Eerie similarities

Halloween is less than a week away! Like many of my favorite shows, I plan to use the holiday as a crutch for one episode/post per year. Since the bulk of my posts are BASOTRUSSLs (Blog About Something Only Tangentially Related to the Upcoming Sunday School Lesson), that means I get to shoehorn some spooky into the scriptures every October.

This Sunday we're covering 3 Nephi, chapters 17 through 19. Here's the link to the study guide material. Without further ado, here are the top 10 Halloween connections I could force from that scripture block, listed from most tenuous to least (though the level of irreverence/sacrilege varies widely):

10) Frequent use of the word "which" (see 3 Ne. 17:15; 18:10-11, 27-28; 19:32-34, etc.--about once every six verses on average). Remember, I said we're starting with the least tenuous.

9) Spooky imagery such as the gates of hell (see 3 Ne. 18:13), referring to people as "souls" (see 3 Ne. 17:25), and frequent mentions of the Spirit or the Holy "Ghost."

8) Bobbing for apples is almost like a secular version of baptism by immersion (see 3 Ne. 19:10-13).

7) Halloween is awesome for both adults and children (see all of 3 Nephi 17).

6) Hordes of maimed and leprous and withered people (see 3 Ne. 17:7-9)...sounds like one of those zombie marathons.

5) Speaking of zombies--Nephi's brother Timothy rose from the dead! (See 3 Ne. 19:4.)

4) Starting "before it was yet dark" and continuing throughout the night, many people basically went house to house, giving the same message over and over (see 3 Ne. 19:2-3).

3) The leaders of the community distributed small pieces of free food, and the people ate until they were full (see 3 Ne. 18:3-5).

2) At one point it seemed like the Nephites were all dressed like ghosts--their "whiteness...did exceed all the whiteness...there could be nothing on earth so white as the whiteness thereof" (3 Ne. 19:25). The study guide page linked to above suggests reading chapter 17 aloud. After you've done that, do the same with this verse too--I've long thought it's one of the strangest sounding passages to read out loud. And finally...

1) Many people sacrificed throughout the night in order to be in the right spot when Jesus appeared--just like Linus's devotion to the Great Pumpkin (see 3 Ne. 19:3). When you wait on the Lord, though, you get much more than a bag of rocks.

Happy Halloween from Tales of Hofmann!