Thoughts on the murder of Laban

Nephi and his brothers have twice failed to obtain the plates of brass from Laban. The first time, Laman alone goes to Laban and simply asks for the plates; Laban refuses, calls him a robber, and threatens to kill him. The second time, the four brothers goes together, bringing gold and silver to offer in payment. Laban again refuses, throws them out, and sends servants to kill them. In fleeing, the brothers have no choice but to leave their gold and silver behind, "and it fell into the hands of Laban" (1 Ne. 3:26).

The third attempt famously ends with Nephi's decapitating the helpless Laban, whom he then impersonates in order to steal the plates. None of this was planned in advance, we are told, but Nephi nevertheless seems to have had a premonition that things would end with the "destruction" of Laban. Citing Moses as an example to encourage his brothers before this final attempt, Nephi concludes with, "Let us go up; the Lord is able to deliver us, even as our fathers [who left Egypt with Moses], and to destroy Laban, even as the Egyptians" (1 Ne. 4:3). He approaches Laban's house alone, with neither weapons nor money nor a clear plan, apparently counting on the Lord to come through with a Moses-style miracle.

And it was by night; and I caused that they should hide themselves without the walls. And after they had hid themselves, I, Nephi, crept into the city and went forth towards the house of Laban.

And I was led by the spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.

Nevertheless I went forth, and as I came near unto the house of Laban I beheld a man, and he had fallen to the earth before me, for he was drunken with wine.

And when I came to him I found that it was Laban (1 Ne. 4:5-8).

The standard Mormon reading is that "the spirit" that led Nephi was the Spirit of the Lord -- hence the capitalization in current editions -- but several commentators have pointed out that this is never made explicit in the text; it is only ever called "the spirit." Daymon Smith has proposed that it was a spirit associated with Makmahod, the sword which Laban wore and with which Nephi killed him. Corbin Volluz raises an even darker possibility with the Hamlet quote that serves as the title of his 2013 essay "'The Spirit That I Have Seen May Be The Devil' -- Nephi's Slaying of Laban." It has also been proposed that the "spirit" was only Nephi's own internal monologue, which is how most moderns would also understand the "gods" who moved the Homeric heroes, but in my judgment this possibility can be ruled out. In telling the story, Nephi distinguishes sharply between the words of the spirit and his own rationalizations, even though it would be in his interest to ascribe the latter to the spirit as well.

And I beheld his sword, and I drew it forth from the sheath thereof; and the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel.

And it came to pass that I was constrained by the spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him (1 Ne. 4:9-10).

Nephi presents himself as unwilling to kill Laban, doing so in the end only because he was thus "constrained" -- that is, compelled or forced -- by the spirit. The spirit speaks only after Nephi has drawn Laban's sword, which is one of Daymon Smith's reasons for associating the spirit with the sword itself. It also raises a question, though: Why is Nephi, professedly unwilling to shed blood, unsheathing Laban's sword before the spirit has constrained him to kill? Is he drawn to the fine weapon by an irrepressible manly curiosity, like Achilles among the women? Is he planning to take it with him for self-defense as he sneaks into Laban's house to steal the plates? Possibly -- but the most natural reading is that the idea of murdering Laban has already occurred to Nephi by the time the spirit on his shoulder, be it angel or devil, chimes in.

And the spirit said unto me again: Behold the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he also had taken away our property (1 Ne. 4:11).

The spirit first simply says, "Kill him," with no explanation given. The second time it offers that "the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands" -- not a moral justification, but a suggestion that Nephi's remarkable luck in finding Laban defenseless may not be luck but providence. If God didn't want you to kill him, why would he have made him so easy to kill? Note also that the spirit refers to "the Lord" in the third person, implying that it is not itself the Spirit of the Lord.

Nephi then begins to give his own rationalizations for the murder: that Laban had tried to kill him and had taken their property. As Corbin Volluz mentions in his essay, Nephi will go on to commit these very crimes against Laban, killing him and taking his property. When he goes on to put on Laban's clothes and speak in his voice, it perhaps underscores the deeper symbolic sense in which he has "become Laban." Nephi also says that Laban "would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord," perhaps implying that Nephi and his brothers had told him that the Lord had commanded them to take the plates but that Laban had still refused to cooperate.

