicated saga.

Was Salinger Jewish? There is no simple answer. His Jewish roots certainly ran deep on his father’s side. His paternal grandfather was a Lithuanian immigrant who served as a rabbi in Louisville, Kentucky, before becoming a doctor. His father, Sol, belonged to Temple Emanu-El, the prominent reform synagogue in New York, where he worshipped on the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

But Salinger’s mother came from entirely different stock. Born in Iowa to the Jillich family, who were Catholics of Scotch/Irish descent, she was christened Marie. When she married Sol, she changed her first name to the more Jewish-sounding Miriam (Moses’ sister). As Miriam Salinger, she “passed” as Jewish — no small irony in 1920s America. Jerry Salinger didn’t find out his mother wasn’t the Jew she pretended to be until just past his bar mitzvah.

A recent post about black falcons unexpectedly digressed into the story of the Philip Roth character Coleman Silk, a mulatto who decides to hide his Black background and pass as Jewish. So running into Roth’s name and then a reference to a gentile passing as a Jew was a bit of a sync.

The Emanu-El reference was a sync, too. In a comment on my recent post “A Proverb,” Kevin makes a pun on “I can’t” and I. Kant, the philosopher. This led me to look into that name, and I discovered that Kant had actually been baptized Emanuel, changing the spelling to Immanuel only after learning Hebrew. This gentile changing his name to make it more Jewish syncs with the case of Marie/Miriam Salinger. (Although apparently Emanuel is a perfectly Jewish spelling as well, if it’s the name of a synagogue!)

In the end, I did find out how Seymour Glass got into my head. I must have glanced at this bag my wife put in the study:

It’s from a shop called Seemore which sells eyeglasses — so a pretty clear link to Seymour Glass. The name on the bag must have influenced my train of thought without it consciously registering.

Of course, the significance of “see-more glasses” will not be lost on my Mormon readers.

An unusually chaotic dream sequence

I dreamed I was taking my sister to a restaurant in Taiwan. Before entering the restaurant proper, there was a small stone building you had to pass through first. I went into this building through an open arch, and my sister waited outside. I got a piece of chalk and wrote on the stone wall, inside but where she could see it from outside, the Chinese character for “Buddha.” The restaurant staff complimented me on my excellent chalkmanship. Then under that I wrote the Latin letter p. Realizing that wasn’t clear enough, I added another letter, making it po. This could represent any of several Chinese characters thus transliterated, but the possible meanings I thought of in the dream were “old lady” (including the slang sense of “wife”) and “break, broken.”

My sister, who doesn’t know Chinese, thought what I had written had something to do with tofu and said something like, “I try to avoid eating tofu. This isn’t a restaurant that specializes in vegetarian cuisine, is it?” I assured her it wasn’t, and together we walked through the stone building and out the other side.

There was a stream we had to cross to get to the restaurant itself, and the way across was a narrow earthen bridge overgrown with grass. As we crossed this, I said, “This place has changed a lot. They used to have a tiger here in a cage. Oh, there it is!”

The tiger, uncaged, was swimming in the stream nearby. Wanting to reassure my sister, I said, “Don’t worry, that tiger’s never attacked me. But you know what did attack me once? A goose!” This was not true, but I said it as a way of lightening the mood.

The scene changed, and I was in a library in America with a woman I thought was an ancient Egyptian or something like that. Pointing with her lips in the Navajo fashion, she indicated another library patron and said in perfect if rather stilted English, “Excuse me, why does that man have a long black cylinder tattooed on his arm? Can you explain its cultural significance?”

“Sure,” I said. “He’s probably an admirer of President Abraham Lincoln, who is by convention depicted with a black cylindrical headdress.” I felt as if I were explaining ancient Egyptian iconography to an American rather than vice versa.

When we walked out of the library, there were a bunch of kids outside, dancing around and singing, “Wing-xing-xing! Wing-xing-xing! It’s a wing-xing-xing! Look out, boys, it’s a wing-xing-xing!”

I understood wing to be English and xing-xing to be Chinese for either “great ape” or “star.”

Little Miss

Little Miss upon a stool

(Possibly a tuft of grass)

Sat and ate her dairy gruel

Till disaster came to pass.

Up beside her crept a spider,

And when Little Miss espied her,

Just imagine, if you can,

How she dropped her whey and ran!