A group of Latter-day Saints have decided to honor the late President Hinckley by reading the Book of Mormon in 97 days (to commemorate his 97 years of life). They are issuing the same challenge to Latter-day Saints everywhere and have set up a web site where you can register and log your progress.
It’s a great challenge and a fitting honor. I’ve signed up; have you? ..bruce..
UPDATE: Below is my current progress chart.
Nephi famously stated that we should liken the scriptures unto ourselves (1 Nephi 19:23). To that end, I find it helpful to consider partaking of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a type and shadow of partaking of the Tree of Life, particularly when reading Lehi’s account of his vision (1 Nephi 8). There is, I believe, support for this approach or interpretation found in both Nephi’s vision of the Tree of Life and in the Savior’s own teachings, particularly as found in the Gospel of John.
Lehi’s account (at least, as far as Nephi records it) is focused on his own concern for his family, in particular his sons Laman and Lemuel (1 Nephi 8:35: “And Laman and Lemuel partook not of the fruit, said my father.”). Nephi, by contrast, is focused on what the various elements of the vision mean. In his vision, Nephi is asked by the Spirit of God: “Knowest thou the condescension [lit. ‘to descend with’] of God?” When Nephi confesses his uncertainty, the Spirit shows him in vision the birth of Christ in the flesh. And having seen that, Nephi gets the rest of his question answered:
And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw? And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things. And he spake unto me, saying: Yea, and the most joyous to the soul. And after he had said these words, he said unto me: Look! And I looked, and I beheld the Son of God going forth among the children of men; and I saw many fall down at his feet and worship him. And it came to pass that I beheld that the rod of iron, which my father had seen, was the word of God, which led to the fountain of living waters, or to the tree of life; which waters are a representation of the love of God; and I also beheld that the tree of life was a representation of the love of God. (1 Nephi 11:21-25)
Nephi then goes on to view “the condescension of God”, namely the ministry of Christ, including His sacrifice “for the sins of the world”, all following directly from the love of God, which in turn is tied to two symbols: the fountain of living waters and the Tree of Life.
So I drove out the man, and I placed at the east of the Garden of Eden, cherubim and a flaming sword, which turned every way to keep the way to the tree of life. (Moses 4:31; cf. Genesis 3:24)
Nephi’s vision of the Tree of Life (1 Nephi 11-15) contains imagery that ties into the description in Genesis/Moses of ‘a flaming sword…[keeping] the way to the tree of life’, but only after correcting for an apparent typographical error in the current editions of the Book of Mormon.
Royal Skousen, as part of his Book of Mormon critical text project, has reached the conclusion that 1 Nephi 12:18 in the original Book of Mormon manuscript (which still exists for that passage) says the following:
…and a great and terrible gulf divideth them yea even the sword of the justice of the eternal God…1 (emphasis added)
Note that this differs from our current edition of the Book of Mormon, which reads “word” instead of “sword”.2 This passage describes that which divides the wicked in the ‘great and spacious building’ from the Tree of Life, namely, ‘the sword of the justice of the eternal God’.
Nephi in later explaining Lehi’s (and his own) vision to his brothers Laman and Lemuel uses slightly different — but, in my opinion, related — imagery:
And I said unto them that it was an awful gulf, which separated the wicked from the tree of life, and also from the saints of God….And I said unto them that our father also saw that the justice of God did also divide the wicked from the righteous; and the brightness thereof was like unto the brightness of a flaming fire, which ascendeth up unto God forever and ever, and hath no end. (1 Nephi 15:28, 30; emphasis added)
Combining Nephi’s descriptions of his (and Lehi’s) vision of the Tree of Life, we have ‘the justice of God’ represented as both a sword and a flaming fire — combined, a flaming sword — and in both cases keeping the Tree of Life from those who choose the world (the ‘great and spacious building’) instead of coming to the Tree of Life on God’s terms.
In short, we have Genesis imagery in Nephi’s and Lehi’s vision of the Tree of Life. One could argue that there is temple imagery in there as well, since the structure of the Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple has been interpreted as a reversal of the fall of Adam, with the candlestick (menorah) in the Holy Place representing the Tree of Life.3
What is perhaps more interesting is that we get through this vision an interpretation of the ‘flaming sword’ mentioned in Genesis — the justice of God, which prevents us in our willful state from approaching the Tree of Life. What the rest of Nephi’s vision tells us is that it is the love and condescension of God that gives us a path (‘strait and narrow’) and a guide (‘a rod of iron’)4 by which we can come and partake of the Tree of Life and thus enter back into God’s presence. ..bruce..
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1 Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon: Part One (Title Page, Witness Statements, 1 Nephi 1 – 2 Nephi 10), Royal Skousen (FARMS/BYU, 2004), pp. 257-258.
2 On the other hand, see “The Word of God” by Leslie Taylor, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2003), pp. 52-63, for an indication that the differences between ‘sword of God’ and ‘word of God’ as used in the scriptures may not be all that great.
3 See “Garden of Eden: Prototype Sanctuary” by Donald W. Parry, Temples of the Ancient World, edited by Donald W. Parry (Deseret Book/FARM, 1994), esp. p. 129 and pp. 134-135.
4 But see Skousen (above), pp. 174-181, who argues that this should be “straight and narrow”.
[NOTE: I originally wrote this essay back in 1994 for Vigor, an LDS samizdat put out for several years in the 90s by Orson Scott Card. Since we’re studying the Book of Mormon in Sunday School this year, I thought it appropriate to repost it, with a few minor edits and with some links added in. It is reproduced here by permission.]
Where is Nephi’s blessing from Lehi? The first four chapters of 2 Nephi contain Lehi’s counsel, prophecy and blessings to the members of the group which he had led from Jerusalem to the Americas. These include remarks directed to his sons (Laman and Lemuel by implication, since he’s chastising them for their behavior up until then and pleading with them to repent); Laman, Lemuel, Sam and the sons of Ishmael; Zoram; Jacob; Joseph; the sons and daughters of Laman; the sons and daughters of Lemuel; the sons of Ishmael “and even all of his household” (it’s unclear whether that’s Ishmael’s household or Lehi’s, though context would indicate the former); and Sam again (with mention of his children). At this point, Nephi states that Lehi “had spoken unto all his household” (2 Nephi 4:12), but there is a very conspicuous absence: Nephi and his children.
It’s clear that Nephi was working from detailed sources, since he transcribed lengthy discourses by Lehi many years after the fact. And it is hard to believe that Lehi would bless and counsel every other son of his, both older and younger, as well as Zoram and the sons of Ishmael, and yet not have anything to say to Nephi. But there is no such blessing on Nephi’s small plates. Instead, Nephi follows all these other blessings with what is often known as “Nephi’s psalm”, lamenting his own weaknesses, his sins, his failings as he perceives them (2 Nephi 4:15-35). After this, he briefly chronicles his own flight (with followers) into the wilderness to escape his brethren and the subsequent history of his group, covering about 18 years in a few dozen verses. With that ends any of his own history-keeping on the small plates; the rest of 2 Nephi comprises discourses, prophecies, and quotations from Isaiah.
Nephi almost certainly had a record of the blessing(s) his father gave him; why did he omit them and instead write his soul-searching psalm? Several possible factors could account for it. Modesty is one, though Nephi has no trouble making himself the focus of the history he has recounted to that point, virtually all of which portrays him in a very good light. Avoiding duplication with the large plates is another — yet the other blessings were most likely copied from Lehi’s record on the large plates (1 Nephi 19:1-2; 2 Nephi 4:14); so if they were duplicated, then why not duplicate his own? A third could be the ultimate fate of his descendants: extinction at the hands of his brothers’ seed. Knowing that, why bother to copy the blessing, which would probably detail that yet again?
The key factor may well be pain and regret over his family’s division and his own possible role in it. Note where the lament is inserted: right between the account of Lehi’s death and his brothers getting angry with him and the account of his brothers threatening death and the subsequent family split. This is not to imply that Nephi had actually somehow failed, but that he felt all too keenly his shortcomings. Did he regretted his rather blunt and sometimes tactless chiding of his brothers and even his parents? Did he miss his brothers and all those who remained with them? Did he wondered if there was something he could have done differently that would have kept his family together? Anyone who has been through a divorce knows the pain and doubt that can linger years after the fact, even when it was for the best.
Nephi created the small plates some 30 years after he and his family left Jerusalem and some 15 years after the flight from his brothers. He crafted on them the story of his family, contrasting time and again his willingness to do the will of his father and the Lord with his brothers’ disobedience and rebellion. But when he got to his father’s last blessings and counsel, all that may have seemed like ashes in his mouth. His family was divided, his brothers still were seeking to destroy him and those he led, and he would be for the rest of his life a stranger in a strange land (cf. Jacob 7:26). Weary and heartsore, he probably looked at his own blessing, shook his head, and brought his history to a quick close, pausing only to express his pain and frustration with his own failings and to encourage himself to press on and trust in the Lord.
— Bruce F. Webster [Vigor, Issue 5, April 1994; note that up to and including that issue, Vigor published all articles anonymously. But I wrote this one; I’m sure I’ve still got the e-mail archives somewhere. 🙂]
Ran across the following quote from 1952 and thought it relevant to the flap over the change to the (non-canonical) introduction printed with the Book of Mormon starting in 1981:
“The first rule of historical criticism in dealing with the Book of Mormon or any other ancient text is, never oversimplify. For all its simple and straightforward narrative style, this history is packed as few others are with a staggering wealth of detail that completely escapes the casual reader. The whole Book of Mormon is a condensation, and a masterly one; it will take years simply to unravel the thousands of cunning inferences and implications that are wound around its most matter-of-fact statements. Only laziness and vanity lead the student to the early conviction that he has the final answers on what the Book of Mormon contains.”
— Hugh Nibley, 1952 (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 5: Lehi in the Desert / The World of the Jaredites / There Were Jaredites [Deseret Book/FARMS, 1988] p. 237.)
I think that Nibley’s observation from 55 years ago not only sums up the major focus and findings of Book of Mormon research for the past half-century, it also illustrates why the vast majority of Book of Mormon criticism is (in my opinion) insipid, shallow, and unconvincing. Evangelists in particular should be aware that most of their Book of Mormon “analysis” is pretty silly to anyone who has actually studied the Book of Mormon and frankly makes the Jesus Seminar‘s critique of the New Testament look downright objective and scholarly.
“The Book of Mormon is tough; it thrives on investigation; you may kick it around like a football, as many have done, and I promise you it will wear you out long before you ever make a dent in it.”
— Hugh Nibley, 1952 (CWHN Vol. 5, p. 153)
While I’m in the middle of writing another post for this blog (“the myths of the Mormon hierarchy”), I do plan a series of posts on the Book of Mormon. I’m going to spend all next year (2008) teaching it in our ward Gospel Doctrine class, and I’ve started to re-read the 40 or so books I own about the Book of Mormon, in more-or-less chronological order. I’ll post relevant quotes and insights here as I go along. ..bruce..
[UPDATED 11/15/07 – 1958 MST]
I have added some quotes by Hugh Nibley from 1952, showing that the idea of other people outside of the Book of Mormon inhabiting the Americans is neither new nor unique.
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There’s a bit of a buzz going on in media covering LDS topics (The Salt Lake Tribune, The Deseret News, LDS and, I suspect, anti-LDS blogs), because of a change that the LDS Church has made in the (non-canonical) introduction to the Book of Mormon:
The book’s current introduction, added by the late LDS apostle, Bruce R. McConkie in 1981, includes this statement: “After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians.”
The new version, seen first in Doubleday’s revised edition, reads, “After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians.”
LDS leaders instructed Doubleday to make the change, said senior editor Andrew Corbin, so it “would be in accordance with future editions the church is printing.”
(Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Single word change in Book of Mormon speaks volumes”, Salt Lake Tribune, November 8, 2007)
It’s a good change, and as I noted in a comment to a post on another blog on this same news, it’s significant not because it reflects current theories on the populating of the Americas but because it also more accurately reflects the Book of Mormon itself.
The racial and cultural picture of the Book of Mormon is anything but the oversimplified thing its critics have made it out to be.
— Hugh Nibley, “The Mormon View of the Book of Mormon,” Concilium: Theology in the Age of Renewal 30 (New York: Paulist Press, 1968): 170-173 (reprinted in Nibley on the Timely and Timeless [BYU Religious Studies Center, 1978]).
I might add to Nibley’s statement “…or its supporters”. This, in fact, has been a major theme of Nibley and FARMS (now Maxwell Institute) scholarship on the Book of Mormon: pointing out what the Book of Mormon actually depicts as opposed to what we think it depicts.
I believe that we as a church — including at times our leaders — have formed generalizations and models regarding what the Book of Mormon describes that, with closer study, aren’t actually supported by the text itself. The classic example of this is the “hemispheric geography model” that was generally held by Church leaders and members through much of the past 175+ years. Because the Book of Mormon speaks of a “land northward” and a “land southward” as well as a “narrow neck of land”, the assumption was made that it referred to North and South America, with the Panamanian Isthmus being the narrow neck. However, many LDS scholars who analyzed the text itself reached quite a different conclusion: that the region described in the Book of Mormon is no more than a few hundred miles in length and width, if that much. This became known as the limited geography model, and it pretty much is the foundation of modern serious Book of Mormon analysis and research.
Similar assumptions have been made over the years as to whether all indigenous peoples on the American continents descended from Lehi and his party. A close reading of the Book of Mormon, particularly the first few books, strongly suggests that the divided Lehite party — led respectively by Laman (Lamanites) and Nephi (Nephites) — found and absorbed (or set themselves up as rulers of) pre-existing indigenous populations in the Mesoamerican region (e.g., see this article, written 15 years ago).
“Turning to the Book of Mormon, is it not possible there also to fall into the old sectarian vice of oversimplifying? Are there not many Latter-day Saints who will insist that every American of pre-Columbian descent must be a Lamanite because, forsooth, there were once Nephites and Lamanites, and the Nephites were destroyed? Yet the Book of Mormon itself makes such an interpretation impossible.”
— Hugh Nibley, 1952 (found in The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 5: Lehi in the Desert / The World of the Jaredites / There Were Jaredites, [Deseret Book/FARMS, 1988], p. 237.)
Beyond that, the Book of Mormon itself makes it clear that at least one population group — the Jaredites (who most likely came via Asia) — had already been in the Americans for 1500-2500 years prior to the Lehites arrival, while another group — located at the city of Zarahemla but commonly called the Mulekites, though no such appellation appears in the Book of Mormon — apparently arrived in the Americas roughly the same time as the Lehites. The three groups had little or no formal contact with another for several centuries, but splinter populations from the other two groups may well be among the indigenous peoples that the Lehites encountered. There are also some hints in the minimal Jaredite record that they may likewise have found and merged with pre-existing indigenous groups (again, see this article, towards the end).
(Sidebar: Orson Scott Card has opined that the ‘Mulekites’ may actually have been a true indigenous group rather than a second band of Middle East refugees; see this article and scroll down to ‘Speculation on Zarahemla’. Actually, read the whole article; it’s well worth the time.)
Genetic dispersal and the mathematics of genealogy seem sufficient to spread the ‘Lamanite’ heritage around among any major pre-Lehite (indigenous) populations in the Americas during the 2100 years between the arrival of Lehi and the arrival of Columbus. For example, it appears that virtually everyone who has European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne and Muhammad; not because those two men populated an empty Europe single-handedly, but because their lineages survived long enough to spread throughout the population that already existed. Similarly, given the fact that population groups were splitting off from the Lehites on a regular basis (e.g., cf. Alma 63:4-10), as well as the relative isolation of the Americas up until 1500 AD, there would appear to enough time (see this article as well as this one) for Lehite ancestry to spread throughout much of North and South America. (As for the “traceable DNA” issue, see this article.)
There is not a word in the Book of Mormon to prevent the coming to this hemisphere of any number of people from any part of the world at any time, provided only that they come with the direction of the Lord; and even this requirement must not be too strictly interpreted, for the people of Zarahemla “had brought no records with them, and they denied the being of their Creator” (Omni 17), i.e., they were anything but a religious colony. No one would deny that anciently “this land” was kept “from the knowledge of other nations” (2 Nephi 1:8), but that does not mean that it was kept empty of inhabitants, but only that migration was in one direction — from the Old World to the New; for even as Lehi was uttering the words just quoted, the Jaredites were swarming in the east, and the old man referes to others yet to come, “all those who should be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord.” Must we look for all these in the book of Mormon?
— Hugh Nibley, 1952 (found in CWHN, Vol. 5, pp. 251-252)
In short, the concept that all native Americans then present from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego when Columbus arrived in 1492 belonged to a population solely created by and descended from Lehi and his party is a straw man perpetuated by Mormons, non-Mormons and anti-Mormons alike. It is neither required nor supported by the Book of Mormon, any more than the hemispheric geography model is. Nor is this a novel idea within LDS circles, any more than the limited geography model is somehow new or recent (it’s not).
As I said, the change is a good one. ..bruce..
Other and related postings on this topic: