The high christology of John has much in common with Book of Mormon christology, where the title page identifies Jesus as “the Christ, the Eternal God” and the Lord himself describes himself as “the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth” (3 Nephi 11:14). Throughout the first half of the Book of Mormon, the promised Jesus is as often as not identified simply as God: for instance, the angel through King Benjamin prophesies that “the Lord Omnipotent, who reigneth, who was, and is from all eternity to all eternity, shall come down from heaven among the children of men, and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay . . .” (Mosiah 3:5). In addition to this similarity in christology, Blake Ostler has suggested that the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants reflect “a major shift from Pauline to Johannine categories of thought” (Ostler, Dialogue 24.1, 93.).  Consequently, it is not surprising that Joseph Smith found so many theological points of contact in the gospel of John.

All the Johannine Discourses—not just those in the Book of Signs but also, and especially, the Farewell Discourses (John 13–17) of the Book of Glory—provide rich material and provocative launching points for discussions of Restoration theology. Time, space, and my own truant participation in this blog only allow an introductory and superficial treatment of two: The Divine Son (5:17–47) today and a single section of the The Life-Giving Spirit (7:16–52) later this week.

Although Jesus acknowledges his identity not just as “the Messiah, which is, being interpreted, the Christ” but also as “the Son of God” as early as his interchange with Nathanael in John 1:47–51, and while he certainly alludes to his divinity and salvific role in his dialogues with Nicodemus (3:1–36) and the Samaritan Woman (4:1–42), the Discourse on the Divine Son is his first, unmistakable public assertion of his divinity and status as God’s Son.

Raymond Brown characterized much of the Book of Signs as “Jewish Feasts and Their Replacement by Christ.” The text only establishes the setting of chapter 5 as “a feast of the Jews” (John 5:1). Because many Byzantine manuscripts read “the feast,” commentators used to assume that the feast in question was the Passover, although this is by no means clear. Instead, a possible alternative suggested by Leon Morris is “the feast of the Trumpets,” or Rosh Hashana, which is attractive because of allusions to the creation of the world, and Rosh Hashana is often associated as “the birthday of the world” and commemorative of creation. This is first evident in the sign, or miracle, the Healing of the Lame Man at Bethesda (John 5:2–16), which precedes the Discourse of the Divine Son, and to Jesus’ references to “his father working” in the discourse itself. The multitude of invalids waiting for “the moving of the water” at the pool, the name of which may mean “House of Mercy or Grace,” resonates with the spirit of God moving over the primordial waters at the outset of creation in Genesis 1:2. The idea is that just as God created in the first instance, Jesus now re-creates, or heals, in this instance. The fact that the healing of the lame man occurs on Shabbat fits the standard motif known from the Synoptics of Jesus’ compassion causing him to ignore contemporary Sabbath restructions, but in John 5 it connects the incident with God completing his creative work in Genesis. As a result, Jesus’ pronouncement at the beginning of his discourse that “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17), connects him with his Father’s divine creative efforts. But, as we shall see, while the Father’s initial creation was finished (shabbat meaning “to make complete, to finish, to stop), Jesus creative, or perhaps re-creative efforts continue

The response of the Jews (John’s standard way, apparently, of usually referring to Jesus’ opponents among the aristocratic, ruling class) to Jesus’ proclamation that he, like the Father, “works” was to seek all the more to kill him “because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). Jesus’ next statement is pivotal, not only for Johannine christology, but also for Restoration theology:

• The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. (John 5:19).

Although Joseph does not seem to have publicly taught or commented on this passage until the Nauvoo period, when he did, it was part of a stunning Restoration declaration during the King Follett discourse of April 7, 1844:

• I wish I was in a suitable place to tell it, and that I had the trump of an archangel, so that I could tell the story in such a manner that persecution would cease for ever. What did Jesus say? (Mark it, Elder Rigdon!) The Scriptures inform us that Jesus said, As the Father hath power in Himself, even so hath the Son power—to do what? Why, what the Father did. The answer is obvious—in a manner to lay down His body and take it up again. Jesus, what are you going to do? To lay down my life as my Father did, and take it up again. Do we believe it? If you do not believe it, you do not believe the Bible. The Scriptures say it, and I defy all the learning and wisdom and all the combined powers of earth and hell together to refute it.

Joseph Smith’s teaching here seems to have not only John 5:19 behind it but also John 10:17–18:

• Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it again.

This last passage actually reflects a unique Johannine doctrinal insight, because in the other gospels and in the speeches of Peter and Paul in Acts and also in their own writings the Jews and Romans take the life of Jesus and then God raises him from the dead. But the Johannine Jesus, uniquely divine, cannot be killed: he must lay his life down. Likewise, he has life in himself to take it up again.

That Jesus may have done this, in fact, in imitation of an earlier act of his Father presents an intriguing doctrinal possibility, but here we are concerned not with what this statement might suggest about the Father but instead with what segue it provides for this discourse’s discussion of the role of the Son. The fact that John 5:19 can be understood with later reference to John 10:18 explains why the next part of chapter 5 turns to a discussion of resurrection: “For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them: even so the Son quickeneth whom he will” (John 5:21). Jesus’ role in raising the dead is connected with the judgment that the Father commits to him (John 5:22–27), laying the groundwork for another doctrinal concept that the Lord unfolded to Joseph Smith as early as 1832.

After teaching that he would quicken those whom he would and that all judgment was committed to him, Jesus proclaimed:

• Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the grave shall hear his voice, and shall com forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation (John 5:28–29).

The fact that Jesus had earlier said that he “quickeneth whom he will” (“quick” being an older English work “for alive” and an antonym for “dead”) may have contributed to the notion that some Christians had had that only the saved or righteous would be resurrected. Yet 5:29 makes it clear that all are resurrected, the righteous “unto life” and the evil “unto damnation.” This passage, of course, proved to be the catalyst for the great revelation that we now know as D&C 76. When Joseph and Sidney Rigdon came upon these verses during the course of their “new translation,” it led to an open vision in which the different degrees of post-resurrection glory were described.

The way to understand Jesus earlier statement in 5:21 about quickening only those whom he would may be to recall the prevalence of realized eschatology in the gospel of John. In this very discourse, for instance, Jesus taught “he that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath (present tense) everlasting life, and shall not come unto condemnation; but is passed (perfect with present meaning) from death unto life” (John 5:24). Here life and death seem not to refer to just physical, that is, biological, life but to spiritual life, which believers can attain to even in this life. Yet the fact that “the hour is coming” when the physically dead shall come forth “alive” makes it clear that John also contains future eschatology. With the judgment, however, however, both senses of “life” seem to obtain: all, good and evil, are resurrected with spiritual bodies, but only the righteous will continue to enjoy true spiritual life (which D&C 76:50–70 equates with exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom). This feeds again into the Joseph’s observation in the King Follett discourse:

• Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you,3 namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power. And I want you to know that God, in the last days, while certain individuals are proclaiming his name, is not trifling with you or me.

Out of time . . . so I will resist the tempting digression into the difference between exegesis and exposition of the well-known, but perhaps frequently misunderstood (but not necessarily incorrect), passage John 5:39 and its ”search the scriptures!”

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

How should we understand the phrase “buy without money and without price”? Much has been written in the last couple of decades on the differences between economic versus gift-based relations. In light of such work, we might interpret Isaiah as effectively arguing that our relation with God is based on gifts or gift exchange, and that there is nothing economic about it. In this sense, God is a god of grace, and to focus on merit-based justice is a mistaken, misguided way to think about our relationship with God.

I am tempted toward this reading of the verse. However, I think it ultimately fails, at least this coarse version of it does. In trying to present a better reading of this verse, I will start with a fairly exegetical tone with my thoughts and gradually become more theological and ambitious in terms of tackling what Jim pejoratively referred to as “the big questions” (his hermeneutic principle #10). I thus plead guilty to grand pontification, with the simple apology that the big questions are what most grip me now.

1. Isaiah 55 and structure

Claus Westermann divides Isaiah 55 into 3 sections:

1. Verses 1–5: An invitation is extended to come to a feast in order to be revived and nourished “without money and without price,” and to enter into an everlasting covenant with God.

2. Verses 6–11: An injunction is given to seek Yahweh and forsake unrighteousness for God’s higher ways since his word has been sent out and will return only after accomplishing God’s purposes, like the rain that waters the earth. There are parallels in this section with Isaiah 40:6ff which is generally considered the prologue to 2nd Isaiah with Isaiah 54–55 the conclusion.

3. Verses 12–13: The departure of Israel from Babylon in order to return home is proclaimed and all of creation sings hymns of praise to Yahweh.

Westermann reads Isaiah 55:1 in terms of deliberate market imagery, like a vendor selling his wares. This market imagery contrasts with the nature imagery invoked to conclude the chapter:

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater . . . . For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree. (55:10, 12–13)

Continuing in the direction Westermann sets out on, it is tempting to take the middle section (“so are my ways higher than your ways” in verse 9) as creating a contrast between the merit-based logic of the human marketplace and the the grace-based logic of nature. In contrast to the “dust of the earth [that] moveth hither and thither . . . at the command of our great and everlasting God” (Helaman 12:8), the logic of the market judgmentally discriminates in an act of rebellious defiance against the exemplary free grace that God offers.

However, if we take this approach to the text, what are we to do with verse 7? It reads,

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

Here we seem to have a rather inconvenient glimpse of the angry, more-justice-than-grace Old Testament God. The mercy being offered here is not as liberal as our (or at least my…) modern sensibilities would prefer. And if mercy is only extended to the wicked after they repent, in what sense is this really mercy? Don’t we have here a case of justice robbing mercy (to invert Alma’s phrase) of its very essence (i.e., grace)?

Westermann, indeed, finds this justice-/works-flavored verse 7 inconvenient and he attributes it to a later redactor. Verse 7 is a “general exhortation without reference to any particular time” (whereas in verses 6 and 8 Isaiah is specifically addressing Israel in Israel’s immediate, specific context).

Westermann, however, is just following a larger commitment to the historico-critical methodology of parsing the Book of Isaiah into 3 distinct units, with at least 3 different authors. Of the three Isaiah’s, it is clearly 2nd Isaiah who seems the most interested in grace and less interested in proclaiming repentance and focusing on inconvenient notions of conditioned mercy, as we seen in verse 7—after all, what 2nd Isaiah seems to understand that some other writers and redactors didn’t, is that conditioned grace is not really grace.

2. Word and profits

Most scholars are in general—though far from unanimous—agreement that 2nd Isaiah begins with chapter 40 and ends with chapter 55. Several commentators argue that 2nd Isaiah can be further divided into chapters 40–48 and 49–55 (see John Oswalt’s commentary, in particular, for analyses and sources). However, in the Book of Mormon, Nephi quotes Isaiah 48 and 49 together (1 Nephi 20–21). I think this is intriguing, and it at least gives us reason to consider linking Isaiah 48 with chapters 49–55.

In light of this approach, it seems significant that the theme of the fall and destruction of Babylon described in chapters 46–47 seems to be left off for a new and transitory theological discussion in chapter 48 regarding the word of God—and it is precisely the word of God that is the concluding topic taken up in Isaiah 55 (55:11 in particular, which I take as the climax of the chapter; more on that below).

At any rate, Isaiah 48 starts out by talking about the relation of the “former things” (48:3), that 1st Isaiah had prophesied about, and the “new things” (48:6) that 2nd Isaiah is talking about. As John Oswaldt summarizes the theme of the first section of Isaiah 48:

In vv. 1–11 Isaiah recaps the argument from prophecy that has been central to his claims in the previous chapters. He shows that God had foretold the events of the past long before they had occurred. He did this to forestall the possible claim that when some great event in Israel’s history had occurred, it was because some other god had done it. Now he has caused predictions to be made that involves a new way of acting. He has done this to show his creativity. If he were a god of this world, then he would have to act in the same ways all the time. But because he is the Creator he can do things that, though new, are consistent with his character. (260)

In contrast to idols, God’s word is creative, able to effect change. This is what Isaiah seems to mean in the complementary closing verse of chapter 55: “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my moth: it shall not return unto me void” (v. 11). This language of the word being “void” should be of particular interest to Mormons, as similar phrasing and themes are used in several other passages of Mormon scripture: Alma 12:23, 26; 42;5 Moses 4:30. God’s word has significant effects, and we can rest assured that God’s prophetic word will prove true, one way or another.

Proceeding with Isaiah 48, we get to some interesting wording in verse 17:

Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; I am the Lord thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go.

This idea of the God teaching Israel “to profit” recalls the language of Isaiah 44:9–10:

Those who make an image, all of them are useless, And their precious things shall not profit; They are their own witnesses; They neither see nor know, that they may be ashamed. Who would form a god or mold an image that profits him nothing? (NKJV)

There is marvelous irony and economic word play here. Somewhat coarsely, we might translate this as: idols are not a good investment. It should not be forgotten that idols were made from silver and gold (Isa 2:20; 31:7), which also served as money (in fact, the word “money” is simply a translation of the Hebrew word for “silver,” which underscores the richness of the irony too easily lost in translation).

So, Isaiah’s claim is that idols are not profitable. This makes sense, from our modern perspective, it seems idols would just sit there on the shelf, not really doing anything except maybe reinforcing vain hopes expressed in desperate prayers offered to the magical powers these statues were incorrectly believed to possess.

Now, in today’s age of global capitalism and highly developed financial markets, the claim that money is not profitable is hard to believe. Just ask any broker or financial advisor and they will happily tell you: wisely invested money will make you money. Yes, there are some risks to various kinds of investments, but if you are smart about the risks you can be sure not to get burned. (Actually, you could also argue that investing in gold statues is not a bad investment, but I won’t try to address this issue till later…!)

If money can often be more profitable than gold statues, does this mean that thinking about money in terms of idolatry is off the mark? To be explicit, the logical argument I am wondering about is as follows: If idols are not profitable, and money is profitable, then money is not an idol.

Surely there are important differences between the kind of idolatry that Isaiah warned about in his day and age and the kind of challenges we are faced with in today’s global marketplace. To help think about the possible meaning and implications of Isaiah’s market imagery better, and its relation to justice and mercy that I mentioned above, I will now turn to three Book of Mormon writers who each use the phrase from Isaiah 55:1, “without money and without price.”

3. Nephi and likening

Nephi quotes Isaiah 55:1 in the context of his latter day prophecy of the Book of Mormon coming forth. Just prior to quoting Isaiah 55:1, Nephi describes the Gentiles at that time as a people who “have built up many churches . . . and preach up unto themselves their own wisdom and their own learning, that they may get gain and grind upon the face of the poor” (2 Nephi 26:25). Just after quoting Isaiah 55:1 (v. 25), Nephi goes on to describe the universality of the Gospel (vv. 26–28), and then to warn against priestcraft and laboring to get gain rather than for the welfare of Zion (vv. 29–31).

This is a curious set of themes that Nephi weaves together. In particular, what the does the universality of the Gospel have to do with priestcraft and wealth-seeking? The word of God, it seems, must be promulgated as a gift, and not commodified and sold for profit. But what does this really mean, and what is the significance of this teaching? And, more particularly, if the word of God is best conceived as a gift, in what sense is it a free gift, and what does this imply about justice as it relates to God’s word?

First, regarding the difference between a gift and a commodity that is sold for money, John Milbank has helpfully written that, whereas economic transactions paradigmatically involve an immediate exchange of goods that have known and identical monetary value, the essence of gifts is a disruption of literal, tit-for-tat, one-for-one economic equivalence. One of the most significant ways that a gift can achieve this is through the power of signification. Milbank writes, “A material thing handed over must be also a sign in order to be a gift” (“The Gift and the Given,” 447).

Consider how Nephi describes his approach to reading scripture, written just before his first major quotation of (2nd) Isaiah: “I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning” (1 Nephi 19:23). The word of God is profitable precisely because it can be adapted to the intentionality of the receiver of the word. D&C 88:33 asks, in a related vein, “For what doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him, and he receive not the gift?” The value of a gift is entirely dependent on the meaning that the gift is understood by the recipient to signify. The word of God functions in the same way: its meaning is entirely dependent on the manner in which the reader interprets and likens what is read.

In this sense, the value of the word of God is dependent on a very personal—or sacred—relation between the recipient of the word and the text itself (or, rather, God, who is understood as the giver of the text). In the Church, various ideas are exchanged about the meaning and significance of God’s word. Out of these exchanges, the central binding and coordinating force of the community is established around which practices and beliefs and centered.

Money functions in a similar way within an economy. Various market participants bring their personal goods together for exchange. Money is used to facilitate the activity of exchange, and prices are formed as the basis around which market activity is coordinated and centered.

