Page 7 - Insights Into The Scriptures - The Jaredites

(Chapters 4 and 5 as sample chapters)

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Are There Any Other Cultures That Match the Jaredites?

For this chapter, to initiate an understanding of cultures like the
Jaredites, I want to consider two things that might be familiar to most of us.
These items are the game of chess and the 1998 animated Disney® movie
Mulan. If you haven’t seen that movie, you might want to watch it. Even
though there is much of Hollywood in the film, many intriguing pieces
from the movie are part of the ancient Oriental cultures and match the story
of the Jaredites. We can use the cultural norms of these two things to
understand the Jaredites better.

Chess
Let's start with the game of chess. In chess everything is done to
protect the king, and when the king is killed or captured, the game (war) is
over.
This chess scenario played out for me once in high school. I had a
math teacher that was a chess master. I was reasonably good at chess and
accepted when he challenged me to a game. Because he was so good, his
goal was not only to win, but to take every piece I had before putting my
king into checkmate.
He had me down to one pawn and my king, and I had only taken about
half of his pieces. But in his effort to take all my pieces, he hadn't noticed
that I had cornered his king. I put him into checkmate with my king and
the one pawn and won the game. That was humiliating to him since it was
his first loss to a high school student. (I never played him again, even at
his pleading, so I could always remain the champion.)
This same event can be seen repeatedly playing out in the book of
Ether. It doesn't matter how many soldiers an army has; if they kill or
capture the king, they have won. And it doesn’t matter whether the leader
is killed or captured. It also doesn’t matter whether the leader is deposed
by a battle between armies or whether the leader is removed by a coup by

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