Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul (Wm Jas Tychonievich)

"One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism," said Joseph Smith, "is to receive the truth, let it come from whence it may." Even Reddit, you may ask? Yes, apparently, even Reddit.

As laid out in my previous post, "A closer look at Malachi material in the Small Plates," there are three places in the Book of Mormon where Malachi seems to be quoted by prophets who definitely (according to the Book of Mormon itself) did not have access to the Book of Malachi. The passages in question are 1 Ne. 22:15-24, 2 Ne. 25:13, and 2 Ne. 26:4-9. In every case, it is the same brief passage, Malachi 4:1-2, that is quoted or paraphrased, suggesting that both Nephi and Malachi may have been quoting some unknown third prophet.

But which prophet? My first thought was that it might be some lost prophecy of Isaiah, since all the Malachi material occurs in commentaries on that prophet. 1 Ne. 20-21 quotes Isa. 48-49 in full, and 1 Ne. 22 (with Malachi material) is Nephi's commentary. Then 2 Ne. 12-24 quotes Isa. 2-14 in full, and 2 Ne. 25-26 (with Malachi material) is Nephi's commentary. Other lost Isaiah material (the "sting of death" bit, not appearing in our Old Testament but cited in the Gospel of Nicodemus as a saying of Isaiah) appears to be quoted in the Book of Mormon, so it seemed like a reasonable hypothesis.

In a comment, though, Bill pointed me to "What is Malachi doing in 1st and 2nd Nephi?" In this Reddit post, someone using the handle stisa79 makes the case that the prophet being quoted by both Nephi and Malachi is Zenos. Upon investigation, I find this theory to be pretty compelling.

Stisa79 notes that 1 Ne. 19 quotes extensively from Zenos, often referring to him simply as "the prophet" but in a context that makes it clear that Zenos is intended. Then 1 Ne. 20-21 quotes Isaiah, and then we come to 1 Ne. 22. In vv. 1-14, Nephi repeatedly paraphrases the Isaiah passages he has just quoted. Then in vv. 15, 17, and 23 -- right where Malachi appears to be quoted -- Nephi again cites "the prophet." The context makes Zenos a likely candidate for the prophet he has in mind.

Here is the first citation from "the prophet":

For behold, saith the prophet, the time cometh speedily that Satan shall have no more power over the hearts of the children of men; for the day soon cometh that all the proud and they who do wickedly shall be as stubble; and the day cometh that they must be burned. For the time soon cometh that the fulness of the wrath of God shall be poured out upon all the children of men; for he will not suffer that the wicked shall destroy the righteous. Wherefore, he will preserve the righteous by his power, even if it so be that the fulness of his wrath must come, and the righteous be preserved, even unto the destruction of their enemies by fire. Wherefore, the righteous need not fear; for thus saith the prophet, they shall be saved, even if it so be as by fire (1 Ne. 22:15-17).

The words in red echo Malachi 4:1; those in blue echo 1 Corinthians 3:15. Under the Zenos theory, then, both Malachi and Paul were also quoting Zenos. Is there any hint of such a connection in the Bible? Remarkably, there is. (This bit is my own discovery, not the Redditor's.) Here is the context of the passage in Paul, color-coded in the same way as the one from Nephi:

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire (1 Cor. 3:11-15).

That word stubble is what first caught my eye, but the real smoking gun is the second passage I have highlighted in red: "the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire." What's the logical connection (implied by "because") between those two clauses? It only makes sense if we assume Paul is alluding to "the day . . . that shall burn as an oven" (Mal. 4:1).

To be clear, this could be a case of Paul alluding to Malachi, and Joseph Smith plagiarizing both Malachi and Paul, but I think the Zenos theory is a much tidier explanation.

Why assume it's Zenos, though? Just because Nephi calls both Zenos and this chap "the prophet"? He also sometimes calls Isaiah "the prophet," so that in itself isn't very strong evidence. For specific evidence that it is Zenos, we need to turn to the Malachi-like language in 2 Nephi. (We now return to summarizing this Redditor's argument; the bit about Paul is my only original contribution here.)

Here are the two passages in question. Language that seems to come from Malachi is highlighted in red, while the words highlighted in blue seem to be allusions to -- something else:

Behold, they will crucify him; and after he is laid in a sepulchre for the space of three days he shall rise from the dead, with healing in his wings; and all those who shall believe on his name shall be saved in the kingdom of God. Wherefore, my soul delighteth to prophesy concerning him, for I have seen his day, and my heart doth magnify his holy name (2 Ne. 25:13).

Wherefore, all those who are proud, and that do wickedly, the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, for they shall be as stubble. And they that kill the prophets, and the saints, the depths of the earth shall swallow them up, saith the Lord of Hosts; and mountains shall cover them, and whirlwinds shall carry them away, and buildings shall fall upon them and crush them to pieces and grind them to powder. And they shall be visited with thunderings, and lightnings, and earthquakes, and all manner of destructions, for the fire of the anger of the Lord shall be kindled against them, and they shall be as stubble, and the day that cometh shall consume them, saith the Lord of Hosts. O the pain, and the anguish of my soul for the loss of the slain of my people! For I, Nephi, have seen it, and it well nigh consumeth me before the presence of the Lord; but I must cry unto my God: Thy ways are just. But behold, the righteous that hearken unto the words of the prophets, and destroy them not, but look forward unto Christ with steadfastness for the signs which are given, notwithstanding all persecution, behold, they are they which shall not perish. But the Son of righteousness shall appear unto them; and he shall heal them, and they shall have peace with him, until three generations shall have passed away, and many of the fourth generation shall have passed away in righteousness (2 Ne. 26:4-9).

And here are the words of Zenos to which the blue phrases appear to allude:

And the God of our fathers, who were led out of Egypt, out of bondage, and also were preserved in the wilderness by him, yea, the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, yieldeth himself, according to the words of the angel, as a man, into the hands of wicked men, to be lifted up, according to the words of Zenock, and to be crucified, according to the words of Neum, and to be buried in a sepulchre, according to the words of Zenos, which he spake concerning the three days of darkness, which should be a sign given of his death unto those who should inhabit the isles of the sea, more especially given unto those who are of the house of Israel. For thus spake the prophet: The Lord God surely shall visit all the house of Israel at that day, some with his voice, because of their righteousness, unto their great joy and salvation, and others with the thunderings and the lightnings of his power, by tempest, by fire, and by smoke, and vapor of darkness, and by the opening of the earth, and by mountains which shall be carried up. And all these things must surely come, saith the prophet Zenos. And the rocks of the earth must rend; and because of the groanings of the earth, many of the kings of the isles of the sea shall be wrought upon by the Spirit of God, to exclaim: The God of nature suffers. And as for those who are at Jerusalem, saith the prophet, they shall be scourged by all people, because they crucify the God of Israel, and turn their hearts aside, rejecting signs and wonders, and the power and glory of the God of Israel. And because they turn their hearts aside, saith the prophet, and have despised the Holy One of Israel, they shall wander in the flesh, and perish, and become a hiss and a byword, and be hated among all nations. Nevertheless, when that day cometh, saith the prophet, that they no more turn aside their hearts against the Holy One of Israel, then will he remember the covenants which he made to their fathers. Yea, then will he remember the isles of the sea; yea, and all the people who are of the house of Israel, will I gather in, saith the Lord, according to the words of the prophet Zenos, from the four quarters of the earth (1 Ne. 19:10-16).

That about covers the Redditor's argument, but let me add one more discovery of my own. The language marked in green above seems to allude to Peter's quotation of the prophet Joel:

But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; . . . I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke (Acts 2:16, 19).

Does this mean Joel, too, was quoting Zenos? Remarkably, as with Paul, the evidence is there:

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars [LXX: vapor] of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered: for in mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord hath said, and in the remnant whom the Lord shall call (Joel 2:28-32).

The blue passages allude not to anything in our Book of Malachi, but to passages we have identified above as coming from Zenos. Immediately after appearing to quote Malachi, Nephi adds that "the fulness of the wrath of God shall be poured out upon all the children of men" -- and then (I have just noticed now!) -- proceeds to quote the same Joel-like language we find attributed to Zenos in 1 Ne. 19.

For behold, saith the prophet, the time cometh speedily that Satan shall have no more power over the hearts of the children of men; for the day soon cometh that all the proud and they who do wickedly shall be as stubble; and the day cometh that they must be burned. For the time soon cometh that the fulness of the wrath of God shall be poured out upon all the children of men; for he will not suffer that the wicked shall destroy the righteous. Wherefore, he will preserve the righteous by his power, even if it so be that the fulness of his wrath must come, and the righteous be preserved, even unto the destruction of their enemies by fire. Wherefore, the righteous need not fear; for thus saith the prophet, they shall be saved, even if it so be as by fire. Behold, my brethren, I say unto you, that these things must shortly come; yea, even blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke must come; and it must needs be upon the face of this earth; and it cometh unto men according to the flesh if it so be that they will harden their hearts against the Holy One of Israel. For behold, the righteous shall not perish; for the time surely must come that all they who fight against Zion shall be cut off (1 Ne. 22:15-19).

Where Joel has "my spirit," Nephi has "the fulness of the wrath of God" -- but in each case the language about it being "poured out upon all" (an expression not found elsewhere in the Bible) is the same.

I've marked Joel's "The sun shall be turned to darkness" in blue as well. To understand why, we need to look at three different passages:

to be buried in a sepulchre, according to the words of Zenos, which he spake concerning the three days of darkness (1 Ne. 19:10).

and after he is laid in a sepulchre for the space of three days he shall rise from the dead, with healing in his wings (2 Ne. 25:13).

But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings (Mal. 4:2).

So the three days of darkness are three days in the sepulchre, after which the one in the sepulchre will rise with healing in his wings. In Malachi, the one with healing in his wings is the Sun. We may thus infer that in the original figurative language used by Zenos, the Sun is laid in a sepulchre for three days, causing the three days of darkness. Joel's reference to the Sun turning to darkness would then be an allusion to this same prophecy.

Going back to the Joel quote above, you'll see that I've highlighted "before the great and terrible day of the Lord come." In my original post about Malachi, "Malachi, and the Small Plates as Nephite pseudepigrapha," I noted that Colby Townsend cites Alma 45 as an example of Malachi language in the Book of Mormon:

Yea, and this because they shall dwindle in unbelief and fall into the works of darkness, and lasciviousness, and all manner of iniquities; yea, I say unto you, that because they shall sin against so great light and knowledge, yea, I say unto you, that from that day, even the fourth generation shall not all pass away before this great iniquity shall come. And when that great day cometh, behold, the time very soon cometh that those who are now, or the seed of those who are now numbered among the people of Nephi, shall no more be numbered among the people of Nephi. But whosoever remaineth, and is not destroyed in that great and dreadful day, shall be numbered among the Lamanites, and shall become like unto them, all, save it be a few who shall be called the disciples of the Lord; and them shall the Lamanites pursue even until they shall become extinct. And now, because of iniquity, this prophecy shall be fulfilled (Alma 45:12-14).

Townsend saw in this a reference to Malachi 4: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord" (Mal. 4:5). I dismissed this in my post, noting that although the phrase "great and dreadful day" is unique to Malachi in the King James Version, in the original Hebrew the very same expression (translated "terrible" rather than "dreadful") occurs in Joel 2, so Alma could have been quoting Joel instead. Now, though, it appears that both Malachi 4 and Joel 2 are quoting Zenos, so this passage in Alma turns out to be relevant after all. That is confirmed by the phrase I have highlighted in blue above. Here is the same language in one of the Malachi/Zenos passages we have already discussed:

But the Son of righteousness shall appear unto them; and he shall heal them, and they shall have peace with him, until three generations shall have passed away, and many of the fourth generation shall have passed away in righteousness (2 Ne. 26:9).

I find the case that all of this is from Zenos to be extremely compelling, and the intertextuality is so very intricate and self-consistent that it is hard to believe it could have been contrived by Joseph Smith -- especially by a Joseph Smith who was at the same time too dumb to know Nephi shouldn't have been quoting Malachi and Paul. In my opinion, the evidence laid out here (much of which, again, comes from "stisa79"), transforms the Malachi material in the Book of Mormon from a major embarrassment to a powerful evidence of the book's authenticity. (And I say that as someone who is not an apologist and who was initially perfectly willing to accept the opposite conclusion, that Malachi proves the Small Plates are fake.)

The one loose end that remains is the Book of Mormon's use of "Son of Righteousness" instead of "Sun of righteousness." Malachi has Sun, and I think I've made a pretty good case that Zenos used Sun as well (with the Sun's three-day entombment in a sepulchre causing the three days of darkness). Since the two words are homophones in English but entirely dissimilar in Hebrew, it's hard to see how the Sun-to-Son swap could have been made by anyone other than the English-speaking Joseph Smith. That, I believe, is now the only unsolved problem relating to Malachi material in the Book of Mormon.

5 Comments:

William Wright (WW) said...
Really well done. I think pretty solid evidence, and the additional ties you made were great.

As to your last unsolved mystery, I did go back and confirm in Skousen's Earliest Text edition of the Book of Mormon that both the printer's manuscript and the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon do indeed have "Son" rather than "Sun". The original manuscript isn't extant for either the 2 Nephi or 3 Nephi references, so we can't go back to that, unfortunately.

Skousen's edition changed it to Sun in their version, to map to Malachi, but they admit it is a conjecture on their part (they literally list that as the reason for the proposed change to those two phrases), likely envisioning that Cowdery wrote the homophone down wrong as he heard it from Joseph's dictation.

So that is a possibility, though there could be other interesting explanations for the difference.
Leo said...
Man, '79 was just a good year for births, wasn't it?
jason said...
https://books.google.com/books?id=_4zcCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA169&dq=Zenos&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj0ooqsqciJAxXtG9AFHXBtHt0Q6AF6BAgIEAM#v=onepage&q=Zenos&f=false That Christ's saying are mainly also just quoting Zenos is blasphemy. Joseph Smith had his "witnesses" to the golden plates mine cool sounding sayings and make a Zenoa document from which to blaspheme God and pretend it all came from this imaginary Zenos dooofus.
WJT said...
Jason, why blasphemy? In the Gospels as we have them, Jesus undeniably quotes and alludes to many Old Testament writings. Feel free to make a case against Zenos, but “it’s blasphemy” isn’t an argument.
WJT said...
To clarify, I understand that many of Joseph Smith’s claims are blasphemous IF false. Obviously. What you seem to be implying is that the Zenos thing is inherently blasphemous and THEREFORE false.

Saturday, November 9^th 2024

Yes, the Book of Mormon does quote Joshua -- but the Church is covering it up!

Wm Jas Tychonievich

5 min read (1,600 words)

I've been reading Jonah Barnes's new book The Key to the Keystone: How Apocryphal Texts Unlock the Book of Mormon's Brass Plates. Barnes's basic thesis is that the content of the Brass Plates differs significantly from that of the Old Testament as we have it, and that various apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts preserve some of these alternative traditions that were lost from the Bible but preserved, via the Brass Plates, in the Book of Mormon. Since I've also explored the question of how the Brass Plates may have differed from the Bible (see "Moses and the Exodus: Where the Book of Mormon parts ways with the Torah"), I'm reading his arguments with interest, though some of the links are more convincing than others.

Barnes is part of the small but growing Mormon "anti-Deuteronomist" movement, which sees Josiah as a bad guy, rejects the Book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History (meaning the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings), and casts Laman and Lemuel as Deuteronomists. He makes the bold claim that the Book of Mormon never quotes from or alludes to any of these rejected books.

The Book of Mormon very obviously does contain material that echoes Deuteronomy -- namely, the prophecy of the prophet like unto Moses, and the account of the Lord's "burial" of Moses. However (as I also pointed out in my Moses post), the Book of Mormon versions of these passages differ significantly from Deuteronomy as we have it, so Barnes concludes that they aren't from Deuteronomy itself but from some older tradition which the Deuteronomists later incorporated. This seems to me to be special pleading, motivated by his anti-Deuteronomist agenda. When the Book of Mormon contains alternate versions of Genesis stories, Barnes says the Nephites must have had an "expanded" version of Genesis; when it contains alternate versions of Deuteronomy material, he concludes that they didn't have Deuteronomy at all.

As a clear example of this bias, Barnes asserts that the Nephites had Leviticus (doubt), based mostly on vague references to the "law of Moses." The only specific links he provides are a reference to drinking blood ("something prohibited by Leviticus 17:14") and the phrase "statues, and judgements, and commandments," which "appears in Leviticus 26:15." In fact, all three of these could with equal justice be adduced as evidence that the Nephites had Deuteronomy, a.k.a. "the book of the law," which also prohibits blood-drinking (Deut. 15:23; see also Gen. 9:4), and which has seven references to statutes and judgments and commandments, including one (Deut 11:1) which matches the Book of Mormon wording much more closely than does Leviticus.

The Book of Mormon also prominently quotes Joshua -- "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve" -- so I was anticipating some similar argument from Barnes about how it wasn't actually from Joshua after all. Astonishingly, what I found instead was a flat denial that the passage in question even exists. Attempting to make the case that the Book of Mormon writers surely would have quoted the Deuteronomistic History if they had had it, Barnes writes:

Surely the Book of Mormon writers will tell the famous stories from Joshua, Samuel, and Kings again and again, as they so often tell and retell the story of Adam and Eve... right?

It turns out that they don't. Nephi said, "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning." So why did the Nephite prophets not:

1) Quote Joshua's adage to "choose ye this day whom ye will serve" when the Lamanites and Nephites parted ways in 2 Nephi 5?

2) Recite the Lord's promise in Joshua 1:8 . . .

He goes on to list a total of 11 things from the Deuteronomistic History that the Nephites might have been expected to quote if they had had access to it -- but very first on the list is a passage from Joshua which the Nephites absolutely do quote, word for word, though not in the chapter Barnes mentions. Barnes even gives it in its Book of Mormon form (the KJV has "Choose you this day"):

For thus saith the scripture: Choose ye this day, whom ye will serve (Alma 30:8).

How could Barnes possibly have missed that? It's one thing to overlook it; it's another to say, "If the Nephites had Joshua, how come they never quote this specific sentence?" -- and then give a sentence which does in fact appear word for word in the Book of Mormon!