Also, in economics, as in communal worship, there is a danger of reification. If dogmatic interpretations of the text become reified by the community, or if the prices established by the market are taken as fixed and objective, rather than subjectively formed by the dynamic forces of the cumulative market participants, then disaster ensues and reality becomes an unwelcome surprise. Dogmatically-regulated readings of scripture might thus be likened to those failed price-control regulations during Carter’s presidency, that I’m (just barely) too young to remember….

In Church, the member who reads only dogmatically becomes alienated from the word which becomes dead to him. The abstract meaning of the word becomes fixed and ceases to be adaptable to the particular core subjectivity that would otherwise make the text live by personal likening of the text in rich and particular truth-producing ways by the faithful reader.

In the case of the market, the prices that were presumed to be fixed and stable can suddenly change. This happened in dramatic fashion with the recent financial crisis. But more worrisome is the way in which the market participant can become dead to the underlying nutritional value of the goods and services that market prices merely signify.

Philip Goodchild argues, “Political economy should . . . be concerned primarily with the distribution of nutrition and time, not with the distribution of exchange value” (Theology of Money, 134). The danger of money is that the pursuit of money becomes an end in itself rather than merely a means of distributing the nutrition, in the form of goods and service, and time, in the form of obligations that money ultimately imposes on market participants who were originally seeking nutrition by means of the market.

And so we see that, like the axe that boasts itself against the hewer of the axe (Isaiah 10:15), the danger of money is that it can take on a force of its own. If care is not taken, this can become the primary force which orients everything that the market participant does and believes. Rather than merely being a tool of the buyer and seller, the market wields control over the buyers and sellers. As Thoreau might say: we don’t ride on the market; it rides on us.

The effect that this kind of market power has on us is easily overlooked, but it should not be underestimated. As Goodchild writes, “The generation of wealth cannot . . . be reduced to the generation of quantities and prices, for wealth is generated by the set of natural, personal and social processes that compose the entirety of human experience” (Theology of Money, 87). Again, the danger is that the money that drives the market becomes the central driving force of our lives.

4. Jacob and corruption

When Jacob quotes Isaiah 55:1–2 he inserts the following phrase of his own in the middle of his quotation: “and remember the words which I have spoken, and come unto the Holy One of Israel, and feast upon that which perisheth not, neither can be corrupted.”

Jacob’s wording here is interesting, especially the use of the term “corrupt.” This term is used later in the Book of Mormon by Christ to warn against the dangers of money worship: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and thieves break through and steal” (3 Nephi 3:19). Similar wording is also used by Nephi—before the coming of Christ—in Helaman 8:25: “instead of laying up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where nothing doth corrupt, and where nothing can come which is unclean, ye are heaping up for yourselves wrath against the day of judgment.”

The term “corrupt” is also used several times in Jacob’s own book. In Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree, “corrupt” is used to describe the trees that bring forth “evil fruit” (Jacob 5:38–39). This idea and imagery seems to echo Isaiah’s idea in the second half of chapter 55 where God’s word is described as not “returning . . . void,” but “maketh [the earth] bring forth and bud” (Isaiah 55:10–11).

But, again, this seems somewhat counter the idea of the word being like pure grace. God’s word is good, not for intrinsic reasons, but because of the effects that it produces. God’s word is profitable? If God’s word is good because of grace, how can such crass, economic language be used to describe it? This underscores the irony at work (better: at play) in Isaiah’s original phrase, “to buy without price and without money,” as Isaiah himself uses economic terminology to describe the fundamentally un-economic nature of Gospel grace in a nearly nonsensical way. What could it mean to buy without price or money? Doesn’t the word “buy” require a notion of price or money to be meaningful?

Perhaps now is a good time to consider rhetorical question posed in Isaiah 55:2 (and 2 Nephi 9:51), “wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labor that which satisfieth not”?

From where I’m sitting, this reads like a scathing critique of our modern, unquenchable consumer culture. Consumption beyond bread does not satisfy; nor does wealth-accumulation beyond what is sufficient for our needs.

I take Isaiah not to be saying that money and markets are bad, per se. Rather, money and markets must be subordinated to agentive acts of market participants, lest desire for corruptible things becomes the defining and controlling center around which the market participant’s world revolves. The world of the market must be subordinated to the world created by God’s word.

Jacob teaches a similar relation between desire for money and desire for God’s kingdom in Jacob 2:18: “Before ye seek for riches, seek ye for the kingdom of God.” Jacob goes on to promise that “after ye have obtained a hope in Christ, ye shall obtain riches, if ye seek them; and ye will seek them for the intent to do good” (2:19). As I read Jacob, and Isaiah, it seems that riches and the kingdom of God are not incompatible, but it is critical that the desire for riches be subordinated to the desire or intent to do good and build the kingdom of God. Otherwise, desire for riches will fail to satisfy. Jacob seems to go even further than Isaiah, and allow that seeking for riches is not incompatible with seeking to build the kingdom, as long as the pursuit of riches comes after a hope in Christ is obtained.

Finally, I will just briefly note (since this is already too long!) that both Isaiah and Jacob seem to come to this understanding of money, the world and and their relation to the kingdom of God through their understanding of the atonement. This is, arguably, the central theme of Isaiah (Oswaltd does an especially good job of arguing for this way of reading Isaiah). And it is the central theme of Jacob’s in 2 Nephi 9. The logic, very roughly stated, is that the tendency of the natural man to desire wealth and power results in inevitable judgment and damnation for God’s people whose word calls them to live a higher law. However, because of the atonement, the corrupting power of the vicious cycle of desire for wealth can be distracted. This makes possible the redemption of God’s people. Moreover, the atonement has the power to effectively redeem markets (including capitalism, I would argue).

5. Alma and idleness

In the first chapter of Alma, Alma accuses a man named Nehor of priestcraft. After Nehor is put to death for his crimes (which included killing a man named Gideon), we are told, “Nevertheless, this did not put an end to the spreading of priestcraft through the land; for there were many who loved the vain things of the world, and they went forth preaching false doctrines; and this they did for the sake of riches and honor” (Alma 1:16). Alma then goes on to describe how the members of the church were persecuted “because they were not proud in their own eys, and because they did impart the word of God, one unto another without money and without price” (1:20).

A few verses prior to this quotation of Isaiah 55:1, Alma claimed that the Nehor incident comprised “the first time that priestcraft had been introduced among this people” (Alma 1:12). It is interesting that this introduction of priestcraft occurs within the first two years of the reign of the judges (cf. 1:23). Is there something about democratic (or, more accurately, non-monarchical) rule that is particularly vulnerable to priestcraft?

Later in the Book of Alma, we read how Alma and Amulek are resisted by a class of lawyers (and judges) who, according to Amulek, makes the following accusation, “the foundation of the destruction of this people is beginning to be laid by the unrighteousness of your lawyers and your judges” (10:27). Our narrator interrupts the narrative and gives a very detailed account of the money system in Nephite society. This interruption in the narrative is marked by two verses explaining how the root problem of these lawyers was a desire to “get gain” and “get money”:

[T]he object of these lawyers was to get gain; and they got gain according to their employ. (10:32)

Now, it was for the sole purpose to get gain, because they received their wages according to their employ, therefore, they did stir up the people to riotings, and all manner of disturbances and wickedness, that they might have more employ, that they might get money according to the suits which were brought before them; therefore they did stir up the people against Alma and Amulek. (11:20)

Although the move away from monarchical rule has surely had many positive effects, the Book of Alma goes to significant length to document an ongoing conflict between the allure and pursuit of money and the preaching of the word of God that occurs after the move toward rule-by-judges. Besides the conflict with Nehor and the money-seeking lawyers which we have just discussed, another closely related conflict arises when Alma contends with Korihor. Among Korihor’s charges against the church leaders is the following:

[Y]e lead away this people after the foolish traditions of your fathers, and according to your own desires; and ye keep them down, even as it were in bondage, that ye may glut yourselves with the labors of their hands, that they durst not look up with boldness, and that they durst not enjoy their rights and privileges. (Alma 30:27)

This language of “rights and privileges”—in the mouth of Korihor—has intriguing resonances with the neoliberal account of political economy. However, rather than exploring this part of the narrative, I wish to focus on the charge that the leaders of the church are teaching and preaching God’s word in order “glut” themselves. The word “glut” is an interesting word choice. First, it has connotations of excess, which might be understood as being more than is sufficient for one’s needs (compare here Adam Miller’s related thoughts on Jesus’ teaching about God versus mammon, and the danger of being excessively concerned about “the morrow”). Second, the word “glut” is used here to describe an explicitly economic charge, namely the church leaders glutting themselves “with the labor of their hands” (cf. 30:31, “glutting on the labors of the people”; these phrases could be understood as wages, or perhaps more generally in terms of their product of labor such as the temple built by the poor as described in Alma 32:5). The term “glut” has, at least in modern English, strong food-related overtones and connotations, as is also used in Isaiah 55:1. Whether Alma (or Mormon as redactor) has Isaiah consciously in mind or not, it seems clear that Isaiah and Alma are at least thinking through similar issues with similar imagery and symbols in mind.

Alma’s reply to Korihor is worth visiting briefly because of the terms that Alma’s response introduce into the narrative of Korihor, terms that have resonances with Isaiah, Nephi and Jacob. After averring that Korihor knows that the church leaders do not receive payment for their service, Alma continues:

And now, if we do not receive anything for our labors in the church, what doth it profit us to labor in the church save it were to declare the truth, that we may have rejoicings in the joy of our brethren? Then why sayest thou that we preach unto this people to get gain, when thou, of thyself, knowest that we receive no gain? And now, believest thou that we deceive this people, that causes such joy in their hearts? (30:34–35)

It is interesting that Korihor accuses Alma of money-seeking since that is precisely the sin that the lawyers and judges were guilty back in Alma 10–11. Why does so much drama in the book of Alma circle around this desire to “get gain”?

Before attempting to answer this question directly, let us consider the topic of idolatry as it explicitly appears in the first 42 chapters of Alma (since Alma disappears from the Book of Alma in chapter 43).

In general, idolatry does not seem to be a major theme in the Book of Mormon, at least not explicitly, at least when compared to the Old Testament prophets. After the small plates, there are only a handful of references to idolatry in the first two books of the large plates. My hypothesis is that this is not unrelated to the fact that, in contrast to the ongoing monarchical rule in ancient Israel, Nephite civilization became more democratic and more focused on what we might somewhat anachronistically call the rule of law.

Alma mentions idolatry in only four passages, and in all four passages the theme is more explicitly linked to riches than mentions of idolatry in prior Book of Mormon passages. In the first of these passages, we read,

For those who did not belong to their church did indulge themselves in sorceries, and in idolatry or idleness and in babblings, and in envyings and strife; wearing costly apparel; being lifted up in the pride of their own eyes; persecuting, lying, thieving, robbing, committing whoredoms, and murdering, and all manner of wickedness. (Alma 1:32)

The context here seems to suggest that “idolatry or idleness” means that idolatry is being used synonymously with idleness. This is a rather surprising from the perspective of Old Testament theology, where there is no hint that idolatry and idleness are related (that I know of—please let me know if I am overlooking a passage somewhere!). However, in the Book of Mormon, this is a common idea. Consider another passage in Alma’s account where idols are mentioned:

And assuredly [the harvest] was great, for they had undertaken to preach the word of God to . . . a people [whose] . . . hearts were set upon riches, or upon gold and silver, and precious stones; yet they sought to obtain these things by murdering and plundering, that they might not labor for them with their own hands. Thus they were a very indolent people, many of whom did worship idols, and the curse of God had fallen upon them because of the traditions of their fathers. (Alma 17:14–15)

Here, it is the Lamanites who are being described, but from a Nephite perspective. The narrator specifically explains that the search for riches springs from a desire to avoid laboring “with their own hands.” The next sentence begins with the word “thus” and immediately goes on to describe the people’s indolence and idol worship.

Alma 7:6 also discusses idolatry in close proximity to the problem of setting one’s “heart upon riches and the vain things of the world.” Alma 31:1 also mentions idolatry. There it is in the context of socioeconomic class inequality.

So, what are we to make of this close linkage between idolatry and idleness in Alma’s work, and how might this relate to the themes of Isaiah 55:1 that we’ve been exploring?

First, it seems that the concept of idolatry shifts in Nephite society as they become more democratic to something more closely linked to work and the workings of a productive networked economy. That is, if democratic society is, for whatever reason, more colonized by economics than monarchical society, then the concept of idolatry is more usefully understood in terms of wealth-seeking than the ancient forms of idolatry practice.

Second, it is interesting that Alma establishes such a close link between a desire for riches and the problem of idleness—after all, it is precisely the opposite of idleness that is the most obvious route to riches (namely, hard work!).

This then relates back to the desire for corruptible goods that can’t satisfy that we discussed previously in the context of Isaiah 55:2 and Jacob’s teachings on the importance of a desire for riches to not supplant desire to build the Kingdom of God.

We might thus understand Alma’s thematic as a translation to the world of economics of the Christian idea of losing yourself to find it. At least in a long-run sense, it seems that the most prosperous kind of society, and economy, is one that is—ironically—not preoccupied with seeking wealth or prosperity.

Third, Alma’s teachings on an absent work ethic has interesting implications for thinking about the issues I raised at the beginning of my remarks related to faith/grace and works/justice. Since this is already too long, I will simply conclude by making a couple of provocative claims as to how this might be understood.

Grace should not be understood as an absolutely free gift, but is better understood in terms of gift exchange. That is, grace is offered universally, via God’s word, but there are effective strings attached. God has promised that his words will not return void. That is, his words will be effective. Thus, his words will effect a change of heart and repentance. Those whose hearts are changed will have their desires changed. This will lead to works that produce joy, and economic prosperity. This sets the stage, then, for a just judgment to take place by which the righteous, who have received the grace offered by God’s word and subsequently begun to produce good works, will be saved.

But, lest I am misunderstood, their good works will emphatically be only (or at least primarily) the product of grace initiated by the word of God that is offered freely to everyone—where “freely” does not mean no strings attached (if nothing else, it is hoped that the gift will be received), but that it is offered universally, without respect to anyone’s past.

God’s word might alternately be understood as being eschatological in that it disrupts the natural flow of time, creating a new life and world that has the power to redeem the natural world. This could be linked back to the idea of repentance mentioned above, with more being said about how God’s word undoes the colonization of space and time that is effected by money and financial markets, respectively. However, this is a topic for another day.

Here’s the frame: I’ll assume that the text is not a static picture or representation upon which I ought to reflect. I’ll assume that the text is not an object of contemplation.

Rather, I’ll assume that the text is itself an agent, something more like a computer program than a still from a movie. The point of the text is to do something, to make something happen, to enroll some agent or entrain some agent in some other agent(s)’ project.

The text is an operation. It’s a plug-in that needs to be run.

But we’ve got compatibility problems, cross-platform issues that require the text to be translated back into machine-code and then creatively recompiled. If we want it to run – rather than function as a museum piece – then we’re going to have to port the text onto the kind of platforms we’ve got available. We’re going to have to render the text sufficiently pliable to cross the gap.

Hopefully, however, once it’s up and running, this kind of program will work more like a virus than a webpage and it, in turn, will exapt, repurpose and reconfigure the operating system itself in surprising ways.

Jesus-text: an applet for inception.

Such a project can fail in a number of ways: (1) we might not be able to get the text to run at all, (2) we might get it to run but only after having changed so much code that, functionally, it no longer resembles the original program, or (3) it might crash our operating systems altogether!

The measure for success in creatively porting this text: when we finally run it on the extant platform, does it produce charity?

Which brings me to my second assumption: whatever this text does, it will be for nothing if it does not show charity.

2. Thesis

My working hypothesis is this: Matthew 6:24-7:1-2 consists of a series of concrete instructions for how to pay attention.

What does this matter? Attention is the sine qua non for both charity and Spirit. There is neither life, nor love, nor spirit without attention.

3. Overview

I’m going to take 6:24-34 as an operational unit. I’ll tack on 7:1-2 for fun.

With respect to 6:24-34, I’ll take 6:24 as the unit’s own thesis and 6:25-34 as an extended explanation of that thesis.

With respect to 6:25-34, I’ll take v25 and v34 as equivalent to one another. The initial explanation of v24 is given in v25 and then repeated, by way of conclusion, in v34. The middle section, verses 26-33, elaborates at length on the explanation of v25/34.

4. The Text

Here’s the full KJV text, formatted in such a way (with awkward blockquotes) to diagram the structure I outlined above:

²⁴ No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

²⁵ Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

²⁶ Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

²⁷ Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

²⁸ And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

²⁹ And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

³⁰ Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, [shall he] not much more [clothe] you, O ye of little faith?

³¹ Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

³² (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

³³ But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

³⁴ Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day [is] the evil thereof.

5. Two Masters

I’m going to take the claim of 6:24 that “no man can serve two masters” as an injunction against multi-tasking.

