Source:Nibley:CW06:Ch19:6

Laman and Lemuel's behavior is culturally appropriate

Laman and Lemuel's behavior is culturally appropriate

The character and behavior of Laman and Lemuel conform to the normal pattern. How true to the Bedouin way are their long, bitter, brooding, and dangerous outbreaks! How perfectly they resemble the Arabs of Doughty, Burton, Burckhardt, and the rest in their sudden and complete changes of heart after their father has lectured them, fiery anger yielding for the moment to a great impulse to humility and an overwhelming repentance, only to be followed by renewed resentment and more unhappy wrangling! They cannot keep their discontent to themselves but are everlastingly "murmuring." "The fact that all that happens in an encampment is known, that all may be said to be nearly related to each other, renders intrigue almost impossible."51 "We were all one family and friendly eyes," Doughty recollects, but then describes the other side of the picture—"Arab children are ruled by entreaties. . . . I have known an ill-natured child lay a stick to the back of his good cherishing mother, . . . and the Arabs say, 'many is the ill-natured lad among us that, and he be strong enough, will beat his own father.' "52

The fact that Laman and Lemuel were grown-up children did not help things. "The daily quarrels between parents and children in the Desert constitute the worst feature of the Bedouin character," says Burckhardt, and thus describes the usual source of the trouble: "The son . . . arrived at manhood, is too proud to ask his father for any cattle . . . the father is hurt at finding that his son behaves with haughtiness towards him; and thus a breach is often made."53 The son, especially the eldest one, does not feel that he is getting what is coming to him and behaves like the spoiled child he is. The father's attitude is described by Doughty, telling how a great sheikh dealt with his son—"The boy, oftentimes disobedient, he upbraided, calling him his life's torment, Sheytan, only never menacing him, for that were far from a Beduin [sic] father's mind."54 It is common, says Burckhardt for mothers and sons to stick together in their frequent squabbles with the father, in which the son "is often expelled from the paternal tent for vindicating his mother's cause."55 Just so Sariah takes the part of her sons in chiding her own husband, making the same complaints against him that they did (1 Nephi 5:2), and she rates him roundly when she thinks he has been the cause of their undoing.