Jacob 5

(August 16, 2013)
This chapter has so many things that it is almost impossible to pick out any one thing to focus on.  But, as I read through this time, my mind focused on the fact that tending olive trees is something that is very middle-eastern in nature.  It is something that would have been foreign both to Jacob and to Joseph Smith.  From that, I felt that I had recognized a pair of additional evidences as to the legitimacy of the Book of Mormon.  First, the obvious matter that Joseph Smith would not have understood keeping olive trees and tending them with such detail as is presented here.  But, just as importantly, it was not Jacob giving the allegory.  Jacob didn’t tend olive trees and wasn’t around them.  He never lived at Jerusalem.  Had Jacob been the one giving the allegory (as would be natural, considering where it was in the book), it would have been out of place and suspicious.  But instead, it is a retelling of an allegory that was given by another prophet at Jerusalem, but one with importance to the people in the New World.  It just fits so perfectly, and it is an example of the anecdotal evidences demonstrating that the Book of Mormon was translated rather than written by Joseph Smith.