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

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

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

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

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

Despite its members, flawed and frail,

The human species as a mass

Came not upon this earth to fail

The test divine. It came to pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore (Isa. 2:4 = Micah 4:3).

Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong (Joel 3:10).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, this did not put an end to the spreading of priestcraft through the land; for there were many who loved the vain things of the world, and they went forth preaching false doctrines; and this they did for the sake of riches and honor. Nevertheless, they durst not lie, if it were known, for fear of the law, for liars were punished; therefore they pretended to preach according to their belief; and now the law could have no power on any man for his belief. And they durst not steal, for fear of the law, for such were punished; neither durst they rob, nor murder, for he that murdered was punished unto death (Alma 1:16-18).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the first citation from "the prophet":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A closer look at Malachi material in the Small Plates

This is a follow-up to my last post, "Malachi, and the Small Plates as Nephite pseudepigrapha."

1. He shall prepare the way

The first passage from Malachi that seems to be referenced in the Small Plates is Malachi 3:1.

Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts (Mal. 3:1).

Here are the alleged references to this in the Book of Mormon:

And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them (1 Ne. 3:7).

And when the day cometh that the wrath of God is poured out upon the mother of harlots, which is the great and abominable church of all the earth, whose founder is the devil, then, at that day, the work of the Father shall commence, in preparing the way for the fulfilling of his covenants, which he hath made to his people who are of the house of Israel (1 Ne. 14:17).

And I will also be your light in the wilderness; and I will prepare the way before you, if it so be that ye shall keep my commandments; wherefore, inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall be led towards the promised land; and ye shall know that it is by me that ye are led (1 Ne. 17:13).

In two of these three passages, the only link to Malachi is some form of the expression "prepare the way." However, this expression is found in multiple parts of the Bible, not only in Malachi, and cannot by itself be considered a quotation from or allusion to Malachi.

Thou shalt prepare thee a way, and divide the coasts of thy land, which the Lord thy God giveth thee to inherit, into three parts, that every slayer may flee thither (Deut. 19:3).

So Jotham became mighty, because he prepared his ways before the Lord his God (2 Chr. 27:6).

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God (Isa. 40:3).

And shall say, Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way, take up the stumblingblock out of the way of my people (Isa. 57:14).

Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people (Isa. 62:10).

Only in 1 Ne. 14:17 is there a connection beyond the apparently common phrase "prepare the way." That verse also includes a "covenant" reference, as does Mal. 3:1. It also includes "the day cometh," which (in precisely that wording) occurs in the King James Version only in Mal. 4:1. However, similar expressions such as "the day of the Lord cometh" (Isa. 13:9, Joel 2:1, Zech. 14:1) are found elsewhere in the Bible. None of the three phrases highlighted in 1 Ne. 14:17 is really distinctive to Malachi. I suppose finding all three together in one verse is some evidence of the influence of Malachi, but it's very far from being a smoking gun.

Overall, I think we can dismiss this group of alleged allusions. They do not constitute strong evidence that the authors of the Small Plates knew Malachi.

2. Cursed with a curse

The next alleged allusion is also very weak:

Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation (Mal. 3:9).

For behold, in that day that they shall rebel against me, I will curse them even with a sore curse, and they shall have no power over thy seed except they shall rebel against me also (1 Ne. 2:23).

The expression "curse with a curse" is not unique to Malachi. In fact, there is an even better match for Nephi's wording elsewhere in the Old Testament:

And, behold, thou hast with thee Shimei the son of Gera, a Benjamite of Bahurim, which cursed me with a grievous curse in the day when I went to Mahanaim: but he came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by the Lord, saying, I will not put thee to death with the sword (1 Kgs. 2:8).

The same Hebrew word translated as "grievous" in 1 Kgs. 2:8 is rendered "sore" in Micah 2:10, so this is essentially the same expression used by Nephi. I don't think Nephi was particularly alluding to Kings, either; more likely, this was just a common expression. So this parallel, too, can be dismissed as evidence for the influence of Malachi.

3. Stubble, the Sun of righteousness, and calves of the stall

The only real smoking-gun links to Malachi are references to this one passage:

For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall (Mal. 4:1-2).

And here are the Small Plates passages that appear to references it:

And when the day cometh that the wrath of God is poured out upon the mother of harlots, which is the great and abominable church of all the earth, whose founder is the devil, then, at that day, the work of the Father shall commence, in preparing the way for the fulfilling of his covenants, which he hath made to his people who are of the house of Israel (1 Ne. 14:17).

For behold, saith the prophet, the time cometh speedily that Satan shall have no more power over the hearts of the children of men; for the day soon cometh that all the proud and they who do wickedly shall be as stubble; and the day cometh that they must be burned (1 Ne. 22:15).

For the time speedily shall come that all churches which are built up to get gain, and all those who are built up to get power over the flesh, and those who are built up to become popular in the eyes of the world, and those who seek the lusts of the flesh and the things of the world, and to do all manner of iniquity; yea, in fine, all those who belong to the kingdom of the devil are they who need fear, and tremble, and quake; they are those who must be brought low in the dust; they are those who must be consumed as stubble; and this is according to the words of the prophet. And the time cometh speedily that the righteous must be led up as calves of the stall, and the Holy One of Israel must reign in dominion, and might, and power, and great glory (1 Ne. 22:23-24).

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

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

With the exception of 1 Ne. 14:17, already discussed, these are undeniable instances of highly distinctive phrases from Malachi. However, they all come from that one brief passage, raising the possibility that in that passage Malachi himself was quoting some earlier prophet. That possibility was raised in the comments on my last post, but my first reaction was to consider it unlikely since several different parts of Malachi were quoted. That turns out not to be the case, though. It's really just that one passage.

Malachi, and the Small Plates as Nephite pseudepigrapha

During the visit of the resurrected Jesus to the people at Bountiful, he recites part of the Book of Malachi to them, citing it by name:

And it came to pass that he commanded them that they should write the words which the Father had given unto Malachi, which he should tell unto them. And it came to pass that after they were written he expounded them. And these are the words which he did tell unto them, saying: Thus said the Father unto Malachi -- . . . (3 Ne. 24:1).

Jesus then proceeds to quote Chapters 3 and 4 virtually verbatim from the King James Version of Malachi (which together comprise Chapter 3 in the original Hebrew). After the quotation, he explicitly states that this is material which the Nephites had not had before:

And he saith: These scriptures, which ye had not with you, the Father commanded that I should give unto you; for it was wisdom in him that they should be given unto future generations (3 Ne. 26:2).

We should therefore understand that (a) the Nephites only had Malachi 3-4, not the entire book, and (b) they only had it after the visit of Jesus. How well does the actual text of the Book of Mormon fit with those two points? Here, from a paper by Colby Townsend, is an exhaustive list of Malachi material in the Book of Mormon:

1. 1 Ne. 2:23 references Mal. 3:9
2. 1 Ne. 3:7 references Mal. 3:1
3. 1 Ne. 14:17 references Mal. 3:1, 4:1
4. 1 Ne. 17:13 references Mal. 3:1
5. 1 Ne. 22:15 references Mal. 4:1
6. 1 Ne. 22:23-24 references Mal. 4:1-2
7. 2 Ne. 25:13 references Mal. 4:2
8. 2 Ne. 26:4 references Mal. 4:1
9. 2 Ne. 26:6 references Mal. 4:1
10. 2 Ne. 26:9 references Mal. 4:2
11. Alma 45:13, 14 references Mal. 4:5
12. Ether 9:22 references Mal. 4:2-3

Many of these are undeniably quoting Malachi, with highly distinctive phrases reproduced word-for-word in the same order. Others are just occurrences of short phrases such as "he shall prepare ... way" and "curse[d] ... with a ... curse," which aren't exactly smoking guns. Even by Townsend's broad, inclusive standard for what counts as an allusion, though, notice that not a single reference to Malachi 1 or 2 appears on his list; 100% of the Malachi material in the Book of Mormon is from Malachi 3 and 4, the two chapters we know the Nephites had. So that checks out.

The problem, though, is where in the Book of Mormon this Malachi material occurs. The only Malachi quotation that occurs in a reasonable place, in a text written after the visit of Jesus, is the one in Ether, which was written by Moroni centuries after Jesus. (It is problematic in its own way, though, since it refers to "the Son of Righteousness." See my 2013 post on that phrase.) All 11 of the others are, if we take the text as face value, anachronisms.

The supposed Malachi quotation in Alma can be dismissed, I think. It uses the phrase "great and dreadful day," which in the King James Version occurs only in Malachi 4:5. However, the exact same Hebrew phrase is also found in the Book of Joel, where it is translated "great and terrible day" (Joel 2:31). Joel was written in the 9th century BC, long before Lehi left Jerusalem, and would have been available to the Nephites. The use of "dreadful" rather than "terrible" in the translation presumably shows the influence of Malachi, but there is no reason to think the original text was referencing Malachi rather than Joel.

That leaves those 10 quotations -- several of which are undeniably dependent on Malachi -- in the first two Books of Nephi. Since Nephi supposedly wrote this material about a century before Malachi and six centuries before Christ, what are we to make of these quotations?

One option is just to add them to the list of "hard-to-define biblical parallels" which somehow found their way into the English translation even though they couldn't have been present on the Plates. I find this unsatisfactory because it fails to explain (a) why only Chapters 3 and 4 are referenced and (b) why there are lots of Malachi references in 1 and 2 Nephi but none in the pre-Christ portion of the Book of Mormon proper (Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, and the early chapters of 3 Nephi).

Another option, for those who believe Joseph Smith made up the Book of Mormon, is that Smith got confused about chronology. After losing the 116 pages, Smith first dictated from Mosiah to the end of the book and then went back and dictated the "Small Plates" portion from 1 Nephi to Omni. Thus, although 1 and 2 Nephi are set before the visit of Jesus, Smith dictated them after dictating the visit of Jesus. Perhaps after dictating the Malachi material in 3 Nephi, he started freely including Malachi in the book and carelessly forgot to stop doing so when he went back and dictated the "Small Plates." In my opinion, it is not remotely plausible that Smith could have been so careless. He clearly spelled out in 3 Nephi that the Nephites didn't have Malachi until the coming of Jesus, and then just carelessly included it anyway (but still carefully including only Chapters 3 and 4), not just once but 11 times? This is pushing the Joseph Smith idiot-savant theory to its breaking point. Dictating 3 Nephi would have made Joseph Smith more aware of the need to keep Malachi out of the pre-Christ portion of the book, not less so.

My own tentative conclusion is that the Malachi problem shows the Small Plates are Nephite pseudepigrapha. Although they are written in the voices of Nephi, Jacob, and other early prophets, they were in fact composed sometime after the visit of Jesus Christ. As I mentioned in my last post, the Small Plates were just "found" by Mormon centuries after Christ, and we know nothing of their provenance. There is no obvious reason to assume they were authentically ancient when Mormon "found" them, and several reasons to doubt this (which I may lay out in another post). But the translation of the Small Plates also has rather dodgy history, right? If they weren't actually written by Nephi and company, why assume they were the work of later Nephites rather than of a panciked Joseph Smith trying to undo the damage done by the loss of the 116 pages? Because of Malachi, that's why. Joseph Smith would have had no reason to suddenly start quoting Malachi when he invented the "Small Plates" text, nor to carefully restrict himself to Chapters 3 and 4. The pattern we observe points to post-Christ Nephites, not Joseph Smith.

One tangentially related note before I wrap this up: The account of Jesus dictating Malachi 3-4 to the Nephites suggests a possible explanation for other anachronistic Bible quotations in the Book of Mormon, such as Moroni's extended quotation from 1 Corinthians (Moro. 7, cf. 1 Cor. 13). If Jesus could bring the Nephites scriptures that were written after Lehi left Jerusalem, then other heavenly messengers could have done the same. We know (see 3 Ne. 28) that the Three Disciples traveled among both the Jews and the Gentiles, and that they "ministered unto" Mormon. Mormon lived in the 4th century AD, long after the books of the New Testament had been written, and it seems probable that the Three Disciples would have delivered some of the content of those books to him in the same way that Jesus delivered the words of Malachi at Bountiful.