And it came to pass that the spirit said unto me again: Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands; behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.

And now, when I, Nephi, had heard these words, I remembered the words of the Lord which he spake unto me in the wilderness, saying that: Inasmuch as thy seed shall keep my commandments, they shall prosper in the land of promise. Yea, and I also thought that they could not keep the commandments of the Lord according to the law of Moses, save they should have the law. And I also knew that the law was engraven upon the plates of brass. And again, I knew that the Lord had delivered Laban into my hands for this cause -- that I might obtain the records according to his commandments.

Therefore I did obey the voice of the spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword (1 Ne. 4:12-18).

After repeating its previous statements, the spirit adds that the Lord himself "slayeth the wicked," implying that therefore Nephi is justified in doing the same. What follows is clearly influenced by the New Testament and is thus textually suspect: "It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief." This echoes the language of Caiaphas as to why Jesus must die:

Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.

And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.

And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; and not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad (John 11:47-52).

This introduces further moral complications. On the one hand, Caiaphas is clearly proposing something wicked: that Jesus be killed for the crime of performing miracles, lest he become so popular as to be perceived as a threat to Rome and provoke violent retaliation. On the other hand, the Gospel author suggests that, due to his role as high priest, Caiaphas spoke more than he knew, and that his words had an unintended but truer meaning: that it was in fact good for Jesus to die in order to save his own nation and others.

Taking his words as he intended them, though, Caiaphas was wrong. Having Jesus executed did not save the Jews from the Romans, who in a matter of decades would raze Jerusalem and its Temple and kill or enslave most of the Jewish people. Nephi's hopes were to prove equally vain. What happened to his nation, the Nephites, in the end? The very fate that the murder of Laban was supposed to prevent: They "all dwindled in unbelief" (Ether 4:3), and then "they were all destroyed" (Morm. 8:2).

Daymon Smith in the final volume of his Cultural History of the Book of Mormon makes the provocative suggestion that the theft of the brass plates may have caused another nation, too, to dwindle in unbelief:

Moreover, we can suppose that the Brass Plates -- being removed from Jerusalem, immediately prior to its capture by Babylon -- also generated commentary and other metatext. Such metatext would've been preserved, carried to Babylon and eventually the gaps in the record were filled in by Babylonian traditions.

This, he says, would yield the Old Testament as we have it, a Babylonized "counterfeit" of the brass-plate records "which inscribes false traditions into scripture."

Who or what was the "spirit" that constrained Nephi to kill? How laudable or culpable was Nephi for obeying it? I don't have definitive answers to those questions, but I think it is clear that the acquisition of the brass plates came at a cost. "Should the first book in the Nephite record be subtitled, 'The Tragedy of Nephi'?" Corbin Volluz asks. It is certainly tempting to see in him a tragic hero in the classical mold: a good man doomed by a tragic error or hamartia, in this case the murder of Laban and the theft of the plates.

The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon

LDS Discussions, which is maintained by the pseudonymous "Mike" and is one of the more even-handed anti-Mormon sites out there, has a whole essay on the question of "Tight vs Loose Translation" of the Book of Mormon, defining the terms thus:

Tight translation: As outlined above by FAIR's use of Emma Smith’s quote above, a tight translation is where Joseph Smith is directly translating the Book of Mormon via the seer/peep stone in the hat word for word. The translation of the plates would appear on Joseph Smith’s seer/peep stone in the hat, and Joseph Smith would dictate them to his scribe. This method of translation is a literal one and does not afford Joseph Smith the ability to change or alter the words as the tight translation must be direct for the stone to reveal further words as we will see from the accounts of the translation.

​Loose translation: This method of translation would give Joseph Smith "inspiration" through revelation, which allowed Joseph Smith the freedom to dictate the text of the Book of Mormon through his own milieu, putting the text of the Book of Mormon in his own words. Effectively Joseph Smith would be given the general lessons and concepts through revelations, but it was then left to Joseph Smith to weave those into a story that could be understood in his time. Some have argued that this would be a revelation of “pure intelligence” where Joseph Smith was flooded with the story itself, some say Joseph Smith could see the actual Book of Mormon events in visions, and some say he got literal translations but was then free to make changes as he saw fit.