Effectively, Jesus’ claim is that no person can pay attention to two things at the same time. Paying attention to two things at the same time amounts to not paying attention.

Here, “paying attention” means “serving.”

If you try to pay attention to two things at the same time, then you’ll fail to pay attention because your attention will bifurcate into “love” and “hate.” Instead of attending to and serving things in light of what they need from you, you’ll end up judging them in terms of your own preferences, in terms of your own likes or dislikes. This bifurcation of attention into modes of (self-) preference (i.e., love/hate) is the root of sin.

6. Take No Thought For Your Life

Jesus’ advice about how to pay attention – that is, for how to attend or serve – is repeated five times in these ten verses. It boils down to this: “take no thought.”

This is pretty straightforward advice. To pay attention to what’s going on, we have to stop thinking about stuff.

When you’re playing with your four-year old, stop thinking about what other stuff you have to do. When you’re on a date with your wife, stop thinking about the “insensitive” thing she (purportedly) did the other day. When you’re going to bed at night, stop thinking about your credit card balance. Et cetera. Be where you are, do what you’re doing.

Verse 25 initially encapsulates the gist of Jesus’ point by saying that you should “take no thought for your life.”

How does taking no thought for my life help me to serve and pay attention? For starters, in order to serve and attend to others I’m going to have to stop thinking about my life. If I’m thinking about my life when I’m supposed to be paying attention and serving, then my attention will bifurcate into preferential judgments about the stuff at hand.

Example: “I really should be paying attention to how well I wipe my baby’s bum while I change his diaper so he won’t get a rash, but I don’t like the smell of this poop so I’m thinking instead about going to the movies later.”

However, Jesus also has something more in mind. Taking thought for your life, he says, amounts to taking thought for what you are going to eat, drink, and wear.

Shouldn’t we take thought for these things? No, because life itself is “more than meat, and the body than raiment.”

What is this “more”?

7. Take No Thought For the Morrow

Verse 34 recapitulates, by way of conclusion, what Jesus means when he says that we should take no thought for our lives: “take no thought for the morrow.”

What is this “more” that life is? This “more” is the present moment. Life is more than our thoughts about what we ought to do next (or what we did or didn’t do yesterday). Life is more than this thinking about tomorrow. Life is the excess of this (unchosen) present moment, a moment that is too much, too full, to be mastered and, instead, can only be served.

Why do we prefer our thoughts about the future to the fulness of the present? Thoughts about the future are thin enough that we can manipulate them according to our preferences: in our fantasies about the future we get to play the master. But if we want to be in the present moment, the only way to be there is to serve.

Seek first to serve. Seek first “the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,” and all the rest of the future stuff “will be added unto you” because the present moment is always full enough to “take thought for the things of itself.” Tomorrow will bring its own “opportunities for service” (i.e., he kakia) that will be “sufficient unto the day.”

8. Judge Not

All of this advice about how and why we need to pay attention is then neatly summarized in these famous verses.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (7:1-2)

Pragmatically, in order to pay attention, we must suspend judgment. We must stop judging things in terms of our preferences. We must stop taking thought for our lives. Life is more than preference – it’s service.

Judgment: the practice of taking (rather then receiving) thought.

With what judgment we judge, we shall be judged. If we suspend judgment and, instead, attend and serve, then we will be served in turn. The Father will feed us. God will clothe us. All the other things of life will be added unto us.

That is, if we can manage to pay attention.

There is a lot of background to consider in my reading, but allow me to provide a very brief description of some of the chief concerns of environmental thought, particularly within the fields of environmental ethics and environmental theology.  Their relevance to the Book of Moses will be pretty obvious.  First of all, it is assumed that, as Aldo Leopold once argued in 1949, “We can only be ethical in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”  The reason, in other words, we have allowed the degradation of the earth is because we have lost a capacity for such recognition in the physical world around us. Some environmental thinkers would describe an ethical relationship with nature as one that acknowledges our human presence in the world as one kind of subjectivity in the presence of others.  Intersubjective experience with nature, in other words, shapes and conditions the human imagination to treat nature as a presence, not as unfeeling object.  Of course, this has led to all kinds of debates and disagreements over how we define the subjective presence of nature, how might it differ, if at all, from human subjectivity, and how important, therefore, is humanity in the broader context of all biological life.

The question appears to be one of wondering whether or not the world is anthropocentric (human-centered) in which we play an exceptional role as the telos of creation or biocentric (life-centered) in which we are just one life form among many, even if the most dominant.  A more biocentric conception of human being is often the result of studying, say, the story of the evolution of life, the intricacies of ecosystems, and the immense diversity of many life forms.  It is also often assumed that polytheistic religions tend to be more biocentric since they place less emphasis on the special role of human beings and more on the plurality of life forces and subjective presences in the world. The assumption is that biocentrism is needed to help to mitigate against the human tendency to prefer our own short-term interests to the long-term and collective needs of broader systems of life.  This has led to some very direct and forceful attacks against the Western tradition of humanism and of religion, especially of the monotheistic variety.  Specifically, the criticisms focus on the human tendency to assume that human needs always take priority over all other forms of life, that the life of the mind and of the spirit is more important than the life of the body, which in the hierarchy of things tends to be relegated to a position of inferiority.  Spirit over body, heaven over earth, eternity over this moment in time, individuality over collectivity, transcendence over immanence—these are the priorities of the West, or so the logic goes, and in such a scenario, it is easy to see why concerns for the well-being of the earth, of the body, and of animals, plants, watersheds, etc. might seem less relevant to our pursuit of salvation. If nature is dead, insensate matter, or a much lower order of life, what difference does it make what we do to it?  It would be a mistaken overstatement, however, to assume that environmentalism is a wholesale attack on most of what the West holds dear and a fetishization of non-Western cultures or of science, as most anit-environmentalist hacks have it.  Although these are real tendencies in environmentalism, one of the most remarkable developments of religious culture in the last 40 years has been the development of carefully considered ethics within all religious traditions and most particularly within the monotheistic traditions of the West, in an effort to identify the grounds for human responsibility to and for the well-being of the environment.

I will point to what I consider to be a few of the most salient and exceptional doctrinal contributions of the Book of Moses (and pass over those shared by the Genesis account) and in each case suggest some of the reasons how these doctrines strike a needed balance between anthropocentrism and biocentrism and thus provide healthy grounds for a strong environmental ethic.

First, we learn that we are created in the image of an incarnate God.  While Genesis teaches that we are created in the image of God, the Book of Moses states more explicitly that we are created in the image of the Savior.  In Moses 1:6, the Lord tells Moses “thou art in the similitude of mine Only Begotten” and in 2:27, the verse adds the following to Genesis 1:27: “ in the image of mine only Begotten created I them.”  We are created, in other words, in the image of a son of God who would take upon him flesh to be the incarnate God.  This isn’t the most revolutionary of differences, since it is somewhat subtle, but it points to the central idea that the human condition is a combination of the body and spirit, of the divine and the earthly, and that this is, indeed, the very nature and sphere of the Creator Himself, a being of flesh and bone, familiar with the intricacies of the Creation as well as with the sufferings of the earthly condition.  Of course, Mormon doctrine stipulates a Father of flesh and bone in any case, but these verses seem to clarify that our model is the same God who created the earth, assumed a body here, and suffered and sanctified the life of the body, perhaps culminating in that remarkable moment when Jesus eats fish with his disciples in a resurrected body.  I want to ask what difference it makes to understand humanity as being in the image of the Son of God, as opposed to evolved from “lower” life forms.  I am completely convinced by the overwhelming evidence of evolution, so I have to wonder what it might mean to dignify an evolved life form that is indeed kin with all the earth.  At the very least it implies respect for all life, implied in 2:22, which is an echo from Genesis: “And I, God, bless [every living creature that moveth]: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the sea; and let fowl multiply in the earth.”  This implies the ethic that biodiversity is its own good end.

This deep intersection between the body and the spirit is further emphasized in the unusual doctrine that all things were created spiritually before they were created physically. It is clearly stated in Moses 3:5: “For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth.”  This doctrine goes right to the heart of the criticisms raised by environmental thinkers and provides the clearest doctrinal basis for the answers to those criticisms that have been provided by ecotheologians.  It has been challenging for monotheistic theologians to provide an adequate doctrinal basis for insisting that in some sense nature is indeed spiritually alive, intelligent, or otherwise present. This is because of the strong condemnations of polytheism and animism that we find throughout the traditions, and the tendency to equate nature worship with misplaced or idolatrous affections.  Some ecotheologians have tried to put spirit into all non-human physical matter by arguing that the earth might in some sense be a kind of body of God, or an extension of his presence. Of course, Mormons have suggested that perhaps the two accounts of the creation in Genesis are accounts of the spiritual and physical creation, but as far as I am aware, this is a Mormon interpretation only.

The spiritual creation precedes any rainfall on the earth, as indicated in this same verse, suggesting that fresh water would become the key to unlock the forces of biological life.  This accords with one of the more stunning passages in all scripture where we learn that the universe and the human condition are shaped by a grand and cosmic chiasmus: “ye were born into the world by water, and blood, and the spirit, which I have made, and so became of dust a living soul, even so ye must be born again into the kingdom of heaven, of water, and of the Spirit, and be cleansed by blood, even the blood of mine Only Begotten” (6:59).  Born of the spirit before coming to earth, we are born in the womb of blood and water.  Spiritual birth is a sanctification of the biological conditions of life, an echo in reverse of the voyage from heaven through the birth canal, capped by the reception of the Gift of the Holy Ghost.  It is only fitting then that God would be of flesh and bone and that the earth itself, the very site of our sufferings, of our toil, of our separation from God, would become the place of return, of restoration of our unity with God.  So too is it fitting that the conditions of the fall (working for food and survival, being subject to sexual desire, experiencing sexual union, and suffering through childbirth and parenting), through the sanctification of the spirit, are not the conditions of our alienation and separation from God, but our means of recovering wholeness, of truly becoming living souls.  Moreover, it is fitting that the image after which we are created is that of the Son of God, that our bodies evolved from dust, and blood, and hard-scrabble struggle for survival over millennia would ultimately be an image of a sanctified and perfect being.  There is something spiritually immanent about all biology and all accident, and all biological process implied here.  That, I know, is a huge can of worms, but it is worth pondering.  It at least implies the need for us to be inherently interested in the workings of physical life, in the diversity of life forms, and in the ways in which physical life is not transcended by the spiritual but is rather informed by and informing of the ultimate verities of the spirit.

Men and women existed, we are told, in heaven, but “there was not a man to till the ground,” no Adam, or as the original Hebrew suggests, a man of the soil, earth-man, man made of dust.  To be human is to be of the dust, to be destined to return to the dust, but to have a temporary probation, like a tree, as a “living soul.”  Indeed, perhaps one of the most remarkable doctrines to emerge from the Book of Moses is the understanding that the combined spiritual and then physical creations of life make of all living things, “living souls” as we are told in verses 9 and 19 with regard to trees and animals.  This implies a kind of spiritual continuum or kinship that undergirds all life forms.  Granted, it does not compromise the specialness of the human condition (created in the image of God), but it does suggest that the specialness of humanity is not categorical or all pervasive.  It is an ambiguous specialness, and the ambiguity seems important to ethics.  Precisely because we do not know exactly on what grounds we are equal to animal and plant life and on what grounds we are distinct, it seems we are placed in a constant state of wonder, a kind of spiritual uncanny, in which by looking into the mirror of nature, now we see ourselves, now we don’t. Before the fall, God commands that all animals should come to Adam “to see what he would call them, and they were also living souls.”  His dominion, in other words, begins with a creative act of naming and continues as a responsibility to ensure the healthy reproduction of all life.  Some of this we can take from the temple, which clearly teaches the right of all living things to fulfill the measure of their creation and to have joy in their posterity.  Curiously, Adam is commanded to “dress” and “keep” the Garden and to avoid the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, (how it matters that this is before Eve is created is a question to consider). The implications of this doctrine are enormous, especially with regards to the ethical treatment of animals, and while this has been given some attention in Mormon scholarship, the significance of trees, for example, as living souls has not been fully understood or explored.  I like that we are told that “out of the ground made I, the Lord God, to grow every tree, naturally, that is pleasant to the sight of man; and man could behold it” (3:9).  The aesthetic value of contemplation, the allure of trees’ always idiosyncratic and unique forms and colors, are here placed in highest priority, and the joy of gaining a relationship with creation, even before the value of use (later in the same verse we read, “and man saw that it was good for food”).  The implication is that language itself (and all of culture by implication) is a function of this wonderful encounter with the strangeness of biological forms.  Nature, in other words, is always central to our spiritual and cultural self-understanding, or at least should be.  To the degree that we lose that sense of wonder, that experience of aesthetic pleasure, or degrade its beauty beyond repair, we are compromising these spiritual recompenses of physical life.

The ambiguity of our continuity and discontinuity with all other life forms and its ethical implications is most powerfully exemplified by Moses’s own experience witnessing the creation that is the pretext for the account we are reading.  I want to end with a consideration of this moment.  [Confession: This last section is adapted from a portion of my MSH paper from 2009]

The vision begins with God’s declaration that Moses’s human specialness qualifies him to become a witness of the whole earth, a kind of integrated understanding of the human within the planetary that the ethics of global climate science has recently begun to attempt: “thou art my son: wherefore look, and I will show thee the workmanship of my hands.” After seeing the whole of it, he lies exhausted, slowly recovers, and notes: “Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing.” This might sound like what some environmentalists have called for: a thorough debunking of the specialness of humanity. And yet Moses’s discovery of his nothingness appears to be his unique human privilege, thus proving this as a false dichotomy.  It is neither a biocentric nor anthropocentric universe but a theocentric one that places humanity in a position of simultaneous liminality and centrality.  Moses is uniquely situated among God’s creations to discover his own nothingness in relation to the complexity and beauty of the whole.  Awe and wonder are his human privilege, not knowledge or possession. When he is tempted by Satan, his power of resistance comes from a determination to learn more about the mysteries of the earth: “I will not cease to call upon God, I have other things to inquire of him.” His anticipation of greater understanding is rewarded with an even deeper vision: “Moses cast his eyes and beheld the earth, yea, even all of it; and there was not a particle of it which he did not behold, discerning it by the spirit of God.”  This leads to his vision of the creation of the world. That Moses discovers, like Adam, that he is a wonderful combination of the spiritual and the physical, that he is a living soul along with plants and animals, provides the grounds upon which an ethical relationship to nature might be established, one that does not diminish nor denigrate the specialness of human being nor the inherent beauty and worth of all creation.  As I noted earlier, as Adam contemplates the strangeness of nature’s spirituality, he discovers his particularly human capacity for awe and wonder. I want to highlight the fact that one of Satan’s main objectives here seems to be to distract, pervert, or otherwise ruin the special and strange relationship between humanity and the creation, suggesting the central importance of this relationship to our own spiritual health and growth.

In conclusion, the LDS account of the creation teaches that we can identify spiritually valuable and ethical uses of natural resources because they are facilitated by and enhance our sense of wonder of our spiritual kinship with the whole of the earth, stimulate a desire for deeper knowledge, and respect biodiversity; only these kinds of acts (ecological restoration comes to mind) are spiritually holy, redemptive, and enact the conditions of a Fortunate Fall.  Acts that decrease wonder, teach us that nature is mere dead matter, stop our growth of understanding, or insist there is no way to act in our human self-interest and in the interest of the web of life, are profane, tragic, and therefore enact the unfortunate conditions of man’s profound alienation from God.

We deny the earth’s holiness when we assume that we have the promise that there is enough and to spare regardless of how we use earth’s resources or when we assume that if the earth appears to be dying or suffering, it must mean we are supposed to let it happen. These are attitudes that are almost fanatical in their devotion to the instrumentality of nature; they see science, in other words, merely as technology, as a certain means to use the world, not as the work of naming and building relationships to other living souls, or at least trying to imagine the earth on its own terms. They are also views that are bent on avoiding self-questioning and circumspection because they are uncomfortable with circumstances that demand judgment and action despite incomplete knowledge and high stakes.  Moses’s recognition of his nothingness is a powerful tool of resistance to Satan’s temptation to want to artificially elevate human significance and power.  In their adherence to false certainties, these attitude refuse the need to engage our own moral agency.  When religious beliefs are motivated by fear rather than love, they shield us from confronting the limitations and uncertainties that science sometimes inspires; when this happens faith would seem to be disingenuous in its claims of universality and even in its claims to morality.  As I have suggested, the alternative is not to declare that one knows the meaning of all things, but to remember that religion is a call to faithful and moral action on behalf of what we love, which is usually more important and far-reaching than what we can claim we know. In short, it is our choice: religion can either help or hurt in rising to the moral challenges of living on the earth, challenges that have perhaps existed from time immemorial but that global climate change has only recently made evident that we can no longer avoid with impunity.

