dead, the

87:2.6The names of the dead were never spo­ken. In fact, they were of­ten ban­ished from the lan­guage. These names be­came taboo, and in this way the lan­guages were con­stantly im­pov­er­ished. This even­tu­ally pro­duced a mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of sym­bolic speech and fig­u­ra­tive ex­pres­sion, such as “the name or day one never men­tions.”

167:4.3The Jews were in the habit of bury­ing their dead on the day of their demise; this was a nec­es­sary prac­tice in such a warm cli­mate. It of­ten hap­pened that they put in the tomb one who was merely co­matose, so that on the sec­ond or even the third day, such a one would come forth from the tomb. But it was the be­lief of the Jews that, while the spirit or soul might linger near the body for two or three days, it never tar­ried af­ter the third day; that de­cay was well ad­vanced by the fourth day, and that no one ever re­turned from the tomb af­ter the lapse of such a pe­riod. And it was for these rea­sons that Je­sus tar­ried yet two full days in Phil­a­del­phia be­fore he made ready to start for Beth­any.

163:2.2One earnest dis­ci­ple came to Je­sus, say­ing: “Mas­ter, I would be one of your new apos­tles, but my fa­ther is very old and near death; could I be per­mit­ted to re­turn home to bury him?” To this man Je­sus said: “My son, the foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. You are a faith­ful dis­ci­ple, and you can re­main such while you re­turn home to min­is­ter to your loved ones, but not so with my gospel mes­sen­gers. They have for­saken all to fol­low me and pro­claim the king­dom. If you would be an or­dained teacher, you must let oth­ers bury the dead while you go forth to pub­lish the good news.” And this man went away in great dis­ap­point­ment.

135:2.1Af­ter an ill­ness of sev­eral months Zach­a­rias died in July, A.D. 12, when John was just past eigh­teen years of age. This was a time of great em­bar­rass­ment to John since the Nazarite vow for­bade con­tact with the dead, even in one’s own fam­ily. Al­though John had en­deav­ored to com­ply with the re­stric­tions of his vow re­gard­ing con­tam­i­na­tion by the dead, he doubted that he had been wholly obe­di­ent to the re­quire­ments of the Nazarite or­der; there­fore, af­ter his fa­ther’s burial he went to Je­ru­sa­lem, where, in the Nazarite cor­ner of the women’s court, he of­fered the sac­ri­fices re­quired for his cleans­ing.