Day 345

  • Principle: All that you have should be ‘unto the Lord.'

  • Book of Mormon Reading: Ether 9:1 - 9:22

  • As righeousness enters into the land, the Lord actively blesses His people.  Blessings from the Lord are more than physical.  Study the following list to learn more about the spiritual gifts.

  • What of these, or other, spiritual gifts have you seen in your life?  How do you develop the gifts you have been blessed with?

  • Side Note about verse 19 and the Jaredite animals.  Hugh Nibley (drawing from Marco Polo) teaches:

    • “I think it quite significant that the Book of Mormon associates elephants only with the Jaredites, since there is no apparent reason why they should not have been as common in the fifth as in the fifteenth century B.C. All we know is that they became extinct in large parts of Asia somewhere between those dates, as they did likewise in the New World, to follow the Book of Mormon, leaving only the written records of men to testify of their existence.”
      “‘They have plenty of iron, accarum, and andanicum,’ says Marco Polo of the people of Kobian. ‘Here they make mirrors of highly polished steel, of large size and very handsome.’ The thing to note here is not primarily the advanced state of steelworking in Central Asia, though that as we have seen is significant, but the fact that no one knows for sure what accarum and andanicum are. Marco knew, of course, but since the things didn’t exist in Europe there was no western word for them and so all he could do was to call them by their only names. It is just so with the cureloms and cumoms of Ether 9:19. These animals were unknown to the Nephites, and so Moroni leaves the words untranslated, or else though known to the Nephites, they are out of our experience so that our language has no name to call them by. They were simply breeds of those ‘many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man’” (Hugh W. Nibley, Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites [1952], 217–18).

  • Additional Study: