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At face value, the account in the book of Ether about the brother of Jared’s 16 miraculously luminous stones seems like a rather random occurrence. In the past, some critics of our faith have even mocked the idea. But in the context of ancient Jewish folklore, the story might not be so strange after all. Many believe that Noah used something similar to illuminate his ark. Perhaps the brother of Jared piggy-backed off of what he’d heard about Noah’s stone (whether fact or legend) in order to solve the problem of illumination for his own vessels.
See video transcript here: [We’ll put a link here when available]
From Book of Mormon Central: https://bit.ly/2XZMVuz
“Glowing Stones in Ancient and Medieval Lore,” by John Tvedtnes: https://bit.ly/2XB97Mz
“When Is A Window Not A Window?” (Take it for what it’s worth): https://bit.ly/3gPqhxD
Babylonian Talmud source: https://bit.ly/30abVC6
Midrash Rabbah source: https://bit.ly/307Q12r
Some additional information concerning Jewish tradition on this topic: https://bit.ly/3gSr691
Notes:
-Unfortunately the renowned literary critic Harold Bloom passed away in 2019, so I can’t ask him about this assessment, but maybe this business with the brother of Jared and the glowing stones was one piece of a very large puzzle that prompted him to write, “I can only attribute to [Joseph’s] genius or daemons his uncanny recovery of elements in ancient Jewish theurgy that had ceased to be available either to Judaism or to Christianity, and that had survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly.” -Harold Bloom, “The American Religion,” pg. 101.
-The following quote surely has interesting implications/connections to Joseph Smith’s seer stone: “Rabbinic legend also records, in typically scattered fashion, how the sacred jewel reached Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. … A reference to the Tzohar is perceived when Joseph’s servant finds his cup in Benjamin’s saddlebags and says, Is this not the cup in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth? (Gen. 44:5). The explanation is that Joseph discovered that if he put the Tzohar in that cup and peered into it, he could divine the future as well as interpret dreams. That is how he was able to interpret the dreams of the butler and the baker, and then the dreams of Pharaoh.” -Howard Schwartz, “Reimagining the Bible: The Storytelling of the Rabbis,” pg. 18. Source: https://bit.ly/3dG3IcW
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