1. A Material Semiotics

Broadly, my hermeneutic approach could be described as a “material semiotics,” but the kind of material semiotics I’ve got in mind requires us to read the relationship between the “material” and the “semiotic” as working in both directions at the same time.

It is pretty banal (though still important) to point out that signs are themselves material and, thus, have a kind of life and independence of their own.

Signs, as obstinately material, never quite do what we want them to do, never quite say what we want them to say, never quite go where we want them to go. There is always some gap between what we thought we meant to say, what the sign does, and what the other receives. There is always a bit of “creative” translation involved as these gaps are negotiated. Meaning is the concrete result of this often ad hoc, material process of semiotic compromise and negotiation.

But the materiality of signs is only half of what I mean by “material semiotics” and, I think, the more familiar, “post-modern” half.

It is true that signs must be qualified by matter – we must recognize their material autonomy (and, hence, their capacity for “errancy”) – but, I’m claiming, it is perhaps even more important to recognize the semiological character of matter itself.

2. The Epistemological Trap

If we recognize the material character of signs but not the semiological character of matter, then we’ll remain stuck within a “representational” notion of signs.  That is to say, we’ll end up thinking that the “gap” between me, the sign, and the recipient is an epistemological gap.

This, I think, is not the way to go.

If the gap is fundamentally epistemological, if the gap is fundamentally a mark of my inability to ever really know or say or articulate the solid and unified reality of the world as it actually is, then every negotiation and compromise necessitated by the material character of the sign will always indicate a failure on our part. If our willful, material, and compromised signs are about representing the uncompromising reality of the world, then they will always and inevitably fail. Such is the much ballyhooed postmodern predicament.

3. A Semiotic Materialism

Enter the qualification of matter by semiotics. It’s my claim that not only are signs material, but that matter is itself semiotic.

This is to say that, when we speak and use signs, we are not engaging in a practice that is foreign to the materials of which speak. Signs are not a way of “overlaying” material reality with a “representational” system that will hopefully more or less “fit” the way things actually are.

Rather, signs are just another variation on the way that all material things - that is, all real things – interact with and relate to one another.

Any entity really relating to any other entity in any conceivable way is doing essentially the same thing that signs do: they are crossing gaps and creating relationships by compromising, translating, and negotiating a relationship that produces a connection between the parties even as it fails to exhaustively unify them.

Here, the gap between a sign and a thing (or a thing and a thing!) is not a representational or epistemological gap. Rather, the gap between signs and things (just as with things and things!) is ontological in character.

In this sense, a material semiotics breaks with a classical understanding of the “material” world on a key point:

Where a classical materiality assumes an automatic, underlying, and substantial compatibility of all material things with one another - such that Nature is always already treated as a single, unified field and our representations of it can only weakly and unsuccessfully hope to mimic this original unity in a fragmentary way – a material semiotics assumes that matter itself (not just our representation of it!) is fundamentally multiple, fragmentary and heterogeneous.

On this view, material stuff can be brought into relationship with other material stuff, but only with a great deal of work and only by way of translations, compromises, negotiations, etc. that respects the multiplicity, autonomy and material irreducibility of each existing thing.

When a carpenter builds a house, when a tree makes sap, when a bacterium reproduces, they each must engage in the same difficult work of negotiation and translation and this work is always only tentative, fragile, and in need of repetition.

Hermeneutics is not qualitatively different from photosynthesis.

4. The Upshot

The upshot of this position is that if matter is itself semiotic, then when we negotiate and translate by way of signs we are not betraying reality but engaging in the very same work that makes anything that is real be real. In other words, in a material semiotics, hermeneutic compromise is not a failed representation of the real but just another mode of more or less successful engagement with it.

Because reality itself is not already a smooth, unified field but a broken and fragmentary network of heterogeneous matter, the broken and fragmentary character of signs and hermeneutics positively confirms rather than negatively denies the legitimacy (and necessity) of the interpretive endeavor.

[Note: In additional to all the reasons supplied by contemporary science to think the nature of matter in this semiological way, Mormons may also have good doctrinal reasons to agree to the extent that we take seriously Joseph Smith's claims that we are co-eternal with God and that the hetergeneous, and quasi-independent multiplicity of this world is not an accidental, temporary feature but, in fact, goes all the way down to the bottom of eternity itself.]

5. Implications

What does all of this have to do with hermeneutics? Here is a brief summary of some critical implications that follow from a material semiotics:

1. All interpretive work is inherently creative and productive. It may involve repetition, but it must repeat with a difference. It doesn’t just represent something that is already there, but always makes something new. And, crucially, this making something new is now understood as a good thing.

2. Interpretive work is real ontological work, not just representational, epistemological work. It is as real as building a house or running telephone wire. It gathers, collects, collates, aligns, translates, negotiates differences, creates alliances, defines oppositions, sets up tensions, lays out networks, and demands perpetual upkeep just like any other material endeavor.

3. The measure of an interpretation’s success is not its representational “correspondence” with an already smoothly connected reality, but its ability to produce stable and durable (though not perfect or effortlessly permanent) connections between hetergeneous and “naturally” fragmentary groups of stuff. The larger the scale of the connections and the more durable and self-sustaining the connections, the more successful, real, and truthful the interpretation is.

A key caveat, here, to this third point: the success of an interpretation is not just dependent on the number of humans that it is able to effectively convince but (at least as importantly) on the number of nonhumans that it is able to effectively gather, connect with, and persuade. If all human beings (perhaps even together with some gods and angels!) agree that dogs can fly but neither the dogs nor gravity are convinced by your proposed interpretation, then it’s not a very good reading. Because material relations are themselves semiological, all the material stuff out there in the world has to be persuaded by your reading as well.

You may offer a brilliant, popularly-supported reading of Genesis 1 as requiring that the earth be 6000 years old, but if 4.5 billion years worth of rocks and weather disagree – well, sorry, but you’re out of luck ;)

6. Conclusion

What I like about this approach is that (1) it removes from the hermeneutic endeavor itself the stain of any “original sin” of representational betrayal, (2) it takes hermeneutic work seriously as real ontological work, (3) it takes seriously and positively the need for ongoing interpretive network building, (4) it doesn’t arbitrarily insulate our interpretive work from the real world but, instead, construes it as just another variation of the only kind of work that is real, and (5) it allows us to view this ongoing, interpretive work of building larger and larger networks of material (human and nonhuman) things as part and parcel of that divine work of at-one-ing that God and Christ are themselves perpetually engaged in.

When we read a text, we’re not just playing with signs but working to reveal the glory (and potential durability) of the world itself.

Alma’s Wisdom-Poem to Helaman
[Al. 37.35–37]

B. W. Jorgensen

Poetry in the Book of Mormon has received far less attention than its doctrinal and narrative content, and (outside the well-known and frequently discussed “Psalm of Nephi” [2 Ne 4.15b–35]) even less close reading. One large recent exception, Richard Dilworth Rust’s long chapter in his Feasting on the Word (1997), ranges over at least a score of examples with helpful lineations; yet even Rust’s perceptive discussion seldom attempts really close reading. The present verse-division and two-column prose format of the Book of Mormon have naturally obscured many occasional poetic passages, though the first edition’s long chapters and paragraphs would have obscured just as much or more; but it’s also true that poems might be even harder to detect in ancient biblical manuscripts. Still a reader, especially reading aloud, may occasionally strike a few sentences or verses in the Book of Mormon that, in their cadenced syntactical and semantic parallelism, sound startlingly like the Hebraic poetry of Psalms, Proverbs, Job, or the Prophets. Beyond the interference of print conventions there also lies the difficult question, debated by scholars of Biblical Hebrew, of the line between “parallelistic prose” and indubitable poetry.

Still, all problems allowed, I hear these three verses, printed as prose, as a small poem:

35  O remember, my son, and learn wisdom in thy youth; yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God.
36  Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord,  and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever.
37  Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings, and he will direct thee for good; yea, when thou liest down at night, lie down unto the Lord, that he may watch over you in your sleep; and when thou risest in the morning, let thy heart be full of thanks unto God; and if ye do these things, ye shall be lifted up at the last day.  (Alma 37.35–37)

Verse-division here corresponds to sentence punctuation, though it appears that periods could replace any of the semicolons in the passage (as the first two periods here replace semicolons in the 1830 edition); yet the prose format cannot entirely obscure the parallelistic rhythms of the clauses. And although some lines here are often used separately (e.g. the oft-quoted first two clauses of v. 37), it’s also easy to sense these lines as a coherent unit of expression, of heartfelt and heart-thought exhortation, continuous with yet separable from what precedes and follows them.

I’m not the first or only reader to notice a poem here: I’d not read his chapter when I first discussed Al 37.35–37, but Rust also cites these verses as an instance of Book of Mormon poetry, “Alma’s Instructions to Helaman,” printing them in two strophes of seven and eight lines and italicizing some key words and phrases (86–87). I want to give closer and more extended attention to what he remarks on very briefly (a dozen lines). And beyond that, I want to suggest that readers of the Book of Mormon might well have a richer and more memorable experience of its language and its religious insights if its poems were printed as poems (as Grant Hardy also prints these verses in his Reader’s Edition), at least if we learned to read them as poems.

These verses occur in Alma’s “commandments” (or instructions, or charge) to his eldest son Helaman, who did not accompany Alma and Shiblon and Corianton on the mission to the Zoramites, and specifically just after he has charged Helaman as his successor in keeping and continuing the Nephite records. Apparently Mormon includes these “commandments” to Helaman, as well as the briefer instruction to Shiblon and the much longer discourse to Corianton, at this point in his abridgement of Alma’s record because this is where they occurred: after the Zoramite mission and just before a Lamanite invasion starts a long war. Mormon calls this “an account [. . .] according to [Alma’s] own record” (35.16), which I take to indicate that chapters 36–42 are a (largely) verbatim transcript, or an insertion, of Alma’s own writing into Mormon’s abridgment.

It may strike a reader as odd that Alma says “in thy youth” to Helaman, who is his eldest son and perhaps a mature man with responsibilities such that he could not leave Zarahemla for the Zoramite mission; his entrusting the records to Helaman (37.1–2) would also suggest Helaman’s readiness for a sacred responsibility. Yet still he has said “thou art in thy youth” (36.3). “Youth” for Alma may be not so much a matter of age as of experience, of whether one has yet begun to “learn wisdom” (37.35). But the call to attention, “O remember, my son,” also suggests the standard situation of ancient near-eastern wisdom poetry, in which a member of the older generation, a father (or at many points in Proverbs, the personified Lady Wisdom), addresses “my son,” a “youth” of the younger generation.

Alma 35.35–37, comprise a “wisdom-poem” set into the midst of a (mainly) prose discourse. In fact these verses occur as a kind of hinge in chapter 37 between Alma’s discussion of the sacred records and his typological interpretation of the Liahona, which he is also entrusting to Helaman. It would be interesting and instructive to study the relations among these segments of chapter 37, but I want to concentrate only on the wisdom-poem itself.

To disclose the poetic (and even, it seems to me, rather musical) structure of this passage, I will re-set it in lines. My lineation differs from Hardy’s and from Rust’s at only a few points, the most salient being my assignment of the initial call to attention as a separate line; the near-identity of our independent lineations suggests the stability and “legibility” of poetic form in this passage. I’ve set each “verset”—the term Benjamin Hrushovski and Robert Alter prefer, also used by Fokkelman alternately with “colon”—as a separate line, but also grouped them in sets of two and three which would correspond to binary and ternary “lines” in Kugel’s, Alter’s, and Fokkelman’s analyses of Biblical poems.

O remember, my son,

and learn wisdom in thy youth;
yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God.

Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support;
yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord,
and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord;

yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord;
yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever.

Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings,
and he will direct thee for good;

yea, when thou liest down at night,
lie down unto the Lord,
that he may watch over you in your sleep;

and when thou risest in the morning,
let thy heart be full of thanks unto God;

and if ye do these things,
ye shall be lifted up at the last day.  (Alma 37.35–37)

It’s generally not hard to recognize Biblical poetry by its use of parallel phrases or clauses, and that is what we can hear in this passage, after the introductory call to attention, “O, remember, my son.” That call itself looks like a standard formula in wisdom-poetry; consider “My son, hear the instruction of thy father” (Prov 1.8), “Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father” (Prov 4.1), “My son, attend unto my wisdom” (Prov 5.1), “My son, keep my words” (Prov 7.1), or Alma’s own more expansive “And now, O my son Helaman [. . .] I beseech of thee that thou wilt hear my words and learn of me” (Al 36.3). Alma’s poem, in fact, seems to be an “instructional” expansion of his testimony in Alma 36.3. James G. Williams in his article on “Proverbs and Ecclesiastes” in The Literary Guide to the Bible explains that one sub-category of wisdom-poetry is “instruction,” characterized by imperative verbs (270), which dominate these verses.

The parallel phrases or clauses of ancient Hebraic poetry, called “versets” by Hrushovski and Alter, occur commonly in pairs, sometimes in threes, with the second (or second and third) verset continuing, amplifying, or focusing the first, sometimes reversing the order of its key terms (“chiasm”), as in the first pair here (I’ll mark what I hear as primary stresses, to call attention to rhythmic parallels and differences, here the doubling, in terms of stress-count, of the amplifying clause):

and leárn wísdom in thy yoúth;
yéa, leárn in thy yoúth to keép the commándments of Gód.

This suggests either that wisdom is keeping the commandments, or that keeping the commandments is the way to learn wisdom, or that we need wisdom in order to keep the commandments; or all of the above.

In biblical poetry (particularly as Alter and Fokkelman read it), semantic and syntactic parallelism are often joined and reinforced by rhythmic parallelism, a balancing of stress-count, sometimes even syllable-count, between versets. Of course the rhythms of biblical Hebrew cannot exactly carry over in translation, yet English renderings of biblical poems often achieve something like this balance with the stress-patterns of English. With the Book of Mormon, we have no access to its “original” language (presumably a colonial dialect of biblical Hebrew, but any back-translations would be suspect as either speculative or biased); for all practical purposes, English is the original language of the Book of Mormon, an “origin” we cannot go behind. So it makes some sense to attend to the English rhythms and sounds of poems in the Book of Mormon. From the standpoint of rhythmic parallelism, Rust’s lineation, taking “O remember, my son, and learn wisdom in thy youth” as the first verset, yielding two versets with six stresses, makes better sense than my separation of the call to attention. Yet all the examples of the call that I quoted above from Proverbs are separate versets, each completed by a semantically and syntactically parallel verset. In both my lineation and Rust’s, the second verset here approximates a very loose English iambic pentameter (with an initial spondee and three anapests). To my ear, most of the lines in Alma’s poem sound nearly (and often exactly) iambic, with occasionally notable departures from that norm. (This raises the interesting question of where Joseph Smith got his ear for iambic meter in English. My first hunch would be, from the verse prologue of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which is quite skillful, if homespun-sounding, iambic pentameter.)

After Alma’s opening line or lines, I think, we have a set, or line, of three versets, with the second and third again reversing the order of key terms in the first, and also urging habits of action that complement the petition recommended in the first:

Yéa, and cry´ unto Gód for áll thy suppórt;
yeá, let áll thy dóings bé untó the Lórd,
and whíthersoéver thou góest lét it bé in the Lórd;

I hear these as one iambic pentameter and two hexameters; the first line begins with two reversed feet and ends with an anapest, the second is catalectic (lacking its initial unstressed syllable), and the third is not only longer but also loosened by three anapests. Notice how the sense of unto changes: it’s one thing to “cry unto God,” but something else to “let all thy doings be unto the Lord”: one petitions, the other offers or submits. Then in the third, longest verset (lengthened by syntax and by syllable-count), unto is replaced by in. All three versets urge a complete reliance on, and dedication to, God, in whom, as Paul told the Athenians, “we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17.28): “all thy support,” “all thy doings,” “whithersoever thou goest.” [bring in Kugel 47ff on “all”?]

Given the development here, which is underscored or expressed in the syntactic and rhythmic enlargement of that third verset, it’s easy to notice a similar progression of focus or intensification as the next pair of parallel versets shifts inward from doings and goings, first to “thy thoughts” and then to “the affections of thy heart”:

yeá, let áll thy thóughts be dirécted untó the Lórd;
yeá, lét the afféctions óf thy heárt be pláced upón the Lórd foréver.

