The first topic is the search for gold and silver. To understand more fully this sin, we need to understand some of the economics behind it. Modern readers see that they searched for gold and silver, and all manner of precious ores, and immediately assume that finding them led to wealth. We understand the California gold rush, where the lucky few did find gold, and it made them wealthy.
What we miss in this verse is the final statement. Jacob tells them that gold and silver and precious ore “doth abound most plentifully.” That is the economic contradiction to value. One does not become rich by having what everyone else has in similar quantities. Wealth comes through scarcity. It was the very fact that only a few struck gold in California, and as a percentage of the population of the United States, only very few obtained the gold. That isn’t the inference in Jacob. In Jacob, these ores are plentiful.
Our first clue that we should read Jacob carefully is that our predisposition about the meaning of gold and silver may not inform the issues Jacob will discuss.