Moses and the Exodus: Where the Book of Mormon parts ways with the Torah

Among the records on the brass plates were what Nephi describes as "the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents" (1 Ne. 5). Since our Bibles also contain "five books of Moses" -- the Torah or Pentateuch, comprising Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- it is natural to assume that the Nephites had these same five books.

I doubt this.

First, as Daymon Smith has pointed out in his Cultural History of the Book of Mormon, the description Nephi gives, while technically true of the Torah we have, would be a very odd way of summarizing it. If you were to read Nephi with no prior knowledge of the Bible, you would assume there were five books about the Creation and Adam and Eve. In fact only one of the Torah's five books, Genesis, touches on these topics, and only very briefly, in its first few chapters. The Torah as we have it is roughly 2% about the Creation and Adam and Eve, 25% about the Patriarchs, and 73% about the life and law of Moses.

(Smith's theory is that the original five books of Moses were lost to the Jews when the brass plates left Jerusalem with Lehi, and that the Torah we have is a collection of pseudepigrapha, cobbled together by later writers from oral traditions, and organized into five books because one of those surviving traditions was that there had been "five books of Moses." I would hesitate to go that far, but Smith deserves credit for pointing out that just because a book has a familiar name doesn't necessarily mean it's the same book we know.)

Second, one of the first things I discovered after starting this blog was that the Nephites knew nothing about Aaron or the Aaronide priesthood. In the Old Testament we have, Aaron is a very major figure, mentioned nearly half as often as Moses himself; but if you read only the Book of Mormon, you wouldn't even know that Aaron existed. To me this is very strong evidence that the "five books of Moses" on the brass plates were different from our Torah, and specifically that they probably didn't include anything like Leviticus or the other "Priestly" material.

Since we can't simply take it for granted that the Nephites had the same Torah that we have, the purpose of this post is to explore possible differences between the story of Moses and the Exodus as known to the Nephites and the version we have in our Bibles.

1. A much shorter sojourn in Egypt?

According to the Torah as we have it, the Israelites left Egypt with Moses exactly 430 years after their ancestor Jacob and his family had taken up residence there (Ex. 12:40-41) -- but we are also told that Jacob's grandson Kohath was among those who entered Egypt (Gen. 46:8-11), and that Moses was Kohath's grandson (Ex. 6:18-20). Kohath lived 133 years; Moses' father, Amram, lived 137; and Moses died at 120 (Deut. 34:7) -- so there's no way to make the numbers work. What does the Book of Mormon say on the question? Did the Israelites live in Egypt for more than four centuries, or only for three generations?

Neither.

And it came to pass that my father, Lehi, also found upon the plates of brass a genealogy of his fathers; wherefore he knew that he was a descendant of Joseph; yea, even that Joseph who was the son of Jacob, who was sold into Egypt, and who was preserved by the hand of the Lord, that he might preserve his father, Jacob, and all his household from perishing with famine. And they were also led out of captivity and out of the land of Egypt, by that same God who had preserved them (1 Ne. 5:15).

To whom do the pronouns I have bolded refer? Who have we just been told God preserved? Joseph, and then, via Joseph, Jacob and his household. Those same people -- the people who were saved from the famine by Joseph -- were led out of the land of Egypt. We are told in Ether 13:7 that either Joseph himself or Jacob died in Egypt, but not all of that generation did. Those who had known Joseph lived to see Moses -- into Egypt and out in a single lifetime.

Doesn't that make more sense anyway? Wouldn't you expect the Israelite culture to have been deeply influenced by that of Egypt if they had really lived there for 430 years? Do you see any signs of that at all in the Bible? There are plenty of pagan fingerprints there, to be sure, but all Canaanite and Mesopotamian, not Egyptian.

In the Torah we have, Joseph enters Egypt as a slave but rises from that station to become second only to Pharaoh in power. When his family joins him in Egypt, they come as honored guests. But then when the Israelites leave Egypt, they are slaves again. Exodus explains this by way of "a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph" (Ex. 1:8) -- because he lived 400-some years after Joseph! -- who decided to re-enslave this formerly high-ranking family. In the condensed timeline suggested by the Book of Mormon, there's no reason to assume the Israelites in Egypt were ever anything other than slaves.

This timeline also fits better with the prophecy of Joseph, quoted by Lehi:

Yea, Joseph truly said: Thus saith the Lord unto me: A choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins . . . . And he shall be great like unto Moses, whom I have said I would raise up unto you, to deliver my people, O house of Israel. And Moses will I raise up, to deliver thy people out of the land of Egypt. . . . Yea, thus prophesied Joseph: I am sure of this thing [the coming of the seer], even as I am sure of the promise of Moses; for the Lord hath said unto me, I will preserve thy seed forever (2 Ne. 3:7, 9-10, 16).

Back in my deboonking days, I used to cite this as evidence against the Book of Mormon: Joseph Smith carelessly has the Lord tell Joseph about a future seer who "shall be great like unto Moses," and then, remembering too late that Moses lived after Joseph, Smith tries to salvage the prophecy by having the Lord add parenthetically, "oh, and by the way, there's going to be this guy called Moses." (We see something similar in Ether 13, where we are told that Ether prophesied about the New Jerusalem, oh, and by the way about the yet-to-be-built original Jerusalem, too.) Obviously a clumsy mistake on the part of Joseph Smith, not a genuinely ancient prophecy.

This argument evaporates, and the prophecy reads much more naturally, if we assume that Joseph knew Moses. They were contemporaries. The Lord doesn't say "a great prophet whose name will be Moses"; he just says "Moses." They knew who Moses was. He was already a public figure, perhaps a prince in the court of Pharaoh as in the Torah we have, and the Lord was promising to "raise up" this Moses and make of him a deliverer for Joseph and his people.

This would make it impossible for Moses to be a descendant of Levi, but that's only a problem if we think the Aaronic/Levitical priesthood was instituted by Moses, and we don't think that.

2. How the Red Sea was parted

In Exodus, the only action Moses performs to part the Red Sea is to lift up his rod and stretch out his hand over the sea:

And the Lord said unto Moses, . . . But lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea. . . . And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided (Ex. 14:15-16, 26).

According to Nephi in the Book of Mormon, Moses parted the Red Sea by speaking to it:

Let us be strong like unto Moses; for he truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither (1 Ne. 4:2-3).

Now ye know that Moses was commanded of the Lord to do that great work; and ye know that by his word the waters of the Red Sea were divided hither and thither, and they passed through on dry ground (1 Ne. 17:26).

A much later Nephi, the son of Helaman, is perhaps confusing Moses with Elijah or Elisha (2 Kgs. 2:1-2, 5-15) when he speaks of him smiting the Red Sea to part the waters:

Behold, my brethren, have ye not read that God gave power unto one man, even Moses, to smite upon the waters of the Red Sea, and they parted hither and thither, insomuch that the Israelites, who were our fathers, came through upon dry ground, and the waters closed upon the armies of the Egyptians and swallowed them up? (Hel. 8:11).

3. The serpents

In the Torah, the Lord sends "fiery serpents" (seraphim) to bite the Israelites (Num. 21:6). Nephi calls them "fiery flying serpents" (1 Ne. 17:41). This is a phrase from Isaiah (14:29 and 30:6) and perhaps reflects Nephi's obvious interest in that book more than any variant version of the Exodus story he may have had.

When Moses prepares a serpent of brass on which victims of the seraphim may look to be healed, the Book of Mormon adds that many people simply refused to do so and thus perished. The Torah says nothing of this.

He sent fiery flying serpents among them; and after they were bitten he prepared a way that they might be healed; and the labor which they had to perform was to look; and because of the simpleness of the way, or the easiness of it, there were many who perished (1 Ne. 17:41).

The Son of God . . . was spoken of by Moses; yea, and behold a type was raised up in the wilderness, that whosoever would look upon it might live. And many did look and live. But few understood the meaning of those things, and this because of the hardness of their hearts. But there were many who were so hardened that they would not look, therefore they perished. Now the reason they would not look is because they did not believe that it would heal them (Alma 33:18-20).

One other possible difference is that the Book of Mormon says God "gave unto Moses power that he should heal the nations after they had been bitten by the poisonous serpents" (2 Ne. 25:20). "The nations" -- goyim -- typically means non-Israelite peoples, but in the Torah only Israelites are bitten. It's possible that "nations" here refers to the twelve tribes, though.

4. Messianic prophecies

In the Torah, the only hint of a Messianic prophecy from Moses -- and thus the sole foundation of the Samaritan Messianic tradition -- is the promise of a future "prophet" (later called the Taheb) in Deuteronomy 18:

The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken; . . .

And the Lord said unto me, . . . I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him (Deut. 18:15, 17-19).

The Book of Mormon refers several times to a slightly different version of this. The main difference is that the specific punishment of being "cut off from among the people" replaces Deuteronomy's vague "I will require it of him":

Moses . . . spake, saying: A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass that all those who will not hear that prophet shall be cut off from among the people (1 Ne. 22:20).

Behold, I [Jesus] am he of whom Moses spake, saying: A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass that every soul who will not hear that prophet shall be cut off from among the people (3 Ne. 20:23).

Therefore it shall come to pass that whosoever will not believe in my words, who am Jesus Christ, which the Father shall cause him to bring forth unto the Gentiles, and shall give unto him power that he shall bring them forth unto the Gentiles, (it shall be done even as Moses said) they shall be cut off from among my people who are of the covenant (3 Ne. 21:11).

The above references clearly cite Moses as the source of this saying, including the "cut off from among the people" but, but he never says it in the Torah we have. In fact, Deuteronomy, the only book of the Torah to mention the promised Prophet, is also the only one to have no references to this sort of "cutting off."

Besides this slightly different version of the Taheb prophecy, the Book of Mormon attributes more explicitly Christian prophecies to Moses but gives few details:

For behold, did not Moses prophesy unto them concerning the coming of the Messiah, and that God should redeem his people? (Mosiah 13:33).

[Zenos and Zenock] are not the only ones who have spoken concerning the Son of God. Behold, he was spoken of by Moses; yea, and behold a type was raised up in the wilderness, that whosoever would look upon it might live (Alma 33:18-19).

Moses . . . hath spoken concerning the coming of the Messiah. Yea, did he not bear record that the Son of God should come? And as he lifted up the brazen serpent in the wilderness, even so shall he be lifted up who should come. And as many as should look upon that serpent should live, even so as many as should look upon the Son of God with faith, having a contrite spirit, might live, even unto that life which is eternal (Hel. 8:13-15).

The Helaman reference above (from Nephi the son of Helaman) is the only one to give any detail, but it is not clear how much of it is being attributed to Moses. Moses said the Son of God should come, and Moses lifted up the serpent -- but did he connect the two, and say that the Son would be lifted up like the serpent, or was that connection made by later prophets like Alma and Nephi?

5. The Lord's "burial" of Moses

The Book of Mormon reports speculation that Alma the Younger's mortal life may have ended in the same unusual way as that of Moses:

Behold, this we know, that [Alma] was a righteous man; and the saying went abroad in the church that he was taken up by the Spirit, or buried by the hand of the Lord, even as Moses. But behold, the scriptures saith the Lord took Moses unto himself; and we suppose that he has also received Alma in the spirit, unto himself; therefore, for this cause we know nothing concerning his death and burial" (Alma 45:19).

Deuteronomy also has an account of Moses being "buried by the hand of the Lord" after viewing the Promised Land from the top of Mt. Nebo in Moab:

And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.

So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And he [the Lord] buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated (Deut. 34:4-7).

These are obviously forms of the same tradition, but they are not the same. Deuteronomy is quite specific that the Lord buried Moses in a specific location on earth ("in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor"), which seems to preclude reading the "burial" as a figurative reference to Moses being "taken up by the Spirit." I guess you could read it as giving the location from which Moses was translated to heaven (just as Elijah was translated on the bank of the Jordan) but it seems pretty forced. "Buried" seems like a pretty odd metaphor for being taken up into heaven, too.

More definitively, the Book of Mormon (I suppose it is Mormon writing in his own voice) clearly states that "the scriptures saith the Lord took Moses unto himself" -- but no scripture that made it into our Bible does say that or anything like it. Therefore, the Nephites had a different account of the end of Moses' life, not simply a different interpretation of Deuteronomy.

You, Lady, are the Tree

Today, serendipity led me a to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, first published in Das Buch der Bilder (1902), which echoes a theme from Nephi's vision. Here it is in case you want to slip it into your next sacrament meeting talk.

First, Nephi, as translated by Joseph Smith:

And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me, "Look!"

And I looked and beheld a tree; and it was like unto the tree which my father had seen; and the beauty thereof was far beyond, yea, exceeding of all beauty; and the whiteness thereof did exceed the whiteness of the driven snow.

And it came to pass after I had seen the tree, I said unto the Spirit, "I behold thou hast shown unto me the tree which is precious above all."

And he said unto me, "What desirest thou?"

And I said unto him, "To know the interpretation thereof" -- for I spake unto him as a man speaketh; for I beheld that he was in the form of a man; yet nevertheless, I knew that it was the Spirit of the Lord; and he spake unto me as a man speaketh with another.

And it came to pass that he said unto me, "Look!"

And I looked as if to look upon him, and I saw him not; for he had gone from before my presence. And it came to pass that I looked and beheld the great city of Jerusalem, and also other cities. And I beheld the city of Nazareth; and in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white.

And it came to pass that I saw the heavens open; and an angel came down and stood before me; and he said unto me, "Nephi, what beholdest thou?"

And I said unto him, "A virgin, most beautiful and fair above all other virgins."

And he said unto me, "Knowest thou the condescension of God?"

And I said unto him, "I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things."

And he said unto me, "Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God, after the manner of the flesh."

And it came to pass that I beheld that she was carried away in the Spirit; and after she had been carried away in the Spirit for the space of a time the angel spake unto me, saying, "Look!"

And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms.

And the angel said unto me: "Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?" (1 Ne. 8:11-21)

And now, Rilke, as translated by J. B. Leishman:

Annunciation

(Words of the Angel)

You are not nearer God than we;

he's far from everyone.

And yet your hands most wonderfully

reveal his benison.

From woman's sleeves none ever grew

so ripe, so shimmeringly:

I am the day, I am the dew,

you, Lady, are the Tree.

Pardon, now my long journey's done,

I had forgot to say

what he who sat as in the sun,

grand in his gold array,

told me to tell you, pensive one

(space has bewildered me).

I am the start of what's begun,

you, Lady, are the Tree.

I spread my wings out wide and rose,

the space around grew less;

your little house quite overflows

with my abundant dress.

But still you keep your solitude

and hardly notice me:

I'm but a breeze within the wood,

you, Lady, are the Tree.

The angels tremble in their choir,

grow pale, and separate:

never were longing and desire

so vague and yet so great.

Something perhaps is going to be

that you perceived in dream.

Hail to you! for my soul can see

that you are ripe and teem.

You lofty gate, that any day

may open for our good:

you ear my longing songs assay,

my word -- I know now -- lost its way

in you as in a wood.

And thus your last dream was designed

to be fulfilled by me.

God looked at me: he made me blind . . .

You, Lady, are the Tree.

Who was the "angel" who appeared to Laman and Lemuel?

Shortly after leaving Jerusalem, Lehi sends his sons back to acquire the plates of brass from Laban. First they apparently just try asking him, not even offering any payment until their second attempt! I can’t even hazard a guess as to why they thought he would just give them this precious (and apparently secret) record for free, but I assume there’s some better explanation than "they were stupid."

Laman doesn’t even want to try a second time, since Laban has just threatened to kill him, but Nephi manages to persuade him. After the second attempt to get the plates ends with the brothers fleeing for their lives as Laban keeps his plates and helps himself to their property, Laman is understandably annoyed:

And it came to pass that Laman was angry with me, and also with my father; and also was Lemuel, for he hearkened unto the words of Laman. Wherefore Laman and Lemuel did speak many hard words unto us, their younger brothers, and they did smite us even with a rod. And it came to pass as they smote us with a rod, behold, an angel of the Lord came and stood before them, and he spake unto them, saying:

Why do ye smite your younger brother with a rod? Know ye not that the Lord hath chosen him to be a ruler over you, and this because of your iniquities? Behold ye shall go up to Jerusalem again, and the Lord will deliver Laban into your hands.

And after the angel had spoken unto us, he departed. And after the angel had departed, Laman and Lemuel again began to murmur, saying:

How is it possible that the Lord will deliver Laban into our hands? Behold, he is a mighty man, and he can command fifty, yea, even he can slay fifty; then why not us? (1 Ne. 3:28-31).

The standard Mormon reading of this is basically that Laman and Lemuel were idiots. They immediately resume complaining and saying their mission is impossible, even though an angel has just appeared to them and promised divine assistance. The story is sometimes cited as demonstrating the futility of showing signs to unbelievers, since they will perversely refuse to believe no matter how in-your-face the proof.

Maybe. But as I've said, I tend to prefer explanations other than "they were stupid."

Looking back at the account of the angel's visit, you can see that there is no mention of anything overtly supernatural. We are not told that the angel came down from heaven, that he radiated light, that his voice shook the earth, or anything of that nature. Nor are we told that Laman and Lemuel were terrified or astonished. The whole thing is remarkably matter-of-fact: "An angel of the Lord came and stood before them, and he spake unto them . . . . And after the angel had spoken unto us, he departed." If you replaced angel (of the Lord) with soothsayer or stranger or even just man, no other changes would be necessitated.

Well, sometimes angelic visitations are like that. Pace Rilke, not every angel is terrible; some, we are told, have even “entertained angels unawares" (Heb. 13:2). I propose that Laman and Lemuel’s visitant appeared as an ordinary man, and that the only thing observably “angelic” about him was the content of his message, which suggested supernatural knowledge of them and their mission — but only suggested, for might not an ordinary mortal have overheard enough of their quarrel to be able to say what this angel said?

I think that’s just about the right amount of miraculousness to make the reactions of both Nephi and his brothers understandable. For one who already accepted the reality of angels, it would be natural to assume the visitor was an angel, but this understanding would not force itself on a skeptic.

After the angel departs and Laman and Lemuel resume their murmuring, Nephi tries to inspire them with a story about the Exodus and concludes:

Now behold ye know that this [story about Moses] is true; and ye also know that an angel hath spoken unto you; wherefore can ye doubt? (1 Ne. 4:3).

The language here is telling: “ye also know,” just as you know what happened in Egypt hundreds of years ago. This isn’t the way he would speak if the angelic visitation were just an obvious fact. He’s appealing to their faith. He’s saying, in effect, “Come on, you have to admit that guy was an angel, right?”

How successful was Nephi’s attempt at persuasion?

Now when I had spoken these words, they were yet wroth, and did still continue to murmur (1 Ne. 4:4).

They weren’t convinced. Nephi wasn’t pointing out the obvious; he was arguing for a particular interpretation of what had just happened.

I’ve just been reading in 3 Nephi 28 about the disciples commonly known as the Three Nephites (although the Book of Mormon never actually specifies their ethnicity). They were transformed into such beings “as the angels of God” (3 Ne. 28:30) but not changed to the same degree as those who are resurrected, and they apparently still looked like ordinary people, since one would scarcely try to put an obvious angel in prison.

My first thought was that Laman and Lemuel's "angel" might have been the same sort of person -- what Mormons call a "translated being," who is made quasi-immortal without dying. But who, exactly? The only figures we know of before the time in question who may not have died are Enoch, Moses, and Elijah. Moses is an interesting possibility, because after the "angel" leaves, Nephi immediately begins talking about Moses -- but on balance I think it was probably not Moses for that very reason. Nephi talks about Moses and then about the angel; if he suspected that the angel was Moses, he would surely have said something to that effect. And if he had no such suspicions, then his talking about Moses was just a massive coincidence. To be clear, I do accept the reality of massive coincidences, but all in all Moses just doesn't fit. Why would that particular person have been sent to encourage them on their quest for the brass plates?

There's someone who fits much better -- not a translated being after all.

In my September 23 post "Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?" (which you should read now if you haven't yet), I propose that the book Lehi reads in his vision represents Laban's brass plates, the record of the descendants of Joseph, and that the being who gives it to him is Joseph himself. In explaining why I thought this, I referred to Joseph's dreams as recorded in Genesis 37. Here's how his brothers reacted to the first of these:

And his [elder] brethren said to him, Shalt thou indeed reign over us? or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words (Gen. 37:8).

Compare this to what the angel says to Nephi's brothers:

Why do ye smite your younger brother with a rod? Know ye not that the Lord hath chosen him to be a ruler over you, and this because of your iniquities? (1 Ne. 3:29).

This fits perfectly, I think. Lehi and Nephi were righteous descendants of Joseph, but the Josephite record -- the brass book -- was currently in the hands of the wicked Laban. This ancestral spirit, as a post-mortal "angel," first appears to Lehi and allows him to read some of the brass book and then intervenes to help Nephi secure it. And just as Joseph told his elder brothers that he would rule over them, making them so angry that they plotted his death, so he came to deliver a similar message to Nephi's elder brothers.

One other little supporting detail is that the angel promises that "the Lord will deliver Laban into your hands" (1 Ne. 3:29). This is the first time deliver and hands occur together in the Book of Mormon, and the next several occurrences are all in this story of getting the brass plates from Laban. The first two times deliver and hands occur together in the King James Bible are both in, of all places, Genesis 37:

And Reuben heard it [the plot to kill Joseph], and he delivered him out of their hands; and said, Let us not kill him. And Reuben said unto them, Shed no blood, but cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, and lay no hand upon him; that he might rid him out of their hands, to deliver him to his father again (Gen. 37:21-22).

Under the subconscious biblical contamination theory, the choice of words suggests a link between Joseph and the events of 1 Nephi 3-4, as if Joseph Smith subconsciously understood who the "angel" was.

The question of Lehi's ethnicity

Note: This is a lightly edited repost of something I wrote in 2014.

What was the ethnic background of Lehi? In one sense, the question is easy to answer. Alma 10:3 explicitly states that “Lehi, who came out of the land of Jerusalem, … was a descendant of Manasseh, who was the son of Joseph who was sold into Egypt by the hands of his brethren.”

From this we might assume that Lehi, a descendant of Manasseh who had nevertheless “dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days” (1 Nephi 1:4), was descended from those Manassites who, together with members of the tribes of Ephraim and Simeon, fled from the Northern Kingdom to Jerusalem during the reign of Asa, as described in 2 Chronicles 15.

The strange thing, though, is that Lehi apparently didn’t know he was a descendant of Manasseh. He found this out only after he had left Jerusalem. Having obtained the brass plates from Laban, “Lehi, also found upon the plates of brass a genealogy of his fathers; wherefore he knew that he was a descendant of Joseph, yea, even that Joseph who was the son of Jacob, who was sold into Egypt . . . And thus my father, Lehi, did discover the genealogy of his fathers. And Laban was also a descendant of Joseph, wherefore he and his fathers had kept records” (1 Ne 5:14, 16).

So, leaving aside the actual facts of his ancestry, which were unknown to him, what did Lehi think he was? What ethnicity did he identify with culturally and in practice?

The most obvious guess would be that Lehi thought of himself as a member of the tribe of Judah — as a “Jew,” to use a somewhat anachronistic term. During the 300 or so years separating the time of Lehi from the immigration of his Manassite ancestors into Jerusalem, it seems likely that the Northern immigrants would have become completely assimilated into Judah and lost their distinct tribal identities. Certainly Manasseh was already considered a “lost tribe” by the time of Lehi.

However, there are certain suggestions in the early chapters of the book (prior to the discovery of Lehi’s Manassite ancestry) that Lehi and his family did not self-identify as Jews. Lehi’s son Nephi, referring to his rebellious brothers Laman and Lemuel, says that they “were like unto the Jews who were at Jerusalem, who sought to take away the life of my father” (1 Nephi 2:13). And in the next chapter, as Lehi explains the plan to obtain the brass plates, he says, “Laban hath a record of the Jews and also a genealogy of my forefathers, and they are engraven upon plates of brass” (1 Nephi 3:3). There is more than one way to interpret such passages, but in my opinion the most natural reading is one which implies a distinction between Lehi’s family on the one hand and “the Jews” on the other.

Another possibility which suggests itself is that Lehi was of Egyptian extraction and that, while he lived in Jerusalem and worshiped the Hebrew God, he did not know that he himself had Hebrew blood. It seems probable that some of the Israelites might have “gone native” while in Egypt and have been left behind by the Exodus — and this would have been especially natural for descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh, who were half-Egyptian by blood and could thus have “passed” more readily among the indigenous population.

When Nephi reports the discovery of their genealogy on the brass plates, he never mentions which tribe they belong to, saying simply “it sufficeth me to say that we are descendants of Joseph” (1 Nephi 6:2). Manasseh is only mentioned much later, in passing, by one of Nephi’s distant descendants. But while he displays a rather un-Israelite lack of interest in tribal affiliation, Nephi does make a point of mentioning that his ancestor was “that Joseph who was the son of Jacob, who was sold into Egypt” (1 Nephi 5:14). This emphasis is more consistent with an Egyptian discovering his Hebrew roots than with an Israelite learning that he belonged to a different tribe than he had supposed.

We also know that Lehi spoke and wrote Egyptian as well as Hebrew. Nephi says that his father’s language “consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2). A thousand years after Lehi, his descendants were still using both Egyptian and Hebrew, though in modified form (Mormon 9:32-33). Laban seems also to have had the learning of the Jews via the language of the Egyptians; his brass plates, which included some texts also found in the Old Testament, were written in Egyptian characters (see Mosiah 1:3-4).

Against this Egyptian hypothesis, though, we have the following words of Nephi to his brothers, spoken before they had obtained the brass plates and discovered their Josephite ancestry: “Moses . . . spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither, and our fathers came through . . . the Lord is able to deliver us, even as our fathers, and to destroy Laban, even as the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 4:2-3). It’s hard to reconcile such language with the hypothesis that Nephi was himself an Egyptian.

To summarize the data to be explained:

• Prior to receiving the brass plates, Lehi apparently knew he was an Israelite but did not know to which tribe he belonged. In the Exodus story, the Hebrews, not the Egyptians, were his “fathers.”
• However, he seems not to have considered himself a “Jew.” (Laban’s servant also speaks of “the Jews” as if he were not one of them.)
• Although he did not know his own ancestry, he knew that his kinsman Laban knew. (Was their family history some kind of secret to which Laban was privy but Lehi was not? Why?)
• Even after learning that he was of the tribe of Manasseh, Lehi seems not to have been interested in this specific tribal identity so much as in his status as a descendant of Joseph.
• Egyptian was apparently the main language of both Lehi and Laban, although they also spoke Hebrew (see Mormon 9:33). The fact that Laban’s copy of the writings of Isaiah and other Hebrew prophets was an Egyptian translation is strong evidence that he was more comfortable with Egyptian than Hebrew.

My own best guess would be that Lehi was an Egyptian, but that there was an unsubstantiated family tradition that they were actually of Hebrew blood. (In this he would be similar to the many modern-day Mormons who believe, without direct genealogical evidence, that they are descendants of Ephraim.) What he read on the brass plates was not so much a revelation as a confirmation of what he had already suspected. Why this confirmation was a secret kept by Laban is anyone’s guess.

Later Nephite understanding of being "cut off from the presence of the Lord"

"Inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments, ye shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord." My last two posts discuss the origin of this Nephite saying and what Nephi himself may have understood it to mean. In this post I want to look at later Nephite (and, in one case, Lamanite) interpretations.

Jacob

Nephi's brother Jacob, the priest, is the first to relate being "cut off from the presence of the Lord" to the fall of Adam:

For as death hath passed upon all men, to fulfil the merciful plan of the great Creator, there must needs be a power of resurrection, and the resurrection must needs come unto man by reason of the fall; and the fall came by reason of transgression; and because man became fallen they were cut off from the presence of the Lord.

Wherefore, it must needs be an infinite atonement -- save it should be an infinite atonement this corruption could not put on incorruption. Wherefore, the first judgment which came upon man must needs have remained to an endless duration. And if so, this flesh must have laid down to rot and to crumble to its mother earth, to rise no more (2 Ne. 9:6-7).

From various references scattered throughout the Book of Mormon, it appears that the Nephites had an Adam-and-Eve story broadly similar to the one we have in Genesis -- perhaps even identical, if mainstream scholars are correct in identifying the story as very old "J" material, not the Levitical "P" source which the Nephites seem not to have had. In Genesis, it appears that the Lord walked and talked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but after eating the forbidden fruit, they "hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God" (Gen. 3:8). We can infer that such direct contact ceased altogether after they were expelled from the Garden. In a fairly straightforward sense, then, the fall resulted in their being "cut off from the presence of the Lord."

This sense of the expression would not seem to apply to Laman and Lemuel (who were reportedly "cut off from the presence of the Lord" shortly before Jacob's sermon), as they never had access to the kind of direct "presence" Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden. Or did they? In 1 Ne. 3:29-31, Laman and Lemuel are visited by "an angel of the Lord" (often understood in the Old Testament to be a manifestation of the Lord himself), and they seem to take it in their stride, as if it were no very unusual occurrence. In 1 Ne. 16:39, "the voice of the Lord" speaks "many words" to Laman and Lemuel, and this seems not to have been an isolated occurrence, either. Nephi later reminds Laman and Lemuel, "ye have heard [the Lord's] voice from time to time" (1 Ne. 17:45). Quite unusually for those characterized as "wicked," Laman and Lemuel appear to have had quite direct access to the Lord's "presence" while Nephi was with them, and this apparently ended later.

Looking back at Jacob's words quoted above, though, is this really the kind of cutting-off he is talking about? Perhaps not. The context is all about physical death and resurrection, as if to die were to be cut off from the presence of the Lord, with resurrection remedying this.

This is the opposite of how we are accustomed to thinking; we tend to assume that it is here in mortality that we are more or less separated from God, to whose presence we return after death. This common understanding is reinforced by Alma the Younger, who teaches that between death and resurrection, "the spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life" (Alma 40:11), while after resurrection "the wicked . . . are cast out" (Alma 40:26).

Alma the Younger

While preaching in Ammonihah, Alma the Younger repeats Nephi's claim that the Lamanites have been cut off:

Now I would that ye should remember, that inasmuch as the Lamanites have not kept the commandments of God, they have been cut off from the presence of the Lord. Now we see that the word of the Lord has been verified in this thing, and the Lamanites have been cut off from his presence, from the beginning of their transgressions in the land (Alma 9:14).

Alma points to the cutting-off of the Lamanites as having verified the word of the Lord to Lehi and Nephi. In order to qualify as evidence for anything, the cutting-off must be an observable fact, so it cannot refer (only) to their inner spiritual status (not being in a state of grace or whatever), nor to their fate in the afterlife. Neither can the cutting-off be death itself, since it occurred "from the beginning of their transgressions in the land" but the Lamanites did not die at that time. It could refer to the withdrawal of angelic visitations and such, as suggested above -- or, more observably, to their exclusion from the Nephite temple and priesthood.

In Alma's advice to his son Corianton, he goes into more detail about the "cutting off" that came from the fall of Adam:

But behold, it was appointed unto man to die -- therefore, as they were cut off from the tree of life they should be cut off from the face of the earth -- and man became lost forever, yea, they became fallen man. And now, ye see by this that our first parents were cut off both temporally and spiritually from the presence of the Lord . . . .

Now behold, it was not expedient that man should be reclaimed from this temporal death, for that would destroy the great plan of happiness. Therefore, as the soul could never die, and the fall had brought upon all mankind a spiritual death as well as a temporal, that is, they were cut off from the presence of the Lord, it was expedient that mankind should be reclaimed from this spiritual death. . . .

And now remember, my son, if it were not for the plan of redemption, (laying it aside) as soon as they were dead their souls were miserable, being cut off from the presence of the Lord. . . . And thus we see that all mankind were fallen, and they were in the grasp of justice; yea, the justice of God, which consigned them forever to be cut off from his presence (Alma 42:6-9, 11, 14).

Alma refers first to being "cut off both temporally and spiritually" and later to "a spiritual death as well as a temporal," suggesting that one of the meanings of cutting-off is death. This seems to be how Mormon uses the expression when he says of one holding heretical views on baptism, "should he be cut off [i.e., die] while in the thought, he must go down to hell" (Moro. 8:14).

Alma's "cut off both temporally and spiritually from the presence of the Lord" is syntactically ambiguous, but in context I think it means "cut off both (a) temporally, by dying; and (b) spiritually, by being separated from the presence of the Lord." Being cut off from the presence of the Lord would them be synonymous with "spiritual death." This spiritual death or cutting-off apparently comes in two phases: Adam and Eve were immediately cut off from God's presence, but also "as soon as they were dead" they would be "cut off from the presence of the Lord." Perhaps this means being even more cut-off than they were in life, or perhaps it means that a provisional cutting-off during mortality would become permanent after death.

As noted above, Alma has just said that upon death "all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life" (Alma 40:11). Here he explains that this universal homecoming is an effect of "the plan of redemption," without which death would bring immediate and permanent cutting-off.

Samuel the Lamanite

Samuel the Lamanite follows Alma closely in equating cutting-off with spiritual death and connecting it to the fall of Adam:

Yea, behold, this death [of Christ] bringeth to pass the resurrection, and redeemeth all mankind from the first death -- that spiritual death; for all mankind, by the fall of Adam being cut off from the presence of the Lord, are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual. But behold, the resurrection of Christ redeemeth mankind, yea, even all mankind, and bringeth them back into the presence of the Lord.

Yea, and it bringeth to pass the condition of repentance, that whosoever repenteth the same is not hewn down and cast into the fire; but whosoever repenteth not is hewn down and cast into the fire; and there cometh upon them again a spiritual death, yea, a second death, for they are cut off again as to things pertaining to righteousness (Hel. 14:16-18).

For Samuel, the "first death" and "second death" are both spiritual in nature. The first death means being cut off from the presence of the Lord, and the second means being "cut off again as to things pertaining to righteousness." I'm not sure if the use of again means that this is just another way of expressing separation from the Lord, or if "things pertaining to righteousness" means something else.

Although Samuel characterizes both "deaths" as spiritual, the first death also seems to have something to do with physical mortality. He says that resurrection brings "all mankind . . . back into the presence of the Lord," which is a curious thing to say. It's not clear why being physically resurrected would mean returning to the presence of the Lord, or how "all mankind" being brought into his presence is to be reconciled with the statement that some of them will be "cast into the fire" of hell. (Contrast Samuel with Alma, who explicitly says it is before resurrection that all men are brought home to God.) I think it's better to deal with this more fully when I reach that part of the Book of Mormon. Here I merely want to note it as a later development of the "cutting-off" idea introduced by Nephi or Lehi, one which apparently differs from Nephi's own interpretation.

Mormon

In Helaman 12, Mormon gives a long list of things that God can cause to happen just by speaking. This is one of them:

And behold, if the Lord shall say unto a man -- Because of thine iniquities, thou shalt be accursed forever -- it shall be done.

 

And if the Lord shall say -- Because of thine iniquities thou shalt be cut off from my presence -- he will cause that it shall be so. And wo unto him to whom he shall say this, for it shall be unto him that will do iniquity, and he cannot be saved; therefore, for this cause, that men might be saved, hath repentance been declared (Hel. 12:20-22).

Mormon does not spell out what he means here, but it seems to refer to damnation after death, the "second death" spoken of by Samuel.

Moroni

Moroni's abridgment of the Book of Ether twice mentions cutting-off, though again the exact meaning is not clear:

And the Lord said unto him: I will forgive thee and thy brethren of their sins; but thou shalt not sin any more, for ye shall remember that my Spirit will not always strive with man; wherefore, if ye will sin until ye are fully ripe ye shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And these are my thoughts upon the land which I shall give you for your inheritance; for it shall be a land choice above all other lands (Ether 2:15).

This is interesting because, just as in the original revelation to Nephi, it pairs the threat of cutting-off with the promise of a land "choice above all other lands." It's not clear if cutting-off here means death (the Jaredites were destroyed), a withdrawal of direct revelation, or something else. (Also, "these are my thoughts"? What does that mean? Not a topic for this post.)

Another reference in Ether is interesting because it makes it very clear that (in this case anyway) cutting-off does not mean death:

And [Morianton] did do justice unto the people, but not unto himself because of his many whoredoms; wherefore he was cut off from the presence of the Lord.

And it came to pass that Morianton built up many cities, and the people became exceedingly rich under his reign . . . . And Morianton did live to an exceedingly great age, and then he begat Kim; and Kim did reign in the stead of his father; and he did reign eight years, and his father died (Ether 10:11-13).

Whatever cutting-off means here, it obviously doesn't mean an untimely demise, nor does it mean being "cursed" in any material sense. I don't think it refers to damnation after death, either, since it is reported as an an observed fact, and reported before he builds cities, becomes rich, lives a long life, and dies. I guess the likeliest reading is that, like the priests in Leviticus, he was "excommunicated" by the religious authorities and excluded from certain holy places or rites.

What did "cut off from the presence of the Lord" mean to Nephi?

"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 the presence of the Lord": My last post catalogues instances and variants of that sentence in the Book of Mormon and speculates as to its origin. In this post and the next one, I want to explore what exactly is being threatened in the last clause. What does it mean to be cut off from the Lord's presence?

The only biblical reference to being cut off from the presence of the Lord is in the Holiness code of Leviticus. For reasons explained in my earlier post "The Nephites knew nothing of an 'Aaronic priesthood,'" I do not believe that Lehi or his descendants had the Book of Leviticus in anything like its present form; their "five books of Moses" (1 Ne. 5:11) and "law of Moses" (1 Ne. 4:15 and passim) were not the same as the Torah we know. Still, Lehi and Nephi came out of the same general cultural milieu that later produced Leviticus, so that book can give us some clues as to what the phrase may have meant to them. Here is the passage in question, reporting the Lord's words to Moses:

Speak unto Aaron and to his sons, that they separate themselves from the holy things of the children of Israel, and that they profane not my holy name in those things which they hallow unto me: I am the Lord. Say unto them,Whosoever he be of all your seed among your generations, that goeth unto the holy things, which the children of Israel hallow unto the Lord, having his uncleanness upon him, that soul shall be cut off from my presence: I am the Lord. . . .

The soul which hath touched any [unclean thing] shall be unclean until even, and shall not eat of the holy things, unless he wash his flesh with water. And when the sun is down, he shall be clean, and shall afterward eat of the holy things; because it is his food (Lev. 22:2-3, 6-7).

If I am right that Leviticus was produced long after Moses's time, then it is actually describing later Temple regulations and projecting them back in time to the Tabernacle of Moses. Here, the idea seems to be that those who enter the Tabernacle/Temple are entering the presence of "the Lord of hosts, which dwelleth between the cherubims" (1 Sam. 4:4). A priest who "goeth unto the holy things" while ritually unclean will be cut off from that presence -- meaning, I think, that he will lose his access to the Temple and his right to function as a priest. Among the "holy things" which a priest would "eat of" was the shewbread -- literally "bread of the presence" -- reinforcing this interpretation that the "presence of the Lord" has to do with the Temple and what pertains to it.

It seems very likely that Nephi also understood the "presence of the Lord" in this way. Consider this passage, where he describes what he sees as a fulfilment of the Inasmuch Promise:

And it came to pass that the Lord did warn me, that I, Nephi, should depart from [Laman and Lemuel] and flee into the wilderness, and all those who would go with me. . . . And we did take our tents and whatsoever things were possible for us, and did journey in the wilderness for the space of many days. . . . And it came to pass that we began to prosper exceedingly, and to multiply in the land. . . .

And I, Nephi, did build a temple; and I did construct it after the manner of the temple of Solomon save it were not built of so many precious things; for they were not to be found upon the land, wherefore, it could not be built like unto Solomon’s temple. But the manner of the construction was like unto the temple of Solomon; and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine. . . .

And behold, the words of the Lord had been fulfilled unto my brethren, which he spake concerning them, that I should be their ruler and their teacher. Wherefore, I had been their ruler and their teacher, according to the commandments of the Lord, until the time they sought to take away my life. Wherefore, the word of the Lord was fulfilled which he spake unto me, saying that: Inasmuch as they will not hearken unto thy words they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And behold, they were cut off from his presence (2 Ne. 5:5, 7, 13, 16, 19-20).

Nephi says that Laman and Lemuel have been "cut off from the presence of the Lord" -- but the narrative only tells us that they were cut off from the presence of Nephi. However, Nephi makes a point of mentioning that he built a temple "like unto Solomon's" only after separating from Laman and Lemuel. A few verses later (2 Ne. 5:26), he ordains his younger brothers Jacob and Joseph as priests (because Nephi knew nothing of Aaron or of the rule that only his descendants could be priests). If Laman and Lemuel had not rebelled against Nephi, they too would have had access to this temple. In fact, Nephi might have ordained them to be priests instead of Jacob and Joseph (just as Moses, according to later legend, had ordained his own elder brother). Having rebelled, though, they were, like the priests in Leviticus who profaned the holy things, "cut off" from the House of the Lord, in which his presence dwells.

Later Nephites, beginning with Nephi's own brother Jacob, would expand the meaning of being "cut off from the presence of the Lord," as I will discuss in my next post. I think this is what it meant to Nephi himself, though, and why he considered the threat of cutting-off to have been fulfilled when his people separated themselves from the Lamanites.

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 the presence of the Lord.

Note: Updated to include some references I had missed. Thank you, Rozy!

If anything counts as a Nephite cliché, this does. It occurs in the Book of Mormon, in whole or in part, with very minor variations, 15 times, written or spoken by six different people (Nephi, Lehi, Jarom, King Benjamin, Alma the Younger, and Mormon).

Where does this saying originally come from? It isn't biblical, nor is it found in the other writings of Joseph Smith. It appears to be either (a) something that was revealed to Nephi and later recast by Lehi in more epigrammatic form or (b) something that was independently revealed, in slightly different form, to both Lehi and Nephi.

The earliest instance we have is from Nephi. He believes in his father's dreams and visions, and prays for his brothers Laman and Lemuel, who do not. In response the Lord speaks to him. It is not clear if this was a literal voice or something else, but in any case it is presented a Nephi's first recorded revelation. Among the things the Lord says is this:

Blessed art thou, Nephi . . . . And inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall prosper, and shall be led to a land of promise; yea, even a land which I have prepared for you; yea, a land which is choice above all other lands. And inasmuch as thy brethren shall rebel against thee, they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And inasmuch as thou shalt keep my commandments, thou shalt be made a ruler and a teacher over thy brethren (1 Ne. 2:19-22).

Although this is the earliest instance of the saying, it is also the least typical. It includes "ye shall prosper" followed by a reference to "land," but not in the otherwise invariant form "ye shall prosper in the land." (Nephi later cites this revelation, in 1 Ne. 4:14, but condenses it to "prosper in the land of promise.") Its first and second halves refer to different groups of people: "ye" (a plural pronoun, including Nephi and unspecified others) vs. "thy brethren" (excluding Nephi). The most significant difference is that the second conditional clause is not about failing to keep God's commandments but rather about rebelling against Nephi.

In this form, the saying is too specific -- too anchored to Laman, Lemuel, and Nephi as individuals -- to have become proverbial until it was (I think) recast by Lehi.

Lehi later reports that he has "obtained a promise" -- meaning a direct revelation? -- which parallels Nephi's revelation in a general way but is even longer and less quotable.

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. And if it so be that they shall keep his commandments they shall be blessed upon the face of this land, and there shall be none to molest them, nor to take away the land of their inheritance; and they shall dwell safely forever.

But behold, when the time cometh that they shall dwindle in unbelief, after they have received so great blessings from the hand of the Lord -- having a knowledge of the creation of the earth, and all men, knowing the great and marvelous works of the Lord from the creation of the world; having power given them to do all things by faith; having all the commandments from the beginning, and having been brought by his infinite goodness into this precious land of promise -- behold, I say, if the day shall come that they will reject the Holy One of Israel, the true Messiah, their Redeemer and their God, behold, the judgments of him that is just shall rest upon them. 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. Yea, as one generation passeth to another there shall be bloodsheds, and great visitations among them (2 Ne. 1:9-12).

The first half -- "inasmuch as [they] shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land" -- is very close to Nephi's version, but the second half is entirely different. This first part, at least, seems to have been revealed to both Nephi and Lehi, and Jarom later quotes it as such, calling it "the word of the Lord . . . which he spake unto our fathers," plural (Jarom 1:9).

We find the first two instances of the saying in its "classical" form in Lehi's parting message to Laman and Lemuel (2 Ne. 1:20) and to the children of Laman (2 Ne. 4:4). In both cases, he introduces the saying as something that "the Lord God hath said." Lehi could conceivably be quoting some prophetic writings which we do not have, something from the plates of brass perhaps; but this is unlikely, as the reference to prospering "in the land" seems to relate directly to the "land of promise" to which Lehi's family was led. It could also be something that was revealed to Lehi himself, but we have no record of this. What we do have is a record of the Lord revealing something extremely similar to Nephi, who would doubtless have told his father, and so the most reasonable assumption is that Lehi was referring to, and paraphrasing, his son's revelation.

In the next chapter, Nephi refers to own revelation -- not to Lehi's version -- and says it has been fulfilled:

And behold, the words of the Lord had been fulfilled unto my brethren, which he spake concerning them, that I should be their ruler and their teacher. Wherefore, I had been their ruler and their teacher, according to the commandments of the Lord, until the time they sought to take away my life.

Wherefore, the word of the Lord was fulfilled which he spake unto me, saying that: Inasmuch as they will not hearken unto thy words they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And behold, they were cut off from his presence (2 Ne. 5:19-20).

The bit about being a ruler and a teacher is clearly from Nephi's revelation. As for the saying in question, he only quotes the second half of it, and not word-for-word, but here, too, it is about disobeying Nephi, not God.

This theory -- that the saying was revealed to Nephi and paraphrased by Lehi, and that later Nephites quoted Lehi's version -- is complicated by the fact that Alma and Mormon quote it as something the Lord said to Lehi:

Behold, do ye not remember the words which he spake unto Lehi, saying that: Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall prosper in the land? And again it is said that: Inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord (Alma 9:13).

And thus we see how merciful and just are all the dealings of the Lord, to the fulfilling of all his words unto the children of men; yea, we can behold that his words are verified, even at this time, which he spake unto Lehi, saying: Blessed art thou and thy children; and they shall be blessed, inasmuch as they shall keep my commandments they shall prosper in the land. But remember, inasmuch as they will not keep my commandments they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord (Alma 50:19-20, Mormon speaking).

No such revelation to Lehi is recorded in the Book of Mormon as we have it. The Lord does say, "Blessed art thou, Lehi," in a dream, but not the other sentences quoted. Mormon may be conflating Lehi's dream with his paraphrase of Nephi's revelation (which also begins "Blessed art thou"), or he may be quoting a revelation to Lehi which didn't make it into the records we have. (Perhaps it was included in the Book of Lehi, the translation of which was lost by Martin Harris.) It wouldn't be the only instance of the Lord revealing something first to Lehi and then, in slightly different form, to Nephi (e.g. the Tree of Life vision).

All in all, though, I still think it most likely that Nephi, not Lehi, was the original source of this revealed saying. It was revealed to Nephi in a specific form, directly referring to himself and his brothers. Lehi then generalized it, citing only "the Lord" and not mentioning Nephi. It was Lehi's more quotable version that became common currency among the Nephites, and thus it came to be referred to mistakenly as something the Lord had said to Lehi. It's not the only possibility, but it's the likeliest one in my judgment.

My next post will explore what being "cut off from the presence of the Lord" might actually mean.

Running into the fountain of all righteousness

Judging by how often they are quoted elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, some of the most famous sayings of Lehi among his descendants were his exhortations to his sons Laman and Lemuel, after whom he had just named a river and a valley:

And it came to pass that he called the name of the river, Laman, and it emptied into the Red Sea; and the valley was in the borders near the mouth thereof. And when my father saw that the waters of the river emptied into the fountain of the Red Sea, he spake unto Laman, saying:

O that thou mightest be like unto this river, continually running into the fountain of all righteousness!

And he also spake unto Lemuel:

O that thou mightest be like unto this valley, firm and steadfast, and immovable in keeping the commandments of the Lord!

Now this he spake because of the stiffneckedness of Laman and Lemuel . . . . And it came to pass that my father did speak unto them in the valley of Lemuel (1 Ne. 2:8-11, 14).

The language introduced here (and no, it isn’t biblical) later shows up in Mosiah 5:15, Alma 1:25, 3 Ne. 6:14, Ether 12:28, and Moro. 8:26. In Ether, the quotation is put in the mouth of no less a personage than “the Lord,” who explicitly identifies himself as the referent of one of Lehi’s metaphors: “me, the fountain of all righteousness.”

No similar expressions occur in the other scriptures produced by Joseph Smith (e.g. the Doctrine & Covenants), so I think the repeated language represents actual quotation and is not an artifact of translation.

I’d tried to start a post on these sayings a few times but was stymied by my confusion over what Lehi was trying to say. Running into the fountain? A fountain is a source of water, not something rivers run into. And what did he mean by calling the Red Sea a fountain? As Lehi himself had just observed, the Red Sea is something rivers empty into, not their source.

(There are fountains in the Red Sea. In fact — apologists take note! — it was in the Red Sea that the first hydrothermal vents were discovered, just decades after the time of Joseph Smith. But in context, “the fountain of the Red Sea” is clearly an expression like “the city of Albuquerque” or “the sin of pride,” and means that the Red Sea is itself a fountain.)

I didn’t want to publish a post that just said, “Look, here’s a metaphor that doesn’t make sense!” So an abortive draft of this post gathered dust for a week or so.

Today I started thinking about it again, thinking that the “fountain” thing must mean something. Lehi understood how rivers work; Joseph Smith understood how rivers work; it’s not just an ignorant mistake. It occurred to me that, in the water cycle as we understand it today, the seas into which the rivers empty are also the primary source, or “fountain,” of the rain which creates the rivers in the first place.

Was the water cycle understood in Lehi’s time? Well, they likely had some concept of a water cycle. Ecclesiastes was probably written a century or two after Lehi, but it hardly presents it as a revolutionary new hypothesis:

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again (Eccl. 1:7).

Isn’t that pretty close to Lehi’s language? The sea into which the rivers run is also “the place from whence the rivers come,” i.e. their fountainhead. I don’t know how the ancient Hebrews explained the details of that process, or how close it was to our modern understanding, but they clearly grasped the basic logic: The rivers never run out of water, and the sea never fills up; therefore, it’s a cycle.

After that little breakthrough, I felt like I was ready to tackle the post again. I still had a few minutes before I would have access to my computer, though, so I picked up Joshua Cutchin’s Ecology of Souls (not a religious book, but one about the connection between UFOs and death) and read a few pages while I waited. Imagine my surprise — or rather how surprised I would have been if I weren’t already used to my life being one synchronicity after another — when one of the things I read on those few pages was this:

Everything has a soul, all derived from the same source. As this constitutes an animistic perspective, an animist analogy seems best. Like rain we fall to Earth, joining others in the river of life to flow untold miles toward the sea where all becomes one before evaporating to begin anew.

The context of this “animist analogy” — Cutchin’s discussion of the possibility that aliens may sometimes reincarnate as humans and vice versa — is far removed from the world of Lehi, but my reading of the analogy itself was perfectly timed.

So, with that long preamble out of the way, what do I think Lehi was getting at?

One fairly straightforward reading would be that he alludes to God as what Aristotle would later call a “final cause,” but the reader will understand my reluctance to read Greek philosophy into the Book of Mormon.

How far should the analogy be pressed? The deepest meaning of the water cycle is that neither river nor sea has a privileged position as “the source.” Each is the source of the other. This chicken-and-egg relationship between God and man is something we associate with “Mormon” theology, even though we find it mainly in Joseph Smith’s later work and not (we tend to think) in the Book of Mormon itself. The idea in some form is surely older than Joseph Smith, though. The Fourth Gospel tells us that the man Jesus knew “that he was come from God, and went to God” (John 13:3). Athanasius of Alexandria famously wrote that “God became man that man might become God.” Did Lehi have any such concept in mind when he exhorted Laman to flow into the fountain of all righteousness? Perhaps. Anyway, it’s something to keep in the back of my mind as I proceed with the book.

The Nephites knew nothing of an "Aaronic priesthood"

One of the questions that arises early for readers of the Book of Mormon is how Lehi, who is not a Levite and certainly not a descendant of Aaron, can offer sacrifice (1 Ne. 2:7), a privilege which, in the Torah as we have it, is restricted to those lineages.

The simplest answer is that this whole concept of an Aaronic or Levitical priesthood did not exist in Lehi's time.

The name Aaron occurs 50 times in the Book of Mormon, as the name of several different people and places. Not a single one of these occurrences refers to the biblical Aaron, brother of Moses and father of the priestly lineages. There is a vague reference to "a Moses" -- perhaps Moses himself, perhaps some later person figuratively so called -- having "a spokesman" (2 Ne. 3:17), but that's as close as we get to the Aaron of our Old Testament. There is no indication that this spokesman is Moses's brother, that his name is Aaron, or that he is a priest.

The name Levi occurs five times, four of which refer to a Jaredite of that name. The other does refer to the biblical Levi, and speaks of "the sons of Levi" making "unto the Lord an offering in righteousness" (3 Ne. 24:3). This is Jesus quoting the post-exilic Book of Malachi. The Nephites had not had this book before (3 Ne. 26:2), so there is no indication that they knew anything about the Levites' special role in the cult of animal sacrifice until after the visit of Jesus -- by which point, of course, said cult had been terminated by Christ (3 Ne. 9:19).

So for me the simplest solution is that Moses never instituted a priesthood restricted to descendants of his brother Aaron, that that was a much later innovation. For what it's worth, this is in broad harmony with the consensus of secular textual critics of the Bible (not a group I ordinarily put a great deal of stock in), who generally date the so-called "Priestly" material in the Torah to the late neo-Babylonian or even Persian period, well after the time of Lehi.

Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?

Lehi's Jerusalem vision

After his first vision of the pillar of fire -- of which we have no other details, only that "he saw and heard much" -- Lehi returned home to Jerusalem, "cast himself upon his bed," and proceeded to have a second vision:

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

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

And he also saw twelve others following him, and their brightness did exceed that of the stars in the firmament. And they came down and went forth upon the face of the earth.

And the first came and stood before my father, and gave unto him a book, and bade him that he should read. And it came to pass that as he read, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord. And he read, saying:

Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations!

Yea, and many things did my father read concerning Jerusalem—that it should be destroyed, and the inhabitants thereof; many should perish by the sword, and many should be carried away captive into Babylon (1 Ne. 1:8-13).

Much more followed -- "many great and marvelous things" both "read and seen," but again we have no details. Apparently it wasn't all bad news about the destruction of Jerusalem, based on Lehi's reaction: "his soul did rejoice, and his whole heart was filled, because of the things which he had seen, yea, which the Lord had shown unto him” (v. 15). Specifically,

He testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of a Messiah, and also the redemption of the world (v. 19).

The traditional interpretation, and problems with it

The "One" descending out of heaven is capitalized in modern editions (though not in the 1830 edition or the printer's manuscript), implying that this being is understood to be Christ, with the "twelve others following him" presumably being the twelve biblical apostles.

This interpretation is reinforced by the very similar language used in the account of Nephi's vision: "And the Lamb of God went forth . . . . And I also beheld twelve others following him" (1 Ne. 11:27, 29). These twelve are later explicitly identified as "the apostles of the Lamb; for thus were the twelve called by the angel of the Lord" (v. 34). Given that we know Lehi's vision included content about the Messiah, and that he used the same expression ("twelve others following him") with which Nephi would later refer to the apostles, it seems obvious that the One Descending must be Christ and that the Twelve Others must be the apostles. Who else could they be?

Here are my reasons for questioning this traditional and seemingly obvious interpretation.

First, Lehi's vision also includes "God sitting upon his throne," clearly a separate being from the One Descending -- but Nephite prophets always taught that the Messiah was the same being as God: "God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people" (Mosiah 15:1). We know that that later Nephites knew Lehi's vision (it is directly quoted by Alma the Younger in Alma 36:22). If they had understood the One Descending to be the Messiah, they would not have conflated the Messiah with God.

Second, Nephi's vision is consistent with the twelve followers being ordinary mortals, but Lehi's is not. Like the One Descending, they come down from heaven: "they came down and went forth upon the face of the earth" (1 Ne. 1:11). Christ came down from heaven, but did the apostles? Only in the same sense that we all do, I suppose, "trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our home." Lehi's Twelve are not earth-dwellers who meet and follow the One after he descends; the Twelve and the One descend together. They "follow him" not in the sense of being his disciples, but in literally following him from heaven down to earth.

Third, Nephi is seeing a vision of things that will happen in the distant future. He sees Christ being born and baptized, acquiring twelve followers, being crucified, and so on. None of these figures he sees talk to him or interact with him, because they're not actually present; he's essentially watching a movie.

Although Lehi also apparently saw visions of the future Messiah, the vision of the Twelve and the One is not a movie-like vision of the future. These beings come down and interact with Lehi. One of them -- either the One Descending or the first of the Twelve Others -- gives him a book in which he reads the fate of Jerusalem. Their coming down is not a future event Lehi is precognitively witnessing; it is a present event, involving beings who were in heaven at the time of Lehi and came down to reveal things to him. His experience is fundamentally different from Nephi's.

Of course, if we accept the preexistence of human spirits (and we do), it is possible that the Twelve Others were the same beings that would later incarnate as the apostles of Jesus, and that they came down to Lehi in their pre-incarnate state, both to inform him of the fate of Jerusalem and to dramatically pre-enact for his benefit certain elements of their future mission -- as if their going "forth upon the face of the earth" was a sort of pantomime of their anticipated work as traveling preachers some six centuries later.

So the Twelve Others could be the apostles, but if so that has important ramifications. Assuming these twelve apostles are more or less the same characters we meet in the New Testament, in that latter book they come across as being ordinary men who were transformed through their association with Christ and became extraordinary. (At least this is true of Simon Peter, the most fleshed-out of the lot.) If they are Lehi's Twelve Others, though, they seem already to have been angelic beings of sorts all those centuries before, brighter than the stars in the firmament, their incarnation as much a "condescension" as that of Christ. And among these godlike beings was the future Judas Iscariot? It's not impossible, but it would require some major reevaluation of the way we normally think of the apostles -- who seem almost to be cast as "bumbling sidekicks" in much of the Bible.

Who else could they be?

If the thirteen luminous beings are not already-godlike beings who will, centuries in the future, condescend to incarnate as mortals, the other possibility is that they are people who already incarnated centuries in the past and have since "gone to heaven" and become like angels. If not the twelve apostles, could they be the twelve patriarchs?

Think of the two dreams of Joseph. In the first,

we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf (Gen. 37:7).

Joseph's brothers immediately understand the dream's import and say, "Shalt thou indeed reign over us?" (v. 8). The upright sheaf represents Joseph himself, and the bowed sheaves represent his 11 brothers.

The second dream is more directly relevant to Lehi's Jerusalem vision because it uses the imagery of the sun and stars:

Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me (v. 9).

Joseph's father, Jacob, understands the dream thus: "Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?" (v. 10). The sun is Jacob, the moon is Rachel, and the 11 stars are Joseph's brothers. Joseph does not mention how he himself was represented in this latter dream, but if the sheaves bowed to a sheaf, it stands to reason that the stars bowed to a star. Could Lehi's sun-like being be Jacob; and the 12 star-like beings, his sons?

After the One and the Twelve descend, 

the first came and stood before my father, and gave unto him a book, and bade him that he should read. And it came to pass that as he read, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord (1 Ne. 1:11-12).

Does "the first" mean the One, or the first among the Twelve? If the latter, then this should be Joseph, clearly primus inter pares in the dream on whose imagery Lehi's vision seems to draw.

Now isn't that curious? Later, in his "real," non-visionary life, Lehi is given another book and reads it. After seeing what is in the book, "he was filled with the Spirit, and began to prophesy concerning his seed" (1 Ne. 5:17). What book was this? The plates of brass, a record kept by the descendants of Joseph, and identifying Lehi as one of their number (something he had apparently not known before). What did he prophesy? "That these plates of brass should go forth unto all nations" (v. 18), just as the 12 star-like beings in his vision "went forth upon the face of the earth."

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

For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; . . . And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews (2 Ne. 29:12-13).

There's one more hint that the book in Lehi's vision is, or represents, the brass plates. When the contents of the plates of brass are summarized, one prophet is singled out for special mention. The plates contained

the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah; and also many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah (1 Ne. 5:13).

Jeremiah perhaps receives special mention because he was Lehi’s contemporary (all the prophets, even the new guy!) and because, as a different Nephi would put it centuries later, Jeremiah was “that same prophet who testified of the destruction of Jerusalem” (Hel. 8:20).

Of the specific contents of the book in Lehi’s Jerusalem vision we have but this one sentence:

Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations! (1 Ne. 1:13)

And this is clearly a condensed paraphrase of one of the prophecies of Jeremiah:

I have seen thine adulteries, and thy neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom, and thine abominations on the hills in the fields. Woe unto thee, O Jerusalem! (Jer. 13:27)

So this book — which may have been presented to Lehi by Joseph of Egypt, contained the words of Jeremiah, and filled him with the Spirit of the Lord — may have been identical to the brass book of Laban, a record kept in Egyptian by the descendants of Joseph, which also contained the words of Jeremiah, and which also filled Lehi with the Spirit of the Lord.

To me this makes more sense than the theory that the twelve apostles came down 600 years before their birth to tell him about the imminent destruction of Jerusalem.

Lehi, Nephi, and the pillar of fire that "dwelt upon a rock": A case study of hard-to-define biblical parallels

The 200th anniversary of Moroni's first appearance to Joseph Smith seems as good a day as any to start a blog on the Book of Mormon, and the very beginning is as good a place as any to start.

One of the first things we are told about the prophet Lehi -- just two verses after the first mention of his name -- is that he saw a pillar of fire which "dwelt upon a rock before him."

Wherefore it came to pass that my father, Lehi, as he went forth prayed unto the Lord, yea, even with all his heart, in behalf of his people. And it came to pass as he prayed unto the Lord, there came a pillar of fire and dwelt upon a rock before him; and he saw and heard much; and because of the things which he saw and heard he did quake and tremble exceedingly (1 Ne. 1:5-6).

This is such an odd turn of phrase -- to dwell is to live in a place, not the sort of verb that would normally take a pillar of fire as its subject -- that I wondered if there was any biblical precedent for it. Putting dwelt rock into the search box on a Bible site, I found the words occur together only once in the King James Bible -- just one verse before the first biblical occurrence of the name Lehi! (The two other occurrences are later in the same chapter.)

And [Samson] smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter: and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam. Then the Philistines went up, and pitched in Judah, and spread themselves in Lehi (Judg. 15:8-9).

That's a bit of a coincidence, right? But there's more. The Book of Mormon verses I have quoted above are among the first in the First Book of Nephi -- just a few verses after the famous opening line "I, Nephi, . . ." (1 Ne. 1:1). This name, Nephi, occurs only once in the King James Bible, in the apocryphal book of 2 Maccabees. Check out the context:

Now when the sacrifice was consumed, Neemias commanded the water that was left to be poured on the great stones. When this was done, there was kindled a flame: but it was consumed by the light that shined from the altar. . . . And Neemias called this thing [i.e. the "water"] Naphthar, which is as much as to say, a cleansing: but many men call it Nephi (2 Macc. 1:31-32, 36).

So in the King James Bible, the name Lehi is juxtaposed with the phrase "dwelt in the top of the rock," while Nephi (naphtha in modern translations) is the name given to a liquid that "kindled a flame" "on the great stones." In the first six verses of the Book of Mormon, the characters Nephi and Lehi are introduced, and there appears "a pillar of fire and dwelt on a rock."

Once we have noticed a possible link between 1 Nephi 1 and the story of Samson in Judges, further possible connections suggest themselves. "Pillar of fire," for example is most closely associated with the Exodus, but Judges 16, just one chapter after the Lehi references, tells the famous story of Samson between the pillars, bringing down the temple of Dagon. Shortly after Lehi sees the pillar of fire, he is "filled with the Spirit of the Lord" (1 Ne. 1:12). Judges is the biblical book where the phrase "spirit of the Lord" first appears, most often in connection with Samson's supernatural strength. In one verse, we even have it juxtaposed with Lehi and fire:

And when he came unto Lehi, the Philistines shouted against him: and the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands (Judg. 15:14).

Are there further connections in the "Nephi" chapter of 2 Maccabees, too? Possibly. Here is part of the prayer of the priests after using this curious "water" (later named Nephi) to ignite their offering:

And the prayer was after this manner; O Lord, Lord God, Creator of all things, who art fearful and strong, and righteous, and merciful, and the only and gracious King, the only giver of all things, the only just, almighty, and everlasting, thou that deliverest Israel from all trouble, and didst choose the fathers, and sanctify them . . . (2 Macc. 1:24-25).

And here is the prayer of Lehi, just after seeing the pillar of fire and being filled with the spirit of the Lord:

And it came to pass that when my father had read and seen many great and marvelous things, he did exclaim many things unto the Lord; such as: Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty! Thy throne is high in the heavens, and thy power, and goodness, and mercy are over all the inhabitants of the earth; and, because thou art merciful, thou wilt not suffer those who come unto thee that they shall perish! And after this manner was the language of my father in the praising of his God; for his soul did rejoice, and his whole heart was filled, because of the things which he had seen, yea, which the Lord had shown unto him (1 Ne. 1:14-15).

The similarities here are less impressive -- how surprising is it that two different scriptural texts should call the "Lord God" "merciful" and "almighty" and also use the phrase "after this manner"? -- but still possibly relevant in the context of the much more striking Nephi-fire-rock parallels.

A much more obvious parallel with Lehi's prayer can be found in Revelation:

And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints (Rev. 15:3).

But isn't it a curious coincidence that this is called "the song of Moses"? Here is the end of the prayer in 2 Maccabees, just one verse before the flames on the great stones:

Plant thy people again in thy holy place, as Moses hath spoken. And the priests sung psalms of thanksgiving (2 Macc. 1:30).

There is nothing about Moses or singing in 1 Nephi 1, but the idea is that this parallel might have brought Revelation 15 into an associative network linked to the name Nephi.

I'm sure I could bring more Bible passages into the network if I kept going with this -- it almost reminds me of rummaging around for puns and allusions in Finnegans Wake (one of the pastimes of my ill-spent youth) -- but there's really no need. In fact I probably should have stopped sooner than I did, since mentioning looser connections probably weakens the overall effect. Focus on the links mentioned in the post title -- Lehi, Nephi, fire on a rock, "dwelt" on a "rock" -- which, I think, are much too specific to dismiss. And understand that this is just a case study. There's nothing special about the Book of Mormon's opening verses; the whole book is full of this sort of thing.

So how are we to interpret such links?

First, far be it from me to say "It can't possibly be a coincidence!" Those who read my other blog, particularly the posts tagged with "The highway is for gamblers," know that seemingly impossible coincidences do happen, and do appear to be genuine coincidences, and that I seem to be particularly good at noticing them. Still, these aren't the sort of promiscuous everything-is-connected-to-everything coincidences that I half-jokingly attribute to the "synchronicity fairies." There's a clear and pervasive pattern of links between the Book of Mormon and one specific text: the King James Bible -- and it's not just a matter of passages that quote or seem to plagiarize that book (though of course there's that, too), but of diffuse "associative network" links of the type highlighted in this post. It wouldn't make any sense to say that the opening of the Book of Mormon was copied from, or inspired by, the books of Judges and 2 Maccabees -- the stories couldn't be more different -- and yet some sort of relationship is clearly there. What to make of it?

Joseph Smith was of course very familiar with the King James Bible, so if we take the skeptical view that he was the author of the Book of Mormon, the influence of the Bible on that text is not hard to explain. The specific form that influence takes in the present example (and others like it) is still somewhat perplexing, though. If someone wants to say that Smith based Alma the Younger's conversion on that of Saul, cribbed the Sermon on the Mount because he didn't know what else to make Jesus teach, and copied out chapter after chapter from Isaiah as filler, okay, that sort of thing makes perfect sense. It's also perfectly reasonable to say that he named Lehi and Nephi by flipping through the index of proper names in the back of his Bible and choosing a couple of lesser-known ones more or less at random. Then he takes the pillar of fire from Exodus and makes it Lehi's burning-bush equivalent. Sure, I'm still with you. "And then," he thinks, "and then I'll say that the pillar of fire dwelt on a rock, just like Samson dwelt in the top of the rock Etam just before the Philistines pitched in Judah and spread themselves in Lehi!" No, sorry, that's not how people think. That's not what an allusion to, or a crib from, the story of Samson looks like -- not a human-readable one, anyway. It's more like what you might expect if you asked ChatGPT to crank out a book like the Bible. A human could do it, of course, but I refuse to imagine Joseph Smith poring over Judges and Maccabees and Revelation like Joyce over his Scribbledehobble notebooks, crossing out each little phrase as he manages to work it into his text -- not in a witty way like Joyce, but just at random, for no reason whatsoever. Hypothesis rejected.

If we reject the Scribbledehobble theory, then maybe there's the International Space Shovel theory. As a very young child, I once wrote a sci-fi story in which among the items of an astronaut's equipment was a shovel thus designated, just because it seemed like an astronaut ought to have such a thing. Only years later did I consciously realize that shovel sounds a lot like shuttle, and that we often heard in the news back then about the space shuttle visiting the International Space Station. Nothing like that had consciously crossed my mind when I gave the astronaut his shovel, and yet I feel certain that that, subconsciously, is where the name came from and why it "sounded right." That the names Lehi and Nephi could have subconsciously primed Smith's Bible-saturated mind to think of of fire dwelling on a rock, and the Spirit of the Lord, and all the rest -- just as you might compose a melody at the piano, going with what "sounds right" and completely unaware that what you're actually playing is "Stewball Was a Racehorse" or "He's So Fine" -- that I guess I can believe.

On this blog, though, our working hypothesis is that Joseph Smith was not the author of the Book of Mormon, but rather that the text under consideration is, to a significant extent, a supernaturally produced translation of something written by Nephi himself -- who, living in the 6th century BC, may have had access to something like the Book of Judges but certainly not to Maccabees or Revelation.

Okay, what now?

There's still some space for the International Space Shovel effect, but only to a very limited extent before it raises serious issues. It might explain why Smith chose to write that the fire dwelt on a rock, for example, rather than stayed or abode or some other translation of roughly equal validity. For the specific phraseology Smith chose, sure, he was obviously influenced both consciously and unconsciously by the King James Bible. What about the actual events in the story, though? Did Lehi actually see fire on a rock, just like the nephi story in Maccabees -- or did he maybe just see a bright light or something in the original, with the story becoming contaminated with Bible-derived details as it passed through the mind of Joseph Smith? Did Lehi actually praise God specifically for his great and marvelous works, and call him almighty, or did some other words of praise, originally quite different in their specifics, take that form due to the furniture of their translator's mind? Or maybe Lehi really did see a fire on a rock, and the associative contamination went the other way, causing a proper name which might have been otherwise rendered to take the precise form Nephi.

We have little understanding of the method by which the English Book of Mormon was produced. Apparently Joseph Smith would stare into his seer-stone or through the Nephite spectacles, "see" lines of text, and read them off to his amanuensis. And this wasn't just some sort of supernatural "technology" that anyone could use; Oliver Cowdery tried and failed. A seer-stone is no use without a seer, one who "has wherewith that he can look . . . it is a gift from God" (Mosiah 8:13). The stone itself is only a tool, "a means that man, through faith, might work mighty miracles" (v. 18). Joseph Smith wasn't just taking dictation; his mind -- clairvoyant but by no means a passive receptacle -- played an essential role. As Orson Scott Card puts it in his allegorical poem about Alvin and Verily (Joseph and Oliver) and their magical Golden Plow (plates),

"It's us that makes it go," he says, and grins.

Now Alvin laughs, a-settin on the ground:

"Maybe it goes a little widdershins,

But it gets around!"

In trying to imagine what Smith's experience as a seer was like, I naturally turn to the nearest thing in my own experience: remote viewing. I know that's a bit like trying to understand the mathematical mind of Newton by introspecting on how I memorized my times tables in elementary school, but it's what I've got. Even when clairvoyant images are very much on target, they present themselves to the viewer inextricably mixed with non-clairvoyant content from his own mind. See, for example, my post "Snail on shingles." The target image was this:

And what I "saw" was this (the numbers are the "target coordinates," written down as a way of triggering the vision):

Most of this image -- the snail shell, the dark surface slanting in the direction shown -- clearly came from the target, but the incorrect details seem to have been filled in by my mind, based on its experience that a dark slanting surface is likely to be a gable roof with asphalt shingles. But when I was doing the viewing, the whole thing, shingles and all, presented itself as "given." There was no possible way for me to know -- short of checking the target image itself after the fact -- which elements were truly clear vision and which were contamination. Could something similar have been true of the lines of text that presented themselves to the seeing eye of Joseph Smith?

If something like this is true, it has far-reaching implications. Should it be a rule of thumb that the more biblical a Book of Mormon passage is, the more suspect it is? Take for example Lehi and Nephi's prophecies about John the Baptist (1 Ne. 10:7-10, 11:27), jaw-droppingly detailed for something supposedly written in the 6th century BC, but also containing not one single detail not found in the New Testament. Should we assume that these details are pretty much all "contamination" from Joseph Smith's own knowledge, and that whatever the real Nephi may have foreseen of John and his work was likely as vague and fragmentary as the corresponding hints in the Old Testament? (I have other theories about this, to be discussed when this blog reaches those chapters, but the contamination theory has a lot going for it.) Or what about Jesus' sermon at Bountiful, most of which is virtually identical to the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew? Jesus could obviously have given essentially the same sermon to two different audiences, so should we see the Book of Mormon as evidence of the reliability of Matthew -- that the Sermon on the Mount at least is a near-perfect transcript of what Jesus actually said? Or should we dismiss the whole thing as obvious contamination and focus instead on the least biblical sayings of Jesus as those most likely to reflect the actual text on the Golden Plates? What about whole events that might be biblical contamination? Did the priests of Noah really kidnap dancing girls just like the Benjamites in Judges? Did the daughter of Jared really dance for decapitation just like the daughter of Herodias? Did Aminadi really read supernatural handwriting on the wall of the temple? Should these whole story elements be bracketed as unreliable? It should be obvious that a lot -- like a lot -- hangs on these interpretive judgments.

There's also the question of whether biblical contamination should be seen as a bug or a feature. Why, after all, did God see fit to reveal the Book of Mormon through clairvoyant visions in a seer-stone, rather than having the plates discovered and translated in the usual way, the same way every other ancient text has been translated? Presumably because a scholarly translation would have been significantly different from the text Smith produced, and because it's better for us to have Smith's version -- despite the contaminations, or precisely because of them? God must surely have had some compelling reason for having the Book of Mormon translated in such an extraordinary manner.

I'm not even going to attempt to settle all these questions yet. I just want to lay them all out at the beginning and keep them in the back of my mind as I proceed with the rest of the Book of Mormon.