Again the syntactic and syllabic and (thus necessarily) rhythmic expansion of the second, focusing or intensifying verset supports or indeed creates the emphasis; with nine stresses, it’s half again the length of the first, and takes a noticeably longer breath to speak. The “affections of [the] heart,” the moving powers of habit and action, are to be “placed upon the Lord forever”: the unexpected post-positioned adverb forever (after four versets have ended with “God” or “the Lord”) extends the categorial and spatial inclusiveness of the previous set of three versets into the dimension of human and divine temporality, perhaps with a subtle reminder that “the Lord” is “forever.”  (“Endless,” as he declares in D & C 19.10, is one of his names.) [cf also the repeated verset “for his mercy endureth forever” in Ps 136 and elsewhere?]

Next comes what Williams calls an “instruction proverb” (270): an imperative clause, “Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings,” followed by an indicative clause of result or consequence, “and he will direct thee for good,” in which the future tense “will direct” makes an implied conditional promise: if you counsel, he will direct. These versets (a trochaic pentameter followed by a loose trimeter) also embed a chiasm: you “counsel with the Lord”; “he will direct thee.” Perhaps it’s worth noticing here that “for good,” which (like “all thy doings”) stands outside the chiastic pattern to complete the sense of the verb direct, also stands in the end-position earlier occupied by “God” and “the Lord” and, just previously, “forever.” For speakers of English the sound-resemblance—almost a pun—between “good” and “God” is inescapable (in Old English the words sound identical, and are spelled identically, though they diverge etymologically). And also, at least in English, “for good” may carry the sense of “forever” or “permanently.”

The next line, or set of versets, is also an instruction proverb in very similar form, yet it also makes another move of focus or specification:

yeá, when thou líest dówn at níght,
lie dówn untó the Lórd,
that hé may wátch óver yoú in your sleép;

Perhaps this should be treated as two versets, as Rust and Hardy do; but to emphasize its syntax and its cumulative rhythm, and the chiastic pattern of its imperative and result clauses, I’ve given each clause a separate line: a tetrameter with a (fairly normal) reversed first foot, a regular trimeter, then a pentameter with dramatically reversed third and fourth feet. We move here from “all thy doings” to one kind of doing, and a largely passive kind at that: how we lie down at night, and what we may hope for if we “lie down unto the Lord.” It’s a version of the first couplet of the bedtime prayer that millions of English-speaking children used to learn:  “Now I lay me down to sleep; / I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” (Having said that, I should perhaps also note that “unto the Lord,” as it were, replaces “to sleep.”)

The next line or verset-pair begins as a parallel to, and a sequential continuation from, this one; yet it lacks the result-clause. Here, a trochaic “counterpointed” rhythm set up in the first verset (iambic tetrameter with one hypermetrical syllable) by “risest” and “morning” plays through the second (pentameter) verset until its last foot returns to iambic:

and whén thou rísest ín the mórning,
lét thy heárt be fúll of thánks unto Gód;

Thanks, evidently, for God “watch[ing] over you in your sleep,” and that you do rise “in the morning” to a new day’s light (God’s first creation and oldest gift). This pair of lines, in fact, might also call to our minds that ancient poem of the days of creation itself, in Genesis 1, which reiterates “the evening and the morning”; and noticing this, we might also notice how many of the imperatives in Alma’s wisdom-poem echo (the English translation of) the Creator’s first imperative too: “Let there be light.” Alma appears to be working in a poetic tradition he inherits from the brass plates he is turning over to Helaman with this very discourse.

I noted the apparent absence of a result-clause in this set, a parallel to “that he may watch over you in your sleep.” But the result-clause in the last line here does perform that function, even as it sums up the entire poem in a single, encompassing conditional promise:

and íf ye dó these thíngs,
ye sháll be lífted úp at the lást dáy.

The final spondee here, stopping an otherwise steady iambic movement, gives emphatic closure to the whole poem. In the initial regular trimeter, “these things” must surely refer back not only to lying down and rising “unto the Lord,” but to the entire series of imperatively commended habits and actions, after which, and as a gracious result of which, the son who “learn[s] wisdom in [his] youth” “shall be lifted up.”

The language of this poem, compared to the best wisdom-poems gathered in Proverbs, is generalized and abstract, almost entirely bare of concrete imagery (even lying down at night and rising in the morning are routine or even generic actions—which may be partly Alma’s point). [here also bring in Kugel 11-12 on “sharpness”?] If he knew some of the finest work in his poetic tradition, Alma might well have confessed, with Nephi (2 Ne 33.1) and Moroni (Eth 12.23), his comparative “weakness in writing,” his lack of the best poets’ gifts for concrete imagery and metaphoric wit. Still, he does exercise something like their skill with parallelistic structure and development. And in his “own record” he does show us how one kind of wisdom-poem might have arisen from, and been embedded in, the lived and recorded history of a particular father and son.

Ancient Hebrew wisdom-poetry is persistently concerned with actions and results, with, as Robert Alter puts it, “dynamic process moving toward some culmination” (LG 620). In these lines constructed on ancient models and perhaps echoing the primal song of creation itself, Alma is instructing Helaman how to construct and conduct his life, from his “youth” (whatever age he is when he begins to “learn wisdom”) to his “last day,” when to rise in the morning will be to be “lifted up”: a life lived in wisdom or in the learning of wisdom, which for Alma is a life lived “unto the Lord” and “in the Lord,” will finally, “at the last day,” be a life “lifted up” unto that same Lord, who was himself  “lifted up” in order that he might “draw all men” unto him (Jn 12.32; cf 3 Ne 27.14).

[an attempt at a new opening for the essay; extra spaces between paragraphs indicate moments of uncertainty as to how to proceed, and some of those gaps, it now seems to me, might be closed without any transitional material, though for now I will leave them as they stand]

The Hebrew Bible, by one estimate, is “roughly one third” poetry (Fokkelman 1). Does the Book of Mormon, which claims kin with (claims a “traditionary” relation to) the Hebrew Bible, contain poems? If it does, where are they, what kinds are they, how do they each individually and poetically work, and how are they related to the prose narratives and other prose forms in which they occur? Those would be the largest and longest questions any “guide” to poems, or to “poetry” (to me these terms differ), in the Book of Mormon should attempt, however provisionally, to offer some answers to.

There are large obstacles in the way. The Book of Mormon includes no “books” largely or entirely composed in verse, as does the Bible (Job, Lamentations), no collections of songs like those in the Bible (Psalms, Song of Songs), no collection of proverbs in verse. Most (virtually all?) of the Book of Mormon’s sizeable prophetic poems present themselves as borrowed from Hebrew prophetic books, overwhelmingly Isaiah; which means in turn that the great majority of poems, or certainly of poetic lines, so far discerned in the Book of Mormon (by, for example, Donald Parry and Grant Hardy) were written by Isaiah (and for the most part match the translations of the committee that produced the Authorized Version). This would leave us to look for poems original to the Book of Mormon distributed through the prose of the book’s historical narrative and exhortation and didactic exposition. Do such poems in the Book of Mormon (supposing we find them), as Fokkelman says of those in the Bible, “articulate the mass of narrative prose, throughout the entire ‘history’ track . . .” (2)? Or what do they do?

Like English translations of the Bible until the mid-20th century, the Book of Mormon comes to us printed throughout as prose, whether in its first edition of 1830 or later formatted in columns and numbered in verses; and its numbered “verses” (for convenience of citation), just like verses in English Bible translations, rather often do not coincide with the verses (lines) of poems. This problem of distinguishing poems in our books of scripture is not just an unfortunate consequence of print culture; Robert Alter reminds us that “poems are not set out as poetry in the traditional Hebrew text” (Art 5). Apparently many ancient systems of writing simply did not develop visual or spatial conventions (lines, stanzas, etc.) for presenting poems as poems, or signs for marking verse lines as lines. Nonetheless, philologists for centuries have discerned the “rules” for “verse,” and the poems, in various traditions and manuscripts (e.g. the continuing recoveries of Gilgamesh from clay tablets and shards, or the Old English heroic poem Beowulf, which comes down to us by way of a single manuscript that might just as well not have survived a fire). It helps us to hear a poem (especially one that does not use end-rime) if we can see it on the page; ancient hearers and readers (who normally read aloud) seem not to have needed such aids; or at any rate they did not have them.

So it’s not surprising that different readers of the Book of Mormon in its standard printed formats have not all discerned the same poems. Hardly any LDS reader now would question the designation of 2 Nephi 4.17b–35 as “The Psalm of Nephi” That this poem starts in the middle of a numbered verse nicely illustrates the problem of discerning poems without the aid of typographic or spatial conventions; that Parry sets just less than half of its numbered verses in his “parallelistic patterns” may be an even stronger demonstration. (Or does the psalm start at 15b, then lapse into prose at 17a and restart at 17b, as Hardy prints it?) The brief “wisdom poem” I propose to discuss here, Alma 37.35–37, has not been uniformly recognized: R. Dilworth Rust and Grant Hardy do set it as a poem (though they set its lines slightly differently), but Donald Parry sets only vv. 35–36 as verse (dividing the first lines differently from Rust and Hardy to display their chiastic pattern). Both Parry (partially) and Hardy (entirely) set Al. 37.33–34 as verse lines (with different lineation), while those same numbered verses do not strike me as a poem with anything like the clarity that vv. 35–37 do. It appears that even among readers on the qui vive for poems, not all look out at the text with the same formal traits in mind, or they look out differently.

Such differences in discernment of poems in the Book of Mormon must partly if not largely reflect the continuing lack of full or exact consensus even among the most poetically attentive readers of the Hebrew Bible.

The big problem has been, and still is, in James Kugel’s title phrase, “the idea of biblical poetry”: “what,” as Kugel asks, “is the difference between what is called biblical poetry and biblical prose?” (76).  This turns out to be less simple than one might wish or suppose. In The Idea of Biblical Poetry (1981), Kugel traces the effort to discern and define biblical poetry, and especially to discover a “meter” for it, from late antiquity to our own time; and as Robert Alter sees it, he “comes perilously close to concluding that there is no poetry in the Bible, only a ‘continuum’ from loosely parallelistic structures in what we think of as the prose sections to a more ‘heightened rhetoric’ of parallelistic devices in what we misleadingly label verse” (Art 4). Though Alter agrees strongly with Kugel on many issues, I find Kugel’s rigorously cautious and circumspect, not to say skeptical, arguments on this critical point harder to get around than Alter does. [more on Kugel’s arguments here? Lack of an inclusive word for “poem” or “poetry” in Hebrew, hence application of a term and concept foreign to that language, tradition, and culture?]
Still, what almost no one seems inclined to dispute is that something called (since the English Bishop Robert Lowth’s “discovery” in the mid-18th century) “parallelism”—or something like it—is the main thing to attend to. But what does “parallel” mean, and what aspects of the language in a passage may be said to be “parallel”? Lowth in his De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1753) called it parallelismus membrorum, parallelism of the “members” or clauses, which Benjamin Hrushovski, and after him Robert Alter and J. P. Fokkelman, calls “versets”; yet in many cases the “parallel” members are less than full clauses (sometimes, for instance, a full clause subjoined by a second predicate or complement, with a subject or subject and verb doing double duty for both). James Kugel begins by saying that “the basic feature of biblical songs . . . is the recurrent use of a  relatively short sentence-form that consists of two brief clauses” with a “slight pause” between and a “full pause” at the end (1); he notes that “here and there ternary sentences . . . also occur, but the binary form is definitely the rule in Hebrew and ternary the exception” (10).

Lowth offered three categories of “parallelism”: “synonymous,” “antithetical,” and “synthetic.” Kugel, for one, argues persuasively that synonymous parallels are almost never synonymous, antithetical is “a distinction without a difference,” and synthetic is a “catchall” (12–13; cf. 57–58). Since Lowth the categories have been subdivided and added-on and multiplied, but all that taxonomic ingenuity seems mostly wasted. Fokkelman basically repeats Kugel’s arguments, and calls Lowth’s third category, the “synthetic” or “complementary,” a “basket term” and “a counsel of despair” (26). “In the end,” Kugel writes, “the most significant long-term result of Lowth’s presentation has been the equation of ‘parallelism’ with poetry”; and he regards the continued discovery of poetic fragments in the prose books of the Hebrew Bible as “right and . . . wrong, for the whole notion of biblical poetry is both right and wrong” (286). Not an easy conclusion to feel comfortable with, yet it seems hard to avoid. And perhaps, if we once accept Kugel’s central claim that “Biblical parallelism is of one sort, ‘A, and what’s more, B,’ or a hundred sorts; but it is not three” (58), we can settle down, as Kugel, Alter, and Fokkelman at their best brilliantly do,  to read sentence by sentence, line upon line, and thus begin at least, whether it suits our notions or not, to discern and display the artistry and the meanings that are there.

*      *      *

Like Joe, I am often drawn to questions of reading and writing (or textuality) in the scriptures. And as I’ve gone through this section, I’ve been struck time and again by the implicit ties between the themes of record keeping, ordinance, interpretation, and voice, all of which are generically related to questions of textuality. I had the feeling several times while reading that Joseph was trying to lay out something as plainly and simply as he could regarding these themes—trying to tell me how they are tied up together, and why they are important—but that I simply wasn’t hearing what he was saying. I’m sure we were both equally frustrated. 128 clearly deals with baptism for the dead, but what I propose in this reading is that we miss Joseph’s intent if we stop there. Rather, I think that it’s about baptism for the dead because that ordinance is an essential piece of a larger, incredibly beautiful, and important, doctrine of the salvific relationship between our siblings and our Gods, and the way in which textuality witnesses that doctrine.

Joseph begins his letter with a very practical, even prosaic, account telling us that he will “now resume the subject of the baptism for the dead,” a subject he apparently cannot stop thinking about while he is apart from the saints and “pursued by [his] enemies” (v.1). Verses 2–4 detail how said baptisms need to take place in front of an eye-witness who will then keep a record of the ordinance and that these recorders may then take their record to a general church recorder who will enter their records in a central record. Joseph then reassures us that copying and redistributing the original records in no way diminishes their truth, efficacy, or sanctity: “And when this is done on the general church book, the record shall be just as holy, and shall answer the ordinance just the same as if he had seen with his eyes and heard with his ears, and made a record of the same on the general church book” (v.4; my emphasis). There is also an interesting conflation between the record and the recorder—the subject appears to shift seamlessly between the two, creating a sense both that the record itself has a witnessing voice and that the recorder himself is somewhat ontologically aligned with the record he produces.

After this detailed account, Joseph acknowledges that the preceding instructions might be “very particular,” but then explains that they are so because they “answer to the will of God, by conforming to the ordinance and preparation that the Lord ordained and prepared before the foundation of the world, for the salvation of the dead who should die without a knowledge of the gospel” (v.5). What is this “ordinance and preparation”? Its specific purpose is for salvation, but not for the salvation of everyone: it’s for those who die without knowing the gospel. And it is something that was initiated and/or set up (an ordinance has a beginning; it is something that was prepared) at a specific time and place. We don’t know much regarding the time/place specified as “before the foundation of the world,” but we do know that it was where at least portions of God’s covenantal law were put in place (D&C 132:5), where God’s love was felt (John 17:24), where people were chosen, foreordained, and ordained (Eph. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:20; D&C 127:2), where Christ was prepared (Moses 5:57), and where the priesthood was found (Abr. 1:3). In other words, suddenly these very mundane details regarding record keeping have been radically recontextualized—the work is not clerical, but sacral.

Given the stated topic under discussion (baptism for the dead), and the preceding reference “the ordinance” in verse 4 (where it clearly refers in the context to the ordinance of baptism for the dead), I think it’s possible (and probable) to read the “ordinance and preparation” as a specific reference to the ordinance of baptism for the dead. And, given its recontextualization, it is clear that this ordinance is not an afterthought, or a way to “make up” for a missed earthly experience, but rather has been fundamental to God’s plan from the beginning in the sense that covenant, priesthood, and Christ are fundamental.

In verses 6–18, Joseph proceeds to expand and explain what, precisely, is at stake in this “ordinance and preparation.” He does so by quoting scriptures that deal with the topic at hand and then providing his own interpretation. He first turns to Revelation 20:12, and interprets it to mean that men are judged by the “records which are kept on the earth,” while “the book of life is the record which is kept in heaven” (v.7). This arrangement is then called a “principle,” and it is from this fundamental truth that Joseph will then extrapolate the logic behind the ordinance of baptism for the dead.