My theory, based on my own experience trying to look up the Alma reference above, is that Barnes was led astray by the church's Great and Abominable Search Function, the awfulness of which it is impossible to overstate. I normally use Ctrl-F on a text file from Gutenberg if I need to search the Book of Mormon, but when I read Barnes, I only had my phone handy, so I had to run the search on the church's Gospel Library app. Here are the results of my initial search:

(image)

As you can see, it returns whole chapters rather than verses as search results. It turns out that Alma 30 is in fact the chapter I was looking for, but you'd never guess that from looking at the search results. Instead of highlighting the verse that includes all four of the words in my search prompt, it offers instead as an excerpt the first occurrence of one of them, in this case "day." If Jonah Barnes had run a similar search to check if the Book of Mormon quotes this line from Joshua, it's easy to see how he could have wrongly concluded that it does not.

I was still sure that it does, though, so I tried a different search term. Remembering that Joshua was quoted in the context of explaining that Nephite law did not regulate beliefs, I searched for that instead:

(image)

Most of these looked like they were "law of Moses" references, but Alma 1 looked like it might be about the actual legal system, so I clicked that one. I thought I had found what I was looking for:

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. Nevertheless, they durst not lie, if it were known, for fear of the law, for liars were punished; therefore they pretended to preach according to their belief; and now the law could have no power on any man for his belief. And they durst not steal, for fear of the law, for such were punished; neither durst they rob, nor murder, for he that murdered was punished unto death (Alma 1:16-18).

That was the expression I had remembered -- but the Joshua quote was nowhere to be found! Was Jonah Barnes right? Had I somehow misremembered? I was so certain of my memory that I was beginning to consider Mandela Effect type explanations, but then I gave the Great and Abominable Search Function one more go and finally found the passage I'd had in mind:

Now there was no law against a man’s belief; for it was strictly contrary to the commands of God that there should be a law which should bring men on to unequal grounds. For thus saith the scripture: Choose ye this day, whom ye will serve. Now if a man desired to serve God, it was his privilege; or rather, if he believed in God it was his privilege to serve him; but if he did not believe in him there was no law to punish him. But if he murdered he was punished unto death; and if he robbed he was also punished; and if he stole he was also punished; and if he committed adultery he was also punished; yea, for all this wickedness they were punished. For there was a law that men should be judged according to their crimes. Nevertheless, there was no law against a man’s belief; therefore, a man was punished only for the crimes which he had done; therefore all men were on equal grounds (Alma 30:7-11).

If anyone knows of a digital Book of Mormon with a less abominable search function, do let me know. I've even tried downloading the Bickertonites' Bible & BOM app, but it treats all search prompts as if they were in quotation marks -- so the prompt choose day serve returns zero results -- and so is no better than a Ctrl-F. The Community of Christ no longer appears to offer any scripture search function, and even if they did there would be the inconvenience of their different chapter-and-verse scheme.

UPDATE: The University of Michigan has a fairly decent BoM search. I'm putting it in the sidebar.

Monday, November 25^th 2024

It's plausible that Joel quoted (and inverted) Zenos

Wm Jas Tychonievich

1.5 min read (470 words)

In "Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul," I proposed that Joel 2:28-32 paraphrases or alludes to Zenos. (See that post for the evidence behind this assertion.) However one of these links seemed a little dubious at first. Joel writes, "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh" (Joel 2:28), while Nephi, in a passage we had identified as containing Zenosian material writes, "the fulness of the wrath of God shall be poured out upon all the children of men" (1 Ne. 22:16). The expression "pour[ed] out . . . upon all" is unique to these two passages, but the meaning is obviously completely different. Furthermore, nothing in Joel suggests that he is quoting or paraphrasing anyone else -- no "thus saith the prophet" or anything like that.

Since reading Jonathan Neal Atkinson's 2002 Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dissertation "New Exodus, New Covenant, New Creation: The Reuse of the Old Testament in Joel," I no longer have these misgivings. As Atkinson documents, the Book of Joel is extremely allusive, almost on the level of the Book of Revelation. Of its 73 verses, Atkinson reckons that 58 of them -- 79% -- quote, paraphrase, or allude to other books of the Old Testament, including Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, 1 Kings, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, and Malachi. There is some disagreement among scholars over the direction of these influences -- whether Joel is a very early prophet quoted by all these other books or a very late prophet who quotes them all -- but Atkinson makes a convincing case that it is the latter. In no case does Joel ever explicitly cite his sources. Given that background knowledge about Joel, we can assume that of course he would have alluded to Zenos, too, if he had access to that prophet's writings, but would not have mentioned his name.

But is it plausible that he would completely invert the meaning of his source, alluding to Zenos's negative outpouring of wrath but changing it to a positive outpouring of God's spirit? Yes. We have an example of just that, where Joel alludes to Micah and/or Isaiah but inverts their meaning:

. . . they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore (Isa. 2:4 = Micah 4:3).
Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong (Joel 3:10).

Joel clearly alludes to these earlier prophets (see Atkinson's dissertation for evidence regarding the direction of dependence) but turns their meaning on its head, making Isaiah's prophecy of peace into a call to war. It is therefore highly plausible that he could have given Zenosian material a similar treatment.

Wednesday, December 18^th 2024

"It came to pass" in the Book of Mormon does NOT match biblical usage

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3 min read (880 words)

Despite its members, flawed and frail,
The human species as a mass
Came not upon this earth to fail
The test divine. It came to pass.

-- Yes and No (spoken by the Joseph Smith character)

You can't really write about the Book of Mormon without talking about "it came to pass," which occurs approximately once every 200 words, 8.7 times as frequently as in the King James Bible. Mark Twain famously called the phrase Joseph Smith's "pet" and said, "If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet."

From the apologetic point of view, the prevalence of "it came to pass" is consistent with the Book of Mormon's being an ancient text written by Bible-reading Hebrews, and the greater frequency of the phrase in the Book of Mormon can perhaps be explained by the fact that it is typically used in narrative passages, and the Book of Mormon is more consistently narrative in nature than the Bible. For example, the biblical books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and Lamentations contain not a single instance of "it came to pass"; but no comparable books of poetry or "wisdom literature" exist in the Book of Mormon.

From a more skeptical point of view, "it came to pass" is just Joseph Smith trying to make his book sound biblical and going a bit overboard with it -- just as someone trying to imitate King James language today might do so by sticking -eth on the end of all sorts of words, even where it would never have been used in authentic 17th-century English.

From the former perspective, "it came to pass" in the Book of Mormon is a Hebraism, a sign that it was written by the same sort of people who wrote the Bible. From the latter, it is a pseudo-Hebraism, a clumsy attempt by a non-Hebrew to imitate a Hebrew stylistic feature.

I come down firmly on the pseudo-Hebraism side of the argument. Here's why.

"It came to pass" essentially means "it happened," and you will find that in the Bible its function is almost always (96% of the time) to indicate when something happened. That is, it is almost always used together with a time expression. Here are the first few occurrences of "it came to pass" in the Bible, with the time expressions underlined:

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord (Gen. 4:3).

And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him (Gen. 4:8).

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose (Gen. 6:1-2).

And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth (Gen. 7:10).

And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made (Gen. 8:6).

Does the Book of Mormon show a similar pattern of usage? In a word, no.

(image)

For the purposes of the above chart, "with a time expression" means that immediately before or after the words "it came to pass (that)" is an adjunct phrase indicating when the event in question came to pass. I was quite generous about what I counted as a time expression; even the common BoM phrase "now it came to pass" made the grade, since now is, at least literally and etymologically, a time adverb. However, instances like the following were categorized as "with no time expression":

And it came to pass that the three hundred and sixty and sixth year had passed away (Morm. 4:10).

And it came to pass that the days of Ether were in the days of Coriantumr (Ether 12:1).

In the Mormon reference above, the passing of the 366th year is what came to pass, not an expression of when it came to pass. In the Ether reference, nothing at all comes to pass (i.e., happens), and the use of the phrase must be considered a solecism. Grammatically speaking, in each of these sentences, the time reference after "it came to pass that" is the subject and is thus not a syntactic adjunct.

Anyway, regardless of the linguistic details of how I classified "it came to pass" sentences, the main point is that the same classification method was used for the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon, with extremely different results.

My conclusion is that the majority of the instances of "it came to pass" in the Book of Mormon do not reflect any stylistic feature of the original records but rather come from Joseph Smith and his conscious or subconscious efforts to "sound biblical."

13 Comments:

Bruce Charlton said...
Interesting analysis, and solidly confirms my very general impression. "It came to pass" in the BoM typically functions as just a filler-phrase, presumably to give time for thinking. I would wish that Joseph had edited it out during transcription for publication - to save this reader from needing to do it.
Leo said...
Using the phrase as a way to buy time for thinking doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's a lot more natural to just pause or clear your throat or say "uh" (if they said such things back then) or take a break. Using a standard filler phrase would inevitably box him in awkwardly, making it harder to continue the telling.

Your theory also suggests he was having a hard time knowing what to say next on a pretty regular basis, as if he was just barely coming up with the next part of the story every few sentences. If so, I would expect to see key story details contradicted over time (especially pronouns), but we don't see that in the text.

I suppose we could assume he knew the story well in his head and he just needed time to Biblify it but using a standard filler to buy time for that still strikes me as incredibly awkward and unlikely.

To me it's more likely he misunderstood the meaning of the phrase and overused it. If so, I think this analysis supports the idea of the BoM being a cultural translation more than anything.
William Wright (WW) said...
Apparently the word that the KJV translators translated into "it came to pass" occurs over 1,200 times in the Old Testament. However, only in 727 of those instances did they used "it came to pass", with the other ~500 times translated into other words or phrases.

The implication, of course, is your analysis isn't what you think it is - yet. You have only compared Joseph's use with the instances in which the KJV translators decided to use that phrase, not actually the full sample of where it occurs in the text from which they translated. A simple explanation for your chart showing the KJV overwhelmingly using "it came to pass" in time-expression instances is because the bias of translators was to use that phrase in those instances, and another phrase in other instances, whereas Joseph strictly and consistently used whatever word or symbol that gave him that phrase in all instances that he found it.

That may or may not be true, but I just bring it up as a possibility to demonstrate your analysis is incomplete.
Anonymous said...
If the phrase, or whatever it is supposed to be translating, did once have a substantive meaning - then presumably that meaning is lost to modern readers; - because to people nowadays the phrase has no discernable function, and seems completely redundant.
Anonymous said...
Anonymous above is bruce g charlton
Peter Johnson said...
No. I imagine instances where there is no time expression its translated "Behold." I'm sure this is the case without bothering to check, since "behold" is frequent in the KJV. And since the real function of "and it came to pass" in the Hebrew Bible is like "behold" in that its an attention grabber. You could just say "Cain slew Abel when they were in the firled" or "Behold Cain slew Abel when they were in the field" as "And it came to pass Cain slew Abel when they were in the field" and its basically the same but the latter two have an attention grabber thingy. But Joseph Smith is not using it to grab attention. He uses it way too much for that. I can imagine had he latched upon "behold" instead of "and it came to pass" we'd have the same problem with "behold," namely him starting nearly every sentence with it, especially in 1 Nephi. So no, it has to be admitted that Joseph Smith overused it to try and make the book sound ancienty.
HomeStadter said...
I once entertained the idea that it was used as a marker to denote section changes, but that didn't pan out.

Another idea that occurs to me is that the Nephite writers themselves might be trying to sound biblical. I'm assuming their language would have changed too, and certain conventions would have become established for prophetic writings.

But assuming the translation is along the lines of mene mene tekel upharsin makes a lot of sense - not just for the Book of Mormon but some of his other translations. A common problems for new writers is managing transitions, and they often put in a repetitive "then" every time something happens. Perhaps the "came to pass"es and "now"s were like that, but with biblical language.
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
Bill, point taken. Checking everything in the original languages will be slow, but I should probably do it for the sake of completeness.

HomeStadter, to check if it was a Nephite thing rather than a Joseph Smith thing, the obvious thing to do would be to check use of "it came to pass" in JS's non-Nephite translated narratives -- meaning, basically, the books Moses and Abraham. That's a pretty small corpus, but it's better than nothing.

Supposing I remain interested enough to do so, I will post updates taking the Hebrew, Greek, and PoGP data into account.
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
I just did a quick check of Moses and Abraham. The two books together have a total of 59 instances of "it came to pass," of which only 12 (20%) have a time expression. So the contrast with KJV usage is even more pronounced than it is in the BoM. I think we have to attribute this non-biblical usage to JS, not the Nephites.
cae said...
This is not at all intended to be offensive, critical, etc...it's a sincere question:

What sort, or degree, of 'evidence' would it take to logically conclude that the Book of Mormon was predominantly fictional - whether made up out of JS's head, or made up and conveyed to him by a lying pseudo-angel named Moroni?
Leo said...
I doubt that question is directed at me so I hope you don't mind me answering it from my own perspective. I don't know if I can ever accept that it was made up out of JS's head unless I assume the scribes are all in on the fraud. I just cannot fathom someone dictating a tale with that much detail and lacking any meaningful errors or inconsistencies. Just keeping the pronouns straight would be nearly impossible, let alone maintaining a cohesive narrative along the way. If it's true JS dictated this the way the scribes report, I just don't see how someone could pull that out of their brain without making some epic errors along the way.

For the second question I would just have to wonder what the point of that would be. If I were a lying angel, I think making a book that has as it's core message that Jesus is real and the path to salvation would make for a pretty poor attempt at deception. What would I gain from it? I think the worst you could say about such an angel is he was bored and decided to write some harmless fan fiction.
HomeStadter said...
@cae I don't think anyone believed in the Book of Mormon because its origin story was so believable, or the text was so authentically Hebrew. Most apologetics, including the depth and internal consistency that Leo cites above are post facto IMHO. The reason we are interested in it, and believe there is something to it, is because in it we've found true and profound things about God and Christ in it, beyond that which is contained in the bible. And yes, many do not. I don't think they (or you) are required to.

I suppose if and when something truer and better at getting me to know God comes along, I would be happy to discard the BoM. And that is the case with all scripture - it points us to Christ, and when we are one with him and the Father we will no longer need scripture.
HomeStadter said...
As an example that you may be familiar with: the story of the woman taken in adultery is an addition, and there is strong evidence it was added hundreds of years later. (Earliest, best manuscripts, references and quotes in early letters).

Yet I and Christians in general still take it as scriptures. Why? Because it is consistent with what we understand the mission of Christ to have been, and contains profound truth about his character and purpose. In a nutshell it shows how he will be our advocate and plead our case - wanting us to repent and have eternal life, and not wanting to condemn and punish us. It's also very clever about the law of Moses, for those of us who are interested in that.

Monday, December 30^th 2024

"I say unto you" in the Bible and the Book of Mormon

Wm Jas Tychonievich

It may not be as notorious as "it came to pass," but "I say unto you" is nearly as distinctive a feature of Book of Mormon language, occurring about 6.3 times as frequently there as in the King James Bible. I touched on this a bit in my 2013 post "Behold, I say unto you, Nay," but that post was more narrowly focused on the use of the formula in answering one's own rhetorical yes/no question, a pattern that is common in the Book of Mormon but entirely absent from the Bible. Not until recently did I notice that "I say unto you" was itself noteworthy.

"I say unto you" may sound to us -- and, apparently, to Joseph Smith -- like generic biblical language, but it's actually a characteristic turn of phrase favored by one specific figure. In the King James Version, this phrase is used once by Absalom (2 Sam. 13:28), once by Gamaliel (Acts 5:38), and 121 times by Jesus. In the Book of Mormon, virtually everyone uses it:

(image)

As with "it came to pass," this pattern of usage is evidence that the language of the Book of Mormon reflects Joseph Smith's imperfect attempts to sound "biblical" and is unlikely to correspond to any specific feature of Nephite language.

Saturday, January 25^th 2025

The parallelism in Mosiah 9-10

Wm Jas Tychonievich

5.5 min read (1,600 words)

Mosiah 10 repeats a large number of elements from Mosiah 9, mostly in the same order and often in nearly the same language. This was discovered by Ganesh Cherian, who discusses it on YouTube here, here, and here.

This is presented, particularly in the last video, as evidence against the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. The idea is that Joseph Smith had memorized "Mad Libs" style templates that he would use in dictating the text, and that in this case he used the same template twice in a row.

Of course, if only Mosiah 10 had repeated the elements in reverse order rather than in the same order as Mosiah 9, it would be an extended chiasmus, one of the apologists' favorite evidences for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. So I don't see why the repetition Cherian has found couldn't also be a form of literary parallelism used by the Nephites. In my mind, the fact the repeated series of elements comes immediately after the original makes the parallelism theory more plausible; if the two parallel series were in entirely different parts of the book, that would be more consistent with the Mad Libs theory.

Anyway, however you interpret them, the parallels are indisputably there in the text. The purpose of this post is to document them in text form for ease of reference, since it appears Cherian's own work is all in video format. (I also identify the specific parallels somewhat differently from Cherian, though he deserves 100% of the credit for noticing them.)

[9:7] And he also commanded that his people should depart out of the land, and (A) I and my people went into the land that we might possess it.

[9:8] And we began to build buildings, and to repair the walls of the city, yea, even the walls of the city of Lehi-Nephi, and the city of Shilom.

[9:9] And we began to (B) till the ground, yea, even with (C) all manner of seeds, with seeds of corn, and of wheat, and of barley, and with neas, and with sheum, and with seeds of (D) all manner of fruits; and (E) we did begin to multiply and prosper in the land.

[9:10] Now it was the cunning and the craftiness of king Laman, to bring my people into bondage, that he yielded up the land that we might possess it.
[9:11] Therefore it came to pass, that after we had dwelt in the land for the space of twelve years that king Laman began to grow uneasy, lest by any means my people should wax strong in the land, and that they could not overpower them and bring them into bondage.
[9:12] Now they were a lazy and an idolatrous people; therefore they were desirous to bring us into bondage, that they might glut themselves with the labors of our hands; yea, that they might feast themselves upon the flocks of our fields.

[9:13] Therefore (F) it came to pass that king Laman (G) began to stir up his people that they should contend with my people; therefore there (H) began to be wars and contentions in the land.

[9:14] For, in the thirteenth year of my reign in the land of Nephi, away (I) on the south of the land of Shilom, when my people were watering and feeding their flocks, and tilling their lands, a numerous host of Lamanites (J) came upon them and began to slay them, and to take off their flocks, and the corn of their fields.

[9:15] Yea, and it came to pass that they fled, all that were not overtaken, even into the city of Nephi, and did call upon me for protection.

[9:16] And it came to pass that I did (K) arm them with bows, (L) and with arrows, (M) with swords, (N) and with cimeters, and with clubs, (O) and with slings, and with all manner of weapons which we could invent, and I and my people did (P1) go forth against the Lamanites to battle.

