Abstract: Because Grant Hardy’s important book deliberately contextualizes the Book of Mormon in light of “the generally agreed upon findings of modern biblical scholars and historians,” it invites further discussion on points in which the Book of Mormon and other significant biblical scholars and historians challenge those findings. Hardy also declares that his commentary “is consistently focused on the plain meaning of the text,” which is understandably appealing, but which is in tension with Joseph Smith’s foundational observation that “the different teachers of the religion understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.” I argue on several key issues that a different contextualization can radically change meaning.

All the texts in the chosen canon would have had an original context, which presupposed a certain pattern of shared beliefs within which the text was set. The context was as much a part of the meaning as the words themselves. Set in a new context, the same text would soon acquire a new meaning.

—Margaret Barker¹

The [Page 110]Annotated Book of Mormon² is, true to its title, an annotated edition of the Book of Mormon, providing notes and commentary on a text held sacred by millions of people. I previously reviewed the book and recommended it for its valuable insights and contributions.³ But I also noted that despite the author’s insider background and careful observations, the lens through which he views the text is, on several key issues, defined by an outsider perspective. The purpose of this essay is to examine the lens used for those key issues and provide additional information that thoughtful readers will want to consider in their own study.

That being said, readers should understand that I make no claim that my examination is exhaustive. Indeed, this essay should be considered a “continued conversation,” drawing upon my own collection of thoughts that reflect my understanding of some topics addressed in The Annotated Book of Mormon.

In no way should engaging in such a conversation be construed as disparaging the author (Grant Hardy), his faith commitment,⁴ or the book he has meticulously created. Hardy explains his approach to his work this way:

All commentaries have biases of some kind or another. This work is an experiment in reading the Book of Mormon as scripture, a genre that is somewhat distinct from both history and fiction. On the one hand, I take its ostensible historical context seriously, trying to imagine how it might be read as an example of exilic literature informed by Hebrew culture and augmented by new revelations received by Lehi and his descendants. At the same time, I accept the generally agreed upon findings of modern biblical scholars and [Page 111]historians, so along with ancient echoes and literary devices I also note incongruities in the narrative, including anachronisms and nineteenth-century parallels. These are all part of what makes the Book of Mormon what it is. As scripture, the primary value of the text is theological rather than historical, even for believers who assume it is based on an authentic ancient record. Faith can often accommodate some degree of historical inaccuracy or even implausibility in a sacred text.⁵

At times his determination to contextualize in light of “the generally agreed upon findings of modern biblical scholars and historians” creates obvious tensions between his stated faith and his annotations and commentary. This includes issues such as the authorship and date of the Sermon on the Mount relative to 3 Nephi, the state of evidential support for the New World portions of the Book of Mormon, the significance of the temple for the Book of Mormon, the Isaiah question, longstanding assertions that the Book of Mormon must be read as “too Christian before Christ” and the related significance of Margaret Barker’s paradigm for that question, claims of anachronism and translation issues, and even whether believing approaches to the Book of Mormon are based on an epistemology of “warm feelings.”⁶ I’ll address some of these issues in this paper, but let me start by considering a concept that is generally and uncritically accepted by Hardy.

Considering the Plain Meaning

Many people assume that a text has what is often referred to as “a plain meaning.” This can be problematic, and Hardy seems to feel that such a meaning is available, even for a text as complicated as the Book of Mormon. He explains that his

headings, introductions, and annotations identify themes and major ideas, highlight narrative structures and literary patterns, delineate arguments, draw attention to internal parallels and allusions, and trace intertextuality with the Bible. The Book of Mormon has often been defined more by [Page 112]its colorful backstory than its actual contents; this annotated edition offers an alternative approach that is consistently focused on the plain meaning of the text.⁷

The notion of following “the plain meaning of the text” is very human and understandably attractive—Hardy cites Nephi’s appeal⁸ that way—but again, I deeply appreciate the young Joseph Smith’s concern that “the same passages of scripture” (Joseph Smith—History 1:12) can be understood very differently, as well as Jesus’s key observation that the same words, planted in different soils, nurtured in different ways, can produce vastly different harvests: “Know ye not this parable? How then will ye know all parables?” (Mark 4:13). What seems to one person as “the plain meaning of the text” may mean something different to another. Consider Jesus’s plain meaning when talking about being “born again,” “other sheep,” “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again,” “This is my body,” or “My Father and I are one.”

Finally, I have often seen what happens to potential for further expansion and enlightenment for the minds that discard the need for further inquiry and stop at what seems to them the indisputable and final “plain meaning of the text.” I recall Jesus mentioning in 3 Nephi 16:17–23 what happened to other disciples who “supposed” (v. 22) they understood him on the topic of “other sheep” but in fact did not, and in consequence did not ask for or receive further light and knowledge. The same Nephi who “delights in plainness” (2 Nephi 25:4) also simultaneously reports that “there is none other people that understand the things which were spoken unto the Jews like unto them, save it be that they are taught after the manner of the things of the Jews” (2 Nephi 25:4). Joseph Smith stated that the problem with creeds was not their content (“all of them have some truth”⁹ and “it don’t prove that a man is not a good man because he believes false doctrine”¹⁰), but their effect in declaring “hitherto thou shalt come, and no further,”¹¹ which places adherents beyond both enlightenment and repentance.

[Page 113]In annotating Nephi’s comments on delighting in plainness in 2 Nephi 25, Hardy says this:

1–8: The contrast between Isaiah’s multivalent prophecies and Nephi’s plainly articulated predictions of the last days is, quite literally, the difference between poetry and prose. Nephi begins with a brief narrator’s comment, for his future readers, and then addresses his people directly beginning in v. 4. He regards the Jews at Jerusalem negatively (works of darkness), perhaps understandably given the persecution of his family, yet he acknowledges their unparalleled expertise in interpreting scripture (v. 5); see 29.4n. 4: The spirit of prophecy appears eighteen times in the BoM and once in the Bible at Rev 19.10, where “the spirit [or essence] of prophecy” is equated with “the testimony of Jesus”; see Alma 4.20n. 5: My soul delighteth in the words of Isaiah, this phrase completes an inclusio that began at 11.2; similarly, “my soul delights in plainness” in v. 4 above begins an overlapping inclusio that ends at 31.3.¹²

Hardy’s annotations generally contextualize the plain meaning of the text relative to literary features, the nineteenth-century context, including the Old and New Testaments, and conclusions of mainstream contemporary secular scholarship. He does refer in some annotations and essays to correlations with locations and details for the Arabian journey and Nahom and provides a map for reference. But again, I observe that on several important issues such as the meaning of the Lamanite curse, the issue of directions in the Book of Mormon, the nature of Jacob’s mark, and even the significance of apparent anachronisms, different soil and nurture can radically influence what might appear to the unwary as the fixed, undisputed, unquestionable, “plain meaning.”

The Plain Meaning in Context

With respect to Hardy’s determination to pursue “the plain meaning of the text” there is the issue that Ian Barbour describes where “theory is revisable in light of observation, but observation may also need [Page 114]to be reconsidered in light of theory.”¹³ For instance, Brant Gardner described an important change in his perspective on Mesoamerican evidence relative to the Book of Mormon:

The difference came when I started looking for Mesoamerica in the Book of Mormon instead of the Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica. Oddly enough, there is a huge difference, and the nature and the quality of the correlations has changed with that single shift in perspective.

Further, Gardner states,

When people ask me about the most important correlation I have found, I have a hard time narrowing it to just one. The most important correlation isn’t a singular finding; rather, it can be seen in the many facets of the discovery that the entire text of the Book of Mormon works better in a Mesoamerican context. Speeches suddenly have a context that makes them relevant instead of just preachy. The pressures leading to wars are understandable. The wars themselves have an explanation for their peculiar features. All of these things happen within a single interpretive framework that puts them in the right place at the right time.¹⁴

If you approach the New World portions of the Book of Mormon demanding or expecting to locate conspicuous evidence of a transplanted and dominant Old World Hebrew civilization that accounts for all of North and South American continental history and all inhabitants evidenced today, you explore in one way. For example, Brent Metcalfe wrote that “Book of Mormon geographers have been unable to deliver a single archeological dig that can be verified by reputable Mesoamericanists as the ruins of an ancient Near Eastern culture, much less of Lehites and Jaredites.”¹⁵

This statement makes clear what Metcalfe demands—an Old [Page 115]World Hebrew civilization; ”the ruins of an ancient Near Eastern culture”—and to whom he will grant authority to dispense what Thomas Kuhn calls “a license for seeing”¹⁶: only “reputable Mesoamericanists,” presumably non-LDS, despite the existence of several notably reputable Latter-day Saint Mesoamericanists. One would think, for instance, that Metcalfe would note a most obvious problem: that of looking for the ruins of an ancient Near Eastern culture in Mesoamerica given the conspicuous tendency of ancient Near Eastern cultures to occur in the ancient Near East.

There are other contexts, however. Consider, for example, small groups of migrants entering already inhabited lands (during Lehi’s time at the level of hamlets and villages¹⁷) and, for practical matters of survival, available natural resources, and the advice and example of local specialized knowledge and techniques, those minority migrants then largely adopt the material culture of the majority locals and immediately begin to mix with them. Within that context, the kind of evidence you seek and where you seek changes radically. You then contextualize and read the Book of Mormon very differently.¹⁸ You might even pay close attention to the internal statements of distance and relationships in considering the location and area concerned, and the state of the society at specific times, rather than assuming an unchanging cultural picture from start to finish. For me, the work of John Sorenson, Brant Gardner, and others like them paradigmatically demonstrates the different harvest produced by the different soil and nurture.

Hardy aptly concludes his essay on “Reading the Book of Mormon as Ancient History” with this:

In summary, taking the Book of Mormon seriously as history in the contemporary era requires some sort of limited geography model that acknowledges the presence of a large number of indigenous peoples in the Americas before 600 BCE, as well as an awareness of anachronisms in the text, and an openness to different types of translation. Reading [Page 116]the Mormon scripture as history might also involve tracking the movements of its characters on a hypothetical map based on internal references (such as the one included in this volume), tracing the development of their ideas over time, weighing their words against their life stories, and looking for the minds of ancient Nephite narrators as conveyed through their writings and editing, with authorial intentions that may be separate from those of Joseph Smith.¹⁹

In dealing with Book of Mormon historicity and geography, we also have the problem of the authority of Latter-day Saint traditions regarding the New York hill, the identity of Lamanites, and the nature of the curse. Are they inviolate and unquestionable on grounds that “Surely a prophet or General Authority would know!” (which inevitably invites the conclusion “hitherto thou shalt come, and no further”), or do we take seriously the formal declaration of “mine authority, and the authority of my servants” that ”inasmuch as they erred, it shall be made manifest” and inasmuch as they sought wisdom, they might be instructed” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:6, 25–26), which encourages a more open-ended, process-oriented approach?

In addition, in considering the impact of Book of Mormon migrations on indigenous populations, we should think through the implications of a first-generation Book of Mormon author (Jacob 1:13–14) deliberately changing the definition of Nephite and Lamanite from genealogical descent to political friendlies and un-friendlies, while very quickly noting the wickedness of Nephites and relative righteousness of less accountable Lamanites that he knew, against the common oversimplifications of many supposedly critical readers. And we should also note that one of Jacob’s first formal acts in the first generation of the narrative is to discourse on how “Gentiles shall be blessed and numbered among the house of Israel” (2 Nephi 10:18). Again, the nature of the evidence sought both inside and outside the text and experience of the text becomes very different. As Kuhn explains, “novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation,”²⁰ and observes that “scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.”²¹ LDS Mesoamericanist John Clark has written,

[Page 117]The logical challenges with the first assertion, that no “cities have been located,” are more subtle. Book of Mormon cities have been found, they are well known, and their artifacts grace the finest museums. They are merely masked by archaeological labels such as “Maya,” “Olmec,” and so on. The problem, then, is not that Book of Mormon artifacts have not been found, only that they have not been recognized for what they are. Again, if we stumbled onto Zarahemla, how would we know? The difficulty is not with evidence but with epistemology.²²

Hardy provides a supplementary essay that discusses the development of various New World geographies, mentioning briefly important books by both John Sorenson and Brant Gardner, as well as the Heartlanders,²³ and the later version of John Clark’s essay on criteria for evaluating geographies. Hardy discusses the lack of any official Latter-day Saint position, other than generally in favor of historicity due in large measure to the implications of the story of physical plates, Moroni as resurrected messenger, and the witnesses. Hardy annotates the evidence for the Book of Mormon mention of Nahom in this way:

Nahom, three altar inscriptions from the 7th–6^th c. BCE indicate that NHM (now transliterated as Nihm) was a tribal name in southwestern Arabia in the area where the Incense Trail turned eastward (see 17.1). Many Latter-day Saints have viewed this as an independent confirmation of a historical detail from the BoM.²⁴

In his general essay on “Reading the Book of Mormon as Ancient History,” Hardy returns to the topic and elaborates this way:

These findings are not conclusive; there are questions, for instance, about the Semitic consonant represented by the h in Nahom, about geographic details, or whether the name [Page 118]might have been adopted by Smith from the biblical prophet Nahum.²⁵

Here again, Hardy strives to balance opposing views, as befits a book published by Oxford Press. Though arguing about the “h” in Nahom as an isolated curiosity is a very different thing than addressing the large-scale convergence of Nahom in the right time and place as one element of a complex set of interlocking details, both geographic and cultural in the whole Old World portion of the 1 Nephi description of the journey from Jerusalem to Bountiful.²⁶ Hardy does include a map of that journey.²⁷

In his summary of the current state of evidence for Book of Mormon historicity, Hardy does not mention copious other works that provide evidence, including:

• The work of Brian Stubbs on Uto-Aztecan language groups, systematically showing extensive patterns of influence from Hebrew, Egyptian, and Phoenician, influence being a very different thing than origins.²⁸
• The two Mesoamerican cylinder seals that have characters resembling those on the Anthon transcript.²⁹
• “Scientific Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic [Page 119]Voyages to and from the Americas” by John L. Sorenson and Carl L. Johannessen, nor Sorenson’s 2009 publication “A Complex of Ritual and Ideology Shared by Mesoamerica and the Ancient Near East.”³⁰
• The 2018 LiDAR surveys with their stunning, revolutionary impact on Mesoamerican archeology, and the unavoidable fact that the exponential leap in evidence to consider that they uncovered so far that had the potential to dramatically undercut the Book of Mormon picture, but instead illuminates and supports it.³¹

That this sort of thing does not allow us to claim any proof for the Book of Mormon is because of the availability and utility of anyone being able say things like “So what?” and “Some things they have guessed right, among so many” (Helaman 16:16) and “Have any of the rulers, or of the Pharisees believed on him?” (John 7:48). Hardy does mention the existence of the important “Book of Mormon Central” website³² and lists a few books that provide useful collections of Latter-day Saint apologetic writings. Again, Hardy is speaking to a particular audience, working through an academic press with implicit editorial priorities, social protocols, and assumptions and space limitations of only a few hundred pages to deal with an ambitious range of issues.

Which Problems are More Significant to Have Solved?

That any paradigm offers unsolved problems is normal, even inevitable. “To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.”³³ That means that paradigm debate always involves deciding “Which problems is it more [Page 120]significant to have solved?”³⁴ Consider again a few issues that Hardy lists as unsolved for the Book of Mormon.

Others have been troubled by the lack of direct historical evidence in the Americas. There are no authenticated reports of pre-Columbian New World sites that show any evidence of Old World influence in the form of pottery, tools, weapons, inscriptions, or agricultural products.³⁵ Finding these sorts of items in an excavation would not prove the Book of Mormon true, but they would make it more historically plausible and indicate potential locations for further research. (Many Latter-day Saints assume that confirming evidences will someday be unearthed.) When challenged to produce a single, credible Nephite artifact, apologists tend to point toward broader patterns of geographical consistency and Mesoamerican cultural parallels such as cities, fortifications, warfare, and roads. Or they look to secondary confirmations from ancient Near Eastern parallels, literary features, and witness statements.³⁶

In considering “Which problems are more significant to have solved?” I find it useful and telling to consider whether and how the current case changes if believers and skeptics could swap issues. Suppose, for example, that Hardy could point to specific “authenticated reports of Old World influence in the form of pottery, tools, weapons, inscriptions, or agricultural products”³⁷ and, even some DNA, and that the Book of Mormon scripture’s authors (who are mainly priests, political leaders, and military men, rather than, say, botanists or farmers or sports fans) had thought to “include the references to the beans, squash, jade, cacao, blowguns, or ball courts that [Page 121]readers might expect today from a historical account.”³⁸ Also suppose he could report no apparent Biblical anachronisms.

But suppose, with those problems resolved, Hardy then had to report that LDS scholars had to admit no geographical consistency and no notable or elaborate Mesoamerican cultural parallels such as cities, fortifications, warfare patterns, writing, volcanic eruptions in the right time and place, no roads and no ancient Near Eastern parallels and literary features, no Valley of Lemuel, no Nahom, no plausible land Bountiful in Oman with convergent features, no pre-Classic Mesoamerican civilizations rising and falling at the right times and places to compare with both the Jaredite and Nephite accounts, no large scale use of cement in the right time and place relative a complex set of geographic and cultural requirements, and no anciently authentic names. Further, that John Clark had reported that the tendency over time as more knowledge of ancient Mesoamerica is uncovered was away from resolution of questions, rather than towards it; that our understanding of Mesoamerican civilizations has less and less in common with Book of Mormon civilizations over time rather than more and more;³⁹ that Brian Stubbs had discovered no Hebrew, Egyptian and Phoenician influence on Uto-Aztecan language groups; that recent LiDAR surveys had severely undercut Book of Mormon claims; that the book demonstrated no notable literary distinction other than bulk and naivete; that rather than resolving “all the great controversies,” that Alexander Campbell had declared the Book of Mormon was both irrelevant and incomprehensible; and finally, no witness statements besides Joseph Smith’s own story.

Given such a hypothetical exchange of present problems for present solutions, would the current case for the Book of Mormon be stronger or weaker? Indeed, given that exchange, would we even be talking about the Book of Mormon nearly two centuries after it appeared?

