Jacob 1 - That We Might Persuade Them to Come Unto Christ I'm taking an online economics class right now, which prompted me to think of the definition of economics in the context of the scriptures. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. In the case of Nephi and his successor Jacob, the plates upon which they engraved their record was a scarce resource. They were costly to make and difficult to engrave, and instilling a tradition of passing them through generations was surely cumbersome. Recognizing the great importance of spiritual things and the challenge of maintaining records, Nephi instructed Jacob to prioritize religious instruction saying, " if there were preaching which was sacred, or revelation which was great, or prophesying, that I should engraven the heads of them upon these plates, and touch upon them as much as it were possible, for Christ’s sake, and for the sake of our people" (Jacob 1:4). This priority was not only reflecte
I usually skip genealogies. Whenever a passage of scripture lists a long line of progenitors with difficult to pronounce names my eyes glaze over and I catch myself reading ahead to find where the actual "content" begins. In the case of the genealogy of Jesus, I can appreciate that it is important because he was prophesied to be a descendant of David, but have never been interested in the actual list of names until I learned that the genealogies recorded in Matthew and Luke are actually different. In his article Why Are Jesus' Genealogies on Matthew and Luke Different, Ben Spackman offered three possible reasons why this might be the case: One of the genealogies is actually Mary's One of genealogy is a royal or legal genealogy, and the other is a physical genealogy Joseph had two fathers ( Heli and Jacob—one a natural father, and the other a legal father, either due to Joseph's adoption by Mary's father Heli, or because Joseph and Heli were brothe