[9:17] Yea, (Q) in the strength of the Lord did we (P2) go forth to battle against the Lamanites; for I and my people did cry mightily to the Lord that he would deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, for we were awakened to a remembrance of the deliverance of our fathers.

[9:18] And God did hear our cries and did answer our prayers; and we did go forth in his might; yea, we did (P3) go forth against the Lamanites, and in one day and a night we did slay three thousand and forty-three; we did slay them even until we had driven them out of our land. [. . .]

[9:19] And I, myself, with mine own hands, did help to bury their dead. And behold, to our great sorrow and lamentation, two hundred and seventy-nine of our brethren were slain.

[10:1] And it came to pass that we again began to establish the kingdom and (A′) we again began to possess the land in peace. And I caused that there should be weapons of war made of every kind, that thereby I might have weapons for my people against the time the Lamanites should come up again to war against my people.

[10:2] And I set guards round about the land, that the Lamanites might not come upon us again unawares and destroy us; and thus I did guard my people and my flocks, and keep them from falling into the hands of our enemies.
[10:3] And it came to pass that we did inherit the land of our fathers for many years, yea, for the space of twenty and two years.

[10:4] And I did cause that the men should (B′) till the ground, and raise (C′) all manner of grain and (D′) all manner of fruit of every kind.

[10:5] And I did cause that the women should spin, and toil, and work, and work all manner of fine linen, yea, and cloth of every kind, that we might clothe our nakedness; and thus (E′) we did prosper in the land—thus we did have continual peace in the land for the space of twenty and two years.

[10:6] And (F′) it came to pass that king Laman died, and his son began to reign in his stead. And he (G′) began to stir his people up in rebellion against my people; therefore they (H′) began to prepare for war, and to come up to battle against my people.

[10:7] But I had sent my spies out round about the land of Shemlon, that I might discover their preparations, that I might guard against them, that they might not (J′) come upon my people and destroy them.

[10:8] And it came to pass that they came up (I′) upon the north of the land of Shilom, with their numerous hosts, men (K′) armed with bows, (L′) and with arrows, (M′) and with swords, (N′) and with cimeters, and with stones, (O′) and with slings; and they had their heads shaved that they were naked; and they were girded with a leathern girdle about their loins.

[10:9] And it came to pass that I caused that the women and children of my people should be hid in the wilderness; and I also caused that all my old men that could bear arms, and also all my young men that were able to bear arms, should gather themselves together to (P1′) go to battle against the Lamanites; and I did place them in their ranks, every man according to his age.

[10:10] And it came to pass that we did (P2′) go up to battle against the Lamanites; and I, even I, in my old age, did (P3′) go up to battle against the Lamanites. And it came to pass that we did go up (Q′) in the strength of the Lord to battle.

That's a series of 17 elements repeated in precisely the same order, with two additional elements (I and Q) only slightly out of order. The chance that this is a coincidence is, I think, negligible. And, as I have said, I think the theory that this is a Nephite literary form is more plausible than the Mad Libs theory. I think having to repeat so many elements in the same order, while at the same time moving the story forward rather than just repeating it, would have made the dictation harder for Smith, not easier. And the fact that the repetition comes immediately after the original makes this look more like a single coherent structure than like a case of self-plagiarism.

This is unlikely to be a one-off. I predict that other long repeated series can be found elsewhere in the book -- and that, as here, the repeated series will come immediately after the original. (If once can be found that is not immediately after the original, that would lend more credence to the Mad Libs theory.)

1 Comment:

Leo said...
I had the same initial thought before reading your conclusion: this would be harder to do than not. The other thought I have is that I suppose this lends credence to a word-for-word translation since a cultural translation would have no need of preserving Nephite literary form. Or maybe it's that it's detectable in this case despite it not being word for word.

Saturday, January 25^th 2025

Did Mormon have the New Testament?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

4 min read (1,200 words)

The Book of Mormon contains several lengthy quotations from the New Testament. For example, Moroni 7 quotes extensively from 1 Corinthians 13; and Moroni 10, from 1 Corinthians 12. These are generally seen as problematic, since it is assumed that the Book of Mormon peoples had no contact with the Old World after the 6th century BC and would therefore not have had any of the biblical books written after that time.

The one known exception to this is the second half of the Book of Malachi, which was written long after Lehi left Jerusalem, but which Jesus recited to the Nephites when he visited them (3 Ne. 24-25), explaining, "These scriptures, which ye had not with you, the Father commanded that I should give unto you" (3 Ne. 26:2). So we have at least once instance of Old World scripture being brought to the Nephites -- not by "contact" in the ordinary sense, but by a resurrected being for whom travel between continents is presumably not a problem.

Mormon lived in the 4th century AD, well after all the books of the Bible had been written. (In fact, the Council of Rome, which formally defined the Catholic canon and created "The Bible," occurred during Mormon's lifetime.) Is it possible that he had the New Testament, or at least parts of it, brought to him by resurrected or translated messengers?

I think the probability is high.

Just a few chapters after Jesus gives part of Malachi to the Nephites, Mormon has this to say about the Three Nephites -- the three disciples who were "transfigured" by Jesus so that they would not die.

[25] Behold, I was about to write the names of those who were never to taste of death, but the Lord forbade; therefore I write them not, for they are hid from the world.

[26] But behold, I have seen them, and they have ministered unto me.

[27] And behold they will be among the Gentiles, and the Gentiles shall know them not.

[28] They will also be among the Jews, and the Jews shall know them not.

[29] And it shall come to pass, when the Lord seeth fit in his wisdom that they shall minister unto all the scattered tribes of Israel, and unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, and shall bring out of them unto Jesus many souls, that their desire may be fulfilled, and also because of the convincing power of God which is in them.

[30] And they are as the angels of God, and if they shall pray unto the Father in the name of Jesus they can show themselves unto whatsoever man it seemeth them good.

Here we learn that the Three Nephites are apparently able to travel around the world at will (just like the resurrected Jesus?). They visit both Jews and Gentiles incognito -- but to Mormon they have "ministered" more openly, since he has seen them and knows their names.

In what did this "ministering" consist? In Webster's 1828 dictionary, one definition of the verb minister is "to afford supplies; to give things needful." Is it possible that one of the things they supplied Mormon with was scriptures? As we continue reading, I think Mormon drops a broad hint to that effect.

[31] Therefore, great and marvelous works shall be wrought by them, before the great and coming day when all people must surely stand before the judgment-seat of Christ;

[32] Yea even among the Gentiles shall there be a great and marvelous work wrought by them, before that judgment day.

[33] And if ye had all the scriptures which give an account of all the marvelous works of Christ, ye would, according to the words of Christ, know that these things must surely come.

[34] And wo be unto him that will not hearken unto the words of Jesus, and also to them whom he hath chosen and sent among them; for whoso receiveth not the words of Jesus and the words of those whom he hath sent receiveth not him; and therefore he will not receive them at the last day;

Verse 33 strongly implies that Mormon believes he has special access to "all the scriptures which give an account of all the marvelous works of Christ" and "the words of Christ." This would surely include the New Testament. In context, the reference in v. 34 to "them whom [Jesus] hath chosen and sent among them" likely refers to the Three Nephites, and one of their roles is to deliver "the words of Jesus." If you put all the pieces together, I think Mormon is telling us that the Three Nephites, who travel freely among Jew and Gentile, have given him Christian scriptures to which he would not otherwise have access.

As if to underscore the connection, Mormon seems to draw on the New Testament in his account of the transfiguration of the Three Nephites earlier in 2 Ne. 28:

[12] And it came to pass that when Jesus had spoken these words, he touched every one of them with his finger save it were the three who were to tarry, and then he departed.

[13] And behold, the heavens were opened, and they were caught up into heaven, and saw and heard unspeakable things.

[14] And it was forbidden them that they should utter; neither was it given unto them power that they could utter the things which they saw and heard;

[15] And whether they were in the body or out of the body, they could not tell; for it did seem unto them like a transfiguration of them, that they were changed from this body of flesh into an immortal state, that they could behold the things of God.

[16] But it came to pass that they did again minister upon the face of the earth; nevertheless they did not minister of the things which they had heard and seen, because of the commandment which was given them in heaven.

[17] And now, whether they were mortal or immortal, from the day of their transfiguration, I know not;

Compare this to Paul's language in 2 Corinthians 12:

[2] I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.

[3] And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)

[4] How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.

Is this deliberate -- telling the story of the Three Nephites using language delivered to him by the Three Nephites themselves?

3 Comments:

Leo said...
If true then the implication is that the NT must be in pretty decent shape as is or else I suspect these disciples would not have bothered sharing it.
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
The presence of so much NT material in the BoM already implies that, I think, regardless of how it got there.

In the BOM’s description of the corruption of the scriptures, the main concern seems to be that “plain and precious” material is being removed. What remains would be comparable to a “Jefferson Bible” — true as far as it goes, but severely distorted by the omission of crucial information.
Leo said...
I might be wrong but I was thinking the portions of the NT we have in the BoM are pretty limited so as to suggest that only those portions (like the sermon on the mount) are reasonably accurate. I also am not sure how many Pauline epistles are cited in the BoM besides what you showed yesterday. But if the disciples handed over an intact NT, that suggests a much broader endorsement to me unless what they handed over was annotated for what they endorsed and didn't.

Monday, February 10^th 2025

Dancing for decapitation -- stop me if you've heard this one

Wm Jas Tychonievich

10 min read (3,100 words)

(image)

Gustave Moreau, La fille de Jared dansant devant Akish (1876)

1. The dancing daughter of Jared

Here's a tale of Jaredite devilry from the Book of Ether. See if it reminds you of anything:

And it came to pass that he begat Omer, and Omer reigned in his stead. And Omer begat Jared; and Jared begat sons and daughters.
And Jared rebelled against his father, and came and dwelt in the land of Heth. And it came to pass that he did flatter many people, because of his cunning words, until he had gained the half of the kingdom. And when he had gained the half of the kingdom he gave battle unto his father, and he did carry away his father into captivity, and did make him serve in captivity;
And now, in the days of the reigns of Omer he was in captivity the half of his days. And it came to pass that he begat sons and daughters among whom were Esrom and Coriantumr; and they were exceedingly angry because of the doings of Jared their brother, insomuch that they did raise an army and gave battle unto Jared. And it came to pass that they did give battle unto him by night. And it came to pass that when they had slain the army of Jared they were about to slay him also; and he plead with them that they would not slay him, and he would give up the kingdom unto his father. And it came to pass that they did grant unto him his life.
And now Jared became exceedingly sorrowful because of the loss of the kingdom, for he had set his heart upon the kingdom and upon the glory of the world.
Now the daughter of Jared being exceedingly expert, and seeing the sorrows of her father, thought to devise a plan whereby she could redeem the kingdom unto her father. Now the daughter of Jared was exceedingly fair. And it came to pass that she did talk with her father, and said unto him:

Whereby hath my father so much sorrow? Hath he not read the record which our fathers brought across the great deep? Behold, is there not an account concerning them of old, that they by their secret plans did obtain kingdoms and great glory?

And now, therefore, let my father send for Akish, the son of Kimnor; and behold, I am fair, and I will dance before him, and I will please him, that he will desire me to wife; wherefore if he shall desire of thee that ye shall give unto him me to wife, then shall ye say:

I will give her if ye will bring unto me the head of my father, the king.

And now Omer was a friend to Akish; wherefore, when Jared had sent for Akish, the daughter of Jared danced before him that she pleased him, insomuch that he desired her to wife. And it came to pass that he said unto Jared:

Give her unto me to wife.

And Jared said unto him:

I will give her unto you, if ye will bring unto me the head of my father, the king.

And it came to pass that Akish gathered in unto the house of Jared all his kinsfolk, and said unto them:

Will ye swear unto me that ye will be faithful unto me in the thing which I shall desire of you?

And it came to pass that they all sware unto him, by the God of heaven, and also by the heavens, and also by the earth, and by their heads, that whoso should vary from the assistance which Akish desired should lose his head; and whoso should divulge whatsoever thing Akish made known unto them, the same should lose his life. And it came to pass that thus they did agree with Akish. And Akish did administer unto them the oaths which were given by them of old who also sought power, which had been handed down even from Cain, who was a murderer from the beginning. And they were kept up by the power of the devil to administer these oaths unto the people, to keep them in darkness, to help such as sought power to gain power, and to murder, and to plunder, and to lie, and to commit all manner of wickedness and whoredoms.
And it was the daughter of Jared who put it into his heart to search up these things of old; and Jared put it into the heart of Akish; wherefore, Akish administered it unto his kindred and friends, leading them away by fair promises to do whatsoever thing he desired (Ether 8:1-17).

2. The dancing daughter of Herodias

I assume anyone with even a passing familiarity with the New Testament will immediately recognize the dancing-for-decapitation plot point in Ether as being strangely similar to one found in the Gospels:

This obviously calls to mind the story of the daughter of Herodias, as told in Mark 6 (and Matthew 14):

And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; and when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel,

Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee.

And he sware unto her,

Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.

And she went forth, and said unto her mother,

What shall I ask?

And she said,

The head of John the Baptist.

And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying,

I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist.

And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her (Mark 6:21-26).

Essentially the same story is told in Matthew 14, but I have quoted the Mark version because it has more in common with the story in Ether. (Matthew omits the reference to "the half of my kingdom" and does not say Herod is "exceeding" sorry.)

3. Two different types of parallels

I think it's important to recognize that the story in Ether parallels that in Mark in two very different ways.

First, and most obviously, there is the core similarity of the plot itself: Someone wishes to be rid of an enemy but does not have the power to do so themselves, so they have their daughter ingratiate a powerful person by dancing for him, which leads to that person agreeing to bring them the enemy's head. This core parallel is reinforced by some incidental similarities in the way the story is told. For example, in both stories "the daughter" is unnamed (only in extrabiblical tradition is the daughter of Herodias called Salome), is said to have "pleased" the man she danced for, and so on.

The other parallels are of the type discussed in this blog's inaugural post, "Lehi, Nephi, and the pillar of fire that 'dwelt upon a rock': A case study of hard-to-define biblical parallels." I have yet to coin a suitable term to refer to parallels of this kind, and so they remain as "hard to define" as ever.

As you will recall if you've read that post, the Book of Mormon's opening verses introduce two characters, Nephi and Lehi, and relate Lehi's vision in which "a pillar of fire . . . dwelt upon a rock" (1 Ne. 1:6). Searching for Nephi and Lehi in the King James Bible, you will find that Nephi (i.e., naphtha) was the name given to a liquid that was "poured on the great stones" and "kindled a flame" (2 Macc. 1:31-32), while Lehi is a place name, introduced one verse after we are told that Samson "dwelt in the top of the rock" (Judg. 15:8). So in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon, Lehi is connected with someone or something that "dwelt" on a "rock," and Nephi is connected with a fire burning on a rock -- but the stories incorporate these elements in entirely different ways, so that the stories themselves are not similar at all.

(image)

The two dancing-daughter stories are similar, but in addition there are parallels of this Lehi-Nephi type (for lack of anything better to call them), where biblical elements appear in the Book of Mormon story but fit into that story in a completely different way:

Herod promises up to "the half of my kingdom" to the dancing daughter. Jared first gains "the half of the kingdom" before being removed from power; it is the desire to regain this lost half-kingdom that motivates the decapitation scheme.
Herod is "exceeding sorry" because he has to kill John, whom he fears and respects. Jared is "exceeding sorrowful" (unnecessarily "corrected" to exceedingly in later editions) because he has lost his kingdom.
The dancing daughter of Herodias requests the decapitation at the prompting of her mother. Jared requests the decapitation at the prompting of his dancing daughter.
Herod swears an oath to give the dancing daughter ""whatsoever thou shalt ask," which turns out to be the decapitation of John. Akish has all his family and friends swear an oath to assist him and keep his secrets; this is to facilitate his plan to decapitate Omer, and it results in their doing "whatsoever thing he desired."

One major difference between the two stories is that only one of the decapitation plots is successful: John is in fact beheaded, while Omer escapes that fate. Even in this difference there is a biblical parallel, though, when you consider how Omer is saved: "the Lord warned Omer in a dream that he should depart out of the land; wherefore Omer departed out of the land with his family" (Ether 9:3). After the deaths of Jared and Akish, who had plotted to kill him, Omer returns (Ether 9:6, 12-13).

Compare this passage from Matthew:

And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they [the wise men] departed into their own country another way.

And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt:

And was there until the death of Herod: . . . But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child's life. (Matt. 2:12-15, 19-20).

This is not part of the Bible's dancing-daughter story -- it's not even the same king Herod -- but it's another story about a murderous "Herod," and it, too, has echoes in Ether 8. The link seems to be the name Herod (which is also phonetically similar to Jared). The expression "warned . . . in a dream" appear only in Ether 8 and Matthew 2, and nowhere else in the Bible or Book of Mormon.

4. Skeptical explanations

Obviously, skeptics are going to explain any biblical parallels in the Book of Mormon as plagiarism or "borrowing" on the part of Joseph Smith: Smith took the main theme from the story of the daughter of Herodias and adapted it for his story about Jared and Omer. It's puzzling that Smith would plagiarize so heavily from the Bible, though -- the one text that he knew most of the potential readers of the Book of Mormon would be intimately familiar with, making his plagiarism extremely easy to detect. If Smith wanted to lift material from the Bible, we would expect him to at least try to disguise it. Instead, we have lots of very obvious Bible plagiarism -- including, in other parts of the book, extensive copy-and-pastes from famous passages in the epistles of Paul. Why would a fraudulent Joseph Smith -- who was obviously neither stupid nor lacking in creativity -- have done that?

And the Lehi-Nephi type parallels can't easily be explained as conscious plagiarism. If Smith made a conscious decision to plagiarize the main story of Salome, it would make no sense to add in other elements from that story -- half the kingdom, exceeding sorrow, oaths to do whatever is requested -- but to work them into the story in a completely different way. This would obviously be more difficult than either straightforward plagiarism or original storytelling, and what purpose would it serve but to make the plagiarism more obvious? What does the "half the kingdom" reference add to the Jared story, except as another telltale sign of the biblical source?

I think the only explanation is that the Lehi-Nephi parallels were added subconsciously: Thinking of the daughter of Herodias story primed Smith's mind, by subconscious free-association, to think of other themes and expressions from that story, and also from another murderous-Herod story. He put these into his text because they just appeared in his mind, without being consciously aware that they had their source in the New Testament.

5. Believing explanations

Coincidence is always a possibility. One need only peruse one of those lists of Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences to be persuaded that two very real events can be connected in multiple ways be sheer coincidence. Some of the similarities are straightforward (each president was shot in the head on a Friday and succeeded by a Southerner named Johnson who was born in '08) and others are more of the "Lehi-Nephi" variety (Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theatre; Kennedy was shot in a Ford automobile, a Lincoln). Other explanations are obviously to be preferred, though.

The beginnings of an explanation for the basic story similarity can be found in the fact that the daughter of Jared's dance-for-decapitation scheme was inspired by "an account concerning them of old, that they by their secret plans did obtain kingdoms and great glory" (Ether 8:9), and of these secret plans Moroni writes, "it hath been made known unto me that they are had among all people" (Ether 8:20). Based on this, we should positively expect to see similar schemes being carried out among other people. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that the wicked Herods might have been involved in Gadianton-style secret combinations. The story of Esther might be a (partially disguised) account of another such scheme. Although she does not dance, Esther is "fair and beautiful" (Esther 2:7) and with that beauty extracts from Ahasuerus the very promise -- "even to the half of the kingdom" (Esther 5:6, 7:2) -- that Salome extracted from Herod. Like Salome and Jared, Esther uses that promise for murderous ends, getting the king to execute Haman and declare open season on the Jews' enemies. Is Esther -- whose book contains not a single reference to God or prayer -- less of a heroine than popularly believed? "For I, Nephi, have not taught them many things concerning the manner of the Jews; for their works were works of darkness, and their doings were doings of abominations" (2 Ne. 25:2). The daughterly dance of death could well be some established ritual among the workers in darkness.

Could the "unto the half of my kingdom" wording also be part of an established secret-combination oath? If so, the inclusion of similar wording may be not a coincidence but an allusion. We know that Moroni is unwilling to "write the manner of their oaths and combinations" (Ether 8:20) directly, so perhaps he is deliberately saying "the half of the kingdom" as a hint to those with ears to hear.

That would leave only "exceeding sorrowful" and "warned in a dream" as seemingly coincidental parallels. They could be just that, coincidences, or they could be instances the sort of "biblical contamination" I proposed in my first post here.

7 Comments:

HomeStadter said...
An idea that may be worth pondering re: "biblical contamination", and the hard-to-define parallels - that these were done deliberately. If we assume that the Book of Mormon is the stick of Ephraim that is supposed to flow together with the stick of Judah (again making the assumption that this refers the bible), as in 2 Nephi 3:12, then these might not be accidents from Joseph Smith's subconscious, but deliberate markers pointing us to the other compilation and designed to change the way we understand both Bible and Book of Mormon stories by comparing the parallel passages.

No particular insights jump out of the examples you mentioned in this post. Esther was a secret combination is interesting but doesn't seem to lead to any important conclusions far as I can tell, and the overall theme seems to parallel the psalm image of the wicked falling into their own trap. If the dancing/half kingdom is a marker of secret combinations does that imply Herod was in a secret combination or that he was their chump? King Lamoni also used the half kingdom phrase, but I don't see anything to suggest secret combinations were part of that story.

Some other parallels off the top of my head:
8 saved in Noahs ark: 8 arks of the Jaredites
Alma the Yr: Saul on the road to Damascus
Jacob 5: Romans 11 Olive tree
Almas the word of God as a seed: Parable of the Sower
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
HS, I think that's true for some kinds of parallels but not others. In the two olive tree allegories, for example, or the two seed comparisons, we have two versions of a similar teaching, and reading each in light of the other should be beneficial. In the stories of Alma and Saul, we perhaps have God dealing with two different people in similar ways, and again comparisons might be instructive. The number eight being associated with Noah and the Jaredites (and circumcision, and baptism) could be symbolism intentionally created by God.

In the case of the two dancing-for-decapitation stories, these are the actions of wicked people, and so it seems unlikely that God created the parallel on purpose by inspiring them to act in similar ways. If the parallels are neither unreal (pure contamination) nor just coincidence, then I think the secret combination angle (Satan inspiring similar works of darkness among different peoples) is the best explanation.

For parallels like those in 1 Nephi 1:6, it's hard to see how comparing the passages could shed any light on anything. Do we understand Lehi's vision better by thinking about Samson dwelling on a rock, the Philisitines spreading in Lehi, and naphtha kindling a flame on the great stones?
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
Lamoni's father's offer of "half of the kingdom" actually makes more sense than its biblical counterparts. Lamoni's father's life is begging to have his life spared, offering, so of course he's willing to make extravagant offers. We see precedent for such an offer in Mosiah 19, where the Lamanites tell the people of Limhi they will "spare their lives" in exchange for "one half of all they possessed."

In the case of Ahasuerus and Herod, it's not clear why they are offering half their kingdom or what they expect to get in exchange. Akish is hoping to secure the daughter of Jared's hand in marriage, but Ahasuerus is already married to Esther. Indeed, she is already the queen, which makes the offer of "half the kingdom" rather strange. In the case of Herod, I suppose it's possible he was hoping to acquire his own stepdaughter as a second wife, but it doesn't seem likely, and the text gives no indication of that or any other motive.
Anonymous said...
As for 1 Nephi 1:6: I am reading In the Language of Adam in which the author argues there was a temple ritual alluded to in Isaiah and throughout the Book of Mormon. He thinks that the Holy of Holies had as important features an outcropping of bedrock and a candlestick. The candlestick is the many branched menorah which represents the tree of life i.e. the Queen of Heaven, now known to us as Mary.
Perhaps we are meant to look at Samson dwelling on a rock as meaning we need to be founded on the rock. Naptha on a rock might be making a point about the tree of life being dependent on the creator, a sort of who is greater David, or his descendant whom he called Lord situation (candles bear flames which would represent the white fruit).
OTOH I may be getting last in a maze of symbolism, drawing connections where none was intended. I've got nothing about the philistines spreading in Lehi. Perhaps that land has some other significance and is called something else in other descriptions.
HomeStadter said...
On the gripping hand - if JS subconsciousness did supply these words and images, it must have perceived some connection greater than 'lets fill in some random bible stuff here'. Our subconscious connections sometimes are trite and dumb, but there is always some connection tighter than random in general category.
PS. Above comment is mine, did not mean to post as anon.
HomeStadter said...
Thinking about 1 Ne 1:6 more - it now seems to me that the burning bush is also supposed to be a representation of the tree of life, with what comes out of her is Jesus Christ, in that case the voice.
Leo said...
Maybe "asynchronous syncs" is a usable term for these odd connections. I like the connection you made between the specific language suggesting an evil ordinance of sorts and the language used by secret combos. Seems plausible. Esther not looking too great in that view.

Thursday, April 3^rd 2025

The end of the endless

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3.5 min read (1,100 words)

In D&C Section 19, the Lord explains that when the punishment of the damned is described as "endless" or "eternal," this does not necessarily mean that it has no end:

Nevertheless, it is not written that there shall be no end to this torment, but it is written endless torment. Again, it is written eternal damnation; wherefore it is more express than other scriptures, that it might work upon the hearts of the children of men, altogether for my name's glory.

Wherefore, I will explain unto you this mystery . . . . I am endless, and the punishment which is given from my hand is endless punishment, for Endless is my name. Wherefore -- Eternal punishment is God's punishment. Endless punishment is God's punishment (D&C 19:6-8, 10-12).

I'm sure I'm not the only Mormon to have found this passage a bit embarrassing. The doctrine that damnation is not necessarily eternal is a good one, but the explanation for that doctrine presented here just reads like sophistry. Really, we're supposed to distinguish between "endless" and "no end"? Also, the claims about what is and isn't written aren't even true. There are passages that say there shall be "no end" to the torment of the damned:

. . . not the destruction of the soul, save it be the casting of it into that hell which hath no end (1 Ne. 14:3).

. . . their torment is as a lake of fire and brimstone, whose flame ascendeth up forever and ever and has no end (2 Ne. 9:16).

These can be explained away -- the first passage says only that hell itself has no end, not that any particular soul will stay there forever; while the second only says their torment is like a fire that has no end -- but again, this feels like sophistry, an attempt to make the text say something other than its plain meaning.

⁂

It turns out, however, that there are several passages in the Book of Mormon that do speak of "everlasting" or "eternal" or "endless" torment that nevertheless does have an end. For example, here is Alma the Younger recounting his conversion experience:

Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation, repenting nigh unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God. My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity. I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more (Mosiah 27:28-29).

Alma very clearly says that he has experienced "eternal torment," but that that experience had an end, and he is tormented no more.

Here is telling the story again:

But I was racked with eternal torment, for my soul was harrowed up to the greatest degree and racked with all my sins. Yea, I did remember all my sins and iniquities, for which I was tormented with the pains of hell . . . . And now, for three days and for three nights was I racked, even with the pains of a damned soul. . . .

I cried within my heart: O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me, who am in the gall of bitterness, and am encircled about by the everlasting chains of death.

And now, behold, when I thought this, I could remember my pains no more; yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more. And oh, what joy, and what marvelous light I did behold; yea, my soul was filled with joy as exceeding as was my pain! (Alma 36:12-13, 16, 18-20).

Alma's "eternal torment" -- which he equates with "the pains of hell" and "of a damned soul" -- lasted "for three days and for three nights." It was eternal, but also of a relatively short duration.

Here is Ammon describing the salvation of the Lamanites:

Yea, they were encircled about with everlasting darkness and destruction; but behold, he has brought them into his everlasting light, yea, into everlasting salvation; and they are encircled about with the matchless bounty of his love; yea, and we have been instruments in his hands of doing this great and marvelous work (Alma 26:15).

Here again, the "everlasting darkness and destruction" are clearly stated to have had an end.

Finally, here is Moroni, talking not about damnation but about death:

And because of the redemption of man, which came by Jesus Christ, they are brought back into the presence of the Lord; yea, this is wherein all men are redeemed, because the death of Christ bringeth to pass the resurrection, which bringeth to pass a redemption from an endless sleep, from which sleep all men shall be awakened by the power of God when the trump shall sound; and they shall come forth, both small and great, and all shall stand before his bar, being redeemed and loosed from this eternal band of death, which death is a temporal death (Morm. 9:13).

Here the end of the endless is about as explicit as can be: "an endless sleep, from which sleep all men shall be awakened."

This last quote, from Moroni, is the least amenable to the D&C 19 treatment. "Endless sleep is God's sleep"? In what sense does the sleep of death pertain to God? I think the obvious reading is that death, unlike ordinary sleep, is potentially endless. Death is a sleep that would last forever, were it not for divine intervention. It is endless by nature, and yet it may end. To quote Lovecraft, who has been in the sync-stream recently,

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

I think "eternal damnation" should probably be understood in the same way. It is naturally and potentially endless, and yet its end may be brought about if God and Man so choose.

2 Comments:

Leo said...
Death is given to man as a gift from God, the means by which we escape this mortal corruption, so I think Endless sleep works just fine. It's the sleep that came from Endless just as the punishment to the wicked came from Eternal.
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
Leo, compare the passages in this post with Alma 42:6, where “man became lost forever” in the fall of Adam and Eve. It’s hard to read this as a reference to God. I think we have to understand it as “potentially forever” or “would be forever were it not for divine intervention.”

(I ran across that passage today in my regular scripture study. I didn’t find it when preparing this post because “forever” wasn’t one of the words I searched for.)

Saturday, April 19^th 2025

Who concealed the Gadiantons' secret plans?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

2 min read (610 words)

In the 75th or 76th year of the judges, Nephi son of Helaman says in a prayer that the band of Gadianton has been eradicated. I have added in brackets the implied referents of the third-person pronouns and possessives, noting that one of them is ambiguous.

O Lord, behold this people repenteth; and they [the people] have swept away the band of Gadianton from amongst them [the people] insomuch that they [the Gadiantons] have become extinct, and they [who?] have concealed their [the Gadiantons'] secret plans in the earth. Now, O Lord, because of this their [the peoples'] humility wilt thou turn away thine anger . . . (Hel. 11:10-11).

The first possible reading is that the people have demonstrated their humility by (1) repenting, (2) wiping out the Gadianton band, and (3) concealing the Gadiantons' secret plans in the earth.

The second possible reading is that the people have been so successful in sweeping away the Gadianton band that that the Gadiantons have (1) become extinct and (2) been forced to conceal their secret plans in the earth.

The first is the most natural reading for a couple of reasons. First, "their humility" definitely refers to the humility of the people, but that reading would be difficult if the three instances of they/their preceding it all referred to the Gadiantons. Second, it is unnatural to say that the Gadiantons "have become extinct and" done something else; they obviously would have had to conceal their plans before they became extinct, and so it would be more natural to say that first in the sentence. If the meaning of the passage is that, although the Gadiantons' themselves have become extinct, their plans are still hidden somewhere in the earth, we would expect a but rather than an and. Because of its naturalness, I assume many readers of the Book of Mormon (including myself until very recently) take the first reading for granted and don't even notice the ambiguity.

The official Chinese translation of the Book of Mormon removes the ambiguity and makes the first reading the only one possible. It says, essentially, that the people have "repented, wiped out the Gadiantons, and concealed their secret plans." The subject of all these verbs can only be "this people."

However, the Russian translators made the opposite call: "они скрыли свои тайные планы" can only mean "they hid their own secret plans." If anyone other than the Gadiantons themselves had hidden the plans, the correct possessive would be их rather than the reflexive свои.

Despite what I have said about the naturalness of the first reading, I can see the Russians' point of view, too. Why would the people who eradicated the Gadiantons themselves carefully conceal the Gadiantons' secret plans instead of just destroying them? Years later, people dig up the plans and use them to start a Gadianton revival. For that even to have been possible, the plans must have been intentionally buried in such a way that they would be preserved -- something analogous to Moroni writing on gold plates and burying them in a stone box. It's hard to imagine any motive for the enemies of the Gadiantons to do that.

If the Gadiantons themselves buried the plans so that they would be preserved for future generations, that raises questions, too. It suggests that the "secret plans" were not just a playbook for criminal mischief but were seen by the Gadiantons as having some almost religious value.

I'm still trying to work out possible understandings of the whole "secret plans" plot point. I just want to document this ambiguity in the text first and see what other people think.

4 Comments:

tekorra said...
"Secret plans" seems to be the exact explicated satanic rites and machinations of this band; the same term is used in Alma 37. These were originally on the records written by Ether and translated by Mosiah, but kept hidden or sealed up from the lay Nephites to prevent them from exercising them and destroying themselves. "retain all their oaths, and their covenants, and their agreements in their secret abominations; yea, and all their signs and their wonders ye shall keep from this people." Moroni says something similar in Ether 8:20 where he won't detail them to us, the Gentiles. Ergo, they weren't fully disclosed in the records passed down among the Nephites. It says Gadianton "was exceedingly expert in many words, and also in his craft" which makes me wonder if he was a kind of scribe, historian, or boffin and was inspired by the Devil to seek out these plans in the sealed record in the archive. The only problem with this theory is that it says he didn't obtain these from the records delivered unto Helaman; "those secret oaths and covenants did not come forth unto Gadianton from the records which were delivered unto Helaman". Unless this is talking of the free records passed down, and not the sealed portion kept/retained from the Nephites. "Therefore ye shall keep these secret plans of their oaths and their covenants from this people, and only their wickedness and their murders and their abominations shall ye make known unto [the Nephites]. (Also, why would Ether include these in his record?)

"conceal[ing] their secret plans in the earth" strikes me as the Nephites sealing these oaths back up, similar to Alma 37 where they must be "retained" and "kept from the people"; sealed back up in the archive or hidden up in the ground. But that does beg a good question, as you point out; why keep them written down? Plus we see that a few years later there was a group of dissenters and Lamanites who "did search out all the secret plans of Gadianton". Did they access these records by searching for where they were kept? Or were they instructed in these plans by the Devil directly?

Back in Ether 8 it says "Whereby hath my father so much sorrow? Hath he not read the record which our fathers brought across the great deep? Behold, is there not an account concerning them of old, that they by their secret plans did obtain kingdoms and great glory?" Is this saying the oaths were in the Jaredite records that were passed down? Why would they do that? Why would the few Jaredite people who came across the ocean choose to keep the records of the evil oaths that led to the fall of Babel?
Ftan said...
Interesting thoughts from a close reading of 3pl pronouns.

In Ether 6, the they of vv8-10 has been interpreted to refer to the Jaredites rather than their vessels, with the result that the verbs break and mar have archaic meaning.

In Ether 8, the whereby seems archaic, with a contextual meaning of 'why?' The OED has it last in Malory, which would mean it's very archaic, late ME even.

Another interesting tidbit is this: No "after that S" usage for more than half the dictation, then 115 of them, starting at 3 Nephi 12. High rates, last seen in the early 1600s. So did Joseph Smith one day in May 1829 decide that he needed to up his archaic game, and start using "after that S" 2/3 of the time, or was it revealed? Similar thing, of course, with wherefore ~ therefore and whoso ~ whosoever (see Metcalfe, ed., 1993). But also with "if it so be". Just three of these before 3 Nephi 16, then 39, the most ever. The only texts with more than ten are late ME, by Chaucer and Lydgate.
J Argyle said...
@Ftan -I sometimes wonder if there wasn't a 1600s person involved in the translation process somehow, someone knowledgeable of the scholarly debates about how to translate that eventually led to the KJV. The 'gifts of the spirit' such as translation may be the spirit allowing us to access other people's minds and use their capabilities, or to view written documents.

As to OP. The people burying it require some explanation. Maybe the plans are like The Ring of Power; they can't be destroyed and are a hazard. Secret combinations seem like a criminal syndicate and or a political movement/conspiracy at first glance, but there has to be something more than that to them, something that explains why they are such a force, and why normal people would find it so hard to resist joining them.
G. said...
I have always wondered *why* the people buried their plans instead of just destroying them. Especially considering the BofM emphasis on burying records precisely so they can later 'speak from the dust.' I have never noticed the pronoun ambiguity until you pointed it out.

My best speculation up till now was that the format of the records was considered sacred, if perverted, too sacred to destroy. Perhaps they venerated records too much to destroy any record, or the records had been recorded on objects where the underlying object was considered sacred.

The only mention of record destruction that I can recall is Alma 14, where they burn the saints and their scriptures in one big fire. Perhaps this became a defining event for the scribal class.