The River Sidon and the Issue of Directions

The name “Sidon” appears 58 times in Hardy’s book, with one annotation mentioning “the north-flowing river Sidon as a [Page 122]central feature of the landscape”⁴⁰ and in another that “The land of Manti was the southernmost Nephite region in the center of their territory. Since it contained the headwaters of the Sidon River, it would have been in the mountains.”⁴¹ Hardy does not comment on the directional difficulty these textual details pose for Heartlanders who, as he reports, “regard the Mississippi as the River Sidon and the Great Lakes as the surrounding seas mentioned in the scriptural text.”⁴² He does, however, spend time detailing supposed directional difficulties for those who adopt a Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon. He observes,

The natural features of southern Mexico and Guatemala can be roughly matched to the internal geography of the text, including a narrow neck of land (the Isthmus of Tehuantepec) and a river flowing northward (the Grijalva), along with various highlands, coastlines, and wilderness areas (even if it requires shifting the cardinal directions counterclockwise by more than 45 degrees).⁴³

While Hardy mentions that Gardner’s work⁴⁴ refines Sorenson’s,⁴⁵ he does not mention that Larry Poulsen and Brant Gardner, in a book Hardy otherwise cites, have refined Sorenson on the issue of direction in the same way that, for astronomical paradigms, Kepler’s elliptical orbits refined the less accurate and less acceptable circular orbits postulated by Copernicus. Poulsen and Gardner pointed out that Mesoamerican culture viewed the directions as related to sunrise and sunset, which varies during the year, and therefore were conceived as quadrants rather than vectors, and viewed the quadrants as a slightly flattened “X” rather than what we, as moderns, reflexively think of in a “+” format. Gardner explains the concept this way:

What you’ll see at the top is this North-South axis and that really looks familiar to us because as modern Americans we conceptualize directions and cardinal directions as a plus sign. What we miss is that Mesoamerica did not. Mesoamerica did not use the concept of a plus sign [Page 123]whenever they described the world and the four quarters of the world. They used an “X.” So for them this is North, not that single line that we think of, but that pie, that whole piece of direction is North. It changes concepts dramatically when we have a quadrant that is Northwest, and they kind of tilt it and say that whole thing is North. So the concept of what North is was probably very different in the Mesoamerican world.⁴⁶

Figure 1 is Larry Poulsen’s detailed figure to show the difference it makes for Hardy’s complaint about Sorenson’s correlation.⁴⁷

Figure 1. Poulsen’s depiction of Book of Mormon directions.

[Page 124]Poulsen’s presentation shows how stories, such as that of Limhi’s explorers, can be illuminated by putting them in specific contexts. Poulsen examines how Limhi sent a group from the Land of Nephi to find Zarahemla and seek help. Their problem involved finding a living person from the generation who had made the journey but who, by then, was too old to be a personal guide, essentially asking, “Grandpa, how do we get to Zarahemla?” The answer would be, “Go to the narrow strip of wilderness that extends from the East Sea to the West Sea, separating the Land of Nephi from the Land of Zarahemla as a natural boundary (Alma 22:27)⁴⁸ and that contains the headwaters of the Sidon. Find the Sidon and follow the West bank downstream until you find Zarahemla. It should take around three to four weeks, if you don’t get lost or delayed.”⁴⁹ Poulsen suggests that the explorers followed the wrong river, the Usamacinta (see figure 2).⁵⁰

Figure 2. Poulsen’s suggested route for Limhi’s explorers.

[Page 125]This not only accounts for them missing Zarahemla and how they passed through a land of many waters (Mosiah 8:8), but also how they could find an unoccupied Jaredite ruin, mistake it for Zarahemla (Mosiah 21:26), and return the way they came with the Jaredite record (Mosiah 8:9).

Poulsen shows that La Venta, an Olmec ruin, had been occupied at the time of the Mulekite arrival—thus allowing for their contact with Coriantumr—but was unoccupied at the time of Limhi’s people (see figure 3).⁵¹ It is also evident that trying to make the story of Limhi’s explorers plausible with either a continental geography or limited North American geography would be an exercise in futility.

Figure 3. Poulsen’s depiction of the rivers and Olmec ruins.

Race and the Lamanite Curse

I have a different view than Hardy on the curse on the Lamanites. This is a key issue. Hardy cites the recent Book of Mormon Studies: An Introduction and Guide, which makes the point that reader concerns [Page 126]about their perception of racism in the text have become a major issue in whether many readers can believe or accept the Latter-day Saint community and message.⁵² So how we treat the text on this issue is not of mere academic interest but is a pressing social concern for real life, and has potentially generational consequences. Here is Hardy’s annotation for 2 Nephi 5, where Nephi describes the curse:

Cursing . . . sore cursing, 1 Ne 2.23; 2 Ne 1.22; Jacob 3.3 (which all refer to this moment). Flint, a hard, often grayish rock. A skin of blackness, a notoriously difficult passage, not only because the equating of skin color with righteousness runs counter to modern ethical standards but because it is contradicted within the BoM itself: 26.33 declares that “black and white . . . all are alike unto God,” and the dark-skinned Anti-Nephi-Lehies and Lamanites are sometimes morally superior to the Nephites (see Jacob 3; Hel 6; 13–15). Some LDS readers have interpreted descriptions of the Lamanites being “dark” as cultural or symbolic rather than biological, but this appears to contradict the plain meaning of the text, and the most plausible naturalistic explanation is that they intermarried with indigenous inhabitants of the Americas who had migrated from Asia thousands of years earlier (see v. 23, and 3 Ne 2.14–16, where the curse was taken from Lamanites who united with the Nephites, but only over the course of several generations).⁵³

Several notable LDS scholars have pointed to the Ancient Near Eastern cultural backgrounds relative to the phrase “skin of blackness.” For instance, the transcript of Hugh Nibley’s Teachings of the Book of Mormon class has this:

Now this cursing. There’s a great deal said about this race business in the Book of Mormon. It’s very clear what it is—it’s a cultural thing. It tells us here in verse 21, “Wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome.” That doesn’t mean they had complexions of milk, that they were pale white and ghostly. That’s not healthy anyway. Nor does it mean that the others were coal black. Black is [Page 127]much too strong a word to use here, if you are using it literally. But, as I’ve said before, it applies just as much in shāḥōr and lābān as it does in Hebrew and Aramaic, and also in Arabic. Anything that’s abyaḍ is good, delightful, pleasant; and everything that’s aswad isn’t. In the paintings, whether it’s Greek vase paintings or wall paintings in Egypt, the people who live in the bayt al-shaîr, “the houses of hair, out in the desert are always painted with dark complexions. The people who live in the bayt al-hajar, “the houses of stone,” are always depicted with light complexions. The women never went out; they would paint their faces with white lead, as a matter of fact. It’s a cultural thing. Of course, if you live that way, you become dark. Also, the camps of natives, Asiatics or anything like that, become garbage dumps. They live by hunting and plunder. They are not cultivating the soil and are not bound to work too much. So they become slovenly and dark in their manner. . . .

One was “exceedingly fair and delightsome,” and the other was a skin of blackness. As I said, shāḥōr is a skin of blackness, which means dark. A good source for that would be Morris Jastrow’s Aramaic Dictionary. For the word black, it gives dark, unpleasant—everything sort of uncomplimentary. We don’t need to linger on that. Here it is [in verse 23]; it says it’s a cultural affair. If you mixed your seed with them, you got the same cursing. If you intermarry with them, you are sharing their culture, and you become just like them. In other words, it is not a racial thing because you can get it yourself. “And because of their cursing which was upon them, they did become an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and did seek in the wilderness for beasts of prey.”⁵⁴

More recently, T. J. Uriona has looked to the Neo-Assyrian “skin of blackness” curse relative to the Book of Mormon:

The phrase “skin of blackness” is only used once in the Book of Mormon as part of Nephi’s unabridged account of his life [Page 128]and prophecies. This makes the phrase, as Gerrit Steenblik has pointed out, “unusual” and suggests it might be unique to the ancient Near East culture that Nephi was familiar with. Support for this suggestion comes from the fact that in a prominent treaty dating to around Nephi’s time we also find something similar to Nephi’s phrase “skin of blackness.” In the Succession Treaty of King Esarhaddon, “skin black as pitch” seems to be used as a motif for death in relation to being cursed. Understood in this way, the phrase “skin of blackness” brings to mind the promise found in Deuteronomy of “life and death, blessing and cursing” (Deut. 30:19) and the need to hearken to the Lord and his appointed representative. This understanding is consistent with Lehi’s plea to choose life and not death (2 Ne. 2:27–29) and avoid being cursed by trusting in Nephi’s leadership (2 Ne. 1:21).⁵⁵

Notice that 2 Nephi 5:21 provides the only occurrence of the phrase “skin of blackness” in all the scriptures. No other Book of Mormon writer uses it, and that may be because Nephi is the only Book of Mormon author to be raised in the Ancient Near East and who—if he existed as person and not a figment of Joseph Smith’s imagination—would and could use the demonstrably ancient Near Eastern colloquial phrase in such an unconscious, unelaborated way.

This sort of thing reenforces for me that the “plain meaning of the text” is not a constant to all observers no matter which cultural background and personal assumptions are at work. Rather, interpretation is inevitably culturally conditioned to some degree by the original speaker, intervening editors, subsequent translators and interpreters, and finally by the expectations, preparations, perceptions, and imagination of the modern reader. In addition to this, I consider the definitions in the Webster’s 1828 dictionary for “blackness”:

BLACK’NESS, noun The quality of being black; black color; darkness; atrociousness or enormity in wickedness.⁵⁶

Even in 1828 skin color is not the only meaning offered. As Jesus observed, the same words, planted in different soils, nurtured in [Page 129]different ways, can produce vastly different harvests. For instance, one of the clearest messages I got from reading Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon, a book that Hardy cites approvingly, is that nineteenth-century Americans had a pre-existing culture that conditioned them to extract their own pre-existing, racist views from the text. Several authors in Americanist Approaches matter-of-factly relate the racism in nineteenth-century American culture to their perception of racism in the Book of Mormon. For example, Peter Coviello sees this in the book:

The Book of Mormon adapts itself to a series of drearily familiar racist tropes of the American nineteenth century: about Indians as remnants of the lost tribes of Israel, or, more saliently, about nonwhiteness as a God-ordained and indelible accursedness. The Book of Mormon, we might say, swallows these conventional racist premises whole, and metabolizes them into an intractably racist cosmology, haphazardly wrought round with a settler-colonial white supremacism that will be unfamiliar to few students of antebellum America.⁵⁷

I can understand the race-based reading, given the cultural environment of nineteenth-century readers and the culturally conditioned expectations of many modern readers, but I personally feel in no way bound to it, even when expressed by notable scholars or by traditional LDS authorities, all of whom, it must be recognized, were influenced by the cultures and traditions of their upbringing. Despite the common American speculations that the Indigenous tribes were descended from the Lost Tribes and frequent mischaracterizations of the Book of Mormon in this regard (even by notables such as Yale’s Harold Bloom⁵⁸), Hardy points out that the Book of Mormon expressly declares that the Lost Tribes are lost.⁵⁹ The three ancient migrations it describes (without ruling out other migrations led or permitted by the Lord in some manner⁶⁰) are all quite different from the Lost Tribes theories. As far as LDS traditions concerning the racial reading of the [Page 130]curse, the formal statement regarding the authority of the Lord’s servants in Doctrine and Covenants 1 expressly states, that “inasmuch as they erred, it might be made manifest” and “inasmuch as they sought wisdom, they might be instructed,” which means that LDS traditions on this topic need not be taken as binding nor agonized over, particularly when those who first promoted them demonstrably did not read closely, nor contextualize carefully, nor could they to the extent we can now do so owing to the changes in available contextual knowledge over time.

I perceive that ye are weak, that ye cannot understand all my words which I am commanded of the Father to speak unto you, at this time. Therefore, go ye unto your homes, and ponder upon the things which I have said, and ask of the Father, in my name, that ye may understand, and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again. (3 Nephi 17:2–3)

Hardy discusses Joseph Smith’s own use of the Book of Mormon and concludes,

In short, Smith treated the Book of Mormon as something external to himself, whose contents he was not particularly familiar with. He certainly never produced anything else like it. That book of scripture, coming at the very beginning of his public life, emerged fully formed as a unified, coherent, history-like narrative of nearly 270,000 words and almost two hundred named characters interacting with one another in complicated plot lines. His later, relatively brief, mostly discursive revelations, such as those collected in the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, along with his revisions of the King James Bible, are not in the same category.⁶¹

I have been impressed by careful readings by hundreds of different Latter-day Saint authors who have prepared their minds and pondered in notably mind-expanding ways, including Nibley, Sorenson, Gardner,⁶² Tvedtnes, Peterson, Ricks, Hamblin, Poulsen, Sproat, Wright, Bowen, Von Feldt, Goff, Ostler, Midgley, Barker, Lindsay, [Page 131]Roper, Larsen, the Astons, Hardy himself, and others. Authors such as these also take into account both close and careful reading and appropriate cultural contexts for at least testing the content of the Book of Mormon. However, even given the racist context of 1820s to 1830 American culture—with the Civil War still thirty years away and slavery still devoutly practiced in half the states—some Book of Mormon commentators have noted the oddness of the text within that nineteenth-century American context, of applying “skin of blackness” to pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, given the conspicuous presence and cultural significance of the enslaved blacks of African descent in the South and the occasional free blacks of the North as a distinctly different people than the our mis-named native Indians. Why not red or copper or brown skin, if the book is to account for Native American origins and if the Book of Mormon is merely a stereotyped recapitulation of nineteenth-century thought?⁶³ Reading the text as Coviello does (“a series of drearily familiar racist tropes”) does not quite fit. Indeed, Jeremy Talmage reports,

The racial worldview of the Book of Mormon is a historical anomaly in that it envisioned Native Americans as either black or white when nearly everyone else identified Indians as red. As it turns out, this radically departed from the personal views of Joseph Smith and his nineteenth-century culture. The description of Native Americans as red, which one should expect to find in the Book of Mormon, simply is not there.⁶⁴

Hardy does cite several important ways and essays in which the portrayal and destinies of Lamanites in the Book of Mormon subverts convenient racist tropes.⁶⁵ Indeed, the first descriptions of the Lamanite culture from the inside that we see during the missionary efforts of the sons of Mosiah (Alma 17–27) is very different than the outside view stereotype given by Enos (Enos 20) several generations earlier. The expectations of readers saturated with those tropes should, however, [Page 132]be acknowledged as preconditioning their interpretations and at least raise questions about the authority of their readings.

I’ve elsewhere cited Ethan Sproat’s detailed case in his “Skins as Garments”⁶⁶ essay that the later Alma 3 discussion of the Lamanite curse should take its context from the dual instances of skin in Alma 3:5–6, where the first use is clearly a garment, and the second likely is as well. Skins can be garments and garments are not always just utilitarian or fashion statements. They can and do often say and symbolize much more, and can, at times, even be metaphoric rather than literal.⁶⁷ In Fiddler on the Roof, for instance, Tevye discusses his inheritance of culturally distinct identifiers such as his hat and prayer shawl, and says, “Because of our traditions, each of us knows who he is, and who God expects him to be,” a remark I find poignant and applicable to Latter-day Saint traditions like temple clothing. It is also useful in considering military organizations, business attire, school marching bands, biker gangs, and political rallies. This is the passage from Alma that Sproat has demonstrated is a potential interpretive key:

Now the heads of the Lamanites were shorn; and they were naked, save it were skin which was girded about their loins, and also their armor, which was girded about them, and their bows, and their arrows, and their stones, and their slings, and so forth. And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob, and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men. (Alma 3:5–6)

Sproat reports that “Commentaries handle the two sentences in one of three ways: (1) by treating both of them independently, as if two very different things were at issue; (2) by commenting on only the second of the two sentences, remaining silent about the first; or (3) by failing to comment on either sentence.”⁶⁸ In Hardy’s commentary, that [Page 133]passage breaks across a page,⁶⁹ visually and physically separating the “skin which was girded about their loins” from the “skins of the Lamanites” being dark. Here is Hardy’s annotation for verse 6, which makes no connection to the skin as clothing in verse 5:

The Nephite assumptions that dark skin was associated with sin and a divine curse, and that it should be a barrier to social interactions and intermarriage, are, from a modern perspective, offensively racist. It is remarkable when such assumptions are overturned later in the BoM, in the books of Helaman and 4 Nephi.⁷⁰

Hardy does not engage Sproat anywhere, but comments on what, to him, is the “plain meaning of the text,” which is a little ironic, considering the additional possibilities of self-administered marks Hardy mentions in his own commentary on the previous verse on the previous page.

For the narrator, the Amlicites’ adoption of Lamanite facial marking represents their assimilation into the Lamanite curse; see 2 Ne 5.20–21. Just as the dark skin of the Lamanites—the mark of their curse for rebellion—kept them separate from the Nephites, so also the self-applied facial markings of the Amlicites served to distinguish them from their Nephite brethren.⁷¹

Hardy finds himself in the position where he insists that the Book of Mormon curse must be read as offensively racist⁷² (supposedly based on the “plain meaning of the text”), that the self-applied Amlicite facial marking also denotes the same curse, while also noting the anomaly that the same offensive racial view is “contradicted within the BoM itself: [2 Nephi:]26.33 declares that “black and white . . . all are alike unto God.”⁷³ Hardy dismisses without discussion or citation the notion of the metaphorical reading implied by Nephi’s ancient Near Eastern [Page 134]background and the association of “skins as garments” that Sproat observes in Alma 3, combined with the fact that the same Book of Mormon authors frequently and throughout the entire book use language associating white/pure/clean garments as metaphors of blessings and repentance, and stained/filthy/bloody garments as symbolic of disobedience and covenant curses in ways that directly parallel the use, context, audience and rhetorical intent of verses so often associated with racial readings.⁷⁴ For example, the same Nephi who wrote both “skin of blackness” and “all are alike unto God” also wrote:

And these twelve ministers whom thou beholdest shall judge thy seed. And, behold, they are righteous forever; for because of their faith in the Lamb of God their garments are made white in his blood. And the angel said unto me, “Look!” And I looked, and beheld three generations pass away in righteousness; and their garments were white even like unto the Lamb of God. And the angel said unto me, “These are made white in the blood of the Lamb, because of their faith in him.” (Nephi 12:10–11)

Hardy is certainly correct to emphasize the connection of the self-administered Amlicite mark with the Lamanite curse, but he does not consider potentially crucial contextual implications of skins as garments.

A Priestly Mark and Contextualization for the Plain Meaning

In the Book of Mormon, we find a commentary by Jacob concerning the Jews and their inability to see due to their propensity to look beyond the mark:

But behold, the Jews were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, they must needs fall; for [Page 135]God hath taken away his plainness from them, and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand, because they desired it. And because they desired it God hath done it, that they may stumble. (Jacob 4:14)

Here is Hardy’s annotation for Jacob’s mark.

Looking beyond the mark, the expression may be original to the BoM. The metaphor appears to come from archery, with the “mark” being a target; cf. 1 Sam 20.20.

Hardy supports the archery interpretation by citing a passage from a biblical story of David and Jonathon, though the general conclusion is consistent with a detailed essay written by Paul Hoskisson.⁷⁵ Hardy cites the same Bible verse that Hoskisson settles on as the best context for interpreting the verse in Jacob. Here is Hoskisson providing more detail:

From the context of this passage, it is clear that the specific meaning of mark is a target for bow and arrow practice. This meaning is confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary.[6] In fact, the word target in its current meaning is not attested in Modern English until a few decades before the translation of the Book of Mormon.[7] On the other hand, the word mark already meant target in the sixteenth century, decades before the King James Bible was translated, as is evident in the 1535 Coverdale translation of Lamentations 3:12: “He hath bent his bowe, and made me as it were a marck to shute at.”[8] It is from this traditional meaning of mark that English has derived the noun marksman, the verbal phrase “mark your target,” and the expression “He is a marked man.” Therefore, when the Prophet Joseph used the word mark in the English translation of the Book of Mormon, his nineteenth-century readers would have known that a mark was something to aim at.⁷⁶

This is a reasonable argument and the reading it implies is common in Latter-day Saint discourse that uses “looking beyond the mark” as [Page 136]a cautionary point, but I think both Hardy and Hoskisson are wrong. Two passages they don’t consider are from Ezekiel 9, which ought to be of contextual interest because Ezekiel and Jacob are contemporary First Temple priests in exile (not archers), and therefore have the potential to cast light on one another.