In order to explain baptism for the dead, Joseph first turns to its “nature.” The innate quality of the ordinance “consists in the power of the priesthood” (v.8). Note that “consists in” is a construction with a slightly different meaning from the more common “consists of” usage: “consists in” means to have as an essential feature rather than to be composed of. Baptism for the dead is in an essential, intrinsic, even possibly hereditary sense “the power of the priesthood.” That power is first defined in terms of a binding and loosening that, while effected on earth, holds true in heaven. Joseph then provides what he terms “a different view of the translation”: “whatsoever you record on earth shall be recorded in heaven, and whatsoever you do not record on earth shall not be recorded in heaven.” It is this linking of “binding” with “recording”—of sealing with writing—that unites the images presented so far. The seemingly common act of keeping a record of an ordinance performed is, it appears, essentially a part of the ordinance and an act of priesthood power. Or, read another way, the ordinance of baptism for the dead is itself a type of priesthood writing wherein the individual is “bound” to Christ as their name is written over and the name of Christ is “recorded” as their own. This writing goes beyond the mechanics of pen to paper; it is an embodied writing wherein the literal submission of the flesh to guiding hands and created elements press upon the soul the saving name of Christ. This is, as Joseph asserts, “a very bold doctrine” (v.9).

And yet, interestingly, the pen and paper (here metaphor for whatever method of record-keeping is employed) cannot be left behind—Joseph continues to insist on the centrality of “books” and “the records which they have kept concerning their dead” (v.8). Wherever the priesthood power has been given, “whatsoever those men did in authority, in the name of the Lord, and did it truly and faithfully, and kept a proper and faithful record of the same, it became a law on earth and in heaven” (v.9; my emphasis). The keeping of the record according to the order prescribed by God is as essential to a priesthood act as is the authority of the priesthood itself, as is acting in the name of the Lord, and as is proper form, order, intent, and faith. And the result is an addition to both earthly and heavenly law. In other words, man, authorized and acting accordingly, can record law in heaven. Perhaps priesthood, writing, and ordinance are intertwined precisely because it is in this relationship that man, on earth, becomes like God, forming law for heaven and earth alike.

“This is a faithful saying. Who can hear it?” (v.9).

Indeed. The doctrine of the power of the priesthood, which is the essential nature of the ordinance of baptism for the dead, is the teaching that man can become like God, authoring eternal law, effecting saving ordinances, inscribing Christ’s name upon his siblings and submitting to that inscription upon his own soul.

And then, in case we have not heard it, Joseph starts the process of citation and interpretation again. He quotes Matthew 16:18, 19, and then tells us that he is going to explain “the great and grand secret of the whole matter,” which “consists in obtaining the powers of the Holy Priesthood” because with them “there is no difficulty in obtaining a knowledge of facts in relation to the salvation of the children of men” (v.11). There is here a hint of the difficulty Joseph is facing in trying to write out his understanding: with/by the power of the priesthood, one may understand salvation completely and without difficulty, but there is no guarantee that this understanding is able to be shared with others. In fact, it would seem that this knowledge is of a type and intimacy that explicitly denies straightforward transmission. There’s a bit of a catch-22: knowledge comes with the priesthood, but the priesthood only comes then to those without a full knowledge or understanding who have demonstrated faith in and covenanted to accept the terms of salvation. For this reason, Joseph must instead return again and again to this pattern of quotation and interpretation, speaking through other texts, retranslating in an attempt to circle around this knowledge to the point that others may be bought to it through inspiration and the power of the priesthood.

Joseph gives it a good try in verse 12: “Herein is glory and honor, and immortality and eternal life—The ordinance of baptism by water, to be immersed therein in order to answer to the likeness of the dead, that one principle might accord with the other; to be immersed in the water and come forth out of the water is in the likeness of the resurrection of the dead in coming forth out of their graves; hence, this ordinance was instituted to form a relationship with the ordinance of baptism for the dead, being in likeness of the dead” (my emphasis). Again, our expectations are reversed here. Baptism on earth was instituted in order to forge a link to the prior ordinance of baptism for the dead precisely because there needs to be accordance of form and record between heaven and earth (for, as we saw in verse 9, to be like God is to create agreement between the heavenly and earthly spheres).

Given the temporal train of our earthly experience, we expect baptism for the dead to be imitative of the earthly ordinance of baptism, but instead we find the reverse. What is the significance of this reversal? If baptism for the dead is a foundational ordinance, then the framework within which we understand the plan of salvation is adjusted. The plan is not for everyone on earth to accept or reject the gospel. The plan is already for the majority to never receive the gospel, never receive Christ, live, be tested under those circumstances, die, and then wait. Wait for others—statistically practically insignificant others—to develop faith, receive the proper ordinances, continue faithfully, and then develop a desire to share what they have gained so that they begin to seek out the records of those who have died, find them, locate time to travel to a specific sacred site in which heaven and earth coincide through priesthood power and earthly record keeping, and then finally initiate the ordinance(s) through which the waiting dead are inscribed with the name of Christ. If I may, what an odd plan.

This significance that Joseph sees in this situation returns again to the theme of accord between heaven and earth—the very physical qualities of submersion and the lowered font evoke the grave (interestingly, the resurrection is not mentioned here), “that which is earthly conforming to that which is heavenly” (v.13). We are baptized, then, in part because the dead must be baptized. Our covenant at baptism is a covenant to be christs, to submit our bodies to the grave repeatedly on the behalf of our brothers and sisters who cannot perform this work for themselves. We take Christ’s name upon us not (only) for our own salvation, but to bring the powers of heaven down to earth, to work on earth so that the law may be written in heaven and those waiting may receive that which was promised to them by their Father at the foundation of the world.

Again, this accordance is tied back to a parallel accordance in records. Joseph quotes 1 Corinthians 15:46–48, a somewhat complicated passage that regretfully I am going to not take up (but that I probably should have). However, for our discussion the point is that Joseph interprets this passage to relate directly back to the prior discussion of record keeping that initiated and sustains this letter: “And as are the records on the earth in relation to your dead, which are truly made out, so are the records in heaven. This, therefore, is the sealing and binding power” (v.14). This seems like another repetition of what has been said before, but what, exactly, is the relation between our earthly records and our dead? There are two types of earthly records implicit in this discussion: the records that allow us to discover our dead, and the records we make following the prescribed order regarding our dead and the ordinances they have received by proxy. The descriptor “truly made out” seems to favor the second, in which case the relationship can be described in salvific terms: these records witness the ordinance of baptism for the dead, and in doing so participate in the creation of a link between heaven and earth through which one dead may receive the name of Christ.  And, apparently, the records in heaven are/perform the same, and this because things have been executed precisely in order to align between heaven and earth, bringing the two spheres into agreement regarding the salvation of a soul. Understanding this multi-sphered sealing power is, for Joseph, a key: it opens the kingdom through an opening of knowledge (see v.14).

For that reason, I find the next sentence almost humorous in its understatement: “An now, my dearly beloved brethren and sisters, let me assure you that these are principles in relation to the dead and the living that cannot be lightly passed over, as pertaining to our salvation” (v. 15). It’s almost as if Joseph is saying “I know I’m appearing to be a bit repetitive here, but I promise this is really important!” The reason, as he explains with 1 Corinthians 15:29, is that this sealing extends multi-laterally. The Saints’ own salvation depends upon their understanding these principles and putting them into action. Once written over with the name of Christ on earth, one must live up to that name through the continual effort at the salvation of those already dead. “Their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation” (v. 15). This subject—the salvation of those dead through the ordinance of baptism for the dead—is the “most glorious of all subjects belonging to the everlasting gospel” (v.17; my emphasis). I don’t often think about this ordinance, but I believe Joseph is telling us that we should.

Verse 18 follows a quotation of Malachi 4:5–6, and provides a review of all the content covered so far, recontextualized by Malachi in terms of the necessity of “a welding link” between the generations. This is Joseph’s final attempt to describe what is at stake in the relationship between the ordinance and the records. But what I am drawn to instead in this verse is the way in which he frames this review. Responding to the text of Malachi, Joseph explains that he “might have rendered a plainer translation to this, but it is sufficiently plain to suit [his] purpose as it stands” (v.18). And here Joseph subtly highlights his interpretive method: he has been responding to scriptural texts, providing interpretations that simultaneously may be read as translations of those texts. Not a word-for-word translation, but a translation through the key of knowledge provided by the power of the priesthood and its accompanying visions such that the scripture text is transformed, recontextualized, re-read, reinterpreted, and even radicalized by the truth of the doctrine under discussion. I think it is significant that Joseph redirects our attention to his methodology as this crucial, summative point. Joseph has already let us know that he cannot necessarily speak plainly and directly regarding the things taught to him by the Spirit. His repeated attempts at elucidating the relationship between the ordinance of baptism for the dead, salvation, recording, and priesthood show this. But they also demonstrate another relationship under (silent) discussion: the relationship between scripture and voice.

Joseph has returned again and again to the scriptures, opening them with his own individual interpretive voice. He provides a pattern for the seeking and gaining of knowledge, and that pattern centers around reading and rewriting scripture. His methodological reminder at this juncture foregrounds the importance of the individual voice speaking in response to the voices of the dead. Just as we are saved in conjunction with our dead, welded together against the potential cursing of the earth, we are saved together with our dead in our conversations with their words. The written scripture, Joseph reminds us, contains an imperfect impression of a once-living voice and as such, demands our own vocal response. The converted converse. They seek their dead, and they reanimate their words through their own witness received and testimony borne. And in doing so, they engage in a re-articulation that redirects our attention once again to the relationship between writing and salvation.

*            *            *

The thing is, I find it impossible at this point to go on without a brief, speculative break. In considering what Joseph presents to us here in section 128, I keep returning to the idea that the relationship between writing, ordinance, priesthood, and salvation functions on multiple levels. And at one level, I find a highly symbolic, metaphoric image: we must write our name over with the name of Christ because he has already written his body over with ours, our corrupted, mortal, piercing names.

Why unite baptism for the dead with an emphasis on ordered record keeping? Why bring the grave to our remembrance, if not to recall that the grave has been overcome? The very act of recording, of writing down a name, an ordinance received and witnessed, parallels the resurrection in which we all hope. Letters—signs—are organized in an effort to re-present a living soul, and in doing so necessarily submit that soul to death. There is no way in which a word, a name, can capture the essence of a life. And yet, in the act of recording, that name is preserved against the losses of memory, time, and death. The writing of the name permits death, but it does so precisely with the hopeful knowledge that that name will be read again and enter into life. Only the written, only the dead, can be reborn through resurrection.

Christ tells us that he has written our selves upon his palms (Isa. 49:16). His scars witness suffering and redemption; they are a physical source of hope pressing upon our souls.

As are the eternal inscriptions we forge in our lives. Joseph lays out for us a plan in which we have the ability to seal the tear between heaven and earth if we so choose. In which we may write, record, inscribe, seal bind, and weld, creating records that will witness on earth and in heaven the ordinances of salvation. We must write not only to create the record that accords with those eternal, but to participate in a physical, embodied act that evokes death and creates the scarred, inscribed, witness. These eternal inscriptions, forged illogically in earthly circumstance, witness as do Christ’s own palms the ordinances prepared from the foundation of the world. And in them we all, together, dead and living, waiting and distracted, have hope.

*            *            *

From this point on, then, it is no surprise that Joseph cannot contain his voice any longer. The remainder of section 128 appears at first like a distinct rhetorical and stylistic break from the discussion of baptism for the dead. But it is Joseph’s own prophetic, praising, living voice that cannot contain his own witness and praise at the doctrine he has received.

“Now, what do we hear in the gospel which we have received? A voice of gladness! A voice of mercy from heaven; and a voice of truth out of the earth; glad tidings for the dead; a voice of gladness for the living and the dead; glad tidings of great joy” (v.19). Joseph witnesses the returning, living voices of those once dead—the voices of the angels of the restoration—Moroni, Michael, Peter, James, John, the archangel, Gabriel, Raphael, Adam; even God and his Son—these are eternal, witnessing voices that intersect precisely with the earth itself. The accord between heaven and earth can, apparently, come from both sides of the veil as we hear the eternal enter the temporal in the wilderness, the banks of the Susquehanna, in bedrooms and in counties. These voices all proceed to perform the same act: they restore the knowledge of God, “line upon line, precept upon precept” (v.21), so that the saints’ hope can be confirmed.

The voices then shift as the mute earth itself appears unable to contain its praise for the creator: “Let the mountains shout for joy, and all ye valleys cry aloud; and all ye seas and dry lands tell the wonders of your Eternal King! … Let the sun, moon, and morning stars sing together and let all the sons of God shout for joy! And let the eternal creations declare his name forever and ever!” (v.23). Joseph hears beyond the veil, and the result is a return to the scene of creation and the joyful shout at the revelation of salvation.

I wanted originally to explore these voices in greater depth, but find my space and time far spent. Joseph’s own voice here fascinates me in its enthusiasm, joy, praise, and continual invitation. Who can resist his “Brethren, shall we not go on in so great a cause?” (v.22). This is not simply an invitation to participate in the gospel or the building of the kingdom, but, in context, an invitation to participate in the cause under discussion: the performance and recording of ordinances for the salvation of the waiting dead and the bringing of heaven to earth as we become as God is, now, in our mortality. Joseph realizes what he is asking, and knows that seeking such an end will necessitate the fire of trial and purification: “he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and sliver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. Let us, therefore, as a church and a people, and as Latter-day Saints, offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness” (v.24; note the choice not to make his citation of Mal. 3:3 explicit).

The offering? It is, of course, “a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation” to be presented “in his holy temple” (v.24). For, after all we can do, what remains are our welding records to witness our Christ and his atoning, graceful gift.

Section 46 of the Doctrine and Covenants gives general directions about conducting meetings and defines the participants.  This occurs early in the history of the church when some fundamental ideas and practices are being revealed and developed.  I will look at how the section establishes community among a diverse group of people and among people with disparate spiritual gifts.  A recurring word in this revelation that deserves attention is “profit.”  Finally, I have nothing to add and will not rehash the continuum of belief/faith/knowledge suggested in this passage, but look at how circumstances may alter understandings of spiritual gifts.

Community and Diversity

The first group of verses is about the meetings of the Saints.  According to the Smith and Sjodahl commentary, this revelation answers a concern about who should be allowed to attend public meetings (271).  Verse three commands “never to cast any one out.”  The only restrictions are in Sacrament meetings where the commandment not to “cast any one out” is qualified by adding “those who are earnestly seeking the kingdom.”  Nevertheless, those who have “trespassed” should not “partake [of the sacrament] until he makes reconciliation” (v. 4).

While the meetings should be directed by the Spirit.  Jim [Faulconer] makes this observation in his teaching notes:

Verses 2-8 do not form a chiasm, but they do form a related rhetorical form, “inclusion,” in which there is a sandwich of material, beginning and ending with parallel themes or phrases and the filling of the sandwich between them:

a Verse 2: Conduct meetings by the Spirit.

b Verses 3-6: No one should be excluded from your public meetings.

a’ Verses 7-8: Ask God in all things.

Jim then asks: “What is the point of this inclusion?”

Indeed if no one is to be excluded, then all are as one, as directed by God and the Holy Ghost.  The scriptures are replete with instructions for oneness.  For example, Paul taught “One Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4.5); Alma taught “that there should be no contention one with another, but that they should look forward with one eye, having one  faith and one  baptism, having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another” Mosiah 18.21), and so on. Under the topical guide “Unity” are nearly 50 references.

My question, to which the answer may be obvious, is if we are one, if we are all alike who come unto Christ, male and female, black and white, bond and free (2 Nephi 26:30) in what ways are we different and does that difference distract from the sense of community?

One answer lies in a structural sense, in the ideas of Victor Turner in The Ritual Process.  Simply put, in order for a collective community or oneness to exist, hierarchy must be balanced by liminality.[1] So that all are alike who come unto Christ, we all partake of communal, eucharistic body and blood of Christ, we bind together with sacramental covenant, we are nevertheless distinct individuals.

If we are truly all alike, one community without distinctions, how would we learn, serve, and meet the challenges of mortal existence?  How can we love one another when the love that is required is occasionally, even often, the most difficult gesture of the heart?

This Section answers the questions in two ways.  First in verse 7 where the Lord instructs:

But ye are commanded in all things to ask of God, who giveth liberally; and that which the Spirit testifies unto you even so I would that ye should do in all holiness of heart, walking uprightly before me, considering the end of your salvation, doing all things with prayer and thanksgiving, that ye may not be seduced by evil spirits, or doctrines of devils, or the commandments of men; for some are of men, and others of devils.

God knows our imperfections and knows that we must depend on Him with “prayer and thanksgiving.”  If God gives (and forgives) me, liberally, must not I also give and forgive?

Second, and this is the bulk of Section 46, is the enumeration of spiritual gifts.  Such gifts are also mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 and Moroni 10: 8-18.

In Corinthians, Paul avers “Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit” (12.4), thus reiterating differences within union, anti-structure in diversity and unity in spirit.

Moroni’s listing of spiritual gifts follows the admonition from verse 5 that by the Holy Ghost you may know the truth of all things, similar to the beginnings of Section 46 and the admonition to follow the spirit.  Moroni then says: “And again, I exhort you, my brethren, that ye deny not the gifts of God, for they are many; and they come from the same God. And there are different ways that these gifts are administered; but it is the same God who worketh all in all; and they are given by the manifestations of the Spirit of God unto men, to profit them” (10.8).

The listing of the gifts are for a single purpose, to serve the community of Saints, yet their diversity is necessary to fulfill the Lord’s purposes.  In more mundane terms, what foreign language missionary has not needed the gift of tongues?  Or the interpretation of tongues?  Why are some priesthood leaders and auxiliary leaders while others are clerks and secretaries?  Why are some scout leaders and others pianists and organists? For example, I have learned that I do not have the gift of administration, although I might have other gifts that serve the needs of the whole.  “And all these gifts come from God, for the benefit of the children of God” (26).

Profit

Section 46 begins with this admonition: “Hearken, O ye people of my church; for verily I say unto you that these things were spoken unto you for your profit and learning.”  Like many other sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, the initial address establishes the relationship between the speaker and the listeners.  Instead of the more common I am God and you are _____ (to whomever the section is addressed), this is a more general direct address, to the people, from the author of the church.  The repetition of the word “profit” throughout the section is an interesting metaphor for the sense of spiritual progress that can come through our meetings and through seeking out our spiritual gifts.

Webster’s 1828 Dictionary has this entry under “profit”:

1. In commerce, the advance in the price of goods sold beyond the cost of purchase. Net profit is the gain made by selling goods at an advanced price or a price beyond what they had cost the seller, and beyond all costs and charges. The profit of the farmer and the manufacturer is the gain made by the sale of produce or manufactures, after deducting the value of the labor, materials, rents and all expenses, together with the interest of the capital employed, whether land, machinery, buildings, instruments or money.

Let no man anticipate uncertain profits.

2. Any gain or pecuniary advantage; as an office of profit or honor.

3. Any advantage; any accession of good from labor or exertion; an extensive signification, comprehending the acquisition of any thing valuable, corporeal or intellectual, temporal or spiritual. A person may derive profit from exercise, amusements, reading, study, meditation, social intercourse, religious instruction, &c. Every improvement or advance in knowledge is profit to a wise man.

The first two definitions are situated in economic terms.  The third definition makes the connection between “profit” and “learning” more explicit.  The subsequent instructions about meetings tie to the earlier admonition that “when [the saints] are assembled together [they] shall instruct and edify each other” (Doctrine and Covenants 43.8).

The second mention of “profit” occurs in verse 12 in outlining the purpose of various spiritual gifts: “To some is given one, and to some is given another, that all may be profited thereby.”  This restates the previous discussion that the individual gifts are for the good of the whole community.

A mere four verses later, after defining the spiritual gift of “diversities of operations,” the conclusion is again offered “that the manifestations of the Spirit may be given to every man to profit withal.”  This seems to be a reaffirmation that the gifts of the spirit are diverse, particular and individual but for the good or “profit” of the whole body.

The conclusion of listing of the spiritual gifts concedes “That unto some it may be given to have all those gifts, that there may be a head, in order that every member may be profited thereby.”  The gifts are to bless others, even when one person has many or all.  This seems to echo Christ’s admonition that the greatest is the one who serves.  It also echoes Turner’s structure/anti-structure sense of communitas.

Seeking Our Own Spiritual Gifts

Finally, I want to address the verses that have had the most importance to me lately.

To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world.

To others it is given to believe on their words, that they also might have eternal life if they continue faithful. (13-14)

For much of my adult life, I considered that I had received the first gift.  I felt like I had a firm witness, and I was grateful for that gift.  I lived a comfortable Mormon life, even in Nevada.  Then my world changed when my second son, a returned missionary, told my husband and me that he was gay.

Much of what I have discussed and believed about community was shattered by his revelation.  I learned that there is a general antipathy, despite what church leaders have said, toward homosexuality.  Longtime friends became suddenly silent, inquired about our other children and obviously did not ask about our gay son.  Certain church leaders were dismissive, misinformed, and even a beloved cousin made public and hurtful comments.  Whatever feelings our son still carried for the Church as an institution were destroyed by the Proposition 8 campaign in California where he lives.  How can we practice community in theory when the practicality testifies of a range from compassion to intolerance and bigotry?  I emphatically do not want to turn this into a discussion of the Church and homosexuality, but to observe how my own faith has been challenged, as has my comfort and complacency. This situation is not the only issue in our lives, but it consumes a large portion.  My son is gay and that will not change.  He has his own story to tell.  His situation, though, affects all in our family.  Some friends and leaders have been constant with our family, more have not.

In the seven years since we have been openly aware of our son’s homosexuality, I feel like I transitioned from the gift of my own knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to belief on the words of those who have that knowledge.  This is particularly true of the temple.  For years after my son’s return from his mission, he and I would attend the temple together.  We had some spiritual experiences there, for which I am grateful.  However, when I attend the temple now, I hear its compulsory heteronormativity and hear my son’s words about guilt and shame even though he had not acted on his desires.  The temple used to be a place of community for me.  Quite frankly, my husband has more faith than I do that all will work out, that the sealing powers will transcend.  I am left to believe on his words and his witness of the Holy Ghost.

Verses 31-34 have therefore become more meaningful and personal to me:

And again, I say unto you, all things must be done in the name of Christ, whatsoever you do in the Spirit;

And ye must give thanks unto God in the Spirit for whatsoever blessing ye are blessed with.

And ye must practise virtue and holiness before me continually. Even so. Amen.

This reiteration reminds me to love my son.  Despite the human unkindnesses of others, especially Church members, our whole family is part of the community of Saints and should not be excluded.  My son has spiritual gifts that continue to bless others.  I must seek the gifts of the Spirit so I may respond with love and patience to all.  We each seek out our spiritual gifts so we may act on the Spirit and benefit others, so we may become one, meet together and profit each other.

Long gone are the days of fight song singing, youthful exuberance and youthful faith in a covenant community.  Gone are the simple beliefs.  Here and now is my hope for a truly inclusive community of virtue and holiness, for spiritual gifts and for eternal life.  That hope is a gift.

Faulconer, James E.  “Sunday School Lesson 15.”  Posted 3 April 2005.  http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2005/04/sunday-school-lesson-15/.  Web.  15 June 2010.

Smith, Hyrum M. And Janne M. Sjodahl.  The Doctrine and Covenants Containing Revelations Given to Joseph Smith, Jr., The Prophet With an Introduction and Historical and Exegetical Notes.  Revised Edition.  Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1972.  Print.

Turner, Victor.  The Ritual Process:  Structure and Anti-structure.  Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969.  Excerpted in A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion.  Ed. Michael Lembek.  Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002.  358-373.  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=S_jZRPPy2jcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA358&dq=victor+turner+communitas&ots=NPRi9M6N0H&sig=bv46cTjxtSz9nJYIwNKV6Fv6uug#v=onepage&q=victor%20turner%20communitas&f=false 16 June 2010.  Web.

What we have instead of Lehi is a fearless youngster appropriating the narrative, a young man who by swearing allegiance to the Lord and to his father, sweeps aside his older brothers, and uniting physical strength, daring, and acuity, audaciously carries out an impossible assignment: procuring the family records on the brass plates, more precious than the family jewels, to ensure the future of his small branch of the family. With these valuable records in hand, a symbol of authority as palpable as a scepter, this small branch maintains the learning and law of the past and becomes the chosen remnant and representative of the huge family of Manasseh. In this family history, the pen does indeed turn out to be mightier than the sword, as Nephi, the possessor of the pen, inscribes himself as the leader of his people. But Nephi, with his sharp instincts, also lays claim to the sword, an item he steals along with the plates, carries on his journey, preserves with the storied record, and describes in more detail than any other item in his inventory. He values this sword for its materials and its fine workmanship, even more than he does for its power to separate Laban from his head. But the point is that in occupying the double roles of keeper of the record along with destroyer of the family’s enemies, he has inserted himself into the power positions of his society.

The Book of Mormon opens with this strong, action-filled, conflict-ridden story. Nephi, a powerful narrator, immediately takes control and speaks with the authority of his sainted visionary father and of the Lord. He brooks no objections. He is right. Nephi, a younger son, lives in the mythic world of obedience to divine command. His brothers live in a very different realm, the reasonable, observable world. Nephi tells his brothers they are wrong. He is scorned by his elder brothers, but he becomes the leader by virtue of his intellectual and physical power. He is the great man. How do we know? He tells us so.
He greets us imperiously as “I, Nephi,” 1:1 not identifying himself, for all the fuss about his father’s record, as the “son of Lehi.” The “goodly parents” are not only not named, they are dismissed. He is not talking of them, he is talking about himself. The structure of his greeting is like unto a personal first person greeting from the Lord. “I am alpha and omega,” and it is familiar from decrees of king, czar, and caesar, as in “I, Claudius.” The usage is so potent and striking that I intend to use it one day myself when and if I write my autobiography, “I, Claudia.”

The literary quality of the first seven chapters of 1 Nephi in the Book of Mormon is very high. Whatever may have been in the lost 116 pages of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon plates, pages somehow lost by Smith and his friends, they could scarcely be of more interest to the reader than this potent first section which now begins the book. Nephi, with much to prove in these first six chapters, convinces us that he speaks for the Lord through the influence of his father, that he justifies violence and crime in the name of the Lord, that a family and spiritual record–even if the content is unknown–is essential, that people who oppose him by choosing the wrong side will suffer, and that if they do not shape up, they will perish. He assumes authority.

This is a generational conflict. The characters are polarized from the beginning. Nephi, definitely old in soul if not in years, allies himself with the Lord, with Lehi his father, and later Ishmael, his future father-in-law. The realistic Laman and Lemuel, the young adventurers who would like to cast off their shadowy religious restraints, who resist whatever they are told to do, along with some of Ishmael’s progeny, refuse to bow to Nephi’s authority. They can’t see taking orders from their little brother, and Nephi’s tough attitude and his success in doing hard things does not make it any easier for them. Nephi repeatedly castigates them, extensively writing out his admonitions and warnings. To go to a new promised land would seem to offer freedom and opportunity, but poor Laman and Lemuel are bound hand and foot by their virtuous little brother.

As must be clear to all readers by this time, I am speaking about this beginning section of the Book of Mormon in a cool, non-worshipful way. Such rules as I have are to look at this scripture as I would at any other text, giving it a fairly close reading; to look for themes, internal tensions, style, character, and personality; to accept the text as it is, assuming that whatever we have is what Nephi and/or Joseph Smith would want us to see. I also look for the tensions in the text that the author and translator did not intend and that they would just as soon we did not see. I think it is fair to talk about such things. I do not hide my personal views and presence, knowing that objectivity is impossible to achieve. I do try to stay inside the text. For this version of the essay anyway, I have consulted no other sources. Some of my rules can be seen to be contradictory as seems to me to be inevitable in such a complex consideration. If this is an irreverent reading of 1 Nephi, so be it.

Authority

Nephi, having introduced himself, proceeds to list his credentials. He must convince us of his authority before he begins his story. He tells us that he is experienced. He has seen “many afflictions.” Although he suggests that he has observed a lot, and he seems to have suffered some of these undescribed afflictions, he gives us no specifics. In these trials, however, he assures us, that he has always been “highly favored” by the highest powers, not his father, but the Lord. He has been a chosen one. The Lord is not a figure of fear and dread to him. He has “a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God.” Note how this bypasses Lehi, the prophet. Nephi, the good, smart kid, sitting at the feet of the Lord, has gotten to know Him well. He uses that knowledge of God as his authority for writing his story, for “mak[ing] a record of [his] proceedings in [his] days.” 1:1
He explains that he will write with the “learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians,”1:2 a not an unusual blend[] of languages in his time, but one that shows his erudition. He stamps his record with experiential authority, wisdom, and skill, saying that it is true, written by himself, from his own knowledge.

So in three verses, without actually saying very much, Nephi establishes himself as a person to be reckoned with, a young person of great experience with excellent connections. He knows a lot, he knows how to do things, and he acts with impeccable credentials. When he says his record is true, he says so with some justification. After giving us reasons to believe what he says, he tells the story.

Other available narratives

But is this story inevitable? We know we should have had another story, the narrative of Lehi. We can imagine it somewhat, although we do not have it. Lehi was a trusted prophet of the Lord who received insider information about bad days to come. He devoted himself to the Lord’s work, spreading the word. He was obedient, but according to Nephi’s description, though not his statement, Lehi was not effective. Nephi shows his mild father suffering from visions of destruction and praising God with humility and rejoicing. He shows Lehi failing to convince the people of their coming destruction. He gets his instructions in small bits and pieces rather than the whole picture. Lehi manages to get his family away into the wilderness, but they hold back. Nephi pictures his father as wise, good, and obedient to the Lord, but not as a strong leader. Lehi receives much faint praise.

Nephi’s brothers Laman and Lemuel would have had a tale to tell, but they are not allowed to tell it. Damned from the beginning by their arrogant, pen-wielding brother, they get no respect, and considerable denunciation. Lehi’s first mention of them, in Nephi’s record, is to despair of them and their unwilling ways. Their great sins are stiffneckedness and murmuring. They did not want to leave their pleasant lives in Jerusalem. They see their father as old and “foolish.” 1:11 I wish that Nephi had played fair with their reactions and with those of their mother Sariah. They have things to say, cases to be made. I wish that these had been included in their own voices. According to Nephi, they acted as they did because “they knew not the dealings of that God who had created them.” 1:12 Had they not gotten the teachings and experience that Nephi did? What was the difference between their early educations? Why are they not more alike? They are not then hardened enemies. When Lehi, “being filled with the spirit,” denounces the brothers, he is quite able to scare them silent, or so he says, so that “their frames did shake.” 2:14 But shouldn’t they have been handled in a different way? The other older brother Sam, persuaded that Nephi truly speaks by “the Holy Spirit,” believes him. But Sam, another good boy, gets very little mention or quotation. It is all “I, Nephi.”

The Other Other: the Women

What can we say of women in this text? We certainly do not expect much attention to females, and they do not get much
In the heading at the beginning of I Nephi, certainly not the words of Nephi, we get several mentions of women. The “account of Lehi and his wife Sariah” shows both equality and possession in the marital pair. They are named together, but Lehi is possessed of Sariah. Elsewhere, women are important, but seldom important enough to name. The “daughters of Ishmael” who will provide half of the genes of the chosen people in the promised land, are always identified by reference to their father not to themselves by name. We cannot but believe that they had individual names and a mother, but they are still the “daughters of Ishmael.”

Nephi acknowledges his “goodly parents” in the first verse, and Lehi is referred to several times before he is named in the fourth and fifth verses and becomes central to the narrative. Sariah is the only woman mentioned by name in Nephi’s writings. Although Sariah is certainly engaged in such huswifery as is required for a pair who dwell in a tent, the business of food, clothing, cleanliness, caring for animals, and keeping order, she is given only a single scene, that of the household shrew in chapter five when she berates her visionary husband for the loss of her sons and her Jerusalem home. Her complaints are given space in the narrative. She doubts her husband’s visionary nature and blames him for the apparent result of following his direction: The whole family will perish in the wilderness. Nephi indicates that there are more complaints “after this manner.” 6:8 In her unhappiness and doubt, she serves as a foil for Lehi’s faith. The safe return of the sons persuades her that Lehi had indeed been led by the Lord, and she testifies of the Lord’s protection of her sons. This “conversion” of Sariah’s unifies the family who all rejoice, sacrifice, burn offerings, and give thanks “unto the God of Israel.” 6:9 Sariah, who had been murmuring, along with Laman and Lemuel, returns to obedience and belief. Her conviction and testimony get a full hearing. She serves her purpose. One strongly feels that she is given this space, the only time she is allowed lines in this little drama, to show repentance for her doubt. Honestly overjoyed by the return of her sons, she admits that her realistic doubts were unfounded and ill-chosen. She plays her role well.

Apparently there were no sisters in the family. Had there been, how would they have been treated? They would likely have been quiet and obedient, like Sam, but also like him, scarcely or not mentioned. Women are certainly important enough in the development of the Promised Land; they bore the children, the precious seed. They were important enough that a special journey to bring along Ishmael and his family had to be made. And later on, Nephi does accuse some of them, in concert with their husbands, of attempting to subdue him. He also acknowledges their pleas on his behalf on another occasion. This is the section of the Book of Mormon most heavily populated with females. What should women make of this exclusion? Perhaps the New World, like heaven before it, had no female inhabitants. If the men are locked into mortal combat mostly by generational divides, the women who accompany them, are scarcely involved at all.

Three Journeys

The sons of Lehi make two major journeys and one partial journey back to Jerusalem before they leave for good. The first time they go for the all-important record. The narrative shows Laman, who has been chosen by lot to wrench the record from Laban, its protector, failing in two tries, showing how very difficult the task is. His failure opens the way for Nephi, on the second journey–although they have not really returned to the wilderness in between, in desperate, violent, God-approved behavior, to save the day. Here is the fairy-tale archetype. The two older sons fail before the youngest, strongest, and most noble son succeeds. Nephi did not need to include the first failed efforts in his story, but again he uses his brother’s behavior to valorize his own remarkable success. We have not only the events, but Nephi’s self-serving representation of the events.

The third journey was for wives. Lehi’s triumphant prophesies for his seed and the record they will keep seem to remind him and the Lord that something else is required to produce the future generations. In considering the value of women here, shouldn’t this absence of future mates have been acknowledged in the narrative before? Shouldn’t wives have been recruited before leaving Jerusalem the first time? Couldn’t they have been picked up by Laman and Lemuel while Nephi was engaged with Laban? Apparently some decision had already been made that Ishmael’s daughters had been chosen to raise up the seed. But the boys all go back again, this time for Ishmael’s whole family whose hearts are sufficiently softened to travel to the wilderness. Lehi’s contingent brings back a family larger than their own. Ishmael and his wife bring two of their sons and their families, and five daughters, allowing wives for the four sons of Nephi and for Zoram.

Harmony did not long prevail, however, because as they travel in the wilderness, the whole group once more breaks into opposing sides. The rebels are again Laman and Lemuel, their potential wives and two of Ishmael’s sons and their wives–the young turks. In looking over the wilderness, they decide that they would prefer Jerusalem. Even possible destruction is better than those wild wastes. On the side of the angels, not to mention maturity, and the Lord, we find, with no surprise, Nephi and Sam, Ishmael and his wife, and their three other daughters.

This inflammatory conflict becomes physical. Echoing the story of the biblical Joseph, from whom Nephi and his family are descended, the older brothers seize Nephi and tie him, threatening to kill him and to leave him to be devoured by wild beasts. Nephi, with divine help, frees himself from the bonds, escaping death and slavery. How could the older brothers be led into these villainous efforts so quickly? What triggers their murderous lusts? How they must have hated their overweening brother. How can they, within eight verses, truss up their brother to slaughter him and then repent of their evil-doings and offer sacrifice and burnt offerings to the Lord?

The Expansion and Compression of Time

Nephi furthers his own story, written long after the fact, with a cavalier treatment of time. This many-scened narrative takes place over an eight-year period. What distance and difficulty lie between the wilderness and ill-fated Jerusalem? Lehi mentions three days from Jerusalem on the road, but he may go farther in after his first halt. How long does each of these journeys take, the back and forth that eventually supplies the wanderers with the record and the wives? How much superior lecturing do the poor elder brothers endure on the road? During the first return to Jerusalem, they beat their younger brothers “with a rod.” 3:28-29 As on other occasions, the virtuous youngsters are saved by divine intervention. The older boys, who have reason and likelihood on their side, are crushingly told “Know ye not that the Lord hath chosen him to be a ruler over you, and this because of your iniquities?” 3:29. This message comes often enough that the reader would think that they get the idea. But no, the episode is routinely repeated.
Nephi has compressed time, skipping much of the ordinary journey and reporting on some incidents in detail. The journey between Jerusalem and the wilderness must have been difficult with its camel travel, setting up camp and breaking it, hidden and open resentment, escalating bitterness between the older and younger brothers resulting in conflict, only to have their rage quelled by visiting angels. Could all this happen on a journey of three days as Nephi suggests in chapter two? 2:6. Nephi gives us the climaxes of the arguments rather than the escalating arguments. And always, he wins.

Poor Laman and Lemuel. They would have done better to return to Jerusalem and perished in its destruction than to weakly oppose their younger brother. Then they could have been forgotten in their laziness and sins, such as they were. Instead, they are skewered in Nephi’s record forever as the bad boys. They stand as the object lesson for generations of young Mormons who chose the wrong. From their first appearance, they are difficult, disobedient, nay-sayers. Without Nephi’s surety, they see, as we can see, many problems with the plan, and in their murmurings they react against the strange instructions they get. Along with the boys, we can see the need for wives could have been foreseen and taken care of before the family left the city. Laman and Lemuel had cause to think that their dreamy father might have done better. These poor boys are shown as bad from the beginning. They must have been the beloved sons of Lehi and Sariah before they began to murmur, but we do not get those early scenes. They are only the other, the bad ones. Nephi, in self-fulfilling prophecy, describes them as worse than they are. He shows his resentment against them. All this is sad and ironic because we know that in the final accounting, the bad boys are victorious.

We see another dramatic example of Nephi’s compression and expansion of the narrative in chapter 7. Lehi’s sons are returning to the wilderness with Ishmael’s family when many of them have second thoughts. They want to go back. Compressed as this account has been so far, Nephi slows down the clock and begins to expatiate on the lessons that they all must learn, to hearken “unto the word of the Lord.” For more than half of the chapter, we have Nephi’s sermon to his brothers. Have they not seen an angel? Didn’t they get the record from Laban? Don’t they know that faithfulness to the Lord will bring them the promised land? Can’t they believe in the future destruction of Jerusalem where the prophets have been rejected and Jeremiah imprisoned? Do they not realize that a return to Jerusalem will result in their deaths? Why does he need to repeat all these arguments at such length?

Nephi’s tone, as reported here, is persuasive. He is reasonable and kindly. Yet he manages to stir his brothers up to wrath and violence. “They did lay their hands upon me, for behold, they were exceeding wroth, and they did bind me with cords, for they sought to take away my life, that they might leave me in the wilderness to be devoured by wild beasts.” This reaction seems too strong for the sermon that Nephi has preached to them. What is going on?

My own innocent and distant reading of this section is that in retelling the story Nephi extended and softened his own words to his brothers, making them sound reasonable and kindly, to further demonize Laman and Lemuel whom he has irritated beyond reason. He may well have purposely brought them to frenzy by his arguments so that he could once again defeat them by his access to divinity. I think he is justifying himself for future readers. So, even as the brothers tie him up, he prays and is freed from his bonds. His brothers, still wroth with him, attempt to retake him and are only dissuaded by the pleas of Ishmael’s fair wife, daughter, and son. Once again, defeated, the brothers “bow down” before Nephi and plead for forgiveness. Nephi, the good, “frankly forgive[s] them,” 7:20-1, exhorting them to pray to the Lord for forgiveness as well. The chapter ends with uneasy harmony, sacrifice and burnt offerings. 7:22.

My point here is the power of the record and the recorder to shape events for a certain purpose. Nephi convinces us, especially at first, to see events through his eyes and to accept his story. I suggest that Nephi purposely extends his account of this speech, making it less offensive than it probably was, to dramatize his confrontation with his brothers and his successful escape and victory over them. This passage also suggests that Nephi is fighting for the Lord, for His good name, for his authority in shaping events. The Lord’s success must be part of the record. Nephi praises the Lord even as the Lord delivers Nephi.

The Murder

Nephi needs the potent authority that he has established, his obedience to his father and his close communication with God, to explain and justify the most drastic event in his account: the murder of Laban. Nephi carefully sets up the story. Lehi apparently tells only Nephi of the dream in which he is commanded to get the brass plates. Nephi is to tell his brothers and take them to Jerusalem. Lehi suggests that the murmuring of the brothers will prevent them from being successful, setting the stage for Nephi’s great speech of belief in and willingness to obey the Lord. This is the speech with which untold young Mormons have successfully girded themselves to do what seems impossible:

I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them. 3:7.

We know from the thrust of the narrative that Nephi will succeed. But first we see poor Laman suffering the wrath of Laban and the loss of Lehi’s treasure to the greedy kinsman. Nephi lets us know that Laban is a bad man. Nephi’s angry brothers show the impossibility of success with the mighty Laban who “can slay fifty” 3:31 men. Nephi again expands his time to give a faithful speech, reminding his brothers that the Lord “is mightier than all the earth,” 4:1. He likens them to Moses doing the impossible. He reminds them of the angel. He does not really persuade them; they come along reluctantly, following Nephi back to Jerusalem.

The scene is set at night. Think how dark it must have been. Somehow, Nephi, near Laban’s house, comes upon Laban himself, drunken, “fallen to the earth.” Here again we have one of Nephi’s extensions of time, chronicling his gradual decision to do the frightful deed. Nephi, having been the leader and shaker, now is led at every step by “the Spirit.” 4:7-18 Who or what is this spirit? Is this the Holy Ghost? Is this the Spirit that speaks to Lehi in chapter 1? Is this the Spirit that interprets Lehi’s dream to him? That spirit came in the “form of a man; yet nevertheless, I knew that it was the Spirit of the Lord.” 11:11. No identification or description is given of this Spirit, yet this inner voice or impulse, rather than Nephi himself or the Lord, is credited with the coming violent actions. Although Nephi argues against the Spirit’s injunction to slay Laban, saying that he “shrunk” from the task and had never “shed the blood of man,” 4:10 it might be noted that he had already drawn forth Laban’s beautiful sword. The Spirit argues for the murder. The Lord had delivered a vulnerable Laban to Nephi. Laban had tried to kill the boys. He wouldn’t listen to the commandments of the Lord. Laban had taken Lehi’s property. The Spirit tells Nephi that the “Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes” and that “It is better that one man should perish than a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” 4:13
Nephi, persuaded, begins to list justifying reasons of his own. The Lord promised prosperity to his seed for obedience. They have to have the law on the plates of brass so that they can keep the commandments. And finally, that Laban had been delivered into his hands so he could get the records. Nephi again invokes authority: “I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.” 4:18. He repeats this last phrase twice. Killing a man with his own sword makes the victory stronger than just defeating him. Laban has been unmanned.

Nephi changes clothes with the corpse–remember the darkness and imagine the gushing blood–and sets out for the treasury where he impersonates Laban, persuading the servant Zoram to give him the brass plates and to follow him. This scene, right out of an action movie, ends with success for Nephi.

The inevitability that there would have been blood everywhere suggests the possibility that Nephi did not really kill Laban but that this was somehow a ritual murder, a complete overpowering of one person by another, climaxing with subduing the enemy with his own sword. The decapitation seems particularly theatrical. He should have gone for the heart. If the murder is theatrical, so is the sword, likely a ceremonial piece of regalia to be used for authority rather than battle. Or Nephi might have stripped the drunken Laban before the event. Such smart thinking under pressure is certainly characteristic of Nephi. The dramatic murder almost calls for a Tarzan-like act, to plant one foot on the corpse and scream out his ritualistic cry of superiority. Nephi does not go that far However, canny as he is, with no witnesses, he is able to make his own story of his obedience to the Spirit immeasurably stronger with his report of this action. Whether the event actually happened as he describes or not, we have here a sharp harkening back to a primitive world.

Nephi’s skill in writing this scene is much to be admired. Having shown the difficulty of the task, having shown his unwillingness to perform a fatal deed, having persuaded himself that he has good reason to kill Laban, being physically large and up to the task, following directions without implicating the Lord or even his sainted father, Nephi smites off the head of Laban and gets the plates. But again, how valorous is it to kill a defenseless, unconscious man in this brutal way? He could well have knocked him on the head and dragged him into an alley. Laban would have been quiet until morning. Still, according to the narrative, having committed murder, theft, and kidnap, for which he seems to have been absolved of any blame, he returns triumphant.

Things

For all its richness of action, this narrative is barren of things, of detail about real life. When an image is included, it seems to have more meaning than it might in a more ornamented story. Here are a few that registered with me.

“And my father dwelt in a tent.” 2:15.

This verse of a single sentence, stark in its simplicity, comes as a contrast to “Jerusalem, that great city” mentioned above. 2:13. Here we see a rare image of Lehi, having set up his community in the wilderness in a tent, a contrast to his life in Jerusalem, “the land of their inheritance, and their gold, and their silver, and their precious things” 2:11 where his valuable possessions have been abandoned. This dramatic sacrifice of the good life for the hard life of following his Lord gives Lehi strength and moral power. He is a man of visions and strong speeches, not a man of action. His great act has been to leave the city for this tent. He can prophecy, he can have visions, and he can utterly confound his bad sons “until their frames did shake before him.” 2:14 He has the power to cow them entirely. They dare not speak against him. His choice to dwell in a tent gives him power over them, but this power is only temporary. Their resentments continually bubble.

“And I beheld his sword, and I drew it forth from the sheath thereof; and the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceeding fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel.” 4:9.

This description of the sword of Laban is Nephi’s strongest declaration of love in this section. Its inclusion in the dramatic murder scene is a little jarring. Nephi has come on a drunken man in the black of night and has been directed to kill him, yet he pauses in his description of the event to describe the beauties of the chosen weapon, of “pure gold” and the “most precious steel.” Nephi’s artisanal skills are aroused by the “exceeding fine” 4:9 workmanship. Is it likely that he really, in the dark, took the time to examine this fine sword before striking off the head of its owner? But its high quality is presented here, giving ritual importance to this political murder. He values this sword, which becomes a valued religious artifact, more than he does the record that he has killed Laban to possess.

The “plates of brass,” by contrast, merit little praise for their looks, their cunning technology, or their precious metal. For them, it is all religious and historical value. The plates contained “a genealogy of [Lehi’s] fathers; wherefore he knew that he was a descendant of Joseph; yea, even that Joseph who was the son of Jacob, . . . And thus my father, Lehi, did discover the genealogy of his fathers” 6:14-15.

Surely, we are surprised that Lehi does not know his genealogy. He knew where to get the record, that Laban was a kinsman. Would he not have learned that he was part of that great family? His birth seems to have been included on those records. Perhaps he had not been interested or aware of his genealogy prior to his departure from the city. Nephi tell us that they did not know the value of the record and had not felt that it was necessary until “the Lord had commanded us” to obtain the record. After they had searched the plates, they found that “they were desirable; yea, even of great worth unto us, insomuch that we could preserve the commandments of the Lord unto our children.” 6:21. The records were valuable then, for genealogy, for doctrine, and for culture.
Perhaps more important, the presence of these plates allowed Lehi to prophesy, perhaps in the way that the golden plates of Moroni, later exhumed from burial, allowed Joseph Smith to see, prophesy, and write scripture. The presence of the plates allowed Lehi, “filled with the spirit,” “to prophesy concerning his seed.” 6:17 Lehi says many things, but the two dramatic ones that Nephi quotes are that “these plates of brass should go forth unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people who were of his seed.” 6:18. He said that the plates “should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time.” 6:19. These prophesies about what were the early books of the Bible have certainly come to pass.

So Nephi justifies the theft of the plates of brass which allowed his seed access to this early record of his people. He asserts that it was “wisdom in the Lord that we should carry [the plates] with us.” 6:22. But couldn’t Lehi have gotten the plates while he was a great man in Jerusalem, or, not unreasonably, had them copied? It is interesting that Nephi does not copy the genealogy of his fathers into his own record. His descent from Joseph is enough for him. All the genealogy is already somewhere else.

Nephi’s Purpose

Nephi dismisses the genealogical record to write of the “things of God.” 6:3 He wants to convert people to God and save them. He does not write things “which are pleasing unto the world.” He must include the genealogy in that category. He writes things that are “pleasing unto God and unto those who are not of the world” and commands his descendants to follow his writings only with things of “worth unto the children of men.” 6:5-6. What does he mean here? What is legitimate and what is not? He continues his narrative showing how those who follow God win and the others lose. I think that this narrative of God’s words, actions, and teachings among his people is what Nephi plans to include. He will describe, praise, and justify the triumphant God, showing Him repeatedly successful.

If my suppositions here have any merit, what are the implications of Nephi’s plan to say what is “pleasing unto God?” In this early history, Nephi must show a battle between good and evil. Such an account requires continual conflict with an other, and to that end, Nephi feels justified in putting down his older brothers. They could see his limitations. For Laman and Lemuel, the elevation of their brother was a trial that set them on a contrary path continued through their progeny. Nephi shows them sufficiently affected by the Lord’s work to apologize, repent, and make offerings on several occasions, but they must repeatedly fall so that they can once again repent and testify to the greatness of God. Nephi’s extensive account sets up this history for his people in the New World.

We might wonder what the selection of Nephi says about the choices of the Lord for his leaders. All leaders are imperfect due to their human state, and I have been critical of and hard on Nephi here. He must have been seen, due particularly to his talents as writer and fighter, as the best man for the job. Nephi’s boldness and self assurance established a new structure of authority in a new land. Once they reached the new world and lost Lehi and the last vestiges of the old culture’s authority, the people rebelled against each other, but half followed Nephi and stuck with him even though there was nothing other than his self professed declaration of authority to support his claim. Once his believing people have been established in the promised land, Nephi’s record becomes increasingly sermonic. The Lamanite other has departed. Nephi is preaching to the good people, his followers, and bold strokes are no longer required to establish his preeminence.