Thursday, October 30^th 2025

Hollow pillars of light or fire

Wm Jas Tychonievich

5 min read (1,400 words)

Ritchie Valens put this in my mind. When you don't speak Spanish, even a common Spanish word has relatively few mental associations, so for me the word arriba is associated with (1) "La Bamba," (2) Speedy Gonzales, and (3) the Spanish translation of Joseph Smith's 1838 account of his First Vision. This last is something I heard recited every week by my Spanish-speaking colleagues when I was a Mormon missionary. I never actively tried to memorize it, but I heard it so many times that to this day I can still recite it verbatim:

Vi una columna de luz, más brillante que el sol, directamente arriba de mi cabeza; y esta luz gradualmente descendió hasta descansar sobre mí. . . . Al reposar sobre mí la luz, vi en el aire arriba de mí a dos Personajes, cuyo fulgor y gloria no admiten descripción. Uno de ellos me habló, llamándome por mi nombre, y dijo, señalando al otro: "Éste es mi Hijo Amado: ¡Escúchalo!"

The ellipsis is not mine. The missionaries memorized a slightly edited version of what Smith wrote, removing the reference to the demonic attack he experienced immediately before the vision. Here's the original English:

I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. . . . When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other -- This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him! (JS-H vv. 16-17)

Despite the clear description of "a pillar of light exactly over me head," artwork tends to show the light as being located in front of Smith and not really in the form of a pillar with clear boundaries. This is probably the best known artistic depiction:

(image)

This is one of the few that shows Smith himself inside the pillar of light, as described:

(image)

The strangest feature of this pillar of light is that it "descended gradually until it fell upon" Smith. This means it was not at all like a beam of light shining down from the heavens, which would instantaneously (in a nanosecond per foot traversed) reach the ground, but was more like a moving object with a particular shape -- apparently that of a cylinder -- and a clearly defined bottom (and so perhaps also a clearly defined top?). When the pillar first appeared, the bottom of it was still high above Smith, and then it gradually descended until it reached him.

It was not until the pillar of light rested on Smith that he was able to see the two Personages, who were presumably (but are not said explicitly to have been) inside the pillar. One possible explanation of this would be that the "walls" of the pillar radiated brilliant light in one direction only, namely outward. Since the pillar was "above the brightness of the sun," it would of course be impossible for anyone looking into it from outside to see anything at all. The inside of the pillar must have been considerably less bright. Otherwise, he still wouldn't have been able to see anything -- and it's hard to imagine the two Personages being so bright as to be notable for their "brightness and glory" even against a background that was brighter than the sun.

This idea of a hollow pillar of light which can have people inside it also appears in the Book of Mormon:

And it came to pass that Nephi and Lehi were encircled about as if by fire, even insomuch that they durst not lay their hands upon them for fear lest they should be burned. Nevertheless, Nephi and Lehi were not burned; and they were as standing in the midst of fire and were not burned. And when they saw that they were encircled about with a pillar of fire, and that it burned them not, their hearts did take courage. For they saw that the Lamanites durst not lay their hands upon them; neither durst they come near unto them, but stood as if they were struck dumb with amazement (Hel. 5:23-25).

Nephi and Lehi were not in the fire but "encircled about" by it. The fire apparently had the form of a hollow cylinder. Those in the center were not burned, but those on the outside were afraid they would be if they got too close. Thus, as with Joseph Smith's pillar of light, the radiant energy seems to be directed only outward. It seems likely that the Lamanites could not actually see Nephi and Lehi at this point, just as Smith could not see the Personages inside the pillar until he, too, was inside it.

Later in the same chapter, the Lamanites repent and find themselves inside a pillar of fire with Nephi and Lehi:

And it came to pass that when they cast their eyes about, and saw that the cloud of darkness was dispersed from overshadowing them, behold, they saw that they were encircled about, yea every soul, by a pillar of fire. And Nephi and Lehi were in the midst of them; yea, they were encircled about; yea, they were as if in the midst of a flaming fire, yet it did harm them not, neither did it take hold upon the walls of the prison; and they were filled with that joy which is unspeakable and full of glory (Hel. 5:43-44).

In the past, I visualized each person being encircled about by his own pillar of fire, but now I think the most natural reading is that there was a single pillar of fire encircling them all. From the fact that nothing was burned, not even "the walls of the prison," I take it that this was more properly a pillar of light, like Smith's, called "fire" because they didn't know what else to call it.

The other main scriptural account of Beings inside a pillar is in Exodus, where the Lord is sometimes in a "pillar of fire" and sometimes in a non-radiant "pillar of cloud":

And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night: He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people (Ex. 13:21-22).

It is understood that the people didn't actually see the Lord himself when he was in the pillar. As with Joseph Smith, what was inside the pillar could not be seen from outside it.

The Lord could see out of the pillar, though:

And it came to pass, that in the morning watch the LORD looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the host of the Egyptians (Ex. 14:24).

It is strongly implied that Moses went inside the pillar when he saw God face to face:

And it came to pass, as Moses entered into the tabernacle, the cloudy pillar descended, and stood at the door of the tabernacle, and the Lord talked with Moses. And all the people saw the cloudy pillar stand at the tabernacle door: and all the people rose up and worshipped, every man in his tent door. And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp: but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tabernacle (Ex. 33:9-11).

It's not entirely clear that Moses was inside the pillar, as he "entered into the tabernacle," while the pillar "stood at the door of the tabernacle." However, the people saw only the pillar, while Moses himself probably saw the Lord, and the best explanation is that Moses was inside the pillar with him.

2 Comments:

James Argyle said...
Elijah and the chariot of fire might be a similar thing. It says there were horses and chariots of fire (and Israelites? v.12) between Elisah and Elijah, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. A whirlwind is roughly hollow cylinderish, and perhaps saying it was also of fire was assumed.

"And as they still went on and talked, behold, chariots of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven." (2 Kings 2:11)
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
Good point, James.

Wednesday, January 14^th 2026

Further evidence for the Zenos theory

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3.5 min read (1,100 words)

My recent dream about how "There's no Second Isaiah" (see my post "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses") prompted me to look into the evidence that the Book of Isaiah had a single author, in contrast to the mainstream position -- usually presented as an established fact -- that chapters 40-66 are by a much later author or authors. So I got an electronic copy of The Indivisible Isaiah: Evidence for the Single Authorship of the Prophetic Book (1964) by Rachel Margalioth and started reading it.

Much of Mrs. Margalioth's method consists of finding distinctive words and expressions that are found in both parts of Isaiah (1-39 and 40-66) but in the writings of no other prophet. The sheer number and specificity of these parallels in style and word choice does indeed make it hard to avoid the conclusion that the book is the work of a single author. As Mrs. Margalioth writes:

This indicates not only a uniformity of style, but also to a uniform trend of thought. This reveals the innermost recesses of human thinking wherein idea and language are woven into one web, and there can be no room for a stranger. This is the style of a man which is the man himself. Our [Jewish] sages must have meant just this when they declared that no two prophets speak in identical style (p. 42).

This got me thinking about Zenos, the otherwise unknown prophet whose work is quoted in three parts of the Book of Mormon. Since these three texts differ greatly in genre and style, it is reasonable to assume that they are quoting three separate Zenos documents rather than a unified "Book of Zenos." For ease of reference, I will give them names:

1 Zenos (fragments of which are quoted or paraphrased in 1 Ne. 19:10-17): a prophecy about the distant future, mot notably including the death and resurrection of a Jesus-like figure
2 Zenos (quoted in Jacob 5): an extended allegorical story about olive trees
3 Zenos (quoted in Alma 33:4-11): a short, psalm-like composition on the subject of answered prayers

That's a pretty small sample -- 102 verses in total, compared to the 1,292 verses of the Book of Isaiah -- but I thought it might be worthwhile to check to see if any of the three Zenos texts share any distinctive wording not found elsewhere. If they do, that would be consistent with Zenos being a real person.

I found no such parallels, which is perhaps not entirely surprising given how short all but one of the texts are.

I did find something else, though. In my 2024 post "Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul," I propose -- building on the work of a Redditor who goes by Stisa79 -- that several other texts in both the Bible and the Book or Mormon also quote or allude to 1 Zenos. I establish this by showing that these uncredited Zenos quotations share distinctive language with the 1 Zenos fragments in 1 Ne. 19 and with each other. One of my commenters then found a paper by Quinten Barney using a similar method to show that two other texts might be influenced by 1 Zenos. I found additional links connecting these two to the texts I had found. I've been meaning to write an exhaustive post about all the scriptural texts that likely quote or allude to 1 Zenos, but I got bogged down in the sheer volume and complexity of all the links I would have to document, and so I haven't finished it yet. Anyway, my current list of texts likely influenced by 1 Zenos is:

Joel 2
Malachi 4 (discovered by Stisa79)
Matthew 23-24 (discovered by Quinten Barney)
1 Corinthians 3
1 Nephi 22 (discovered by Stisa79)
2 Nephi 25-26 (discovered by Stisa79)
Alma 45
Helaman 13-15 (discovered by Quinten Barney)

Although I didn't find any direct linguistic links between the 1 Zenos fragments and 3 Zenos, I did find links between 3 Zenos and two of the texts in the above list, which I believe to have been influenced by 1 Zenos. Here are the relevant verses:

Yea, and thou hast also heard me when I have been cast out and have been despised by mine enemies; yea, thou didst hear my cries, and wast angry with mine enemies, and thou didst visit them in thine anger with speedy destruction (Alma 33:10, explicitly quoting 3 Zenos).

And they shall be visited with thunderings, and lightnings, and earthquakes, and all manner of destructions, for the fire of the anger of the Lord shall be kindled against them, . . . And when these things have passed away a speedy destruction cometh unto my people; for . . . when the Spirit ceaseth to strive with man then cometh speedy destruction, and this grieveth my soul (2 Ne. 26:6, 10-11, with strong links to 1 Zenos).

Yea, I will visit them in my fierce anger, and there shall be those of the fourth generation who shall live, of your enemies, to behold your utter destruction; and this shall surely come except ye repent, saith the Lord; and those of the fourth generation shall visit your destruction (Hel. 13:10, with strong links to 1 Zenos).

Alma 33:10 and Hel, 13:10 are the only verses in all scripture to include the words {enemies, visit, anger, destruction}. With the exception of enemies, the words even occur in the same sequence in both texts.

The phrase "speedy destruction" occurs twice in 2 Ne. 26:10-11, once in Alma 33:10, and nowhere else in scripture. Both passages also include visit and anger.

This obviously falls far short of the sheer volume of parallels connecting the two parts of the Book of Isaiah, but I still think it counts as a little more evidence in favor of the reality of Zenos.

I haven't yet done any intertextual study of Jacob 5 (2 Zenos), more because it's really long and boring than for any more respectable reason. Once I do that, I'll try to put together a single article covering the Zenos text exhaustively.

2 Comments:

Jacob G. said...
Romans 11 draws from what you call Zenos fragment 2. Perhaps Paul read it when he was in Arabia for three years. Speculatively, 'Arabia' may have meant 'Lihyan', where some people still remembered Lehi and Nephi and their preachings, referenced in D&C 33.
There are other ways Paul could have read Zenos, but as far as I can tell, it was completely absent from the Jerusalem schools where Paul was instructed.
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
I'm currently working on a post about how 2 Zenos relates textually to Isaiah, Paul, and Luke. Stay tuned.

Thursday, January 29^th 2026

What did Alma know, and when did he know it?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

4.5 min read (1,300 words)

At the very beginning of Nephite history, Nephi himself prophesied that Jesus would come 600 years from the time Lehi left Jerusalem:

"Yea, even six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem, a prophet would the Lord God raise up among the Jews -- even a Messiah, or, in other words, a Savior of the world" (1 Ne. 10:4).

"And behold he cometh, according to the words of the angel, in six hundred years from the time my father left Jerusalem" (1 Ne. 19:8).

"For according to the words of the prophets, the Messiah cometh in six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem; and according to the words of the prophets, and also the word of the angel of God, his name shall be Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (2 Ne. 25:29).

However, when Alma the Younger is preaching an Ammonihah circa 82 BC, he appears to be unaware of this prophecy, as he says they "know not how soon" Christ will come:

And now we only wait to hear the joyful news declared unto us by the mouth of angels, of his coming; for the time cometh, we know not how soon. Would to God that it might be in my day; but let it be sooner or later, in it I will rejoice (Alma 13:25).

The skeptical explanation for this discrepancy goes something like this: According to the well-established theory of Mosiah priority, Joseph first dictated the lost 116 pages, then continued dictating from Mosiah 3 (now Mosiah 1, as the first two chapters were lost) to the end of the book, and finally went back and dictated from 1 Nephi to Words of Mormon. By the time he dictated the "small plates" books, Joseph Smith no longer remembered many of the details from the lost 116 pages, but he was worried that the pages might resurface at any time and didn't want there to be any discrepancies. That is why the "small plates" books give so few historical details and name so few of the characters. To pad out this section and make up for the lack of any detailed history, Joseph Smith filled the small plates with lots of prophecies, including Nephi's detailed visions of the future. The problem was that he didn't know he would later be creating these visions for Nephi at the time he dictated "large plates" books like Alma, and so the characters in that part of the book are inexplicably ignorant of what Nephi prophesied.

The only believing explanation I have encountered is simply that, for whatever reason, the contents of the small plates were just not common knowledge among the later Nephites. In support of this, we have Mormon circa AD 385 speaking of the small plates as if they were some obscure document buried in the archives, which he had not known about before:

And now, I speak somewhat concerning that which I have written; for after I had made an abridgment from the plates of Nephi, down to the reign of this king Benjamin, of whom Amaleki spake, I searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands, and I found these plates, which contained this small account of the prophets, from Jacob down to the reign of this king Benjamin, and also many of the words of Nephi (W of M v. 3).

So it appears that, whatever the reason may be, Alma the Younger did not have access to the small plates. One problem with this assumption, though, is that in his words to his son Helaman circa 74 BC he appears to quote from them directly:

Yea, methought I saw, even as our father Lehi saw, God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels, in the attitude of singing and praising their God; yea, and my soul did long to be there (Alma 36:22).

The passage in boldface is a 20-word verbatim quote from the small plates:

And being thus overcome with the Spirit, he was carried away in a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God (1 Ne. 1:8).

If we want to maintain that Alma really didn't have the small plates, I guess the explanation must be that this passage was also in the lost 116 pages.

For the believer, the large plates, believed to have started with a Book of Lehi, would surely have contained an account of Lehi's Jerusalem vision, and Nephi's own account of that vision would likely have quoted some of his father's language directly. Alma wasn't quoting Nephi; rather, both Alma and Nephi were quoting Lehi.

For the skeptic, it is unlikely that Alma's quote would match the language of the lost 116 pages exactly, since Joseph Smith didn't have those pages when he wrote Alma. But when he was writing the replacement text ("small plates"), Smith referred to Alma and made sure to make Lehi say what Alma had said he'd said. If Smith was doing this, though, he wasn't very consistent about it. For example, Alma claimed that Lehi and Nephi called the ball Liahona (Alma 37:38), but Smith apparently forgot to include that word in the replacement text.

I've been familiar with the above arguments for some time. However, not until my umpteenth rereading of Alma just today did I notice another highly relevant passage. This is Alma addressing his son Corianton circa 74 BC

And now, my son, this was the ministry unto which ye were called, to declare these glad tidings unto this people, to prepare their minds; or rather that salvation might come unto them, that they may prepare the minds of their children to hear the word at the time of his coming (Alma 39:16).

Here Alma starts to say that Corianton is to prepare the minds of the people to hear Christ when he comes, but then he corrects himself and says that no, actually, it's to help them prepare their children to hear Christ when he comes. This implies that Alma knows Christ is not coming soon enough for people who are adults in 74 BC to hear him themselves but is coming soon enough for those people's children to hear him. In other words, he appears to know the date of Christ's coming with considerable precision, and this is in stark contrast to what he had said just eight years earlier -- when he said "we know not how soon" Christ will come and seemed to entertain the possibility that it would be in his lifetime.

So in 82 BC, Alma doesn't know when Christ is coming -- but then in 74 BC he (1) appears to quotes verbatim from 1 Nephi and (2) suddenly does know when Christ is coming. This strongly suggests to me that at some point between those two dates, Alma gains access to the small plates and becomes familiar with their contents.I'm going to have to go back through the relevant portion of the Book of Mormon with that hypothesis in mind and see if I can find any hints of exactly when and how that might have happened.

3 Comments:

William Wright (WW) said...
A counter argument to Alma having come across Nephi's written prophecies and referencing them by the time he is talking to his sons in Alma 36 - 42 are his concluding words to Helaman the following year before he disappeared without a trace - found in Alma 45.

He speaks to Helaman in private and shares a prophecy with him that the people of Nephi will be destroyed within 400 years of Jesus' manifestation to them, and that their falling away will begin within the fourth generation:

"... from that day, even the fourth generation shall not all pass away before that great iniquity shall come."

This of course mirrors Nephi's own prophecy as well as the vision he saw with the angel, which also mentions the fourth generation not all passing away before they begin to fall:

"But the Son of Righteousness shall appear unto them; and he shall heal them, and they shall have peace with him, until three generations shall have passed away, and many of the fourth generation shall have passed away in righteousness.

And when these things have passed away a speedy destruction cometh unto my people; for, notwithstanding the pains of my soul, I have seen it"

So, Alma is saying the same thing that Nephi wrote, but he doesn't reference him at all. Rather, Alma tells Helaman that this is a 'new' prophecy or revelation that he has received via the spirit of revelation, and instructs Helaman to write it down (see vs. 9-10). If he was referencing Nephi's words, I would have to think he would have said so, and even pointed Helaman to the direct reference, and there wouldn't have been any need for Helaman to write down the prophecy again as if it was a new thing.

This seems to suggest that neither Alma nor Helaman had access to what Nephi wrote, at least the material at the end of what is now 2 Nephi.

Which makes it a bit of a mystery as to who Nephi thinks he is writing to at that point. He keeps referring to people who are his 'brethren' at some future time, instructing them to remember things, and even foresees that those specific words will be preserved and handed down from generation to generation - which would seem to imply that Alma and then Helaman would have them, based on Alma's injunction to Helaman on preserving the records that have been handed down - but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Samuel the Lamanite would be another example of someone who seems to have received similar information independently of any knowledge of a previous written record. He also prophesied of the Nephite destruction within 400 years of his statement (he said this 5 years before Jesus' birth), and directly says that rather than this came from "whatsoever things the Lord put into his heart". This again strongly implies that even though Samuel is repeating prophecy of both Nephi and Alma, he has no knowledge of either of their prophecies.
William Wright (WW) said...
Sorry - second to last sentence is garbled (typing/ thinking too fast...). Meant to say ".. that rather than this coming from some other written source, this came from 'whatseover things the Lord put into his heart.'"
Wm Jas Tychonievich said...
This is complicated somewhat by the strong possibility that both Alma and Samuel the Lamanite are quoting Zenos in those passages, as is Nephi in 2 Ne. 26, though not in 1 Ne. 12. (The evidence for this will be outlined in a future post.)

I don't think that prophesying or speaking "whatsoever things the Lord put into his heart" necessarily excludes references to the past prophecies of others. Ample counterexamples can be found, the most obvious probably being the Book of Revelation (which incorporates an impressive proportion of all the prophetic material in the OT) and the prophecies of Joseph Smith.

Thursday, February 19^th 2026

The Twelve Tribes against the Twelve Apostles

Wm Jas Tychonievich

7.5 min read (2,200 words)

The first part of Nephi's high mountain vision deals with the conception, birth, baptism, ministry, end execution of Jesus Christ -- the resurrection is, strangely, omitted -- and presents no real problems. It is consistent with the stories we have in the New Testament. After Christ's execution on the cross, though, things get a little confusing:

And I, Nephi, saw that he was lifted up upon the cross and slain for the sins of the world.

And after he was slain I saw the multitudes of the earth, that they were gathered together to fight against the apostles of the Lamb; for thus were the twelve called by the angel of the Lord. And the multitude of the earth was gathered together; and I beheld that they were in a large and spacious building, like unto the building which my father saw.

And the angel of the Lord spake unto me again, saying: "Behold the world and the wisdom thereof; yea, behold the house of Israel hath gathered together to fight against the twelve apostles of the Lamb."

And it came to pass that I saw and bear record, that the great and spacious building was the pride of the world; and it fell, and the fall thereof was exceedingly great.

And the angel of the Lord spake unto me again, saying: "Thus shall be the destruction of all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, that shall fight against the twelve apostles of the Lamb" (1 Ne. 11:33-36).

This can be seen as a reference to the fact that the early church was persecuted. What is strange is the angel's insistence that "the house of Israel hath gathered together to fight against the twelve apostles of the Lamb." In the history we know, it was primarily the Romans that persecuted the early Christians, and though the Jews also participated, it certainly wasn't the gathered House of Israel, a term which always refers to all Twelve Tribes being reunited, as in the LDS Article of Faith, "We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes" (A of F 10). The Ten Tribes disappeared in the eighth century BC and remain "lost" to this day. James, one of the apostles against whom these gathered tribes are supposed to be fighting, addresses his epistle "to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad" (James 1:1).

Furthermore, elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, Jesus himself seems to say that the tribes will not be gathered until they accept him as their Redeemer:

And I command you that ye shall write these sayings after I am gone, that if it so be that my people at Jerusalem, they who have seen me and been with me in my ministry, do not ask the Father in my name, that they may receive a knowledge of you by the Holy Ghost, and also of the other tribes whom they know not of, that these sayings which ye shall write shall be kept and shall be manifested unto the Gentiles, that through the fulness of the Gentiles, the remnant of their seed, who shall be scattered forth upon the face of the earth because of their unbelief, may be brought in, or may be brought to a knowledge of me, their Redeemer.

And then will I gather them in from the four quarters of the earth; and then will I fulfil the covenant which the Father hath made unto all the people of the house of Israel (3 Ne. 16:4-5).

If the House of Israel is not gathered until after they accept Christ, why would they have "gathered together to fight against the twelve apostles"?

One possible interpretation is that the gathering in Nephi's vision is figurative. The tribes weren't literally gathered together any more than they were literally in a single "large and spacious building." Rather, the apostles went out into the world, meeting hostility wherever they went -- tradition has it that Matthew was killed in Ethiopia, Bartholomew in Armenia, Andrew in Greece, Thomas in India, and so on -- and in this way the Twelve Tribes, while still physically "scattered abroad," were figuratively "gathered" or united in their fighting against the apostles.

Another possibility is that "after he was slain" means thousands of years after he was slain (or just that Nephi saw this after he saw Jesus slain, which may or may not correspond to historical chronology). The fight may be still in the future, after the promised "literal gathering of Israel" -- which would mean the "twelve apostles" must be someone other than the biblical figures to whom that term usually refers, but this is hardly a problem for Mormons, who already accept that many different groups of twelve men can be and have been called by that title.

It is even possible that Nephi's use of the term has no reference to Jesus' disciples during his mortality at all. Notice how the Twelve are first introduced in the vision:

And I looked and beheld the Redeemer of the world, of whom my father had spoken; and I also beheld the prophet who should prepare the way before him. And the Lamb of God went forth and was baptized of him; and after he was baptized, I beheld the heavens open, and the Holy Ghost come down out of heaven and abide upon him in the form of a dove. And I beheld that he went forth ministering unto the people, in power and great glory; and the multitudes were gathered together to hear him; and I beheld that they cast him out from among them.

And I also beheld twelve others following him. And it came to pass that they were carried away in the Spirit from before my face, and I saw them not.

And it came to pass that the angel spake unto me again, saying: Look! And I looked, and I beheld the heavens open again, and I saw angels descending upon the children of men; and they did minister unto them.

And he spake unto me again, saying: Look! And I looked, and I beheld the Lamb of God going forth among the children of men. And I beheld multitudes of people who were sick, and who were afflicted with all manner of diseases, and with devils and unclean spirits; and the angel spake and showed all these things unto me. And they were healed by the power of the Lamb of God; and the devils and the unclean spirits were cast out (1 Ne. 11:27-31).

First Nephi sees scenes from the life of Jesus. Then he sees "twelve others following him" -- which may mean coming after him in time -- and these are then "carried away in the Spirit" so that he no longer sees them. Rather than this referring to anything that happened to the apostles themselves, I think this may just mean that this part of the vision ended, and he went on to the next scene. The next scene is "angels descending upon the children of men" -- When did this happen? It could have been any time -- and then the scene changes back to the life of Jesus. The Twelve are explicitly removed from the scene before this, and there is no mention of their appearing in the subsequent scenes of Jesus' life. This is consistent with the possibility that they are not contemporaries of the mortal Jesus.

If the Twelve Apostles in the vision are not the familiar New Testament characters, who might they be?

It's interesting that immediately after seeing the Twelve "carried away in the Spirit," Nephi sees angels descending and ministering. The number of angels is not specified, but could it be the same Twelve, now translated or resurrected beings? This brings me back to my 2023 post "Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?" This, you will recall, is what Lehi saw in that vision:

And it came to pass that he saw One descending out of the midst of heaven, and he beheld that his luster was above that of the sun at noon-day.

And he also saw twelve others following him, and their brightness did exceed that of the stars in the firmament. And they came down and went forth upon the face of the earth (1 Ne. 1:9-10).

In that post, I pointed out the identical language used in the two visions -- "twelve others following him" -- but thought the Twelve seen be Lehi couldn't be the apostles seen by Nephi because they descended from Heaven and didn't seem to be ordinary mortals. Now, though, I see that Nephi's vision does suggest that the Twelve Apostles may have been carried off to Heaven and then descended again as "angels."

What is meant by these angels "descending upon the children of men"? This unusual language is only found in other place in scripture:

And he [Jesus] saith unto him [Nathanael], Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man (John 1:51).

Here the angels both ascend and descend -- just as in Nephi's vision, if the Twelve are in fact the same beings as the angels. In my 2019 post "Notes on John 1," I had this to say about that verse of the Gospel:

"The angels of God ascending and descending" certainly sounds like a reference to Jacob's dream -- "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it" (Genesis 28:12) -- with the Son of man playing the role of the ladder.

The use of "descending upon" makes sense in John 1 because Jesus is metaphorically Jacob's Ladder. What does it mean in Nephi's vision, where the angels descend not upon a singular Son of Man but "upon the children of men"?

The only other "descending upon" in scripture refers not to angels but to the Spirit at the baptism of Jesus:

And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him (Mark 1:10).

One likely interpretation of this is that the Spirit of God entered Jesus at this point, making him fully divine. Could Nephi mean something similar, with angelic spirits entering the bodies of mortals?

In my post on Lehi's Jerusalem vision, I proposed that the twelve star-like beings he saw descending out of heaven might be the patriarchs of the Twelve Tribes. Could it be these same patriarchs, as glorified "angels," that "descend upon" or enter the Twelve Apostles? Later in Nephi's vision he is told:

Thou rememberest the twelve apostles of the Lamb? Behold they are they who shall judge the twelve tribes of Israel (1 Ne. 12:9).

This would certainly make sense if the Twelve Apostles are in some sense the Twelve Patriarchs.

In my post on Lehi's Jerusalem vision, I noted that each of the Twelve Tribes is associated with a holy book and even used language suggesting that each book almost embodied one of the patriarchs:

If Joseph -- in the form of the book kept by his tribe, the plates of brass -- will go forth unto all nations, what of the other 11 starry beings who also go forth? Well, according to Nephi's later prophecies, each of the other tribes will also produce a holy book, and these, too, will go forth to the world.

And this brings me to the symbol of the Cherubim, or the Four Living Creatures -- who symbolize both the Twelve Tribes of Israel (see "The Throne and the World" for details) and, by a later tradition, the authors of the four canonical Gospels. And this reminds me of my own 2024 vision, recorded in "Étude brute?", in which I was shown a book and told

This book is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves.

Well, this post has certainly raised more questions than it has answered. I'm just thinking aloud and welcome comments.

1 Comment:

Jacob G. said...
First thought is Philip K. Dicks idea that its really 45 AD and the intervening time is illusory. If something like that were true, or could be true, there is no way we could reason about it.

Monday, February 23^rd 2026

Intertextuality in 2 Zenos (Jacob 5)

Wm Jas Tychonievich

9.5 min read (2,900 words)

(image)

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees (1889)

The 2 Zenos text (as quoted in Jacob 5) has significant parallels to three different biblical texts: Isaiah 5, Luke 13, and Romans 11. In this post I will lay out the parallels and attempt to discern the direction of the influence.

⁂

A. Isaiah 5 and 2 Zenos

Both of these texts are quoted in the Book of Mormon (in 2 Nephi 15 and Jacob 5, respectively), so we know that the Nephites had both of them. Here are the main parallels between the two.

1. Both are about a vineyard, and both explicitly say that it is an allegory about "the house of Israel." For Isaiah, Israel is the vineyard itself; for Zenos, it is an olive tree in the vineyard. These are the only two places in scripture where the house of Israel is associated with a vineyard. The "plant" to which Isaiah's parallel metaphor likens the men of Judah means in Hebrew "that which is planted"; it could refer to an individual plant such as the olive tree of Zenos, or it could mean "plantation" and refer to the vineyard as a whole.

For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant (Isa. 5:7).

I will liken thee, O house of Israel, like unto a tame olive tree, which a man took and nourished in his vineyard (Jacob 5:3).

2. Both texts say that the vineyard "brought forth" unwanted "wild" fruit. In Isaiah, there is no explanation for this; the well-cultivated vineyard spontaneously produces "wild grapes" (literally "stinking or worthless things" in Hebrew). In Zenos, the lord of the vineyard has grafted tame branches onto wild olive trees, which is why these trees bring forth a combination of tame and wild fruit. The only other reference to wild fruit in scripture is the story of the "wild gourds" served to the prophets in 2 Kgs. 4:39.

"he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes" (Isa. 5:2)
"wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?" (Isa. 5:4)

"the other part of the tree hath brought forth wild fruit" (Jacob 5:25)
"a part thereof brought forth wild fruit" (Jacob 5:45)

3. In both stories, the owner of the vineyard asks rhetorically, in almost the same language, what more he could possibly have done for the vineyard.

"What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?" (Isa. 5:4)

"What could I have done more for my vineyard?" (Jacob 5:41)
"But what could I have done more in my vineyard?" (Jacob 5:47)
"What could I have done more for my vineyard?" (Jacob 5:49)

4. Both texts juxtapose pruning and digging, a combination that is not found elsewhere in scripture. In Zenos, the lord of the vineyard and his servant repeatedly prune and dig about the olive trees in an attempt to save them. In Isaiah, the owner of the vineyard refuses to do so.

"it shall not be pruned, nor digged" (Isa. 5:6)

"I will prune it, and dig about it" (Jacob 5:4)
"he pruned it, and digged about it" (Jacob 5:5)
"And the Lord of the vineyard caused that it should be digged about, and pruned" (Jacob 5:11)
"Let us prune it, and dig about it" (Jacob 5:27)
"I have digged about it, and I have pruned it" (Jacob 5:47)
"Wherefore, dig about them, and prune them" (Jacob 5:64)
"I nourished my vineyard, and pruned it, and dug about it" (Jacob 5:76)

⁂

B. Luke 13 and 2 Zenos

1. Both are about a fruit tree (not a grapevine) in a vineyard. There are no other references in scripture to anything other than grapes being grown in a vineyard.

"A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard" (Luke 13:6)

"like unto a tame olive tree, which a man took and nourished in his vineyard" (Jacob 5:3)

2. Both refer to the unfruitful trees as "cumbering the ground." The verb cumber is not to be found elsewhere in scripture, except in Luke 10:40 ("Martha was cumbered about much serving"), where it is a different word more literally translated as "distracted."

"cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?" (Luke 13:7)

"that they may not cumber the ground of my vineyard" (Jacob 5:9)
"all sorts of fruit did cumber the tree" (Jacob 5:30)
"I also cut down that which cumbered this spot of ground" (Jacob 5:44)
"Let us go to and hew down the trees . . . that they shall not cumber the ground of my vineyard" (Jacob 5:49)
"and the bad be hewn down . . . that they cumber not the ground of my vineyard" (Jacob 5:66)

3. Both have the owner of the vineyard "dig about" and "dung" the unfruitful trees. "Dig about" is to be found nowhere else, except in Job 11:18. Dung as a verb is found nowhere else.

"I shall dig about it, and dung it" (Luke 13:8)

"I will prune it, and dig about it" (Jacob 5:4)
"he pruned it, and digged about it" (Jacob 5:5)
"And the Lord of the vineyard caused that it should be digged about" (Jacob 5:11)
"Let us prune it, and dig about it" (Jacob 5:27)
"I have digged about it, and I have pruned it, and I have dunged it" (Jacob 5:47)
"dig about the trees" (Jacob 5:63)
"Wherefore, dig about them, and prune them, and dung them" (Jacob 5:64)
"I nourished my vineyard, and pruned it, and dug about it, and dunged it" (Jacob 5:76)

⁂

C. Romans 11 and 2 Zenos

1. Both passages juxtapose firstfruit (or first fruit) with root and branches. Neither of these latter words is juxtaposed with firstfruit anywhere else in scripture

For if the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches (Romans 11:16)

I have preserved the roots and the branches of the first fruit (Jacob 5:60)

2. Both speak of branches being broken off and the branches of a wild olive tree being grafted in.

"And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them" (Romans 11:17)

"they came to the tree whose natural branches had been broken off, and the wild branches had been grafted in" (Jacob 5:30)

3. Both refer to "sparing" the tree or its branches.

For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee (Romans 11:21).

But, behold, the servant said unto the Lord of the vineyard: Spare it a little longer. And the Lord said: Yea, I will spare it a little longer, for it grieveth me that I should lose the trees of my vineyard (Jacob 5:50-51).

4. Both refer to "the natural branches" of the olive tree being grafted "in again."

And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree? (Rom. 11:23-24)

And the branches of the natural tree will I graft in again into the natural tree; And the branches of the natural tree will I graft into the natural branches of the tree; and thus will I bring them together again, that they shall bring forth the natural fruit, and they shall be one (Jacob 5:67-68).

⁂

D. Other related texts

In 1 Nephi 10, Lehi gives a brief version of the olive tree allegory. There is no reference to wild branches or wild fruit, only to the natural branches being broken off and scattered and then later grafted back in. Most of what is in this summary can be found in Romans 11, with the exception of the "house of Israel" reference (as in Isaiah 5 and 2 Zenos) and the mention of the broken branches being scattered in many places (as in 2 Zenos).

Yea, even my father spake much concerning the Gentiles, and also concerning the house of Israel, that they should be compared like unto an olive tree, whose branches should be broken off and should be scattered upon all the face of the earth.

Wherefore, he said it must needs be that we should be led with one accord into the land of promise, unto the fulfilling of the word of the Lord, that we should be scattered upon all the face of the earth.

And after the house of Israel should be scattered they should be gathered together again; or, in fine, after the Gentiles had received the fulness of the Gospel, the natural branches of the olive tree, or the remnants of the house of Israel, should be grafted in, or come to the knowledge of the true Messiah, their Lord and their Redeemer (1 Ne. 10:12-14).

In 1 Nephi 15, Nephi comments on these words of Lehi, explaining them to Laman and Lemuel. This explanation also says nothing about the wild branches or wild fruit. The main thing it that distinguishes it from 1 Ne. 10 is that it mixes vine and olive symbolism, as only 2 Zenos does, speaking of "the true vine" as apparently interchangeable with "the true olive tree."

And they said: Behold, we cannot understand the words which our father hath spoken concerning the natural branches of the olive tree, and also concerning the Gentiles.

Behold, I say unto you, that the house of Israel was compared unto an olive tree, by the Spirit of the Lord which was in our father; and behold are we not broken off from the house of Israel, and are we not a branch of the house of Israel?

And now, the thing which our father meaneth concerning the grafting in of the natural branches through the fulness of the Gentiles, is, that in the latter days, when our seed shall have dwindled in unbelief, . . . they shall come to the knowledge of their Redeemer and the very points of his doctrine, that they may know how to come unto him and be saved.

And then at that day will they not rejoice and give praise unto their everlasting God, their rock and their salvation? Yea, at that day, will they not receive the strength and nourishment from the true vine? Yea, will they not come unto the true fold of God?

Behold, I say unto you, Yea; they shall be remembered again among the house of Israel; they shall be grafted in, being a natural branch of the olive tree, into the true olive tree (1 Ne. 15:7, 12-16).

This mention of "the true vine" (there are no "true" trees or vines in 2 Zenos) brings in John 15 as yet another possibly related text. This refers to "withered" branches (mentioned four timed in 2 Zenos) and unfruitful branches being "cast . . . into the fire" and "burned" (mentioned 11 times in 2 Zenos). Branches that bear no fruit "he taketh away," which seems different from casting them into the fire and may refer to the brances being grafted into other trees scattered around the vineyard, as in 2 Zenos.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.

Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. . . .

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.

I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.

If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned (John 15:1-2, 4-6).

In Alma 16, Mormon again references this "true vine" and specifically mentions grafting.

That they might not be hardened against the word, that they might not be unbelieving, and go on to destruction, but that they might receive the word with joy, and as a branch be grafted into the true vine, that they might enter into the rest of the Lord their God (Alma 16:17).

In Alma 13, Alma perhaps references 2 Zenos with his reference to "all parts of our vineyard."

[W]e are thus highly favored, for we have these glad tidings declared unto us in all parts of our vineyard (Alma 13:23).

⁂

E. How are all these texts related?

Our preferred solution -- the simplest one under the assumption that the Book of Mormon is basically legit -- would be that 2 Zenos is the oldest text, that all the others are influenced by it, and that this is sufficient to account for parallels between the Book of Mormon and certain New Testament texts.

I think this works for our main texts. Consider the central image in each:

2 Zenos: an olive tree in a vineyard
Isaiah 5: a vineyard
Luke 13: a fig tree in a vineyard
Romans 11: an olive tree

If 2 Zenos is the original, each of the others takes one aspect (vineyard, tree in vineyard, olive tree) of its more complex image. If the biblical texts came first and Joseph Smith created the 2 Zenos text, he took three different allegories about three different crops and combined them into a single integrated story -- which is not impossible to do, of course, but is more difficult and unlikely than the reverse. Were it not for the Luke 13 text, I would have said that Zenos's incongruous olive tree in a vineyard was evidence of a story cobbled together from two different sources, one about an olive tree and the other about a vineyard -- but the parable in Luke about a fig tree in a vineyard shows that perhaps vineyards with crops other than grapes are not so incongruous after all.

The main sticking point is the "true vine" language used in John 11, 1 Nephi 15 (which also has "true olive tree"), and Alma 16. Mormon may have had access to the New Testament, which potentially explains Alma 16, but 1 Nephi 15 -- the words of Nephi, unedited by Mormon -- cannot be explained in that way. I also don't think it works to assume that the "true vine" comes from 2 Zenos. Unlike the 1 Zenos fragments in 1 Nephi 19 -- which are obviously just that, fragments of a larger text -- Jacob 5 seems to be a complete Zenos text quoted in its entirety. At present, I have no good explanation for the "Johannine" language in 1 Nephi 15 other than the sort of "contamination" discussed in "Lehi, Nephi, and the pillar of fire that "dwelt upon a rock": A case study of hard-to-define biblical parallels."

3 Comments:

Jacob G said...
Might '...the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.' of Matthew and Luke also be a reference to 2 Zenos? In Jacob 5 its fruitless branches that are cut off not trees but its similar. IIRC the Lord is always wanting to burn them, and the servant is always suggesting some new thing to try with them.

Only Romans 11 gets the overall message of the parable while the other examples is just similar imagery.

Any ideas why the 'vineyard' seems to have mostly olive trees in it (at least 5) but doesn't talk about any vines? Some linguistic quirk perhaps?
Jacob G said...
And the phrase 'the first shall last and the last shall be first.' A bit different in v.63 'the first and the last; and the last and the first...'
WJT said...
Good possible connections. Thanks.

No idea why it's set in a vineyard when vines and grapes play no role in the story. I would have thought it a clumsy error of JS's if not for Jesus' own parable about a fig tree in a vineyard.

Friday, February 27^th 2026

Who had the vision that converted Abish?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

2.5 min read (690 words)

(image)

Sheri Doty, Abish Teaching the Lamanites

The Book of Mormon briefly mentions that Abish, a Lamanitish woman, had "been converted unto the Lord for many years, on account of a remarkable vision of her father" (Alma 19:16).

In my past readings, I had always assumed that this meant a vision that her father had had. This time around, though, I realized that it could also mean a vision in which she had seen her father -- either her own human father (presumably after his death) or her Father, God. In fact, at least in the English of our own day, this latter reading is the more natural one. If I wanted to refer to a vision which my father had had, I would say "a vision of my father's," with the possessive -'s.

Of course, we can't assume that the language of the Book of Mormon -- a combination of King James English and Joseph Smith's frontier dialect, perhaps (according to a currently popular theory) with an unexplained admixture of even earlier English -- always corresponds to current usage, so I tried to look for similar structures elsewhere in scripture.

The structure "determiner + noun + of + nominal possessive" is certainly attested in scripture, at least with pronouns: "these sayings of mine" (Matt. 7:24, 26; 3 Ne. 14:24, 26; 15:1), "a friend of mine" (Luke 11:6), "every prayer of mine" (Philip. 1:4), "those sons of mine" (Alma 56:17), "these last commandments of mine" (D&C 17:8), "these words of mine" (D&C 95:3), "any neglect of mine" (JS-H 1:59), "a neighbour of thine" (1 Sam. 15:28), "this liberty of yours" (1 Cor. 8:9), "five damsels of hers" (1 Sam. 25:42), "every beast of theirs" (Gen. 34:23), "every oblation of theirs, and every meat offering of theirs, and every sin offering of theirs, and every trespass offering of theirs" (Num. 18:9).

Searching for similar instances with nouns rather than pronouns is much more difficult, since there are so many possibilities.

The fact that of can also mean "from" in King James English (e.g. "learn of me" means learn from me, not about me) also complicates matters, since of course this sense of of would not use the possessive. So "they speak a vision of [from] their own heart" (Jer. 23:16) and "then shall they seek a vision of [from] the prophet" (Ezek. 7:26) are not counterexamples. "Every word of God" (Prov. 30:5, Luke 4:4, 1 Ne. 17:35) could also be understood in this "from" sense -- Luke is paraphrasing "every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord" (Deut. 8:3) -- and thus do not provide decisive evidence. Any reference to a "vision of God" (or "of the Almighty," as in Balaam's formula) should be assumed to mean "from God" also, unless it is made clear that God himself was seen.

The distinction we are interested in does not exist for the; "the vision of Isaiah" could mean either a vision seen by Isaiah (like "a vision of Isaiah's") or a vision in which Isaiah was seen (like "a vision of Isaiah"). So I searched the scriptures for various other determiners (a, every, any, this, that, these, those) + "visions(s) of," excluding instances where of could mean "from" and other irrelevant instances such as "a vision of the night" (Job 20:8, 33:15).

This search yielded only a single instance: "a vision of angels" (Luke 24:23), in which the angels are the ones seen and so of course the possessive would not be used. So zero relevant evidence either way.

Of course other nouns than "vision" could be relevant, and my search also missed any instances where an adjective is interposed between the determiner and the noun (as in "a remarkable vision of her father"), but it's hard to narrow down all those possibilities into something searchable. I think my only option at this point is to keep my eyes open for such expressions the next time I read through the entire canon.

Meanwhile, the nature of the vision that converted Abish remains ambiguous.

Saturday, February 28^th 2026

Is El a Lamanite god in the Book of Mormon?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3 min read (960 words)

No El, no El, no El, no El
-- Christmas carol

(That epigraph is just a throwaway pun, of course, though it is perhaps worth noting that this very old carol includes a non-biblical detail concerning the new star which seems to be right out of the Book of Mormon: "And to the earth it gave great light / And so it continued both day and night.")

Hugh Nibley makes much of the lack of Baal names in the Book of Mormon, asking how the uneducated Joseph Smith could have known that such names happened to be very unpopular around the time Lehi left Jerusalem. I find this completely unimpressive, since no uneducated Christian would expect Israelite names to include the name of this "false god." Besides, the Book of Mormon does include one Baal name: Isabel (Alma 39:3), which is apparently either a form of Jezebel (Hebrew ʾIzeḇel, meaning "Where is Baal?") or is parallel to Isaiah (Yəšaʿyāhū, "Yahweh is salvation"), with Baal replacing Yahweh. This name occurs over 500 years after Lehi left Jerusalem, presumably part of an unbroken tradition of Baal names.

What I do find striking is the relative lack of El names. Of the 300-some proper names that are unique to the Book of Mormon, not a single one of them incorporates the element El. The Bible, in contrast, contains over 300 El-derived names. The El names that do occur in the Book of Mormon fall into three categories:

(1) Names used by Isaiah (Immanuel) and Malachi (Elijah), appearing in the Book of Mormon only where whole chapters from those books are quoted verbatim, by Nephi (2 Ne. 17:14, 18:8) and Jesus (3 Ne. 25:5) respectively.

(2) References to the biblical figures Israel -- which, significantly, means "fights against El" -- and (probably) Samuel. Jesus' reference to "all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after" (3 Ne. 20:24) presumably refers to the biblical Samuel, since Samuel the Lamanite was a very recent prophet.

(3) Lamanite-affiliated names: Lemuel, Ishmael, and Samuel. These are the only El names that belong to Book of Mormon rather than biblical figures, although the names themselves are biblical.

The original founders of the Lamanite group were Laman, Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael, Ishmael himself having died before the schism. The land of Ishmael was Lamanite territory, "being called after the sons of Ishmael, who also became Lamanites" (Alma 17:19). As for Samuel, he is scarcely ever mentioned without a reminder that he is a Lamanite. I strongly suspect that the Lamanites adopted El as their primary name for God, after which the Nephites stopped using it.

But isn't el just a common noun referring to any god or tutelary spirit? Yes, and so is baal a common noun meaning "lord." That doesn't stop such names from becoming associated with a particular religion, leading those who oppose that religion to avoid them. Even in English, God generally implies the specific god worshiped by Christians and some Jews.

We know that the Nephites and Lamanites used different names for God, because the Lamanite king of Ishmael (500-some years after the departure from Jerusalem) doesn't understand the name of the Nephite deity:

And Ammon began to speak unto him with boldness, and said unto him: Believest thou that there is a God?

And he answered, and said unto him: I do not know what that meaneth.

And then Ammon said: Believest thou that there is a Great Spirit?

And he said, Yea.

And Ammon said: This is God (Alma 18:24-28).

The Lamanite name for God is translated as "Great Spirit" -- thus possibly the biblical El Elyon, "the highest el."

What was the primary Nephite name for God? Not Baal, obviously, per Nibley (Isabel is a "harlot," probably the leader of a false religion like the Jezebel of Rev. 2:20-22, whose work as a self-proclaimed "prophetess" is called "fornication" and "adultery"). The next obvious candidate would be Yahweh. Certainly that name was used, as as the last verse in the book refers to "the great Jehovah" (Moro. 10:34). As an element in names, it occurs in the Nephite names Jeremiah, Joshua, and Zedekiah, all of which are biblical. It is likely that these Nephites were named after Hebrew figures rather than with specific reference to Yahweh (just as we use names like Martin and Dennis without intentional reference to Mars and Dionysus). The only non-biblical Nephite names that seem to incorporate Yahweh are Amalickiah and Mosiah. It has also been suggested that the distinctive -ihah ending in Ammonihah, Cumenihah, Mathonihah, Moronihah, Nephihah, and Onihah (though cf. the Jaredite name Orihah) may be a form of Yahweh.

Nibley has proposed that, given the Egyptian connection, Amon or Ammon (king of the gods in Egypt, also rendered Amen) may have been used as a divine name by the Nephites. The main objection to this is that Ammon itself appears as a personal name in the Book of Mormon. While names incorporating the names of gods are common, it seems highly unlikely that anyone would be named simply God. Whether or not it is a divine name, it does seem to occur in a lot of Nephite names, including (allowing for some variation in the second vowel) Aminadab, Aminadi, Ammonihah, Amnigaddah, Amnihu, Amnor, and Helaman. Since only one of these has a double m, it is possible that Amon (or Amin or Aman) was a divine name and that Ammon meant something else. If we allow Omn as a variant, we might add Gadiomnah, Omner, Omni, and Teomner to the list (though cf. Antiomno, a Lamanite). It's an interesting possibility, especially given Joseph Smith's own use of Ahman or Aumen as a name of God.

Sunday, March 1^st 2026

The harlot Isabel

Wm Jas Tychonievich

14 min read (4,100 words)

This turned out to be unexpectedly lengthy and speculative, but I think the hypotheses it introduces have got legs.

I mentioned this in passing in my last post, "Is El a Lamanite god in the Book of Mormon?", but I don't think "the harlot Isabel" (Alma 39:3) was just a hooker -- which in turn means that "these things" which are "most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost" (v. 5) may not refer primarily to, as the chapter summary in the current CJCLDS edition has it, "sexual sin" (though of course that is abominable, too, as Jacob 2-3 makes crystal clear).

In support of the conventional reading, there is obviously the use of the word "harlot." Beyond that, we are also told that "she did steal away the hearts of many" (v. 4), which could refer to many men falling in love with her. Finally, in calling Corianton to repentance, Alma exhorts him to "go no more after the lusts of your eyes" (v. 9), which sounds like a man being seduced by a beautiful temptress.

And that's it, really. Nothing else in Alma's four-chapter speech to Corianton sounds at all like a lecture on chastity -- again, compare it to Jacob 2-3, which very clearly is a lecture on chastity. Instead, Alma devotes most of his time to doctrinal minutiae about the timing of the resurrection, the meaning of the word restoration, and so on -- none of which would seem to be a high priority if he were speaking to someone so religiously unserious as to be traveling some distance to patronize a top-drawer prostitute when he was supposed to be on a mission.

We are told that Corianton "didst forsake the ministry, and did go over into the land of Siron among the borders of the Lamanites, after the harlot Isabel" (v. 3). In other words, this is not a case of a missionary coming across an alluring prostitute and succumbing to temptation. He left the land of the Zoramites, where he had been preaching, and traveled to another land to be with a specific harlot.

It's odd that Alma would call out the harlot by name if she was just a harlot. In a book with vanishingly few named female characters, where even queens go unnamed, Alma saw fit to mention -- and Mormon saw fit to include in his abridgment -- the name of some prostitute his son slept with? I don't think he's doing that. I think he's calling Isabel a harlot, accusing her of harlotry -- meaning that she wasn't a harlot openly, or in the ordinary sense.

Alma says to Corianton:

Suffer not yourself to be led away by any vain or foolish thing; suffer not the devil to lead away your heart again after those wicked harlots. Behold, O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw your conduct they would not believe in my words (v. 11).

But how did the Zoramites see his conduct if he left the land of the Zoramites and traveled to Siron to do it? It scarcely seems likely that he would have announced publicly that he was going on a road trip for the purpose of sleeping with a particularly famous prostitute. Even if he had been sleeping with hookers in the land of the Zoramites first, that is the sort of sin one commits in secret, not something that would likely become publicly known. It seems that Corianton's great sin was something he did openly.

Also, notice the strangeness of the reference to "those wicked harlots" -- not harlots in general (so Corianton wasn't a common whoremonger), and not Isabel in particular (so it wasn't an individual love affair, condemned as "harlotry" because illicit), but "those wicked harlots," a specific group. Elsewhere in scripture, harlots are never called "wicked," that adjective being reserved for those who patronize them or pimp them out. Here, too, it seems that Alma would be more concerned to condemn Corianton's behavior as wicked rather than that of the harlot. The only other reference in all of scripture to prostitutes being "wicked" is that in Nephi's high mountain vision to "the wickedness of the great whore" (1 Ne. 14:12) -- where it refers not to a literal hooker but to "that great and abominable church, which is the whore of all the earth" (1 Ne. 22:13).

That's what I think we're dealing with here, too: not a call girl but an abominable church. If Corianton did "forsake the ministry" to join a cult, that very likely would have been public knowledge -- converts don't keep it secret; they spread the word -- and it would have undermined Alma's teaching much more directly and seriously than if Corianton had merely struggled with chastity.

Sexual irregularities may have played a role in this cult, as they often do, but not necessarily. False religion itself is consistently referred to in scripture with the language of prostitution. For example, the phrase "go a whoring" occurs 18 times in the Old Testament, and every single time it refers not to literal prostitution but to the worship of false gods. Jeremiah 3 is another clear example, where repeated references to "playing the harlot" refer not to sex but to the nations of Israel and Judah being unfaithful to their God.

As I mentioned in my last post, Isabel is the only name in the Book of Mormon to include the theophoric element Baal, which again suggests the worship of a false god. Specifically, Isabel may be a form of the biblical name Jezebel (pronounced Izebel in Hebrew). This is interesting because, besides the historical Jezebel who championed the worship of Baal in the days of Elijah, there is another woman called by that name in the Bible:

Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds (Rev. 2:20-22).

Of course Alma could not have been influenced by John of Patmos, but he may have been using a similar rhetorical device. It is unlikely that this false prophetess's name was actually Jezebel; rather, John calls her that in the same spirit in which he calls Rome "Babylon" and Jerusalem "Sodom and Egypt." Alma may be doing the same thing. Despite all the sexual language used -- seduce, fornication, bed, adultery -- it is pretty clear that "Jezebel" is not merely a woman of loose morals but a religious leader, one who "calleth herself a prophetess." Another interesting parallel is that the condemnation of "Jezebel" is prefaced with "I have a few things against thee," just as Alma tells Corianton "this is what I have against thee" (Alma 39:2). That particular turn of phrase is found only in Revelation 2 and Alma 39.

Alma's reference to Isabel's stealing "away the hearts of many" is also more consistent with the language of false religion than with that of romantic love or lust. For example:

But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them (Deut. 30:17).

And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart. For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods (1 Kgs. 11:3-4).

The passage about Solomon is particularly clear. Even when it is his wives and concubines that "turned away his heart," the reference is not to love or sex but to false religion.

An even clearer example, using the same verb steal, refers to Alma himself prior to his conversion to religion of his father:

And he became a great hinderment to the prosperity of the church of God; stealing away the hearts of the people; causing much dissension among the people; giving a chance for the enemy of God to exercise his power over them (Mosiah 27:9).

Again, this very clearly refers to drawing people into false religious beliefs or practices, not to sexual seduction.

So if Isabel was a religious leader, what was her doctrine? We can perhaps infer it from the other points Alma makes, and the misconceptions he seems eager to rectify, in the remainder of his speech to Corianton.

First, "concerning the coming of Christ," (Alma 39:15), Alma says:

And now I will ease your mind somewhat on this subject. Behold, you marvel why these things should be known so long beforehand. Behold, I say unto you, is not a soul at this time as precious unto God as a soul will be at the time of his coming? (v. 17)

If Corianton's unease of mind on this issue came from Isabel, then perhaps she taught either, like Sherem (Jacob 7:7) and Korihor (Alma 30:13) that foreknowledge was impossible or, like mainstream Bible critics today, that the words of prophets always have to do with their own time rather than with the distant future.

Second, Alma says:

I perceive that thy mind is worried concerning the resurrection of the dead. Behold, I say unto you, that there is no resurrection -- or, I would say, in other words, that this mortal does not put on immortality, this corruption does not put on incorruption -- until after the coming of Christ. Behold, he bringeth to pass the resurrection of the dead. But behold, my son, the resurrection is not yet (Alma 40:1-3).

Corianton had a problem with the doctrine of the resurrection, but not the one you would expect. Rather than doubting that resurrection was possible, he apparently believed that it was already happening in his time, before the coming of Christ.

Alma's next point is not explicitly tied to Corianton's worries, but we can still assume that that is his reason for bringing up this otherwise seemingly unimportant question and for having "inquired diligently of the Lord to know" (v. 9) more about it:

Now there must needs be a space betwixt the time of death and the time of the resurrection. And now I would inquire what becometh of the souls of men from this time of death to the time appointed for the resurrection? (vv. 6-7)

Alma then addresses misconceptions (presumably those of Corianton under the influence of Isabel) about the meaning of "first resurrection":

Now, there are some that have understood that this state of happiness and this state of misery of the soul, before the resurrection, was a first resurrection. Yea, I admit it may be termed a resurrection, the raising of the spirit or the soul and their consignation to happiness or misery, according to the words which have been spoken.
And behold, again it hath been spoken, that there is "a first resurrection, a resurrection of all those who have been, or who are, or who shall be, down to the resurrection of Christ" from the dead. Now, we do not suppose that this first resurrection, which is spoken of in this manner, can be the resurrection of the souls and their consignation to happiness or misery. Ye cannot suppose that this is what it meaneth (vv. 15-17).

The passage I have put in quotation marks is quoting Abinadi (Mosiah 15:21), who is the one who introduced the idea of a "first resurrection," so apparently Isabel accepted the authority of Abinadi (who converted Alma Sr., Corianton's grandfather) but interpreted his words differently from Alma.

Alma then begins his discussion of the meaning of "restoration":

Yea, this bringeth about the restoration of those things of which has been spoken by the mouths of the prophets. The soul shall be restored to the body, and the body to the soul; yea, and every "limb and joint shall be restored to its" body; yea, even a hair of the head shall not be lost; but all things "shall be restored to" their proper and "perfect frame." And now, my son, this is the restoration of which has been spoken by the mouths of the prophets (Alma 40:22-24).

The quotation marks indicate that Alma is here paraphrasing (with some parts quoted verbatim) his own former missionary partner Amulek (Alma 11:43-44). However, the first reference to this general "restoration" (as opposed to Nephi's references to the restoration of Israel) is again from Abinadi (Mosiah 15:24).

Alma goes on to refute the false understanding of "restoration" promoted by "some" (i.e. Isabel's group):

And now, my son, I have somewhat to say concerning the restoration of which has been spoken; for behold, some have wrested the scriptures, and have gone far astray because of this thing. And I perceive that thy mind has been worried also concerning this thing. But behold, I will explain it unto thee (Alma 41:1).

He explains that "restoration" means the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked punished. Then he says:

And now behold, my son, do not risk one more offense against your God upon those points of doctrine, which ye have hitherto risked to commit sin. Do not suppose, because it has been spoken concerning restoration, that ye shall be restored from sin to happiness. Behold, I say unto you, wickedness never was happiness (Alma 41:9-10).

Note that Corianton's offense against God concerns "points of doctrine" rather than sexual sin.

Alma moves on to the next "worry" of Corianton's:

And now, my son, I perceive there is somewhat more which doth worry your mind, which ye cannot understand -- which is concerning the justice of God in the punishment of the sinner; for ye do try to suppose that it is injustice that the sinner should be consigned to a state of misery (Alma 42:1).

As an aside, I note the synchronicity that just this morning I read these lines from Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, quoted in The King in Yellow:

Oh Thou who burn'st in Heart for those who burn
In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
How long be crying, 'Mercy on them, God!'
Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?

As a further synchronicity, FitzGerald notes (though this is not quoted in The King in Yellow) that this tetrastich is supposed "to have arisen from a Dream, in which Omar's mother asked about his future fate," leaving it unclear whether it was Omar or his mother that had the dream. This syncs with the subject of my recent post, "Who had the vision that converted Abish?"

This ends our synchronistic intermission. Back to the harlot Isabel.

Alma's lengthy explanation of the punishment of sinners is not germane to our topic here. He concludes with this:

O my son, I desire that ye should deny the justice of God no more. Do not endeavor to excuse yourself in the least point because of your sins, by denying the justice of God (Alma 42:30).

To summarize, Corianton's main false beliefs, which we are assuming reflect the teachings of Isabel, are: (1) that resurrection is already happening; (2) that resurrection happens immediately after death, since otherwise what would happen between death and resurrection?; (3) that the "first resurrection" is not a resurrection of the body but the survival of the soul; (4) that "restoration" means being restored from sin to happiness; and (5) that it would be unjust for God to punish sinners.

I think this whole complex of ideas can be traced to a different interpretation of the teachings of Abinadi. He taught:

But behold, the bands of death shall be broken, and the Son reigneth, and hath power over the dead; therefore, he bringeth to pass the resurrection of the dead. And there cometh a resurrection, even a first resurrection; yea, even a resurrection of those that have been, and who are, and who shall be, even until the resurrection of Christ -- for so shall he be called (Mosiah 15:20-21).

I think a natural interpretation of this is that Christ will bring a resurrection when he comes, but that "there [also] cometh a resurrection, even a first resurrection" -- "first" because it happens before the later resurrection brought by Christ. What will be different about the resurrection brought by Christ? Perhaps it is a bodily resurrection, whereas the first resurrection (which has been happening all along) is simply a raising of the spirit after bodily death.

Abinadi certainly seems to be saying in this passage that the first resurrection includes absolutely everyone who dies before the resurrection of Christ. In fact, when Alma quotes Abinadi to Corianton, he even adds the implied word all: "a first resurrection, a resurrection of all those who have been, or who are, or who shall be, down to the resurrection of Christ."

Abinadi continues:

And now, the resurrection of all the prophets, and all those that have believed in their words, or all those that have kept the commandments of God, shall come forth in the first resurrection; therefore, they are the first resurrection. They are raised to dwell with God who has redeemed them; thus they have eternal life through Christ, who has broken the bands of death (vv. 22-23).

Here the first resurrection is equated with being "raised to dwell with God" to "have eternal life." In other words, it appears that everyone in the first resurrection -- meaning everyone before the resurrection of Christ -- goes to Heaven. There is no explicit mention of the resurrection of the body. Against the seeming universalism of the preceding verses, these seem to limit the first resurrection to the prophets, those who have believed the prophets, and those who have kept the commandments.

He goes on to include others, too, though, again suggesting universalism:

And these are those who have part in the first resurrection; and these are they that have died before Christ came, in their ignorance, not having salvation declared unto them. And thus the Lord bringeth about the restoration of these; and they have a part in the first resurrection, or have eternal life, being redeemed by the Lord (vv. 20-24).

Thus far, we can understand how someone might misunderstand Abinadi as saying that all sinners (or at least all before Christ) will be "restored" rather than punished. But how to reconcile this with what Abinadi says next?

But behold, and fear, and tremble before God, for ye ought to tremble; for the Lord redeemeth none such that rebel against him and die in their sins; yea, even all those that have perished in their sins ever since the world began, that have wilfully rebelled against God, that have known the commandments of God, and would not keep them; these are they that have no part in the first resurrection. Therefore ought ye not to tremble? For salvation cometh to none such; for the Lord hath redeemed none such; yea, neither can the Lord redeem such; for he cannot deny himself; for he cannot deny justice when it has its claim (vv. 26-27).

Alma Sr. had been a priest of Noah but was then converted by Abinadi. Alma Jr. was at first "numbered among the unbelievers" and sought "to destroy the church of God" (Mosiah 27:8, 10) which had been founded by his father on the teachings of Abinadi, but he later converted to his father's Abinadite religion. Now we have Alma Jr.'s son Corianton falling in with Isabel's movement, which apparently accepted the teachings of Abinadi but not those of either of the Almas, for Alma Sr. also implied that not everyone would "be numbered with those of the first resurrection" (Mosiah 18:9). Now it also appears that Isabel did not have exactly the same words of Abinadi as the Almas, for the verses quoted above flatly contradict her doctrine, and one can only "wrest" these things so far.

The words of Abinadi as we have them were written down by Alma Sr. from memory some time after he had heard them (Mosiah 17:4) and are thus unlikely to be strictly accurate. Is it possible that Isabel's movement was founded by someone who was also present in the court of Noah and was converted by Abinadi's words, but remembered them somewhat differently?

And that leads us to another possible significance of the designation "harlot." It is said of Noah and his priests (of whom Alma Sr. was one):

And it came to pass that he placed his heart upon his riches, and he spent his time in riotous living with his wives and his concubines; and so did also his priests spend their time with harlots (Mosiah 11:14).

The wording "and so did also his priests" implies that the priests did the same thing that Noah himself did, and that "harlots" is thus a pejorative reference to their own wives and concubines (which they also had; see Mosiah 11:4). For those who condemn polygamy, taking additional wives and concubines is equated with "committing whoredoms" (Jacob 2:23).

What happened to Alma Sr.'s wives and concubines when he converted to the doctrine of Abinadi and fled the court of Noah? Their husband's falling out of favor with the king would have put them in danger, so it seems likely that they would have fled with him. However, the converted Alma could not have remained "married" to any but one of them, and this abandonment might naturally have led to a falling-out. Thus we have a perfect explanation for a woman, called a "harlot," who accepted Abinadi, was at odds with the Almas, and had a somewhat different recollection of what exactly Abinadi had taught: Isabel was one of Alma Sr.'s former wives or concubines. Rather than being a seductive young temptress, she was a woman old enough to be Corianton's grandmother, and perhaps his actual grandmother, or else one of his grandmother's former sister-wives.

If this line of thinking is correct, it sheds light on another question that has bothered me for a long time: Why had Alma Jr. been trying to destroy his father's church in the first place? Actively trying to destroy the church, and to lead away others after him, suggests not mere waywardness but religious zeal. Alma Jr. is often compared to Saul of Tarsus -- the parallels are so obvious that critics accuse Joseph Smith of plagiarizing the New Testament story -- but Saul's motive is clear. Saul was a strict Pharisee (Acts 26:5), Christians venerated a scathing critic of the Pharisees as the Son of God, and Saul saw it as his religious duty to extirpate this heretical sect. Alma Jr., in stark contrast, was the son of the founder and high priest of the very religion he sought to destroy! Where did his heterodox views come from?

If his own mother was Isabel, promulgating a rival interpretation of Abinadi (on whose authority as a prophet Alma Sr.'s church rested), it all makes sense. It also explains his success in "stealing away the hearts of" so many in Alma Sr.'s church and "causing much dissension among" them (Mosiah 27:9). As happened after the assassination of Joseph Smith, different believers in the murdered prophet understood (or in some cases "wrested") his teachings differently and founded rival sects.

This has all been highly speculative, but I think it explains a lot and is thus likely to be a good seed.

Wednesday, March 4^th 2026

Idolatry or idleness

Wm Jas Tychonievich

2 min read (600 words)

A few passages in the Book of Mormon appear to contain errors immediately followed by corrections. This is probably the most obvious instance:

. . . and thus we see that they buried their weapons of peace, or they buried the weapons of war, for peace (Alma 24:19).

Since "weapons of peace" doesn't make any sense, the "or" seems to be a correction, meaning "or rather." Since one can't easily erase an error once it has been engraved on a gold plate, it makes sense that errors would be corrected in this way. Alternatively, "weapons of peace" could have been Joseph Smith's slip of the tongue rather than a mistake on the plates, but that seems less likely, since his scribe could have just crossed out the incorrect phrase and written the correct one. The mistake itself could have been made in any language, though.

The following example from Alma, though, seems like it must have been a slip of the tongue on Joseph's part, since it is only in English that idolatry and idleness sound similar.

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 . . . (Alma 1:32).

This seems to be an error and correction because "idolatry or idleness" is such an odd expression otherwise. The two concepts seem to be unrelated, but they do sound similar in English. However, another possibility is that the text really is equating idolatry with idleness to make some point -- something along the lines of "fasting and prayer, or otherwise rejoicing and prayer" (D&C 59:14). Three other passages in the Book of Mormon, which pair idolatry with idleness but without using similar-sounding words, suggest that this is in fact the case:

Now they were a lazy and an idolatrous people; therefore they were desirous to bring us into bondage, that they might glut themselves with the labors of our hands; yea, that they might feast themselves upon the flocks of our fields (Mosiah 9:12).

Yea, and thus they were supported in their laziness, and in their idolatry, and in their whoredoms, by the taxes which king Noah had put upon his people; thus did the people labor exceedingly to support iniquity (Mosiah 11:6).

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; notwithstanding the promises of the Lord were extended unto them on the conditions of repentance (Alma 17:15).

This juxtaposition does not occur in the Bible. The closest thing I can think of conceptually is the occasional references to idols as "vanities," for example:

They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities: and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation (Deut. 32:31).

The Hebrew words translated "vanities," and pretty clearly referring to the worship of "that which is not God," means "emptiness, futility, uselessness" and is thus conceptually akin to idleness. So perhaps that is the idea behind the "laziness and idolatry" passages in the Book of Mormon: useless people who worship useless things.

Thursday, March 5^th 2026

The Brass "five books of Moses" revisited

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3 min read (900 words)

This is the standard reading of Nephi's list of what is included in the Plates of Brass (1 Ne. 5:11-13):

And he beheld that they did contain:

(1) the five books of Moses [Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy], which gave an account [in Genesis] of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents;

And also (2) a record of the Jews from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah [parts of Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles];

And also (3) the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah; and also many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah [Isaiah, parts of Jeremiah, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah; plus other prophets like Zenos and Zenock].

In other words, the Brass Plates essentially contained the Old Testament, minus the post-exilic books, plus some other books we no longer have.

As discussed in "Moses and the Exodus: Where the Book of Mormon parts ways with the Torah," I doubt this. In that post, I emphasized that Nephi makes it sound as if all five books of Moses were about the Creation and Adam and Eve, when in fact only a few chapters of Genesis touch on those topics. I've just realized that another reading is possible, one in which Nephi is summarizing the content of each of the five books in turn:

And he beheld that they did contain the five books of Moses, which gave an account of:

(1) the creation of the world,

and also (2) of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents;

And also (3) a record of the Jews from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah;

And also (4) the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah;

and also (5) many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah.

The main question this reading raises is why these would all be considered "books of Moses." If we allow ourselves a little flexibility with the punctuation, though, we can modify our reading slightly:

And he beheld that they did contain the five books:

(1) of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world,

and also (2) of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents;

And also (3) a record of the Jews from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah;

And also (4) the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah;

and also (5) many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah.

In the King James English which the Book of Mormon so often imitates, a relative clause with which can refer to a person, as in the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, which art in Heaven . . ." (Matt. 6:9). Under this reading, the five books of the Brass Plates would be: (1) Moses, (2) Adam and Eve, (3) the Jews, (4) the Holy Prophets, and (5) Jeremiah.

Note that I don't think we can assume from the Book of Mormon alone (taking the Bible to be unreliable) that Adam and Eve predated Moses. "Our first parents" is also used to refer to Lehi and Nephi at one point (Hel. 5:6), so it does not necessarily mean the first ancestors of the entire human race.

***

Table of Contents

Monday, November 4th 2024

Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul

Wm Jas Tychonievich

11 min read (3,200 words)

5 Comments:

Saturday, November 9th 2024

Yes, the Book of Mormon does quote Joshua -- but the Church is covering it up!

Wm Jas Tychonievich

5 min read (1,600 words)

Monday, November 25th 2024

It's plausible that Joel quoted (and inverted) Zenos

Wm Jas Tychonievich

1.5 min read (470 words)

Wednesday, December 18th 2024

"It came to pass" in the Book of Mormon does NOT match biblical usage

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3 min read (880 words)

13 Comments:

Monday, December 30th 2024

"I say unto you" in the Bible and the Book of Mormon

Wm Jas Tychonievich

Saturday, January 25th 2025

The parallelism in Mosiah 9-10

Wm Jas Tychonievich

5.5 min read (1,600 words)

1 Comment:

Saturday, January 25th 2025

Did Mormon have the New Testament?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

4 min read (1,200 words)

3 Comments:

Monday, February 10th 2025

Dancing for decapitation -- stop me if you've heard this one

Wm Jas Tychonievich

10 min read (3,100 words)

7 Comments:

Thursday, April 3rd 2025

The end of the endless

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3.5 min read (1,100 words)

2 Comments:

Saturday, April 19th 2025

Who concealed the Gadiantons' secret plans?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

2 min read (610 words)

4 Comments:

Thursday, October 30th 2025

Hollow pillars of light or fire

Wm Jas Tychonievich

5 min read (1,400 words)

2 Comments:

Wednesday, January 14th 2026

Further evidence for the Zenos theory

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3.5 min read (1,100 words)

2 Comments:

Thursday, January 29th 2026

What did Alma know, and when did he know it?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

4.5 min read (1,300 words)

3 Comments:

Thursday, February 19th 2026

The Twelve Tribes against the Twelve Apostles

Wm Jas Tychonievich

7.5 min read (2,200 words)

1 Comment:

Monday, February 23rd 2026

Intertextuality in 2 Zenos (Jacob 5)

Wm Jas Tychonievich

9.5 min read (2,900 words)

3 Comments:

Friday, February 27th 2026

Who had the vision that converted Abish?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

2.5 min read (690 words)

Saturday, February 28th 2026

Is El a Lamanite god in the Book of Mormon?

Wm Jas Tychonievich

3 min read (960 words)

Monday, November 4^th 2024

Saturday, November 9^th 2024

Monday, November 25^th 2024

Wednesday, December 18^th 2024

Monday, December 30^th 2024

Saturday, January 25^th 2025

Saturday, January 25^th 2025

Monday, February 10^th 2025

Thursday, April 3^rd 2025

Saturday, April 19^th 2025

Thursday, October 30^th 2025

Wednesday, January 14^th 2026

Thursday, January 29^th 2026

Thursday, February 19^th 2026

Monday, February 23^rd 2026

Friday, February 27^th 2026

Saturday, February 28^th 2026

Sunday, March 1^st 2026

Wednesday, March 4^th 2026

Thursday, March 5^th 2026