For instance, compare Jacob on his own consecration as a temple priest (which likely makes him an anointed one, a messiah) and the consequent responsibility that goes with it, potential blessings and curses attached to a covenant:

Wherefore I, Jacob, gave unto them these words as I taught them in the temple, having first obtained mine errand from the Lord. For I, Jacob, and my brother Joseph had been consecrated priests and teachers of this people, by the hand of Nephi.

And we did magnify our office unto the Lord, taking upon us the responsibility, answering the sins of the people upon our own heads if we did not teach them the word of God with all diligence; wherefore, by laboring with our might their blood might not come upon our garments; otherwise their blood would come upon our garments, and we would not be found spotless at the last day. (Jacob 1:17–19)

Compare that with Ezekiel’s commission:

Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me.

When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand. (Ezekiel 3:17–18)

Both Ezekiel and Jacob report personal visions,⁷⁷ which means their eyes are open and they are the opposite of blind. They are aware of the stiffhearted (Ezekiel 2:4) or stiffneckedness (Jacob 4:14) tendencies of the portions of Israel to whom they minister. And both discuss an important mark. Here is Ezekiel’s mark, not mentioned by Hoskisson or Hardy:

And the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of the [Page 137]city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof. . . . but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary. (Ezekiel 9:4, 6, emphasis mine)

An important aspect of Ezekiel’s mark is that it was associated with the Lord’s sanctuary, which would be the Jerusalem temple. Margaret Barker has commented on the priestly language and traditions around Ezekiel’s mark:

“Mark,” however conceals what that mark was. The Hebrew says that the angel marked the foreheads with the letter tau, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the ancient Hebrew script that Ezekiel would have used, this letter was a diagonal cross, and the significance of this becomes apparent from the much later tradition about the high priests. The rabbis remembered that the oil for anointing the high priest had been lost when the first temple was destroyed and that the priests of the second temple were only “priests of many garments,” a reference to the eight garments worn on the Day of Atonement (m. Horayoth 3.4). The rabbis also remember that the anointed high priests of the first temple had been anointed on the forehead with the sign of a diagonal cross (b. Horayoth 12a). The diagonal cross was the sign of the Name on their foreheads, the mark which Ezekiel described as the letter tau.⁷⁸

Remember that Jacob had been consecrated as a temple priest “by the hand of Nephi,” which likely means that he had been anointed with the mark. Anointing was related to the temple and to vision and to wisdom.

The perfumed anointing oil was kept in the holy of holies, and when the royal high priest was anointed, he received the gift of Wisdom herself: resurrection life, vision, knowledge and true wealth. The high priest was anointed on his head and between his eyelids—a curious detail which must have symbolised the opening of his eyes. When the oil [Page 138]was hidden away in the time of Josiah, Enoch said that the priests lost their vision. This is the context of the Messianic prophecy in Isaiah 11: “The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of Wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge and the fear of the LORD.”⁷⁹

Remember that “messiah” means “anointed one.” And since the tau mark also represented the Name, anointed high priests quite literally took upon themselves the Name of God in their anointing and calling and standing in for God in their high priestly ritual roles.⁸⁰ Hence, the association in the scriptures with the phrase “Name of the Lord” with the visible presence of God.⁸¹ As Barker explains,

The fact that we call Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, which means the Anointed One, shows that Christians live and think in a world where the lost anointing oil and everything it stood for has been restored. The perfumed anointing oil was fundamental to the original temple world. Tradition remembered that it represented oil from the tree of life, and the tree of life was the ancient symbol of the Holy Wisdom. One of the wise teachers of Israel had said: “Wisdom is a tree of life for those who hold on to her.”

The oil from the tree of life opened one’s spiritual eyes. When the high priest was anointed, the oil was put on his eyelids. It changed the way everything was seen. In fact, the oil transformed and heightened all the senses. The anointed ones saw and heard differently, and so they thought differently. The anointed mind was transformed, and this became the characteristic temple world view. Isaiah said the anointed one received the Spirit of the LORD, the spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge and the fear of the LORD. When the priests of the original temple abandoned Wisdom, Isaiah said their punishment would be to see and not see, to hear and not hear, and so they would no longer understand.⁸²

[Page 139]Large eyes on many of the hundreds of sixth-century BCE Asherah figurines discovered in and around Jerusalem symbolized the vision bestowed by Wisdom, and the anointing and opening of the eyes, which highlights the irony that the first generation of the archeological discoverers of those Jewish Pillar Figurines could not see any significant place for them in Israel’s religion and discarded them as trash.⁸³ So it is important to consider that the same time that the use of these figures stopped in Israel was the time of Josiah and his violent reform, and his removal of the Tree of Life from the temple (2 Kings 23:6)—the symbol of Wisdom (Proverbs 3:13–19). Deuteronomy also insists, against the Exodus account, that the Lord had been only heard and not seen by Moses.⁸⁴ Jeremiah 5:21, Zephaniah 1:17, Ezekiel 12:2, 1 Enoch 93:7–8, Lehi (1 Nephi 5:4 versus Jacob 4:14) and Nephi (1 Nephi 7:8 versus 1 Nephi 11), and Jacob (4:14; 7:12) all refer to blindness in Israel at that time, all contrasting that blindness with what they have personally seen.⁸⁵

Rather than explore Barker’s work relative to the mark and anointing and her relevance to the common claim that the Book of Mormon is anachronistically too “Christian before Christ,” Hardy summarily dismisses her this way:

Some LDS writers, drawing on controversial theories of biblical scholar Margaret Barker, have suggested that the Book of Mormon includes traces of anti-Deuteronomistic ideology, but this hypothesis runs counter to the ethos of the Book of Mormon as a whole.⁸⁶

Hardy supports his dismissal of Barker with the “controversial” label,⁸⁷ while providing no details of what her theories are, what books [Page 140]and articles she has written, what her language skills are, what sources and evidence she gathers, what notable non-LDS biblical scholars appreciate her work, what peripheral or direct relevance her work might have for the Book of Mormon, or even mentioning that Barker herself has directly addressed the question of the Book of Mormon relative to Jerusalem in 600 BCE.⁸⁸ Hardy addresses the question of the Book of Mormon and Josiah’s reform with this argument:

Nephite authors, with their emphasis on Moses, prophets, fulfilled prophecies, obedience to commandments, blessings and curses, and covenant obligations, take a basically Deuteronomistic approach to history. This is perhaps most clearly evident in their frequent invocation of God’s promise to Lehi that “inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; but inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence” (2 Ne 1.20, with nineteen additional citations).⁸⁹

Besides this paragraph, Hardy includes a detailed appendix listing places where the Book of Mormon contains “Biblical Quotations, Allusions and Parallels.” Part of that section goes through Deuteronomy⁹⁰ and cites fifty-one Deuteronomy verses to compare with Book of Mormon passages. Even with this added set of citations, I do not find Hardy’s argument persuasive because while [Page 141]Nephi, Lehi, and Jeremiah all demonstrate respect for and knowledge of Deuteronomy, they all openly contradict our current version of Deuteronomy on exactly the verses and issues that Barker uses to unlock the nature of Josiah’s reform. None of those key verses appear on his list of Deuteronomy quotations, allusions, and parallels or anywhere in his commentary. Given that Lehi and Jeremiah know and cite Deuteronomy, for me it follows that any contradictions they make are deliberate and significant.

For example, Deuteronomy prohibits “enquiring after the secret things which belong to the Lord alone” (Deuteronomy 29:29) and declares that the duty of Israel was to obey the commandments brought down from Sinai and not to seek someone who would ascend to heaven for them to discover remote and hidden things (Deuteronomy 30:11–13).⁹¹ Against this Jeremiah reports that the Lord spoke saying “Call unto me and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty (or hidden) things which thou knowest not” (Jeremiah 33:3). 1 Nephi 1 shows Lehi discovering those secret things, preaching them, and being rejected in Jeremiah’s Jerusalem for doing so.

Deuteronomy has this, depicting the law as replacement for wisdom:

Keep therefore and do them [that is, the statutes and judgments of the law] for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. (Deuteronomy. 4:6)

Even though Jeremiah often cites Deuteronomy and therefore shows direct knowledge and respect when due, he also says this, which strikes me as a direct reply to that passage:

How do ye say, We are wise, and Yahweh’s torah is with us? In fact it was made for a lie, the lying pen of the scribes. [Friedman’s translation here is stronger than the KJV.] The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them? (Jeremiah 8:8–9).

[Page 142]It is this sort of deliberate contradiction to specific passages in Deuteronomy that Barker cites as the key to understanding the nature of Josiah’s reform:

The Deuteronomists denied that anyone had a vision of the Lord (Deuteronomy 4:12), they denied that anyone had revelations from heaven, and they insisted the Ten Commandments were all that was necessary (Deuteronomy 30:8, 11–14). Nothing more was to be added to them (Deuteronomy 5:22). Prophecies were genuine only if they had already been fulfilled and had no more power (Deuteronomy 18:21–22). The Deuteronomists had no place for angels, and so they did not use the title “Lord of Hosts.” These were the minds that eventually led to the closed canon of scripture and the cessation of prophecy. But the prophets did have visions of the Lord and the angels, they did speak in the name of the Lord, and their unfulfilled prophecies were carefully preserved. Not everyone shared the views of the Deuteronomists, but the writings of these other people are often outside the Bible.⁹²

She also made the key observation that “Josiah’s changes concerned the high priests, and were thus changes at the very heart of the temple.”⁹³ Neal Rappleye explains that “being against parts of the ideology of a particular group who uses Deuteronomy as a foundation is not the same thing as being opposed to that text itself. Lehi and Nephi were not anti-Deuteronomy, and certainly were not anti-Moses.”⁹⁴ Barker suggests that the portion of Isaiah often designated as the Third Isaiah, “illuminates the fifty-year gap in the Chronicler’s record” showing how divisions in Israel hardened into a rift.”⁹⁵ She also notes:

[Page 143]A relatively uncritical appraisal of the book as a whole gives a picture of the enemies whom the prophet attacked, because the picture is not one for which we have been prepared, I have not found any commentary that actually dwells upon the identity of these enemies or draws the very obvious conclusion. They were inspired by the ideals of the Deuteronomists.”⁹⁶

After several pages of close reading and noting patterns of difference between the Masoretic Hebrew of Deuteronomy and the Dead Sea Scrolls, she can conclude “What the Third Isaiah can teach us, if nothing else, is that the Deuteronomistic theology and its offspring were neither normative nor universally accepted.”⁹⁷

Plus, given some crucial differences between the Masoretic Hebrew that underlies our King James Bible and the much older Dead Sea Scrolls version of Deuteronomy, we can also ask, which version of Deuteronomy did the Brass Plates contain? For that matter, were the Brass Plates compiled during Josiah’s reform or during the reign of Jehoiakim, an Egyptian puppet ruler, as a gift for the Egyptian Pharoh, much as the later Septuagint was commissioned by a Pharoh.

Brass Plates prepared for Josiah might be subsequently updated to include “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” (1 Nephi 5:13), Jeremiah having been called the year after Josiah’s reform began. If the Brass Plates were made during the reign of Jehoiakim as a planned gift for Pharoh’s library, during a period when the reformers were in relative disarray due to the death of Josiah and Egyptian control of the government, then Egyptian writing there would set a pattern for Nephi’s record keeping, as well as allowing for the inclusion of prophecies of Jeremiah subsequent to the death of Josiah up to Zedekiah. At the same time, the defeat of the Egyptians and installation of Zedekiah by the Babylonians would have interrupted the diplomatic plans to give the plates to Pharoh, leaving them available to Nephi in Laban’s treasury. Remember that Neal Rappleye and Val Larsen have made substantial observations to show that Laman and Lemuel show sympathy to the Deuteronomists, that perhaps [Page 144]Zoram held to Deuteronomist readings, and that Sherem was clearly a Deuteronomist.⁹⁸

Barker highlights the difference between Deuteronomy 32:8–9 in the King James Bible (based on the Masoretic text) compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls version:

When the Most High [that is, El Elyon] gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God [KJV, “children of Israel”]. For the Lord’s portion [that is, Yahweh’s portion as a son of El Elyon] is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.

The older version depicts Yahweh as one of the sons of El Elyon, God Most High. For my purposes here, consider that the first two of six occurrences of most high in the Book of Mormon are these:

And when I had spoken these words, the Spirit cried with a loud voice, saying, “Hosanna to the Lord, the most high God; for he is God over all the earth, yea, even above all. And blessed art thou, Nephi, because thou believest in the Son of the most high God;”

When the son of the Most High appears to the Nephites, he declares, “I am he who gave the law.” That is a notably significant theological statement that Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, the father of those humans who covenant with him, has a Heavenly Father to whom he prays, whose voice we hear announcing him, El Elyon, God Most High.

Barker shows that the reformers presented the Law as replacing Wisdom, noted their rejection of the Tree of Life (a symbol of Wisdom, Proverbs 3:13–19) from the temple, their argument that God cannot be seen, only heard, and that we should consider only the Lord alone, and not consider a Heavenly Father or Mother, and not think of the Lord of Hosts, and that we should not desire for a person to enter the Great Council among those hosts to learn the mysteries but rather obey an unseen God based on the Law given in a presently held book.

Only after establishing her paradigm independently did Barker [Page 145]encounter the Book of Mormon, and she soon publicly recognized its unexpected and elaborate consistency with her reconstruction of preexilic Temple Theology. At the Joseph Smith Conference in 2005 Barker explained,

New Testament scholars agonize over why the first Christians applied Yahweh texts to Jesus. And how, they ask, could all of the early Christian teachers have found Jesus in the Old Testament? When I wrote a book setting out all this rather obvious evidence, [The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God] it was regarded as strange and hopelessly radical. Another example: the Jerusalem Bible, the translation prepared by the Roman Catholic Church, leaves the name Yahweh in the Old Testament, instead of using the customary form, the Lord, and then has “the Lord” in the New Testament. With one editorial decision, they broke the link between the Old Testament and the New and obscured the fundamental proclamation of the first Christians: Jesus is the Lord, Jesus is Yahweh. A third example: the new English translation of the Targum, the Aramaic version of the Old Testament, does not use the term Messiah in the Psalms when translating the Hebrew word msyh, which means Messiah. The reason given is, “It does not seem appropriate to use words like Messiah and ‘messianic’” in connection with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament.

It was my challenge to assumptions such as these, which simply ignore the evidence of both the Hebrew Bible and of early Christian writings, that led to my first contact with Mormon scholars. The original temple tradition was that Yahweh, the Lord, was the Son of God Most High, and present on earth as the Messiah. This means that the older religion in Israel would have taught about the Messiah. Thus finding Christ in the Old Testament is exactly what we should expect, though obscured by incorrect reading of the scriptures. This is, I suggest, one aspect of the restoration of “the plain and precious things, which have been taken away from them” (1 Nephi 13:40). The Jehovah of the Old Testament is the Christ of the Book of Mormon (Mosiah 3:8; 3 Nephi 15:5).⁹⁹

[Page 146]By dismissing Barker as “controversial,” Hardy can side with “biblical scholars” without ever having to address the question of who has the best interpretation of available evidence in terms of Kuhn’s paradigm-choice criteria. By siding with unnamed biblical scholars, he does not have to address the fact that many notable biblical scholars admire and endorse Barker’s work, as is undeniably evidencedby her election as President of the Society for Old Testament Study, her Lambeth Doctor of Divinity awarded by the notably learned Archbishop of Canterbury, and her invitation to write the Isaiah chapter for Eerdman’s Commentary on the Bible. This is also why Hardy can declare on the authority of unnamed biblical scholars in unnamed books and unspecified arguments that the Book of Mormon is anachronistic because it is “too Christian before Christ.” Hardy doesn’t offer a critical engagement with Barker’s work, but rather, a proof-text and an appeal-to-authority assertion to support uncritical dismissal. He mentions the existence, not the content, of a single essay on her work relative to the Book of Mormon, that was included in Glimpses of Lehi’s Jerusalem.¹⁰⁰ He does not mention the many scholars in and out of the Latter-day Saint community that have explored and appreciate her work.¹⁰¹

Thomas Kuhn reports that “no part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are not often seen at all. . . . Normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.”¹⁰² There is a difference between examining the Book of Mormon according to the given assumptions of a specific community of biblical scholars and explicitly testing by comparison with a competing paradigm whether that approach provides the best puzzle definition and testability, accuracy of key predictions, breadth and depth and coherence of explanation, fruitfulness, simplicity and aesthetics, and future promise. But as Hardy openly states, his object in his commentary, though still ambitious and valuable, is more limited and deliberately defers to the conclusions of “biblical scholars.”

The Nephite adherence to the Law of Moses, including most of Deuteronomy, does not necessarily mean adherence to the ideology of the Deuteronomist reformers and Deuteronomy’s editors. Lehi’s vision of the Tree of Life (1 Nephi 8:10–12) viewed in relation to Josiah’s [Page 147]recent removal of the Tree of Life from the temple (2 Kings 23:6) should register as significant.

Later in the Book of Mormon, Sherem, echoing the reformers who changed the role of the high priests from being anointed to being the priests of the many-colored robes, declares to Jacob that “thou goest about much, preaching that which ye call the gospel, or the doctrine of Christ. And ye have led away much of this people that they pervert the right way of God, and keep not the law of Moses which is the right way” (Jacob 7:6–7). Jacob, in line with First Temple theology responds, “I have heard and seen; and it also has been made manifest unto me by the power of the Holy Ghost; wherefore, I know if there should be no atonement made all mankind must be lost” (Jacob 7:12). Remember that the festival calendar in Deuteronomy 16 is missing the Day of Atonement, something I have never seen mentioned let alone discussed, by any other biblical scholar besides Barker in discussing Josiah’s reform. I notice that Jacob’s response to Sherem emphasizes the atoning Messiah and that Jacob’s discourse in 2 Nephi 6–10 demonstrates Day of Atonement patterns.¹⁰³

Nephi’s comments on the rejection of Lehi’s first public discourse indicated he was one who “saw and heard” (1 Nephi 1:19), that he “manifested plainly of the coming of a Messiah, and also the redemption of the world,” ritually dramatized in the temple on the Day of Atonement. “And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him; yea, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had cast out, and stoned, and slain; and they also sought his life, that they might take it away” (1 Nephi 1:19). Hardy’s annotation has this on Lehi’s report of violence:

Despite the persecution reported at Jer 11.18–19 and 26.7–9 (and the NT recollections of Mt 23.37 and Heb 11.36–37), accounts of prophets who were slain are rare in the OT; see 1 Kings 18.4; 2 Chr 24.20–22; Jer 26.20–24.¹⁰⁴

Hardy does not mention these Bible passages discussing Josiah’s reform:

And he slew all of the priests of the high places . . . (2 Kings 23:20)

[Page 148]Your own sword hath destroyed your prophets like a destroying lion . . . (Jeremiah 2:31)

. . . in thy skirts is found the blood of poor innocents: I have not found it by secret search but upon all of these . . . (Jeremiah 2:36)

The only biblical account of extensive public violence against religious figures in Israel during the period to compare with Lehi’s report and Jeremiah’s complaint is that of Josiah’s reform. Remember that prophet and priest are not exclusive categories. Note that Jeremiah was called the year after the reform began, “against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land” (Jeremiah 1:18), and in the dangerous role he is assigned, Jeremiah receives assurance that he will be protected (Jeremiah 1:19).

The Messiah as Anachronism, or Perhaps Not

Hardy also comments on Lehi’s mention of a Messiah:

A Messiah, in the OT this title generally refers to human priests or kings (e.g., 1 Sam 24.6; Isa 45.1), though the idea of a future Davidic monarch who would bring peace and justice can be seen in the books of Isa, Jer, and other prophets. The word messiah appears a few times in Jewish writings from 200 BCE to 100 CE to describe a coming savior/redeemer of Judah, and then the idea is picked up strongly in the NT. Lehi’s use of “Messiah” is something of an anachronism (especially since he views him as a redeemer of the whole world, not just of Judah; cf. 1 Ne 10.4–5), but the entire Christology of the BoM is anachronistic in the same way. One of the primary themes in the BoM—and one of the ways in which it augments the Bible—is its insistence that some prophets had a clear knowledge of Christ before his birth.¹⁰⁵

For some essential perspective on the implications of a reform like the one that 2 Kings attributes to Josiah and the Deuteronomists, and the reluctance of many biblical scholars to even consider the possibility that something was amiss in the aftermath, consider this comment by Kuhn:

[Page 149]For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts’ paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific.

No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative.¹⁰⁶

There have been multiple opportunities for exactly this kind of selection, editing, and recontextualization to occur in the transmission of the scriptures throughout history:

• With Josiah and the Deuteronomists before and during the exile.
• With Ezra during the restoration.
• After the destruction of the second temple by the Romans.
• During the rise of Rabbinic Judaism and their development and selection of canon in response to both their changed national circumstances and the rise of Christianity.
• With the Christian development and selection of their canon.
• With the later Protestant reformers and the selection of their canon.
• As opposing tides of believing scholars from various communities and secular scholars push back and forth on biblical claims and interpretations.
• As different generations and schools of Latter-day Saint scholars decide on the best way to present Latter-day Saint history and interpret our scriptures.

[Page 150]In many cases these weren’t just possibilities, but there is significant direct evidence that selection, editing, and recontextualization did occur. It is quite simply a human way to put our lives and thought in order according to our best available, most preferred, most fashionable, or most expedient thinking.

Nevertheless, many Old Testament scholars have noted that an edition of the Deuteronomist history, Deuteronomy through Kings, was expressly created to honor Josiah¹⁰⁷ and to denigrate those who came before, specifically on whether they lived up to the Deuteronomistic agenda.¹⁰⁸ Is it unthinkable that a process that Kuhn describes as typical in the sciences after a revolution in thought should also have occurred in the Deuteronomist writing and editing as part of political and religious upheaval of Josiah’s openly violent reform? Do the extant Bible manuscripts and versions and contextual writings—by their perfect consistency, purity, and lack of gaps, inner tensions, opaque texts, controversies, degrees of archeological tension and support, and comparisons with other ancient writings and traditions—prove that nothing like that ever happened?¹⁰⁹ Would the Deuteronomists who were capable of openly executing a whole set of priests and publicly burning the Tree of Life that had been in the temple for hundreds of years have any qualms about suppressing or editing other texts of which they disapproved? Barker demonstrates that “The distribution of unreadable Hebrew texts is not random; they are texts which bear upon the Christian tradition.”¹¹⁰

Did the later Rabbinic Jews, in the social upheavals after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, and against the threat of the rise of Christianity as a rival set of beliefs, have qualms about re-interpreting the scriptures to support their own beliefs?

J. Neusner, Incarnation, says that when the Jerusalem Talmud had taken shape within the Palestinian community it had been addressing the threat of Christianity in the fourth century. The Judaic response to the Christian way of reading the Old Testament was “a counterpart exegesis,” p. 107. The [Page 151]Jewish sages adapted the Scripture to their new situation. When they “read and expounded Scripture it was to spell out how one thing stood for something else. . . . The as-if frame of mind brought to the Scripture renews Scripture with the sage seeing everything with fresh eyes,” p. 125. Such studies should make us less confident that it was the Christians who were “rereading” the Old Testament.¹¹¹

On this subject, we should consider not only the content of certain of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but also the temporal gap separating their discovery and the circumstances of their first publication. Here is Matt Roper discussing some implications of the content of a fragment called 4Q246 relative to the Book of Mormon:

Another example of the problems with assuming that certain passages from the New Testament represent later developments, peculiar to Christianity, is seen in the Book of Mormon usage of the terms “Son of God” and “Son of the Most High God” (1 Nephi 11:6–7). These terms are seen by the Tanners as obvious plagiarisms from New Testament gospels . . . yet both titles have recently turned up in an unpublished Dead Sea Scroll fragment written in Aramaic from before the time of Jesus. Although it is unknown to whom the prophecy refers, the fragment states:

[X] shall be great upon the earth. (0 king, all (people) shall] make [peace], and all shall serve [him. He shall be called the son of the [G]reat [God], and by his name shall be hailed (as) the Son of God, and they shall call him Son of the Most High,”

The writer for Biblical Archaeology Review [Hershel Shanks] states, “This is the first time that the term ‘Son of God’ has been found in a Palestinian text outside the Bible. . . . Previously some scholars have insisted that the origin of terms like ‘Most High’ and ‘Son of the Most High’ were to be found in Hellenistic usage outside of Palestine and that therefore they relate to later development of Christian doctrine. Now we know that these terms were part of Christianity’s original Jewish heritage.’’ If one small fragment can change our understanding of this term, is it really that hard to believe [Page 152]that other ideas and phrases found in the Book of Mormon, heretofore thought to be anachronistic, might also be verified in the future?¹¹²

John Tvedtnes also discussed the implications of other Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, in this case, the Messianic Apocalypse 4Q521, which not incidentally, like 4Q206, was held back from publication for over 35 years after its discovery.

[for the hea]vens and the earth will listen to his Messiah,

[and all] that is in them will not turn away from his holy precepts.

Be encouraged, you who are seeking the Lord in his service!

Will you not, perhaps, encounter the Lord in it all those who hope in their heart?

For the Lord will observe the devout, and call the just by name,

and upon the poor will he place his spirit, and the faithful he will renew with his strength

For he will honour the devout upon the throne of eternal royalty,

freeing prisoners, giving sight to the blind, straightening out the twisted.

Ever shall I cling to those who hope. In his mercy he will jud[ge,]

and from no one shall the fruit [of] good [deeds] be delayed,

and the Lord will perform marvelous acts such as have not existed, just as he has sa[id]

for he will heal the badly wounded and will make the dead live, he will proclaim good news to the meek

give lavishly [to the needy], lead the exiled and enrich the hungry. ¹¹³

[Page 153]Tvedtnes notes that the text shares some themes with Isaiah 61, the passage Jesus read in the synagogue to open his public ministry (Luke 4:16–30). He then points out that “All of the elements of the Dead Sea Scrolls text are found in the Book of Mormon.”¹¹⁴ For instance, he notes that “The miracles enumerated by King Benjamin [at the temple in Zarahemla, Mosiah 3:5] are essentially the same as those found in the Messianic Apocalypse.”¹¹⁵ After making comparisons to the teachings of several Book of Mormon prophets, Tvedtnes concludes,

It seems unlikely that Jesus would have been so well received by his Jewish disciples had he not conformed to their concept of the Messiah. Some of the recently released Dead Sea Scrolls show that at least some of the Jews of the time expected a Messiah who would be a divine savior, performing many miracles, and bringing the resurrection. In this context, the pre-Christian teachings of a Messiah found in the Book of Mormon are perfectly reasonable.¹¹⁶

In a related vein, Tvedtnes wrote of traditions, none of which were known in Joseph Smith’s day, that credited Jeremiah with having made prophecies that “the Son of God would come,” consistent with Helaman 8:19–20 in the Book of Mormon declaring that he had done so. For instance, he cites Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho and Irenaeus (both second-century church fathers) who “attributed to Jeremiah a prophecy not found in the biblical account in which the prophet wrote that the Lord would descend to preach salvation to the dead.”¹¹⁷

It should not be surprising that John Sorenson reports that destruction of an opponent’s records was a standard feature of Mesoamerican politics, actions that deeply distressed the Mesoamericans when the Spanish in their turn did it to the vast majority of their records.¹¹⁸ In much more recent history, when I look back at what happened to the bulk of old FARMS materials virtually overnight when the new Maxwell [Page 154]Institute management changed their website in 2016, and the deliberate lack of references to that older material in their subsequent publications, it seems obvious to me that yes, people can and do that sort of thing regularly.

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which it had been embodied.¹¹⁹

All of this background means that when I read Jacob 4:14, given the way I now contextualize the passage, I see a direct and insightful comment on Josiah’s reform:

But behold, the Jews [that Lehi knew in Jerusalem in the period before the destruction] were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness [as Lehi had testified “plainly of the coming of a Messiah and also the redemption of the world” (1 Nephi 1:19, emphasis mine) and Josiah’s recent Reform had changed the role of the Temple High priest to that he was no longer anointed, and therefore, literally, no longer a Messiah, and the festival calendar in Deuteronomy lacks the Day of Atonement (see Deut. 16) which ritually dramatizes the redemption of the world], and killed the prophets [see the recent open violence of Josiah’s reform], and sought for things which they could not understand.¹²⁰

Wherefore, because of their blindness [also reported for that time by Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Ezekiel, Lehi, Nephi and 1 Enoch], which blindness came from looking beyond the mark [that is, the anointing of the high priest that designated and symbolized the Messiah as atoning Lord and symbolized the opening of the eyes and seeing of the anointed and the council visions of the prophets], they must needs fall; for God hath taken his plainness [concerning a Messiah and the redemption of the world] away from them, and delivered [Page 155]unto them many things which they cannot understand because they desired it. (Jacob 4:14)

I cannot offer my reading as proof, but I can invite readers to consider, consistent with Kuhn, which reading is better in terms of testability, accuracy of key predictions, comprehensiveness and coherence, fruitfulness, simplicity and aesthetics, and future promise? And just how promising is it to approach the Book of Mormon under the assumption that its Christology must be viewed as anachronistic?

The Plain Meaning, Contextualization, and Consequent Theological Perceptions

Hardy discusses Nephi’s preference for “plainness” versus his important post-modern observation that “there is none other people that understand the things which were spoken unto the Jews like unto them, save it be that they are taught after the manner of the things of the Jews” (2 Nephi 25:5).

I think Nephi is talking about both his personal preference and practical pedagogical matters in a mostly oral culture in dealing with his own extended families mixing with indigenous peoples who had different cultural backgrounds. “Liken it to yourselves” works across cultural and temporal boundaries and has value in that sense. Joseph Campbell has discussed culturally specific aspects of mythologies, as well as archetypal aspects that cross cultural boundaries, and that one aspect of any mythology is to show us “how to live a human life.”¹²¹ I notice that if the only people around for Nephi to talk to and about were Lehi’s descendants and therefore raised in and by a single culture, there could be no cultural mixing and only one cultural outlook possible—Jewish—and therefore it could not be considered as esoteric by insiders because there was nothing outside to contrast and compare it with. There was much of my Utah Wasatch Front upbringing that I had no self-awareness of until I lived in England for two years. Without cultural difference and mixing, the issue of difference and the need for cultural instruction that Nephi references in 2 Nephi 25:1–5 could not have arisen.

In discussing Abinadi’s discourse, Hardy’s annotation has this, showing theological concerns that arise from his preferred contextualization and what seems to him “the plain meaning”:

[Page 156]Abinadi here seems to be describing a single divine being who at times functions as both the Father and the Son, that is, a variation of modalism.¹²² In other BoM passages, the Father and the Son are depicted as separate persons who are nevertheless one God;¹²³

In The Great Angel, Margaret Barker observes that

All the texts in the Hebrew Bible distinguish clearly between the divine sons of Elohim/Elyon and those human beings who are called sons of Yahweh. This must be significant. It must mean that the terms originated at a time when Yahweh was distinguished from whatever was meant by El/Elohim/Elyon. A large number of texts continued to distinguish between EI Elyon and Yahweh, Father and Son, and to express this distinction in similar ways with the symbolism of the temple and the royal cult. By tracing these patterns through a great variety of material and over several centuries, Israel’s second God can be recovered.¹²⁴

In his Second Witness commentaries, which Hardy commends,¹²⁵ Brant Gardner applied this observation to the Book of Mormon in his “Excursus: The Nephite Understanding of God”:

There are two “fathers” here. In the stories or myths (to use [Page 157]the anthropological term) the sons of one father are heavenly, and the sons of the other are human. The two fathers operate in different realms . . . .

When the context is a horizontal relationship in the heavens, the “father” is El Elyon, and Yahweh is his son. When the context crosses the boundaries of the heavens to create a relationship with humanity, the father is defined by this vertical deity-to-human sphere. In the vertical context, the father is Yahweh . . . .

The Book of Mormon defines the various divine personages in the same way. In the Book of Mormon as in the Old Testament, the heavenly or earthly context serves as the defining field of operation which informs the reader (or listener) about the appropriate definitions of “father” and “son.” This variation works for all the texts I have examined in the Book of Mormon.¹²⁶

Practical approaches to learning and teaching, such as “liken the scriptures unto yourselves” and drawing upon “the plain meaning of the text” adopted for practical reasons can and often do fall short of ideal circumstances. Hence, Nephi encourages his people to “liken the scriptures to themselves,” to apply them to their own circumstances and address their immediate needs and capacity to understand. However, there are those in the Nephite culture who found themselves in ideal circumstances of being able to receive specialist training and I think were “taught after the manner of the things of the Jews, like unto them.” I do not think Nephi meant that no one should be taught Jewish culture and language (or other relevant cultures and languages¹²⁷) like unto them. Rather, as a practical matter, the “plain meaning” and “liken unto yourselves” approach is a valid way for everyday people to begin to obtain real benefit from the scriptures on immediate exposure, a portion of the word that they can immediately experiment on with their current level of understanding and begin a journey to greater light and knowledge, especially in a society that [Page 158]primarily operates as oral culture, influenced by, but not dominated by, their relatively small-scale print media.¹²⁸

As Matt Roper and John Gee have argued, we see such likening when Jacob discourses from Isaiah about the good that can come from cultural mixing and extending of the covenant promises through adoption.

Wherefore, the Gentiles shall be blessed and numbered among the house of Israel. “Wherefore, I will consecrate this land unto thy seed, and them who shall be numbered among thy seed [emphasis mine]¹²⁹ forever, for the land of their inheritance; for it is a choice land, saith God unto me, above all other lands, wherefore I will have all men that dwell thereon that they shall worship me, saith God” (2 Nephi 10:18–19).

In addition to explaining the latter-day application of Isaiah’s prophecy, Jacob’s sermon can be read as addressing the question of how Lehite Israel is to relate to non-Lehite peoples in the promised land. The answer, Jacob taught, is that they may, if they so choose, join with the people of God in seeking to build up Zion as joint inheritors of the land. Once they do so, they become Israel too and are numbered with Lehi’s seed.¹³⁰

Likening the scripture to yourselves, relating scripture to personal circumstances, and drawing benefit from what seems to be the plain meaning of the text is a start for anyone to begin with, not the end that everyone should settle for. Consider King Benjamin:

2 And it came to pass that he had three sons; and he called their names Mosiah, and Helorum, and Helaman. And [Page 159]he caused that they should be taught in all the language of his fathers, that thereby they might become men of understanding;¹³¹ and that they might know concerning the prophecies which had been spoken by the mouths of their fathers, which were delivered them by the hand of the Lord.

3 And he also taught them concerning the records which were engraven on the plates of brass, saying: My sons, I would that ye should remember that were it not for these plates, which contain these records and these commandments, we must have suffered in ignorance, even at this present time, not knowing the mysteries of God.

4 For it were not possible that our father, Lehi, could have remembered all these things, to have taught them to his children, except it were for the help of these plates; for he having been taught in the language of the Egyptians therefore he could read these engravings, and teach them to his children, that thereby they could teach them to their children, and so fulfilling the commandments of God, even down to this present time. (Mosiah 1:2–4)

Hardy annotates verse two here this way.

All the language of his fathers, including the type of Egyptian on the Brass Plates (cf. v. 4), crucial to retaining a connection to their Israelite heritage, which the Mulekites had lost; see Omni 1.18–19n.¹³²

In 3 Nephi 17: 2–3, Jesus makes this comment, which strikes me as cautionary regarding “the plain meaning.”

I perceive that ye are weak, that ye cannot understand all my words which I am commanded of the Father to speak unto you, at this time. Therefore, go ye unto your homes, and ponder upon the things which I have said, and ask of the Father, in my name, that ye may understand, and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again.¹³³

Hardy makes no comment on that passage but moves on to talk about Jesus’s spontaneous compassion and healings in 3 Nephi, [Page 160]which are certainly noteworthy and worthy of comment. I also notice that the 3 Nephi account does not report that anyone raised their hand and protested, “But if you would just tell us plainly enough now, we would not have to ponder, or pray, or have to work to prepare our minds, or actually have to live the covenant path over time to experience the implications for ourselves, and we could have what we want right now, without working or waiting.”

On Others and the Land

Here is a Book of Mormon verse that Hardy annotates regarding others in the land.

8 And behold, it is wisdom that this land should be kept as yet from the knowledge of other nations; for behold, many nations would overrun the land, that there would be no place for an inheritance. 9 Wherefore, I, Lehi, have obtained a promise, that inasmuch as those whom the Lord God shall bring out of the land of Jerusalem shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land; and they shall be kept from all other nations, that they may possess this land unto themselves. (2 Nephi 1:8, emphasis mine)

Hardy’s annotation has this:

Lehi speaks as if there were no indigenous people already in the land. 9: The demonstrative those leaves room for the Mulekites, who were also brought by God out of Jerusalem and whom the Nephites will later encounter; see Omni 1.12–19.¹³⁴

This is another place where conditionality of both “the plain meaning” and the extent of “the land” comes into play in Hardy’s commentary. This has implications for the “other nations” directly attached to the covenant curse in 2 Nephi 1:8, 11–12. Recall that Hardy has written that

taking the Book of Mormon seriously as history in the contemporary era requires some sort of limited geography model that acknowledges the presence of a large number of indigenous peoples in the Americas before 600 BCE.¹³⁵

[Page 161]Other than Hardy’s discussion of the Mulekites, we get no exploration of crucial points in the annotations. Must “those” refer only to Mulekites?¹³⁶ How about surviving Jaredites, especially in light of Nibley’s observation that the curse of destruction was applied specifically to Coriantimur’s house;¹³⁷ that “destroy” does not mean “annihilate absolutely,” but rather “breaking into constituent parts;” and the notable phenomenon of Jaredite names turning up among the Mulekites;¹³⁸ as well as the express mention of the changed/different Mulekite language (Omni 17–18). This all has significance for Sorenson’s candidate location for Zarahemla being near the border of two separate language groups in Mesoamerica. And Nephi states that God “remembereth the heathen” (2 Nephi 26:33), which makes the best sense if he knows people who can be described as heathen, rather than as Israelites.

And how big is the land that Lehi is talking about? Must it refer to an empty continent? Two passages have been used to argue that such was the case. Ether 13:2 refers to “after the waters had receded from the face of this land, it became a choice land above all other lands,” but it does not specify whether it was the waters of the flood or the waters of creation.¹³⁹ The other passage occasionally drawn in this service is the Ether 2:5 reference on the Jaredites passing through “that quarter where never man had been” in context refers to an Old World location before their ocean voyage. In reading The Book of Mormon, must we assume therefore, despite both the archeological evidence and numerous indications in the text of “others,”¹⁴⁰ that [Page 162]the North and South American continent utterly empty for Lehi’s group and Mulek’s group? At the very least we know about Jaredite survivors and Mulek’s people, as well as indeterminate “all those who shall be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord” (2 Nephi 1:5). Is “the land” an absolute concept, or a relative concept? The story of the locusts in Exodus should be a reminder to think in relative terms.

And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: . . . For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt. (Exodus 10:14–15)

In this passage, even “the face of the whole earth,” that an observer there could see, is limited in context. It is not an absolute that commits readers to imagine the plague locusts denuding all of Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas, the Islands of the seas, and Antarctica. So, in the Book of Mormon, “the land” refers to just the part they happen to occupy and know. The Webster’s 1828 dictionary has this as the most relevant definition:

“2. Any portion of the solid, superficial part of the globe, whether a kingdom or country, or a particular region. The United States is denominated the land of freedom.

Go, view the land even Jericho. Joshua 2:1. “a portion of the earth’s solid surface distinguishable by boundaries or ownership.” [emphasis mine]

That definition and the following example are directly relevant to the question of the covenant curse concerning the “many nations that might overrun” the land. And is there a difference between a small hamlet¹⁴¹ and a “nation” with a central government and standing military, or at least, a well-trained militia? And must the “other nations” that Lehi mentions in the covenant curse be conceived of as across the oceans in the far future?¹⁴² How would that deter Laman and Lemuel, [Page 163]who in the text are warned that given apostacy, the danger can arrive at “the passing of a generation” (2 Nephi 1:10–12) rather than after 2,000 years? Or, rather, can we see Lehi’s “other nations” as across the mountains or other natural boundary at some “many days” distance (where, in 1 Nephi 17:3, eight is “many”), especially if their threat is a significant part of the covenant curse. Think about this passage in Mosiah:

My son, I would that ye should make a proclamation throughout all this land among all this people, or the people of Zarahemla, and the people of Mosiah who dwell in the land, that thereby they may be gathered together; for on the morrow . . . (Mosiah 1:10)

If the people of Mosiah in the land of Zarahemla can gather on the morrow, how expansive is the “land” at that point? Remember that the same covenant with blessings and curses that existed in the land of Nephi had existed in the land of first inheritance. Nephites had to leave the land of first inheritance, traveling for “many days,” and then lived under the same covenant blessings and cursings in the land of Nephi before Benjamin’s people later left that land for Zarahemla. The covenants and promises for “the land” need not be bound to one location but can travel with those who make the covenants. The Book of Mormon expressly declares “and they shall be gathered together to the lands of their inheritance” (1 Nephi 7:12), and Hardy’s annotation states “the plural is significant given BoM teachings about multiple promised lands.”¹⁴³

Alma’s Nephites later fled from the Land of Nephi to Zarahemla for a distance that families with flocks could accomplish in twenty-one days.¹⁴⁴ So, again, if Benjamin’s people can gather “on the morrow,” how big is the land of Zarahemla at that time? Given this context, must we suppose that the plain meaning of “the land” requires an empty continent?

Notice, as well, the timing Lehi predicts for the arrival of other nations to fulfill the covenant curse:

11 Yea, he will bring other nations unto them, and he will give unto them power, and he will take away from them the lands of their possessions, and he will cause them to be scattered and smitten. 12 Yea, as one generation passeth to another [Page 164]there shall be bloodsheds, and great visitations among them. (2 Nephi 1:11)

Hardy’s annotation does not comment on the fact that just after Lehi’s death in 2 Nephi 5, which was the passing of a generation, Nephi and all those who would go with him must leave the land of first inheritance to journey to what becomes the land of Nephi. The 2 Nephi 5 text describes them traveling many days (not weeks, months, or years) to the land they called Nephi, from which Mosiah later migrates (Omni 12) to Zarahemla. In a previous essay, concerning the conditions of the curse and the details of history in the record after the death of Lehi, I wrote this:

Second Nephi 5:2–5 reports that soon after the death of Lehi-the passing of a generation-Nephi’s brothers plotted against his own life. Nephi and those he called “his people” fled the land. Despite the report that those who initially left “were those who believed” in God (2 Nephi 5:6), such passages as 2 Nephi 32:7 and 2 Nephi 33:1–3 suggest strongly that Nephi’s people had problems of their own. For example. Jacob reports on the necessity for “diligent” labor among them on the part of the prophets (Jacob I :7) even before Jacob 2: 15 describes the beginning of extreme tendencies. Prior to the departure of Nephi’s people, the Lamanites had already acted in a role as “a scourge to [Nephi’s people], to stir them up in remembrance of me” (2 Nephi 5:25), Although neither Nephi nor Jacob provides details, Jacob 1:10 describes Nephi as having “wielded the sword of Laban” in defense of his people. Thus we have no record of the conditions for blessing being fully kept, and significant information suggesting that the covenant curse was in effect almost from the time of the death of Lehi. That is, immediately after the death of Lehi (the passing of that generation), we see the loss of lands and scattering (2 Nephi 5:5), and smiting and bloodsheds (2 Nephi 5:25, 34, Jacob I: 10). What about the “other nations”? Alerted by the work of Sorenson and others, we have only to look with eyes that see.¹⁴⁵

Notice, again, that the first discourse that Jacob gives at Nephi’s [Page 165]direction that follows upon all of this social upheaval and travel is about Gentiles who “shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters will be carried upon their shoulders,” their kings and queen become the nursing fathers and mothers of Israel, “and the Gentiles shall be blessed and numbered among the house of Israel” (2 Nephi 10:18).¹⁴⁶

Notice, as well, that Jacob, the one who gave this discourse about cultural mixing and adoption, is a first-generation Book of Mormon writer who declares that subsequently in his record “Nephite” and “Lamanite” are not to be taken as strictly genealogical, but political, with Lamanites as generally unfriendly, rather than as inevitably unrighteous. The very next verse refers to wickedness among the Nephites, which should be a reminder that the Book of Mormon is not stuck in a notion of righteous Nephites and wicked Lamanites, but rather of a constant back and forth, including mixing and changes from one political division to another, and changes in righteousness.

Even though Hardy acknowledges that a case for a historical Book of Mormon “acknowledges the presence of a large number of indigenous peoples in the Americas before 600 BCE,” he appears to dismiss all archeological and textual suggestions for an immediately present threat for nearby “other nations” to fulfill the explicit conditions of the covenant curse at the passing of a generation. At the end of Hardy’s annotation for 1 Nephi 11:12, he looks to a remote future threat: “Other nations, European conquerors and settlers.”¹⁴⁷

Temples in the Book of Mormon

When it comes to considerations of the temple and the Book of Mormon, Hardy writes that

Temple worship is a key aspect of Latter-day Saint theology, and while some LDS commentators claim to see in the Book of Mormon echoes of the modern endowment ceremony (a ritualized reenactment of the creation and fall, with sacred clothing, covenants, and gestures), the connections are tenuous. Aside from a presumption that sacrifices and offerings prescribed by the Mosaic Law occurred in Nephite temples, the text gives scant attention to what happened within those sacred precincts.¹⁴⁸

[Page 166]Notice the immediate problem with such a statement is contextual—looking in the Book of Mormon for “the modern endowment ceremony” rather than learning about ancient temples and then looking at the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and modern Latter-day Saint temples in that context.

The Nephites soon begin to build temples (2 Nephi 4:16 in Nephi; Mosiah 2:1 in Zarahemla; 3 Nephi 11:1 in Bountiful),¹⁴⁹ many major discourses in the Book of Mormon have temple settings (Jacob 1:7; 2–3; Mosiah 2–5, 3 Nephi 11–28), and many have temple themes (2 Nephi 2:14–26; Alma 12:21–37; 13:3–16; 42:2–27). The effect of expectation on perception is like the tendency of Book of Mormon skeptics to call for evidence of a conspicuous and dominant Hebrew culture in Mesoamerica, rather than, as Gardner describes, Mesoamerica in the Book of Mormon.

On a more personal level, I have reported what has happened to me on occasion when my wife sends me to find some food item in the kitchen. My expectation of a particular kind of packaging blinds me to the existence of what I seek in a different form. I have pointed to Kuhn’s discussion of how regularly exactly this kind of preconception interferes with perception in the sciences.¹⁵⁰

In the literary mystery genre Agatha Christie’s most famous stories work not just because she provides puzzles, but because at times she plays with the expectations that genre readers have learned about what happens in such puzzles. She can construct stories in which many scenes basically shovel important clues in the reader’s face, but [Page 167]we fail to see what she is doing in, for example, The Murder of Roger Akroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, The Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution, Curtain, and Crooked House because the plots in those “whodunnit” stories, each in a different way, violate our unconscious expectations of what can happen in a “whodunnit.” Once we unlearn those expectations in the denouements, once we have our eyes opened, the scales fall away, and we experience an expansion of the mind.

The other side of this situation is the problem of Othello, when he misinterprets the evidence in front of him and tragically misreads “the plain meaning.” Instead of enlightenment, due to poor choices made after misreading the evidence, Othello is shattered by what he finally learns. In the sciences, Kuhn observes that “unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can only emerge to the extent that his [or her] anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong.”¹⁵¹

John Welch offered his “paradigm shifting” reading of 3 Nephi as a temple text in 1990, followed by further insights and expanded research in later books and presentations.¹⁵² Other Latter-day Saints have built upon his insights, myself included.¹⁵³ The point is that the context we choose and the possibilities we imagine will affect the insights we obtain.

Even so, suppose we start with Hardy’s brief outline of the “modern endowment ceremony.” There are numerous concepts presented in the Book of Mormon that are also present in the modern endowment.

[Page 168]A ritualized re-enactment of the creation and fall

Third Nephi 8–11 is the story of a society’s fall and massive destruction, as a voice declaring to survivors, “I created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are” (3 Nephi 9:15) and later explains the events as a new creation in which “old things are done away. All things are become new” (3 Nephi 12:47). During his personal temple discourses, Jesus “expounds all things, from the beginning” 3 Nephi 26:3). And there is much more to consider. A striking moment in 3 Nephi 9, after the dreadful destruction occurs when the voice of Jesus is heard to proclaim,

That great city Zarahemla have I burned. . . . That great city Moroni have I caused to be sunk in the depths of the sea. . . . And many great destructions have I caused to come upon this land, and upon this people, because of their wickedness and abominations. (3 Nephi 9:3–4, 12)

In The Myth of Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, Mircea Eliade discusses an essential part of ancient temple drama as a Sacred Combat. He refers to how “the ritual combats between two groups of actors reactualize the cosmogonic moment of the fight between the god and the primordial dragon . . . for the combat . . . presupposes the reactualization of primordial chaos, while the victory . . . can only signify the creation.” The voice of Jesus in 3 Nephi can be understood as recontextualizing the destructions as the ritual Sacred Combat in the Year Drama where his victory is explicitly described as a new creation. “Old things are done away, all things have become new” (2 Nephi 12:47). Eliade also describes the importance of the kindling of fire and light at the end of three days of darkness.

The death of the individual and the periodic death of humanity are necessary, even as the three days of darkness preceding the ‘rebirth.‘¹⁵⁴

And then behold, there was darkness upon the face of the land. And it came to pass that there was thick darkness upon all the face of the land, insomuch that the inhabitants thereof . . . could feel the vapor of darkness; And there could be no light, because of the darkness, neither candles, neither torches; neither could there be fire kindled. . . . And there [Page 169]was not any light seen, neither fire, nor glimmer, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars. . . . And it came to pass that it did last for the space of three days. (3 Nephi 8:19–23)

There is much more in Eliade on the rites performed at ancient temples that casts light on the events in 3 Nephite 8–28, none of which emerges from a nineteenth-century context and a focus on “the plain meaning of the text” from that perspective.¹⁵⁵

Several Book of Mormon authors discuss the garden and fall, such as Lehi in 2 Nephi 2, Benjamin in Mosiah 3:19, and Alma in Alma 12:22–30 and to Corianton in Alma 43:2–15. The state of the Nephites in 3 Nephi 8:23–25 is that of not just a fallen couple out of Eden, but of a fallen society, weeping and wailing in darkness, a setting that, if we saw depicted in a medieval painting, we would recognize as hell, which is as fallen as can be.

Sacred clothing in a temple setting

Several Book of Mormon authors talk about garments and purity in temple settings. Notice that in 3 Nephi 11:8, the messenger comes to the temple “clothed in a white robe,”¹⁵⁶ and later the glory is expressly stated as “the light of his countenance did shine upon them, and behold, they were as white as the countenance and garments of Jesus” (3 Nephi 19:25). Further, Jesus mentions “those who have washed their garments in my blood” (3 Nephi 27:19). The Book of Mormon ends with an invitation to “put on thy beautiful garments, O daughter of Zion” (Moroni 10:31) and that “the covenants of the Eternal Father which he hath made unto thee, O house of Israel, may be fulfilled” (Moroni 10:31).

Covenants

In 3 Nephi 9:19 is the covenant of sacrifice, to offer up the sacrifice of a broken heart and contrite spirit. This is followed by is a covenant to obedience (3 Nephi 12:20), to obey the Gospel (3 Nephi 12:31–34; 14:12), to avoid evil speaking (3 Nephi 12:22), to live chastely (3 Nephi 12:27–32), and to consecrate one’s life (3 Nephi 13:33; 3 Nephi 26:19; 4 Nephi 1:3).

[Page 170]Gestures

“Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you, and whosoever will come, him will I receive; and blessed are those who come unto me” (3 Nephi 9:14). Later, at the temple, as a means of coming to know that the recently arrived messenger is exactly who the voice proclaimed him to be,

And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety and did bear record, that it was he, of whom it was written by the prophets, that should come. (3 Nephi 12:15)

Another significant passage in 3 Nephi 27:29 is the Lord’s instruction to “Ask and ye shall receive, knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Then there is 2 Nephi 1:15: “I am encircled about eternally in the arms of his love.”

There is much more to consider in writings of Hugh Nibley, John W. Welch, Eliade, John Lundquist, LeGrande L. Baker, Stephen Ricks, Val Larsen, M. Catherine Thomas, D. John Butler, Margaret Barker, Jeff Bradshaw, and many others that look to the temple and thereby shed light on the Book of Mormon.¹⁵⁷

Jesus’s Sermon and Scholarship Regarding Matthew and Gospel Composition

The climax of the Book of Mormon is the 3 Nephi appearance of Jesus at the temple. One dimension of Hardy’s approach is this:

And finally, 3 Nephi offers particularly rich instances of both intertextuality, as it draws on biblical phrases and quotes large blocks of text from both the Old and New Testaments, and also intratextuality, in its extensive allusions to earlier passages from the Book of Mormon itself. The formatting [Page 171]and annotations in this edition can help readers identify these sorts of textual connections, and will also point out variations and modifications to the source texts. In trying to understand what the book’s narrators and characters are communicating, it is useful to note places where Jesus’s sermon at the temple differs from the Sermon on the Mount. And it may be meaningful to ask why Jesus rearranges the sequence of verses in Isaiah 52, or why he skips over Isaiah 53, which is often regarded by Christians as one of the most clearly Messianic of Old Testament prophecies. Similarly, it may be important to note the intricate relationship between earlier Nephite prophecies and the terrible judgments that precede Christ’s appearance, or the numerous points of contact between Jesus’s teachings in Bountiful and those of Nephite prophets who preceded him. The narrative of 3 Nephi interweaves biblical and Nephite voices to an extraordinary degree, with Mormon describing Jesus as having “expounded all the scriptures in one” (23.14)¹⁵⁸.

This describes a notable feature of Hardy’s annotations for 3 Nephi. For example, his annotation for 3 Nephi 13:25–34 has this:

The impracticality of this section of the Sermon, with its discouragement of planning or preparation, has long troubled Christian readers. The BoM offers a solution by limiting its scope to those with particular callings to the ministry rather than to believers in general, as happened at Alma 31.37–38. 25: As with the lengthy quotation of Isa 12–24 in 2 Ne, the original chapter breaks in the Nephite Sermon on the Mount do not match those in the Bible. Meat, food. 27: Add one cubit unto his stature, an alternative biblical translation is “add a single hour to your span of life” (NRSV). 30: Cast into the oven, as fuel for cooking. The BoM changes a rhetorical question into a promise, predicated on faith. Here faith refers not so much to belief as to trust in divine providence. 31: The omitted observation has been punctuated as a parenthetical comment in the KJV since 1611. 34: The BoM switches the positions of is and unto from the KJV. If an idiomatic translation of Mt is “Each day has enough trouble of its own” [Page 172](New International Version), the meaning of the BoM might be “Each day can handle whatever troubles may come.”¹⁵⁹

Overall, the formatting and annotations are very helpful to modern readers. However, at times we find this undercurrent in Hardy’s introduction to 3 Nephi.

On the first day, he recites an almost verbatim¹⁶⁰ version of the Sermon on the Mount. Biblical scholars believe these Christian guidelines were not collected into exactly this form until the late first century, when Matthew’s Gospel was composed, but in 3 Nephi they provide a convenient synthesis of what Christ describes as “the things which I taught before I ascended to my Father” (15.1).¹⁶¹

The same tension regarding unnamed biblical scholars’ views and textual assertions in their unnamed books, compared to the Sermon at the Temple also emerges later in Hardy’s annotations:

Jesus delivers to the people of Nephi a slightly emended version of the Sermon on the Mount. Biblical scholars generally agree that the sermon in Mt was composed by the author of that Gospel from various sayings of Jesus that had circulated after his death, noting that many of the sayings appear in different contexts in Mk and Lk. Given that the book of Matthew is dated toward the end of the 1st c. CE, Christ’s sermon to the Nephites would have preceded the NT version by several decades. This could be taken as evidence that the sermon in 3 Ne originated with the Bible rather than with ancient Nephites; or that Jesus, knowing what Matthew would eventually write, taught a proto-version in Bountiful, signaling divine approval of Matthew’s later compilation; or that the translator inserted a familiar example of Christian teaching into the Nephite record to represent Jesus’s basic message. In any case, whereas in Mt the Sermon on the Mount is the first of five distinct sermons, suggesting that Jesus is like Moses delivering an updated Torah, in the BoM [Page 173]Jesus is speaking not as a new Moses, but as the God of Israel.¹⁶²

It is certainly true there are many scholars who accept and promote such claims about Jesus and the composition of the gospels, just as different views of Joseph Smith go with different perspectives of skeptics and believers. For his publisher, Hardy must make a serious effort to accommodate the diversities and expectations of his audience, as well as holding every right to express his own reading of the evidence at hand and his own sense of the best scholarship. Even so, I find more specificity on crucial issues regarding differing views helps in dealing with such controversies and in being able to navigate and reconcile them. How do Hardy’s unnamed scholars date Matthew and support their view of him as the late composer of the Sermon on the Mount? Can they produce the kind of unambiguous direct contemporary evidence that skeptics argue Latter-day Saints ought to find in Mesoamerica before daring to believe in public, or worse, in an academic setting?

For example, do we have signed contemporary witness statements for the existence and provenance of “Q,” a hypothetical source that a notable stream of thought reasons that Luke and Matthew theoretically used to supplement Mark, on their assumption that Mark is the oldest canonical gospel? Do Hardy’s biblical scholars track the various contemporary accounts of Jesus’s sermons in the archives of dated and collected magazines, newspapers, personal journals, and legal records in the publishing houses of the day, which, over the brief period of Jesus’s actual ministry, provide a thorough and detailed account of what he did and did not say and what his disciples did and did not record? And have these scholars then been able to show how, from detailed contemporary records and interviews with a late first century figure writing as Matthew, who, according to this context, gathered previously unorganized wise sayings and memorable parables by the late, lamented Jesus, as passed along by oral means (on the assumption that Jesus’s disciples and followers in Jerusalem, a day’s walk from the literate Qumran communities, all must have been either illiterate or uninterested in writing down significant things Jesus said) until “Q” and Mark, and Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Plain, and added his own imagination to create a notable and influential Sermon to serve a much later audience, and secured its wide [Page 174]acceptance over the potential objections of any still-living people who had heard Jesus speak, and people who knew other witnesses and other gospels, addressing rather different communities and agendas? That is, do those unnamed biblical scholars, figuratively speaking, unlike the Latter-day Saints, have the actual Golden Plates, their language and sources, and their contemporary cultural provenance in hand? Or are they interpreting available later copies of earlier writings according to a specific set of assumptions, ideologies, and interpretive principles? Is it intellectually scandalous that many informed thinkers have faith in those scholars if what they say, while accepted as an academically sound gospel in certain influential circles, has not been proven beyond question with unambiguous evidence?

The issue is which paradigm should in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely. A decision between alternate ways of practicing science is called for, and in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than on future promise. . . . A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.¹⁶³

What we all have to do is weigh and consider theories that attempt to account for relationships and origins and sources of the synoptic gospels, their differences with John, and relations to the New Testament and early Christian writings. They may be persuasive or dominant theories in some circles and communities, but they are not based on the kind of uninterpreted contemporary confirming data that we also lack for Book of Mormon stories—other than, say, Nahom, as not just a single isolated parallel in the right place and at the right time, but in an elaborate interconnected convergence in relation to the whole journey from a specific time in Jerusalem, across the Arabian Peninsula, through distinctly described locations.¹⁶⁴ Nor are they the only theories that circulate among important and influential scholars to account for what we have in Matthew and the other Gospels.

[Page 175]Besides Welch, notable Latter-day Saint scholars such as Robert D. Millet, Richard L. Anderson, A. Don Sorenson, and John Gee have all addressed the question of the dating of the composition of Matthew as presented during their university training in opposition to their faith, and all of them point to other streams of scholarship, interpretations, and issues that ultimately leave them with room for faith. Sorenson and Millet, for instance, both refer to different streams of scholarship that question the claims of late Matthean composition. Millet refers to the work of non-LDS scholar William Farmer,¹⁶⁵ that “all the church fathers who mention the sequence of the Gospels indicate that Matthew was written first” and says,

Let us put the matter another way. Jesus and his disciples were Jews living in Palestine. In due time the community that began with Jesus and his disciples spread out into the Mediterranean world. As the extra-Palestinian expansion of the community took place, more and more gentiles sought membership in it until finally it developed into a community that was predominantly gentile.

How does this affect our view of the Gospels? All would agree, of course, that Matthew is the most Jewish Gospel in the canon. It is also the Gospel that best reflects the Palestinian origins of the Christian church. Luke too is very Jewish, but there are many passages where, by comparison, this Gospel is better adapted for use by gentiles outside of Palestine. While unmistakably retaining traditions of Jewish and Palestinian origin, Mark is the best adapted of the three for gentile readers who are not acquainted with Palestinian culture. Thus, in terms of historical development, we can begin easily enough with Matthew and go on to Luke and/or Mark. But historically speaking, it is difficult to reverse the process and to place Matthew after either one or both of the others.¹⁶⁶

Gee described both the express controlling assumptions that [Page 176]drive the late authorship hypothesis that dominates one conspicuous stream of New Testament scholarship. These assumptions are:

1. There are no contemporary or near contemporary sources for the existence of Jesus.
2. There are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life.
3. We do not know who the authors of the Gospels were.
4. All the Gospel narratives are late.
5. Much of the Gospels and other sources about Jesus were fabricated.¹⁶⁷

Gee explains how these assumptions influence the harvest:

The five assumptions that . . . many—if not the majority of—New Testament scholars accept are the consequence of one particular solution to a very old problem. The synoptic problem can be stated as follows: How can one account for the similarities—in some cases verbatim—between the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Traditional solutions to the problem go back to historical evidence from the second century. Protestants, however, who only accepted scripture (sola scriptura) and rejected the use of tradition, rejected this solution. One proposed solution was that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all borrowed from a hypothetical earlier source denoted Q from German Quelle, “source.” There was no historical evidence for this source, but at least it did not follow Catholic tradition.

Hypothesizing a source Q forced scholars to date the gospels all later than that (assumption 4), which in turn meant there were no extant contemporary or near contemporary sources for Jesus (assumption 1) and, given the typical dates hypothesized for the gospels, no eyewitness accounts of Jesus (assumption 2). Rejecting tradition also meant we could not trust the traditional attributions of the gospels (assumption 3). We would also have to reject the [Page 177]correct handing down of the details of Jesus’s life, so at least some of them must have been made up (assumption 5).¹⁶⁸

In contrast, Gee explains how he dates Matthew as the first and early Gospel based on Matthew being the gospel quoted in the early Christian Didache and how he dates that document.

The Didache, however, treats both apostles and prophets as current offices as well as bishops and deacons. These are attested in book of Acts and the epistles of Paul in the middle of the first century. The Didache must date to sometime in the first century.

The Didache is labeled as “the teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles through the twelve apostles” It cannot date before the opening of the gospel to the Gentiles recounted in Acts 10. Based on the chronology of Paul’s life, this would have to be before Paul’s mission to the Gentiles in Tarsus. The Didache also refers to disciples as “Christians” which occurs after the mission of Paul and Barnabas to Antioch.

Significantly, however, the Didache contains none of the instructions to the Gentiles on circumcision deriving from the Jerusalem council. The instructions of the Jerusalem council also contain none of the basic Christian teachings and practices enumerated in the Didache. The pronouncements of the Jerusalem council seem to be an appendix to the Didache. The Didache thus predates the Jerusalem council. This places the Didache sometime between Acts 11 and 15.

The Didache three times refers to something it calls “the gospel,” which is in the singular. It knows only one. When it quotes Jesus, the quotations are from Matthew 6:9–13 and 7:6, not from Luke or Mark. The gospel of Matthew must predate the Didache and thus must date sometime before Acts 15 at latest, which puts it before the gospel of Mark.

Matthew, however, preserves the injunction of Jesus to his apostles not to preach to the Gentiles. Such prohibitions are absent from Luke and Mark, which were written after the permission to preach to the Gentiles. Thus, Matthew must have been written before the prohibition was lifted in Acts [Page 178]9–10. This puts the writing of Matthew within a few years of the resurrection.¹⁶⁹

Gee’s essay is very useful in that he exposes the assumptions, the history, and the names involved in the arguments that he addresses, and he gives clear reasons for proposing an alternative.

While Hardy cites Welch’s Illuminating the Sermon at the Temple and the Sermon on the Mount, he does not mention any of Welch’s arguments for questioning the late date and Matthean authorship that Hardy accepts. Welch writes that “nothing like scholarly unanimity exists over how much of the Sermon Matthew wrote himself, or how much he took from pre-existing sources.”¹⁷⁰ He observes that “of 383 basic vocabulary words in the Sermon on the Mount, I count 73 (or 19% of the total) that appear only in the Sermon (sometimes more than once) and never elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew.”¹⁷¹ That is, attributing the Sermon to Matthew seems problematic if its vocabulary is so distinctive compared to the rest of Matthew’s gospel.

In a later publication, Welch offered these new observations, which I notice add weight and depth and range to support Gee’s argument:

Moreover, even more significant for present purposes, Sermon on the Mount elements are also found heavily in 1 Peter (by this count 7 times), in James (12 times), and Romans (11 times). On at least six of these 30 occasions, the word orders are chiastically inverted, which according to Seidel’s law, may indicate that these passages were consciously quoted. It seems easier to believe that the Sermon on the Mount was known to Peter, James, John, and even Paul, than to believe that all of these early New Testament writings were somehow known to the writer of the Sermon on the Mount. As mentioned above, Hans Dieter Betz has argued that parts of the Sermon on the Mount should be seen as pre Matthean. But going beyond Betz’s analysis, the verbiage and echoes of the Sermon on the Mount found elsewhere in the New Testament would not only mean that parts of the Sermon on the Mount were also pre-Petrine, [Page 179]pre-Jamesian, and even pre-Pauline, but also (because these quotations and echoes come from every part of the Sermon on the Mount) that the Sermon had become coin of the realm at a very early stage in the first few decades of Christianity. Otherwise, how can one explain the fact that all of these Sermon on the Mount phrases had become so widely known and commonly taken as magisterial? Seeing the Sermon on the Mount as a temple-related text that was used to instruct converts and perhaps specifically to prepare initiates for baptism (as I suggest) would explain this wide distribution of Sermon on the Mount elements across the full breadth shown on Table 8 [that is Selected Sermon on the Mount Verbiage and Echoes Found Elsewhere in the New Testament, including Mark, Luke, 1 Peter, James, and Romans], a suggestion that certainly has enormous implications.¹⁷²

One of those implications is that the certainties that Hardy reports with respect to a proposed late dating and Matthean authorship of the Sermon on the Mount can be seriously questioned. We don’t have to take his “biblical scholars” approach as a unanimous consensus or an insurmountable fact, to which surrender and accommodation is the only rational option, but rather, as a stream of thought that we can acknowledge as part of our intellectual environment for which historicist approaches can and ought to prepare themselves.

For specific scholar’s comments on the Sermon in the Book of Mormon, Hardy has this:

Probably the first instance of a prominent biblical scholar reading a section of the Book of Mormon generously was Krister Stendahl, “The Sermon on the Mount and Third Nephi,” in Reflections on Mormonism: Judeo-Christian Parallels, ed. Truman G. Madsen (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1978), 139–54. The same topic was taken up at much greater length by John W. Welch in his Illuminating [Page 180]the Sermon at the Temple and the Sermon on the Mount (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1999).¹⁷³

Besides Welch’s response to Stendahl, Richard L. Anderson also responded directly as part of his important essay on “Imitation Gospels and Christ’s Book of Mormon Ministry.”¹⁷⁴ He noted that “Stendahl represents the vocal majority of current New Testament scholars who see all Gospels as formed by the development of stories about Jesus and reflective of the Church, more than personal eyewitness or recollection.”¹⁷⁵ While Anderson then goes on to directly “meet the main issues that a sympathetic scholar raises,” Hardy does not refer to Anderson.

In light of the background on various streams of biblical scholarship I have mentioned here, consider the tensions for both Christian and Latter-day Saint faith as evident in Hardy’s approach to the Sermon that by design defers to a particular stream of “biblical scholarship.”

Jesus delivers to the people of Nephi a slightly emended version of the Sermon on the Mount. Biblical scholars generally agree that the sermon in Mt was composed by the author of that Gospel from various sayings of Jesus that had circulated after his death, noting that many of the sayings appear in different contexts in Mk and Lk. Given that the book of Matthew is dated toward the end of the 1st c. CE, Christ’s sermon to the Nephites would have preceded the NT version by several decades. This could be taken as evidence that the sermon in 3 Ne originated with the Bible rather than with ancient Nephites; or that Jesus, knowing what Matthew would eventually write, taught a proto-version in Bountiful, signaling divine approval of Matthew’s later compilation; or that the translator inserted a familiar example of Christian teaching into the Nephite record to represent Jesus’s basic message. In any case, whereas in Mt the Sermon on the Mount is the first of five distinct sermons, suggesting that Jesus is like Moses delivering an updated Torah, in the BoM [Page 181]Jesus is speaking not as a new Moses, but as the God of Israel.¹⁷⁶

As I have stated, Hardy’s commentary carries several unresolved tensions like this that occasionally rise to unavoidable prominence and significance, due to the nature of it being obliged to appear objective and attentive to apparent scholarly consensus in a university setting. Writing in defense of a faith that in many obvious ways goes against scholarly consensus, if I hope to be taken seriously, or at least be recognized as dealing with the reality at hand, I must directly address counter arguments and scholarship on the topics I choose to address. I cannot just label and dismiss them as “Not us!” or as “Fake news!,” letting the label seem to do the work while in reality censorship does even more. If I decide that my testimony counts as significant for the question of “Which problems are more significant to have solved?” I must also acknowledge that by itself, a testimony does not make my knowledge “perfect,” as Alma explicitly reminds us (Alma 32:35–36). That means that my experiments on the word ought to continue (Alma 37:43).

Take note that Hardy does cite books and authors that provide commentary and arguments that he does not directly mention or address. As we have seen, he at least cites Welch’s Illuminating the Sermon at the Temple and the Sermon on the Mount, which surveys the question of the Matthew’s date and the question of the composition of the Sermon on the Mount in much more detail than does Hardy, as befits Welch’s more focused and specialized commentary. Welch also raises the issue of the Sermon at the Temple as potentially providing more information on an issue for which “one seeks further documentary evidence in the first place.”¹⁷⁷ Hardy is not claiming to be the last word, but is, rather, dealing with a broad array of issues in a single-volume single-author commentary that the Latter-day Saints who enter these fields must confront and resolve one way or another. Even if I am not persuaded by some annotations or comments for this or that issue, I give Hardy his due for pointing to scholars who, in many instances, contextualize and argue differently than he does in his essays and annotations. And I join with many other readers who appreciate the fresh insights that Hardy provides.

Still, as much value as I find in most of Hardy’s formatting, [Page 182]annotations, readings, and supporting essays, for his suggestions on the relation of the Sermon at the Temple to the Sermon on the Mount, I am not enticed by a picture of a divine Christ looking at a future composition by Matthew and saying in essence, “Hey, I wish I’d thought of that. I’ll use it on the Nephites.” That picture assigns more plausibility to a Joseph Smith drawing on his environmental sources to produce a new fiction, as Robert M. Price depicts it in his essay in American Apocrypha, a book Hardy mentions in passing:

If the Book of Mormon is the literary creation of Joseph Smith, who wrote new biblical-sounding stories by combining familiar biblical vocabulary and motifs, then we may do the same sort of comparative redactional analysis on the Book of Mormon that scholars have been doing on the Bible . . . Like the Gospel writers, as understood by Crossan, Brodie, and Helms [emphasis mine], Joseph Smith seems to have created new holy fictions by running the old ones through the shredder, and reassembling the shreds in new combinations.¹⁷⁸

That is a paradigmatic narrative, a more elaborate way to say what is said by one source Hardy quotes when describing the Book of Mormon as “Bible fan fiction,”¹⁷⁹ a window through which to view the text. Hardy writes that

Launching or reshaping a literary movement is a rare, extraordinary accomplishment; founding a new religion is even more so. Smith’s work tapped into the religious and social assumptions, worries, and yearnings of thousands of Americans and Europeans who welcomed its arrival. This excitement was intimately connected to their feelings about the Bible. Indeed, to use an anachronistic term, the Book of Mormon might be considered Bible fan fiction (an observation made by the creators of The Book of Mormon, the 2011 Broadway musical). People who loved the Bible wanted more of it. They wanted additional episodes and spin-offs that continued the story by filling in gaps, answering [Page 183]questions, exploring alternative plot lines, shifting the focus to an American setting, and addressing contemporary issues.¹⁸⁰

For some readers a framing metaphor like “Bible fan fiction” does all the work necessary to model the problem and solution. For others, such a narrative serves to direct the inquiries they subsequently perform. As far as the details emphasized by believers go, “Joseph did it somehow” and “some things they may have guessed right, among so many.” “Somehow” is simple, but does not support helpful puzzle definition, which means it is not easily testable in the way that historicity is. Nibley observed,

Thus, while we can never prove absolutely that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, we are justified in the outset in assuming that it is what it claims to be. If one assumes that it is true, its features at least become testable.¹⁸¹

Without testable puzzles, Kuhn’s criteria for “accuracy of key predictions” in judging paradigms cannot be employed, nor can “comprehensiveness and coherence, nor fruitfulness, nor future promise. Simplicity, yes; it is a simple way to explain the Book of Mormon. It only gets complicated by looking closely and considering oppositional arguments, which with a “fan fiction” understanding is not an urgent issue, and can be deferred by the simple expedient of not reading closely and ignoring the work of informed defenders. Deference to tradition and authority figures can ground personal choices, yes, but they have less to do with “better” and more to do with holding to the familiar and serving social expedience.

Compared to close readings by believers who examine the Book of Mormon in the context it claims for itself, I find that skeptical readings always fall short in light of Kuhn’s criteria for paradigm choice. I found it fascinating that Robert Price, for example, begins his essay approaching 3 Nephi and the Book of Mormon by discussing the discovery of the Book of the Law during Josiah’s day as a meaningful paradigm that guides his approach to Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. Price views the Book of the Law as a recent pious fraud and applies [Page 184]that pious-fraud model as a paradigm for viewing Joseph Smith and his book.¹⁸² Hardy observes that

For most outsiders, however, arguments about Book of Mormon historicity can seem somewhat quaint and of limited interest, except, perhaps, for what they might reveal about faith-filled hermeneutics and scriptural authority. Evidences for and against the existence of ancient American prophets may be significant to people who are invested in the religion or are considering joining, but they are not urgent topics for academic researchers.¹⁸³

That lack of urgency, it seems to me, is exactly why Hardy (unquestionably an academic researcher) overlooks important observations about historicity issues, such as Mesoamerican directions presented in detail in a book he cites,¹⁸⁴ and defers instead to a criticism of Sorenson that remains popular among skeptics despite being obsolete since at least 2008. Such a lack of urgency may be why it seems not to have occurred to Robert Price to consider the reforms of Josiah as a meaningful historical context against which to test the content of the Book of Mormon. That contextual comparison, I notice, is exactly what Margaret Barker appealed to in her talk on the Book of Mormon.

What I offer can only be the reactions of an Old Testament scholar: are the revelations to Joseph Smith consistent with the situation in Jerusalem in about 600 BCE? Do the revelations to Joseph Smith fit in that context, the reign of King Zedekiah, who is mentioned at the beginning of the First Book of Nephi, which begins in the “first year of the reign of Zedekiah” (1 Nephi 1:4)? Zedekiah was installed as king in Jerusalem in 597 BCE.¹⁸⁵

As Alma explains, “even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words” (Alma 32:27). Several of [Page 185]Hardy’s comments in his final essays strive to open the possibility of fruitful growth for a portion of words nurtured as inspired fiction. He acknowledges that such a course is in tension with the face value story that Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon present, but Alma of course, recognizes that “even so it is with my words. Ye cannot know of their surety at first, unto perfection, any more than faith is a perfect knowledge” (Alma 32:26). Alma does not specify which portion of his words a person must select if they wish to experiment upon them, and nor does he precisely define which experiments must be performed. Hardy acknowledges some of the experiments both defenders and skeptics have done, and he also sets out a fresh range of possible experiments and frameworks for those who are open to an inspired fiction approach.¹⁸⁶

Hardy on “Biblical Quotations, Allusions, and Verbal Parallels”

One of the last sections of Hardy’s book is a detailed, comprehensive listing of “Biblical Quotations, Allusions, and Verbal Parallels.” Hardy recognizes that not only are the dating of Isaiah and the Sermon live issues for Book of Mormon readers, but the anachronistic presence of New Testament phrases in various places present a problem as do issues like “the ending of Mark.”¹⁸⁷ He shows his readers that he is [Page 186]aware of the problems, and that he has faced it boldly, carefully, and comprehensively, without flinching from the possible implications for faith. Certainly, ignoring the problem may provide time to consider other things, but does not make the problem go away, nor does blissful ignorance create solutions. Hardy cites the ongoing publications of Nicholas Frederick on this issue,¹⁸⁸ just as Frederick later cites Hardy’s efforts on apparent dependence of Ether 12 on Hebrews.

While the question of biblical language in the Book of Mormon is a legitimate topic of study, it seems to me that Nibley’s comments on “The Big Picture” versus a tightly focused little picture have relevance.

It is important to specialize. It is sound professional policy to deal with something that nobody else understands. But there are natural limits to specialization: inevitably one reaches the point at which the study of a single star cannot be pursued further until one has found out about a lot of other stars. The little picture starts expanding into a big picture, and we soon discover that without the big picture the little one cannot be understood at all.¹⁸⁹

It is one thing to claim that apparent anachronistic language in various places is a significant problem for seeing the Book of Mormon as an inspired translation of an ancient document. It is quite another thing to turn that observation into predictions that account for a wide range of other specialist observations about the Book of Mormon that strongly indicate historicity, whether the picture of Lehi’s Jerusalem, the journey to Arabia, the authentic non-biblical names, the complex use of allusion and the presence of elaborate ritual patterns, an abundant set of New World correlations, the eyewitness reports of the dictation of the Book of Mormon and the evidence of the manuscripts, detailed accounts within the text that describe specific human experience such as NDE reports, survivor witness patterns, addiction recovery, as well as Hebrew temple ritual and festival patterns, First Temple theology, Hebrew poetic forms, patterns of warfare and politics far beyond Joseph Smith’s experience, and the elaborate New World correlations that have multiplied primarily in the past four decades.

[Page 187]For example, in her approach to explaining Joseph Smith, Ann Taves unblushingly ignores all of that and reduces the problem of the Book of Mormon as a whole to basically bulk and some matters of style.¹⁹⁰ This is why I keep promoting the full range of Kuhn’s criteria for paradigm choice as including puzzle definition and testability, accuracy of key predictions, comprehensiveness and coherence, fruitfulness, simplicity and aesthetics, and future promise. Not just a favorite puzzle given some unexamined assumptions, a tightly focused test result, and a declaration that there is nothing remarkable or difficult to explain. (“Nothing to see here folks. Move along!”) Hugh Nibley cogently observed that “Book of Mormon critics have made an art of explaining a very big whole by a very small part.”¹⁹¹

As another relevant example of the difference between a wide-view big picture and a narrow focus, one of the things that struck me most when I read Frederick’s 2015 “Evaluating the Interaction between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon: A Proposed Methodology,”¹⁹² is that while he gave notice that Jerald and Sandra Tanner had published critical arguments and research that highlighted apparently anachronistic uses of New Testament language,¹⁹³ he did not acknowledge that Matthew Roper and John Tvedtnes had published very detailed and telling responses to the Tanners that amounted to significant scholarship on the topic.¹⁹⁴ Someone must [Page 188]have mentioned Roper’s and Tvedtnes’s essays to Frederick, because a later essay does mention them:

In a response to the Tanner’s Covering Up the Black Hole in the Book of Mormon, Matthew Roper argues that much of the New Testament language likely had a Semitic background that could explain its presence in the Book of Mormon: “I would like to see an in-depth study of the Semitic background behind the New Testament passages which most resemble those in the Book of Mormon. I believe that such a study would show how frequently the New Testament draws on older material.” In a review of the same work, John A. Tvedtnes proposes a slightly different solution: “My response to this criticism is that Joseph Smith deliberately used the King James Version wording because it corresponded to the Bible known to his contemporaries. . . . The use of precise New Testament phraseology is not negative, however, as long as the idea fits the passage.”¹⁹⁵

What Frederick does not do is describe the overall approaches of Roper and Tvedtnes, nor does he mention the evidence for the question at point. Just as importantly, none of their wider evidence relevant to the Big Picture question, “Is Joseph Smith’s inspiration real?” The Tanners had taken advantage of newly available computerized scriptures and search capabilities to look through the Book of Mormon for New Testament language. Roper pointed out several key problems with the Tanner’s approach, including that

they have made no attempt to show where Book of Mormon prophets may have drawn upon Old Testament material, which could have been found on the brass plates. This is certainly an important issue in evaluating the worth of their comparisons. Yet they have failed to include this kind of information in their list. Since I used the same computer media they did, I can only assume that they have ignored [Page 189]those passages altogether. It is unfortunate that they would suppress this information.

Having reviewed the material in question, I conclude that most of the evidence may be divided into three groups:

1. Examples where Old Testament language is equal to or closer to the that of the New Testament passage given by the authors as proof of plagiarism.

2. Examples where Old Testament language can be found which very closely resembles that of the New Testament language.

3. Examples in which the Book of Mormon could have drawn upon Old Testament ideas.¹⁹⁶

For practical reasons of space, the published version of Roper’s study only presents his findings for 1 Nephi. But that does allow for many comparisons with Hardy. For example, in Hardy’s list we find 1 Nephi 11.25 appears twice, once alongside Jeremiah 1:13 and once alongside Revelation 11:17. In Roper’s study, we find the following:

1 Nephi 11:25 fountain of living waters

Revelation 7:17 living fountains of waters

Jeremiah 2:13 they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters

Jeremiah 17:13 they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters¹⁹⁷

One important thing that even this kind of comparison overlooks is texts external to the Bible, such as 1 Enoch, which has significant influence on Revelation, both being associated with the temple, and which happens to refer to both the Tree of Life (1 Enoch 24:2–6, 25:1–7) and the living waters (1 Enoch 17:4, 22:9). It is important to realize that the New Testament writers quote not only the Old Testament, but other writers known to them and, sometimes, not known to us. Nor can we assume that we know all the sources available to Old Testament and Book of Mormon writers and editors, based only on records that have survived.

One of Hardy’s recurrent points is anachronism.¹⁹⁸ He says,

[Page 190]While historical anachronisms and incongruities provide important evidences of Book of Mormon origins, they may not be as definitive as some nonbelievers assume. The Mormon scripture presents itself as a translation of an ancient text, but without having access to the gold plates, it is impossible to determine the exact nature of the translation, and that ambiguity allows Latter-day Saints considerable room for faith. By the same token, the parallels with antiquity that believers are fond of highlighting may also prove elusive, for similar reasons.¹⁹⁹

This ambiguity is why Alma distinguishes “proof” from “cause to believe” (Alma 32:17–19) and why Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, and Bach must report that “Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved.”²⁰⁰

Hardy’s list of biblical language in the Book of Mormon associates 1 Nephi 2:10 with 1 Corinthians 15:58. Here is Roper’s relevant entry:

1 Nephi 2:10–11 Steadfast, and immovable in keeping the commandments of the Lord. Now this he spake because of the stiffneckedness of Laman and Lemuel.

1 Corinthians 15:58 Be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.

Psalms 78:7–8, 37 That they might . . . not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments: And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation; . . . whose spirit was not stedfast with God. . . . Neither were they stedfast in his covenant. (See also Isaiah 48:18–19 and 1 Nephi 20:18–19.)

Roper comments,

In this last comparison, the authors have only circled the Book of Mormon phrase “steadfast and immovable” (p. 85), yet while the words steadfast and unmoveable occur together in the New Testament, it seems clear that the passage of 1 Nephi 2: 10–11, taken as a whole, fits best into the [Page 191]context of Psalms 78, especially since Nephi always compares his family’s experience with the Israelite Exodus from Egypt.²⁰¹

Another possible language comparison outside of the Bible goes back to Nibley’s discussion of Arabic qasida. Recall that Hardy’s formatting sets those passages off as poetry, but not as culturally specific Arabic poetry, as Nibley argued in An Approach to the Book of Mormon.²⁰²

A crucial aspect of the anachronism issue emerges when Hardy cites the King James transition of Matthew 5 along with 3 Nephi.

Behold, do men light a candle and put it under a bushel? Nay, but on a candlestick.

His annotation here is:

Candle and candlestick were anachronistic even in the KJV, where Jesus was speaking of an oil lamp and a lampstand. Bushel, a basket or bowl.²⁰³

Here Hardy lands on the issue of translator anachronism but does not explore the implications for the Book of Mormon. He does not suppose or imply that the presence of candle and candlestick and bushel in the KJV means that Jesus did not exist, or that Matthew did not exist but was a medieval fiction. The implication here is that the King James translators were simply trying to communicate the meaning of the Greek for readers in their culture “after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:24), and if it happens to not be technically accurate in some respects, it manages to convey the meaning intended, and therefore it is “sufficiently plain to serve my purpose as it stands” (Doctrine and Covenants 128:18). All the English of Joseph Smith’s translation is anachronistic relative to the language on the plates, but that is indeed the point of translation, “to express the sense of one language in the words of another.”²⁰⁴ The definition does not rule out expressing that sense using words and/or language that is not [Page 192]completely original or unprecedented if it happens to aptly convey the sense to the target audience.

Another related aspect of translation involves the fact that words themselves not only change in pronunciation and spelling over time, but that their definitions can also change. When we read a seemingly simple word like “steel” in the Book of Mormon, what does that mean? Hardy does raise the issue of the Hebrew underlying the English for the King James version:

It is perhaps ominous that Nephi’s attention is first drawn to the sword. Steel, bronze; the BoM follows the anachronistic usage of the KJV in referring to bronze as “steel” or “brass” (2 Sam 22.35; Job 20.24; Ps 18.34; Jer 15.12; see 2 Ne 3.2n).²⁰⁵

That is, if the KJV translators could use steel to translate brass, so could Joseph Smith. In another place he says this:

Sword of Laban, see 1 Ne 4.9, 38n. 15: Nephi’s knowledge of metallurgy would have been unusual. Brass and steel are anachronistic for the early 6th c. BCE; the use of the two metals, along with iron, is unattested in the New World before Columbus.²⁰⁶

For iron and Hardy’s claim that it is “unattested,” see what happens if you Google “Olmec Iron.”²⁰⁷ The discovery of Olmec iron in the 1990s, dating not just to Nephite times, but specifically to Jaredite times, raises the question of just what kind of inquiries Hardy and his editors made, or whether some unquestioned assumptions about the state of Book of Mormon evidence have at times substituted for careful inquiry.

But there is even more to the question of the word steel than this. Before the word steel was applied to the processed alloy we are familiar with as moderns, it had other uses, as explained by one message-board commenter:

The history of the word [steel] originates not in metallurgy, but in adjectives or characteristics: “The noun steel originates from the Proto-Germanic adjective stahliją or stakhlijan [Page 193]‘made of steel,’ which is related to stahlaz or stahliją ‘standing firm.’”

For that reason, we can find apparently anachronistic use of the word “steel” in the King James Bible.

• In Job 20:24 we read: “He shall flee from the iron weapon, and the bow of steel shall strike him through.”
• Similarly in Psalm 18:24: “He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms.”

If you do a text search for the words “iron” and “steel” in the OT, the only instances of “steel” that occur are in connection with bows. And as we will remember, there was a problem for Lehi’s expedition when Nephi’s “steel bow” broke. Nephi’s bow could not have been of an alloy of iron and carbon. How the heck could he have drawn it if it were made of that, let alone break it? The technology of archery has a rich and long history. Read up on the types of bows on Wikipedia. It seems that it should be obvious that a “steel bow” is one that is simply exceptionally strong, that propels the arrows a greater distance or with more force.

The point is, the word steel has been used historically to mean things (or people) which are exceptionally strong. Do you remember that stalwart (<-there’s that root word, again!) Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili? Of course you do! But not by that name. He preferred the name Joseph Stalin. He was the “man of steel” who was made of the same stuff you and I are made of. There wasn’t a hint of iron-carbon alloy in his entire body.

The other problem with “steel” and “brass” and suchlike is that we are reading a translation into English from an ancient language whose deepest nuances have been lost to time. In many cases we (or the King James translators) are not entirely sure what was meant by some words. The word “brass” in the OT is translated from a word which may actually mean “bronze.”

And with the Book of Mormon, God Himself gave the [Page 194]translation, and He seemed to want to stay consistent with human translations and word usage.²⁰⁸

This means that Nephi’s steel bow may just be a notably sturdy compound bow. Evidence, again, that the “plain meaning” of the text may, in cases, not be quite as plain as we think. This is exactly why Jesus says that criticism, judgement, and discernment, must begin with being self-critical: “Then shalt thou ye see clearly” (Matthew 7:5). Not before.

Whether the paradigm of discrediting anachronism is better or best compared to a complex play of our incomplete knowledge of the resources available to ancient authors and the valid possibilities and resources available to modern translators including their unrestricted access to and knowledge of the King James Bible, as well the inspiration, requires comparison, and then evaluation against criteria that are not paradigm dependent. Paradigm testing and ideological dismissal are very different things and the existence of faith comparison based on criteria that are not completely paradigm-dependent defines the difference. All the evidence and insinuation and personal insecurity that convinces Othello to adopt the Iago-inspired narrative that Desdemona has been unfaithful can be interpreted differently, and indeed should have been, and that is what makes Shakespeare’s play a tragedy. The case of Othello should remind us that of N. R. Hanson’s observation that “all data are theory-laden.”²⁰⁹ No one actually follows the data to its inevitable conclusion without a framing narrative/theory in which to model and interpret that data. Otherwise, a person has no basis to select which data to consider and has no interpretive framework. Which high-level narrative of the composition of the Book of Mormon is best? Inspired translation, as Joseph Smith claimed? Or an authorship involving imagination that discredits its claims to historicity (if not potential divine inspiration) via conclusive and telling anachronistic plagiarism? How comprehensive and coherent is the explanation? Does verbal anachronism in a translation across time and culture provide a sufficiently decisive solution towards solving the puzzle the Book of Mormon represents as to eclipse all other puzzles and solutions as having of little or no significance? Or should we [Page 195]expect such currently unsolved puzzles as due to the nature of translation and the limits of our knowledge of both ancient authors and the legitimate resources and inspiration of the translator? “What should we expect in an inspired translation?” is a significantly different question than “What do I expect from an inspired translation?” and the related question, “What do I want from an inspired translation?” The difference is an explicit self-awareness of the need to be self-critical and self-reflective.

And what about the aspects of the Book of Mormon as ancient document that a focus on anachronism as such filters out?

Most of us lend to see parts of a form hierarchically. The parts that are important (that is, provide a lot of information), or the parts that we decide are larger, or the parts we think should be larger, we see as larger than they actually are. Conversely, parts that are unimportant, or that we decide are smaller, or that we think should be smaller, we see as being smaller than they actually are.²¹⁰

None of us can avoid demonstrating exactly which things we think are most important and which things are least important, and time has a way of sorting out whether we are correct.

A Mention of DNA and the Question of Linguistic Evidence

Hardy’s essay on “Reading the Book of Mormon as History” includes a brief mention of the DNA issue. He writes,

More recently, DNA studies have failed to find connections between Native Americans and Near Eastern peoples, and no non-Mormon linguists have recognized any direct contact between New World and Old World languages.²¹¹

Here again, “What do I expect?” is a very different question than “What should I expect?” and, different still, “What should I ideally get?” On the topic of DNA, John M. Butler discussed a 2003 study of Icelandic populations and observed,

Examining the same Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA markers used in other genetic studies, these 131,060 Icelanders “revealed highly positively skewed distributions [Page 196]of descendants to ancestors, with the vast majority of potential ancestors contributing one or no descendants and a minority of ancestors contributing large numbers of descendants.” In other words, the majority of people living today in Iceland had ancestors living only 150 years ago that could not be detected based on the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA tests being performed and yet the genealogical records exist showing that these people lived and were real ancestors. To the point at hand, if many documented ancestors of 150 years ago cannot be linked to their descendants through Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA tests from modern Iceland, then it certainly seems possible that the people who are reported in the Book of Mormon to have migrated to the Americas over 2,600 years ago might not have left genetic signatures that are detectable today.²¹²

Is it decisively significant that DNA studies have failed to find a connection? Or is it simply unrealistic to expect such a thing? It turns out that the DNA controversy cannot be separated from the question of whether the Book of Mormon describes indigenous origins absolutely, or just a few small boats and barges arriving in already inhabited locations. Should we judge based on what we want to have from DNA evidence, or what is realistic to expect? Or should we judge based on the Archimedes principle, that “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world.” In exploring Book of Mormon issues, there is a difference between looking for understanding and looking for leverage.

As far as linguistic connections go, consider Brian Stubbs, Exploring the Explanatory Power of Semitic and Egyptian in Uto-Aztecan and his 2011 FAIR presentation on the topic.²¹³ Hardy may be hinting at his awareness of the existence of Stubbs’s work in this phrase: “no non-Mormon linguists have recognized any direct contact between [Page 197]New World and Old World languages.”²¹⁴ Even with the “non-Mormon” qualification made to exclude Stubbs, Hardy overstates the case, failing to recognize the work of John Welch over 30 years ago.²¹⁵

The Isaiah Problem and Potential Solutions

Latter-day Saint scholars have been addressing the Isaiah question for several decades,²¹⁶ which involves the commonly held notion that the current book of Isaiah was composed by at least three different authors and/or scribal schools: (1) an original Isaiah contemporary with Hezekiah, (2) an exilic Isaiah, and (3) a post-exilic Isaiah. Nibley,²¹⁷ In the 1960s, and later Welch,²¹⁸ in the 1990s, suggested that perhaps what we have in the Book of Mormon was Isaiah at the time, other than Isaiah 54, which, as Welch points out, need not have been on the Brass Plates, since it is quoted by the risen Jesus. Other Latter-day Saint scholars such as Victor Ludlow and Avraham Gileadi argue for a unified Isaiah based on structural arguments. And there are those who treat the multiple Isaiah hypothesis/consensus as kryptonite for the claims of the Book of Mormon. Here is Hardy’s most detailed annotation dealing with the question:

Nephi copies these chapters from the Brass Plates, though most scholars believe that Isaiah 40–55 (Second Isaiah) was written in the mid-6th c. BCE, a generation after Lehi’s family had left Jerusalem. Believers might respond to this discrepancy by positing a divinely sanctioned updating of Nephi’s writings, or a very free translation. In any event, there [Page 198]are similar problems for all the extended quotations from the Hebrew Bible, including the chapters from First Isaiah reproduced in 2 Ne 12–24. The BoM follows the King James Bible quite closely, even though the underlying Hebrew text of that 1611 translation—the Masoretic Text (MT)—was the end result of a process of writing, editing, revising, augmenting, and merging sources that continued for many centuries after 600 BCE. In this edition, many of the BoM modifications to lengthy quotations from the KJV are bolded, to show places where the BoM might function as biblical commentary of sorts. As with other such quotations, many of the changes in chs. 20–21 are to words that were italicized in the KJV (indicating that they were added by the translators when the Hebrew original yielded incomplete sentences in English). Additions of conjunctions, interjections, and minor clarifications are also common, as are transposed words. From the perspective of the narrative, it is unclear whether these changes to the KJV are supposed to be restored original readings, or Nephi’s own glosses on Isaiah intended to “liken” scripture to his family’s current situation. In any case, the deletions, additions, and substitutions of a few words here and there are reminiscent of how 1 Chr 16.8–36 adapts Pss 105, 96, and 106 to fit a particular historical context.²¹⁹

I wrote a chapter on the Isaiah situation in Paradigms Regained, drawing mostly on the Maxwell Institute volume on Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, which offered a range of knowledgeable arguments and assessments, and Barker’s case in The Older Testament that Second Isaiah radically changed the theology of ancient Israel from a belief in El Elyon, the High God, Yahweh as his son assigned to Israel, and the existence of other sons who constituted the angels, the hosts of heaven behind the title Lord of Hosts, toward the strict monotheism that Yahweh was El. The thing I found most interesting about her case was that none of the Isaiah chapters that make that argument (chapters 40–47) appear in the Book of Mormon, which explicitly retains preexilic theology. Barker cites scholars who argued that “the prophecies of the Second Isaiah are thought to have been shaped by the patterns of the preexilic festival,”²²⁰ and in a footnote mentions one [Page 199]scholar’s “argument for a remarkable correspondence between Isaiah 40ff and the tradition of the autumn festival in preexilic Jerusalem, and ‘the coherence of many units in an interlocking pattern descended from the festival . . . ; and ‘The relating of prophecies to a ritual tradition shows up the depth and range in their meaning which is missed by an interpretation restricted to a historical view.”²²¹ That is particularly interesting compared to John Thompson’s observations in an essay in Isaiah and the Book of Mormon that “from the structure and themes of 2 Nephi 6–10, one may conclude that Jacob’s speech was given in connection with a covenant-renewal celebration that was most likely performed as part of the traditional Israelite autumn festivals required by the law of Moses.”²²² So, in the Book of Mormon we have Jacob quoting from Isaiah 50–51 during the traditional autumn festival, which is thought to have liturgically shaped those chapters. This is not the kind of correlation that is easy to explain as a lucky guess or accident on the part of the youthful Joseph Smith. Hence, it is the kind of thing that critics prefer to not mention or acknowledge in considerations of the purported Isaiah problem.

I subsequently returned to the topic of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon after reading Barker’s essay on “The Original Context of the Fourth Servant Song,” which made the case that Isaiah 53 was directly inspired by Hezekiah’s bout with the plague and, therefore, makes that chapter preexilic and available to Abinadi via the Brass Plates. A recent online discussion included this additional insight:

I suspect that at least portions of what we call Deutero Isaiah existed in the brass plates. INTERESTINGLY, the parts of Isaiah which appear in the Book of Mormon do NOT include the mention of Cyrus, and cut off EXACTLY at chapter 55, which is considered the last chapter of Deutero-Isaiah before Trito-Isaiah starts. Joseph also completely skips over “The Apocalypse of Isaiah” which is a section of Proto-Isaiah now thought to be a post-exilic addition.

Maybe he just got incredibly lucky, but when you look through what texts ARE in the Book of Mormon from Isaiah, notably absent are THE WORDS THAT FORM THE FOUNDATION OF THE DEUTERO ISAIAH THEORY. Pretty [Page 200]much ALL the chapters and verse segments which deal with “politics” other than Babylon. The missing chapters and verses go on and on about the Medes, Elam, Ethiopia, Egypt, etc. But they simply don’t exist in the Book of Mormon. I personally find it very reasonable to assume that the Book of Isaiah was updated by motivated scribes as time went on, just as other biblical texts were, and that the Deutero Isaiah chapters existed before 600 BC, but in a much smaller form.

Taken together, I believe you have a real copy of Isaiah in Lehi’s hands. It is a smaller version of the book than we have, and doesn’t have many of the texts that we suspect were later additions. Also, it has some texts that were later updated and altered. It doesn’t have all the political baggage other than using Babylon as a metaphor.²²³

John Welch noted that since Isaiah 54 is quoted by the risen Lord, it need not have been on the Brass Plates. It is also of interest that the theme of Isaiah 54 is “the daughter of Zion” where Barker notes that the Servant of the Lord and the Daughter of Zion each “has the same amount of material in chapters 40–55, yet until recently, only the male Servant figure was studied and emphasized.”²²⁴ In connection with the recent recognition importance of the Daughter of Zion, along with the more famous Servant songs, only recently recognized by modern scholarship, an important essay at Book of Mormon Central observes that

Moroni beheld the actual destruction of his people, and yet his final message expresses hope that the daughter of Zion will one day be enthroned and endowed, like the goddess Ishtar, due to the Book of Mormon’s salvific power:

Awake, and arise from the dust, O Jerusalem;

yea, and put on thy beautiful garments, O daughter of Zion;

and strengthen thy stakes and enlarge thy borders forever,

[Page 201]that thou mayest no more be confounded,

that the covenants of the Eternal Father which he hath made unto thee, O house of Israel, may be fulfilled. (Moroni 10:31, cf. Isaiah 52:2)

Endowed with beautiful garments of power and glory, the daughter of Zion is the divine, feminine manifestation of God’s righteous sons and daughters passing through the veil of mortality and entering into the joy, rest, and holiness of the Lord.²²⁵

All of these insights mean that the Isaiah situation is a field in which it pays to be aware of the best arguments and options in an unsettled situation, and to keep a broad perspective on evidence that suggests that Joseph Smith’s inspiration was real, rather than narrowly focused on what seems to be human perfection. If the question is perfection, then only imperfection is decisive, but only if one can safely assume that they are at present perfectly capable of detecting and interpreting it. If the question concerns evidence for real inspiration on the part of Joseph Smith and the Restoration, I am obligated to take a much broader view and accept the existence of human imperfection, and the limits of current knowledge, especially my own.

To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.²²⁶

If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times.²²⁷

The problem is not imperfection, but rather deciding “Which problems are more significant to have solved?” And that, as Kuhn points out, even in the sciences must ultimately involve faith, rather than unattainable certainty.

Literary Approaches to the Book of Mormon

In his essay “The Book of Mormon as Literature,” Hardy writes,

The Book of Mormon, with its ungainly repetitive style, is not [Page 202]an obvious candidate for literary acclaim. Yet if readers can see past the individual sentences and verses to larger units of paragraphs, pericopes, chapters, and books, its literary features become more evident (many of which are noted in the annotations in the present volume). There is a range and verve to the story of the Nephites, which despite its convoluted narrative unfolds according to a coherent underlying design. And for a work with disputed origins, a literary approach offers common ground for discussion between those who regard the text as historical and those who view it as fiction. Someone, somewhere had to determine how the narrative should be structured and presented, with what sorts of details, including physical descriptions, chronological markers, direct discourse, and editorial comments.²²⁸

He further comments that

the formatting in this edition is much more suited to reading the Book of Mormon as literature, with larger narrative units readily identified, headings and paragraphs that indicate changes of speakers and topics, quotation marks and poetic forms, and a few highlighted examples of rhetorical devices. The goal has been to bring to the foreground the literary features of the text, and thereby emphasize its meaning and message. Additional details about literary techniques and biblical intertextuality in specific passages can be found in the annotations.²²⁹

In his later essay “Further Reading: The Book of Mormon as Literature,” Hardy remarks that

The topic of chiasmus comes up often in LDS discussions of the Book of Mormon as literature, due to its apologetic function and the extensive writings of John W. Welch. Welch has edited Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 1988), which includes a chapter on the Book of Mormon and offers a comparative perspective, while keeping the focus firmly on the ancient world. Brent Metcalfe provides counterarguments in his “Apologetic and Critical [Page 203]Assumptions about Book of Mormon Historicity,” Dialogue 26, no. 3 (1993): 153–84.²³⁰

He also cites his own “Understanding the Book of Mormon” and works by Richard Dilworth Rust²³¹ and Hugh Pinnock.²³² He then cites Mark Thomas’s Digging in Cumorah on type scenes:

From a more religiously neutral point of view, Mark D. Thomas’s Digging in Cumorah: Reclaiming Book of Mormon Narratives (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999) makes important points about narrative forms, or type-scenes, in the Mormon scripture, noting precedents in both the Bible and nineteenth-century religious culture.²³³

While Hardy is a careful and important scholar for literary approaches to the Book of Mormon and offers many important insights, he is not the only one. And while he cites a few other important scholars to show the existence of different approaches, I think it is important for Book of Mormon study to be aware of the range and depth and diverse insights that can come from literary approaches. There is a plethora of sources to which Hardy does not refer:

• Alan Goff, who has not only reviewed Thomas at length,²³⁴ but who has also for over thirty years provided many important essays on type scenes and allusion in the Book of Mormon, highlighting the book’s literary qualities and techniques relative to Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative.²³⁵
• Matthew Bowen’s extensive work on onomastic wordplay in the Book of Mormon, that is, on how the Hebrew meanings [Page 204]of names disclose wordplay in the stories that deepens the meaning and artistry we can see.²³⁶
• Ben McGuire’s important study of allusions to the David story in Nephi’s encounter with Laban, and how all of those allusions fit on one side of what biblical scholars have surmised are two different David stories spliced together.²³⁷
• Bruce Jorgenson’s important “The Dark Way to the Tree: Typological Unity in the Book of Mormon”²³⁸ and Eugene England’s “A Second Witness for the Logos: The Book of Mormon and Contemporary Literary Criticism,”²³⁹ both of which draw on the important literary theorist, Northrop Frye.
• Tod R. Harris’s “Journey of the Hero: Archetypes of Earthly Adventure in the Spiritual Passage in 1 Nephi,”²⁴⁰ which uses Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces as a lens for exploring Nephi’s account.
• Robert Rees’s important essays on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon compared to the work and processes of the most notable writers of the American Renaissance.²⁴¹
• [Page 205]John Gee’s “The Wrong Kind of Book,” which shows that the Book of Mormon literary style and themes are very different than what was expected and demonstrated by other nineteenth-century works including View of the Hebrews and Manuscript Found.²⁴²
• Eugene England and Jana Riess who have separately and effectively examined Book of Mormon accounts in light of Rene Girard’s theories of the scapegoat and imitative desire and cycles of violence.²⁴³
• Lisa Bolin Hawkins and Gordon Thomasson’s important essay on “Survivor Witness in the Book of Mormon,” an essay I consider essential reading for understanding Mormon and Moroni as authors with distinctive experience, values, and emphasis that they bring to their witness in relation to the genre of “survivor witness” literature that emerged from Nazi and Soviet death camps.²⁴⁴
• Richard L. Anderson’s “Imitation Gospels and Christ’s Book of Mormon Ministry” with its discussion of the 3 Nephi account in comparison to several other modern books claiming to be new revelations about Christ.
• William Eggington’s essay “’Our Weakness in Writing’: Oral and Literate Culture in the Book of Mormon,”²⁴⁵ nor Brant Gardner’s more recent exploration of that important topic.²⁴⁶
• [Page 206]Alyson Von Feldt’s comparison of the Book of Mormon to biblical Wisdom literature.²⁴⁷
• Nibley’s comparison of Ether to the distinguishing characteristics of the genre of ancient epic literature²⁴⁸ or his later comparison of the 3 Nephi account to ancient Post Resurrection 40 Day accounts²⁴⁹
• Sorenson’s “The Book of Mormon as a Mesoamerican Codex,” which compares the themes and content of the Book of Mormon with those of Mesoamerican literature.²⁵⁰
• Joseph Spencer’s An Other Testament: On Typology.²⁵¹
• Midgley’s and Novack’s work on important distinctions between a community remembrance focused on keeping covenants with a living God versus a detached academic curiosity about the variety and details of Jewish culture that has demonstrably ”assisted the subsequent decline in authentic religiosity.”²⁵²

I have not mentioned everything possible to mention but, rather, just a few subjective favorites. Hardy is not attempting to be comprehensive on literary approaches to the Book of Mormon, nor is he obligated to be, given limited space in even a large book. Rather, he is obligated to first provide his own reading and annotations, and then to introduce fields of discussion with deliberate balance while pointing to at least some notable works across a wide range of approaches. My [Page 207]point is that when we approach the Book of Mormon as literature, the field is infinitely larger than any one commentator or school of thought can offer, no matter how important and how welcome their insights.

Wide reading and exploring a range of different approaches continually reminds me that skilled and perceptive readers can see things in the Book of Mormon that I would never have imagined, if left to myself. The consequent awe I feel encourages me to be both humble and teachable.

Epistemology

In his essay on epistemology, Hardy states,

The recommended approach is based on an invitation given by the book’s last narrator to his future audience:

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost. (Moro 10.4)

In most fields, warm feelings are unreliable gauges of truth, yet there is an assumption here that the question of whether the book is an authentic revelation can best be resolved through additional, personal revelation. The requirement of preexisting sincerity and faith makes it as much a test of the reader as of the scripture.²⁵³

I very much like Hardy’s insight that reading the Book of Mormon is “test of the reader.” But I also notice that Moroni says nothing about warm feelings as a reliable gauge of truth:

But behold, that which is of God inviteth and enticeth to do good continually; wherefore, every thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God . . .

For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for everything which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power [Page 208]and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God. . . .

And now, my brethren, seeing that ye know the light by which ye may judge, which light is the light of Christ, see that ye do not judge wrongfully; for with that same judgment which ye judge ye shall also be judged. Wherefore, I beseech of you, brethren, that ye should search diligently in the light of Christ that ye may know good from evil; and if ye will lay hold upon every good thing, and condemn it not, ye certainly will be a child of Christ.

And behold, there were divers ways that he did manifest things unto the children of men, which were good; and all things which are good cometh of Christ; otherwise men were fallen, and there could no good thing come unto them. (Moroni 7:14, 16, 18–19, 24)

Hardy may be conditioned by Latter-day Saint cultural over-use and repetition of Doctrine and Covenants 9:8–9 (“ye shall feel that it is right”), but I conducted a wide survey of scriptural descriptions of how the Holy Ghost confirms truth and found that it is equally balanced between mind and heart (Doctrine and Covenants 8:2), between left- and right-brain operations (see for example, Doctrine and Covenants 11:12–14), between intellectual enlightenment and expansion, feelings of peace, expansion of the soul, joy and reconciliation, and “right action” (actually doing good and demonstrating through those actions faith in Christ).²⁵⁴

For many years I have made the case that the epistemology in Alma 32 corresponds to that offered in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and I have noticed that where Jesus calls for the sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit, that is a test of both mind and heart, of our willingness to offer up our preconceptions and our desires in order to discover what is real.

So, yes, Hardy is correct and insightful in recognizing that the Book of Mormon tests the reader. My own study of biblical keys for discerning true and false prophets included observations that of seventy or so arguments offered by biblical peoples to justify rejection of prophets, they all boil down to saying, “it’s not what I think” or “it’s not what I [Page 209]desire.”²⁵⁵ The actions that the Bible recommends that people ought to follow to find truth amount to a formal process of offering up what we think and what we desire—that is, to offer the sacrifice of a contrite spirit and a broken heart in order to progressively discover more of what is real.²⁵⁶ It also turns out that the arguments given by biblical peoples to reject a prophet in every case simultaneously demonstrate exactly where people have failed to live up to the test of offering up the sacrifice of a broken heart (offering what they desire) and of a contrite spirit (refusing instruction, refusing to offer what they think).

Alma 32 encourages readers to start with just a portion of the word. It does not specify which portion, leaving that to the individual, nor does it specify exactly which experiments a person ought to perform. Just by existing, the Book of Mormon defines a great many different puzzles to consider from a wide range of possible approaches. And even as far as trying to spread the good word goes, the Book of Mormon offers the examples of the sons of Mosiah, who clearly began their dangerous and challenging mission with different approaches, Ammon being initially much less direct than his brothers, but ultimately more successful in a way that cleared the way for the later success of his brothers. That is, Ammon was relatively reticent until after he gained trust in important circles. Then he spoke out.

Hardy has managed to get the most prestigious academic press in the world to produce a valuable and impressive annotated edition of the Book of Mormon. That is an impressive achievement. So, Hardy’s approach to sharing the Book of Mormon may be different than mine in some respects, but it is still a welcome invitation to experiment upon the word.²⁵⁷

Conclusions

As should be evident, I am not a fan of asserting a “plain reading” of any historical text, especially one that claims to be an ancient text written by multiple authors and translated by divine means. Any reading, plain or not, is dependent on the lens through which we view the text, and [Page 210]that lens is fashioned by the framework, paradigm, or context that we construct in order to make sense of the data that we have available.

That I would differ from Hardy on some issues is to be expected—we no doubt privilege data differently and, therefore, possess different paradigms for the text. I would likewise expect that readers will differ in their understandings from both Hardy and myself. This is why a continued conversation is so important to all of us.

Fortunately, the Book of Mormon does not present us with a zero-sum proposition. There is much that has been discovered concerning the book and its authors at an increasing pace over the last two centuries. And, no doubt, the pace of discovery will continue into the foreseeable future.

While our individual understanding of some details in the Book of Mormon may differ, I join Hardy in viewing it as a “gift from God,”²⁵⁸ one that should be studied, appreciated, and treasured.