It started with the question of "Does God promise more blessings for righteousness or curses for wickedness?" I studied it from the perspective of the Book of Mormon, then I did the same study for the Old Testament. Here's a side by side comparison of their percentages.
They are surprisingly close - especially given the fact that I'm not perfect at identifying blessings and curses. There's also variability based on the distinctive style of each prophet (remember - statistician). It does seem like the Old Testament has a higher percentage of curses, but not enough to say it's all that different.
First off the Lord promises blessings more than curses. Even under the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. It's about a 2:1 ratio of blessings to curses. This means the Lord would rather promise a blessing twice before threatening with a curse. As a parent I've thought about the "carrot or the stick" styles of parenting.
Clearly the Lord feels like there's appropriate times to promise blessings (carrot) or threaten punishment (stick). But God tries the carrot twice before resorting to the stick. I'm going to attempt to incorporate that into my parenting as well.
It's worth noting that the Book of Mormon and Old Testament are much closer in percentage than I expected. It feels like their tones are so different. But while the stories and prophetic styles are quite different the source is the same: The Lord. What is quite different is which blessings or curses are mentioned. Here's only the top ten from each book.
 |
| Old Testament |
 |
| Book of Mormon |
I'm showing only the top ten items in the pie chart because there's so many blessings/curses that are only mentioned once. As you can see there is a strong emphasis on the promised land in the Old Testament, but a strong emphasis on joy in the Book of Mormon. Here's the same thing with Curses:
 |
| Old Testament |
 |
| Book of Mormon |
Kind of noticable that the Old Testament is really heavy on DEATH. The Book of Mormon focuses more on Destruction as a generic term. I think there's two reasons for this:
1) The authors are different.
Book of Mormon was mostly written by Mormon (and his son Moroni, with a good chunk from Nephi) so the style is distinct. The Old Testament has lots and lots of authors, so you'll see lots of different verbage, but death is sort of a uniformly understood term.
2) The audience is different
The Old Testament was written for ancient Isreal - although we can learn from it and special parts were written for us (looking at you Isaiah). The Book of Mormon was written specifically for our time, so you'll see differences in culture. For example "Shame" is listed as #3 in the Old Testament, but wasn't really mentioned in the Book of Mormon. In ancient Israel shame would have been a sore curse, but in our modern world it isn't viewed as that serious.
The bottom line is this: God promises more blessings than curses, about a 2:1 ratio. But the blessings (or curses) given are different depending on who the Lord uses to send his message and who the message goes to.
My next question was whether there were times that had more blessings/curses than other times. The Book of Mormon didn't yeild results that were interseting, but the Old Testament has more verses. Looking through the bible in order gave this graph:
Stat bits - the height is how many times it's mentioned in that chapter. It's in log scale so the really tall peaks don't overwhelm the graph. The idea is to see where the blessings are mentioned more than curses (or vice versa). This graph doesn't really have strong places where blessings are mentioned and curses not.
The Bible isn't actually in chronological order, so I mapped it across time to get this:
The problem is so much of the Bible takes place within a relatively small time frame. So instead I left it in chronological order but spaced the chapters out evenly across the graph:
There is another intersting find I discovered. The top two blessings mentioned in the Old Testament were "A promised Land" and "Joy". Mapping those out chronologically gave this graph:
Which also emphasizes that what blessings are mentioned will depend on the people the Lord is talking to. A promised land was mentioned much less after they already had reached that land.
What lessons do we learn? I think the Lord prepared the Isrealites to understand the blessings and curses with the teachings of Moses. Then as they lived righteously the Lord promised blessings. As they turned away from Him the curses were threatened.
It interests me that right after the captivity there's a surge in blessings promised. I'm assuming it was to bring hope to those suffering. I think we could listen to the words of the prophets to see what stage we are in. Are things going well and the emphasis is on blessings? That's a good sign. Do things seem to be going well and the emphasis is on curses? Perhaps we should look at where we can repent and return to the Lord.
If things are going badly and the emphasis is on blessings maybe we should take hope and turn to the Lord. If it goes badly and curses are threatened, then if we are righteous that probably means things are about to get better. Of course if we're not living righteously then watch out. The end of the Book of Mormon was written specifically to help us understand that scenario.
Just because I like it - here's the top 20 blessings from the Old Testament
No comments:
Post a Comment