Tuesday night the New York Philharmonic Orchestra gave a free concert in Central Park.  In the morning we laid down a sheet and when we came back in the evening we had a front-row seat to the whole thing.

The past couple of years, this concert’s initial schedule date has been rained out and they’ve had to re-schedule it.  This time around, despite a weather report that predicted “scattered thundershowers” - there was no problem.  The weather was great.

The evening’s program was:

Shostakovich: Festive Overture
Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4, Italian
Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture
Sousa: Washington Post March
Sousa: Liberty Bell March
Sousa: The Stars and Stripes Forever

Just a note about Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March” - it’s also been used (and may be more commonly known) as the theme music to Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

In that spirit, this year the NY Philharmonic did something that was “completely different” than past years.  They allowed the audience to make a choice as to what the orchestra would play for an encore.  The conductor, Bramwell Tovey (who had everyone laughing with his humorous remarks between pieces), gave us directions as to how to vote using text messaging and the two choices were between “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov or “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix.

The votes were counted by the end of the intermission and according to the director more than 60,000 votes were cast.  The votes were “overwhelmingly” in favor of “Purple Haze.”  It was awesome.

The experience was even better because of a couple of good friends who were with us.  I won’t divulge any names but will simply say that it was a couple I’ve known since my 1993 BYU Jerusalem study abroad experience.

The Awesome Highlighter (yes, that’s what it is called) website provides one of the most convenient applications I’ve seen for marking up and commenting online articles of interest and then saving the links or even posting them to another application (such as Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, etc.).  There’s also a Firefox add-on (scroll all the way down on the page already linked) that makes using Awesome Highlighter features even easier.

Every now and then, when reading the Genesis creation story, I’ll hit the word “bdellium,” look it up and then shortly thereafter forget what the word refers to. It’s not exactly a word that’s come up in conversation.  That is because “bdellium” is defined as “an aromatic gum resin, similar to myrhh” - something we rarely talk about these days.  It is a word that also has an association (in Hebrew) with pearls … but I’m not sure yet what the Hebrew word is for pearl.  I’ll look that one up or talk to someone about it and get back to this post at some point.

It turns out the word “bdellium” appears in the Bible only twice.

Genesis 2:12
And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

Numbers 11:7
And the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdellium.

Here’s the wikipedia entry for bdellium.

Genesis 2:10-14
10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
11 The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
12 And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
13 And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
14 And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

Two of the rivers mentioned in this passage are known today, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The other two rivers, Pison (or Pishon) and Gihon are not recognized on today’s maps - though scholars have some ideas about where they might have been located. The wikipedia links on Pishon and Gihon make for some interesting reading on the subject of these rivers and where they may have been located.

The wikipedia entry for Garden of Eden has a section called “Latter Day Saints’ geography” which reads:

For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the Mormons or Latter Day Saints), the Garden of Eden is believed to have been located in present-day Jackson County, Missouri according to Joseph Smith, Jr.  Independence, Missouri was revealed to be the “center place” of Zion and the original dwelling place of Adam and Eve in the Garden which God planted “eastward in Eden”.  According to Joseph Smith, Adam and Eve traveled 85 miles north to the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman after they had transgressed and were driven from the Garden.  (Adam-ondi-Ahman is sometimes mistakenly associated with the location of the garden itself). As for its location in the western hemisphere, some Latter-day Saints have presumed the continents were not yet separate before the Great Flood and that this approach would be consistent with the configuration of the super-continent Pangaea.  While geologists consider that the continents had separated by the Cretaceous period, some Latter-day Saints and other Christians have pointed to the account in Genesis which states that the earth was “divided” in the days of Peleg. In the Pearl of Great Price, it is claimed that there were lands and rivers that were given names later attached to other lands and rivers as in the Book of Genesis.  The geographic descriptions of Eden in the Bible would therefore refer to entirely different lands and rivers than those carrying the same names today, whose names were transposed after the biblical flood to local lands and rivers in the Near East. By one account Joseph Smith taught that Noah built the ark near modern-day South Carolina.  Thus, it is argued, the offspring of Noah populated the eastern hemisphere.

As a Mormon, I’m very familiar with some of these ideas - though reading this was the first time I had ever heard of Joseph Smith connecting Noah’s Ark to South Carolina. Honestly, I am interested in reading and learning about ideas in regards to these Pison and Gihon rivers and where they could have been located - but I’m not overly concerned about coming to any definitive conclusions on the subject. Nor am I going to try and transcribe Mississippi into Hebrew at any point in the near future.