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.