Mike's argument is that all eyewitness accounts of the translation support the "tight translation" theory: Joseph Smith saw a bit of text, read it out, made sure his scribe had copied it down correctly (including spelling), then saw the next bit of text, and so on. This implies that every word of the text was revealed, and that Smith played no more active or creative a role in the production of the text than did his scribes. A few aspects of the text -- for example, the use of unfamiliar words like cureloms and ziff, which were not understood by Smith but were faithfully copied down as received -- support this theory.

Overall, though, the English text of the Book of Mormon strongly implies a loose translation. It is full of anachronisms, historically problematic uses of the King James Bible, and 19th-century Protestant theology. The original text was also full of misspellings and grammatical errors, most of which have since been corrected. Smith himself also apparently felt at liberty to alter the revealed text in more substantial ways -- for example by inserting "the son of" in places where the first edition had portrayed Jesus as being God himself. All these issues constitute overwhelming evidence that, if the text of the Book of Mormon was indeed revealed, the revelation was filtered through the limited understanding of Joseph Smith, introducing countless errors and changes that were not in the original source text on the golden plates.

Mike argues that defenders of the Book of Mormon can't have it both ways: They can't say that the text was revealed word for word, as all eyewitnesses attest, and then turn around and say that problematic aspects of the text reflect Joseph Smith's own language and limited understanding.

I believe we can have it both ways. My own theory is that Joseph Smith experienced every word of the text as "given" or revealed -- that he was reading off what he saw, not consciously interpreting it or putting it in his own words -- but that what he saw was nevertheless substantially influenced and corrupted by his own understanding.

I briefly introduced this theory in my inaugural post here, "Lehi, Nephi, and the pillar of fire that "dwelt upon a rock": A case study of hard-to-define biblical parallels" (September 2023). I gave an example from my own experience as a dabbler in the art of remote viewing, in which one is given a string of numbers which have been assigned to a "target" about which one knows nothing and then attempts to perceive that target by psychic means. Later, the identity of the target is revealed, and the accuracy of the viewing can be assessed.

In the example I discussed there, I received and sketched an image of a sloping roof with dark shingles, with a very large snail shell on it. After the viewing, I checked the target image and found that it was indeed a photograph of a snail shell on a dark surface sloping in the direction indicated in my sketch -- but that the surface was rock, not a shingled roof. This was undeniably a "hit," an example of successful extrasensory perception -- the odds of my having seen a snail shell on a dark sloping surface by chance are effectively zero --  but the "shingled roof" aspect was an error. Did I see a dark sloping surface and then reason that it was most likely a shingled roof? No. I saw the roof -- including the opposite slope, with no snail on it -- just as clearly as I saw everything else. The whole thing was experienced as "given," with absolutely no sense that I was interpreting or expanding on what I saw. And yet, apparently, I was. The roof came not from the target image but from my own experience and expectations about the likely identity of dark sloping surfaces.

I recently read an even clearer example of this sort of thing from a much more professional remote viewer: Courtney Brown of the Farsight Institute, in his magnum opus, Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception. Brown is describing two different remote-viewing sessions in which, unbeknownst to him going in, the target was the same: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

The first of the two sessions is very accurate with regard to location and environment. Descriptions of Washington, D.C. are very clear. Descriptions and sketches of various landmarks (such as the Washington Monument and what appears to be the Lincoln Memorial) in Washington, D.C. are also clear. Descriptions and sketches of what appears to be the Ford Theater are quite good . . . . The session is also very accurate with regard to perceptions of the nature of the primary subject (a U.S. president). In this session I do not perceive the actual attack on President Lincoln, although I do report a mental despondency on the part of the President at the time of the assassination event.

The second of my two sessions for this target is also very accurate with regard to location and environment. Descriptions of Washington, D.C. are very clear. Descriptions of various landmarks (such as the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial) in Washington, D.C. are also clear, and some of the sketches with identifying deductions are quite remarkable. (See figures 6.1, 6.2a, and 6.2b.) Descriptions and sketches of what appear to be the Ford Theater (or components of the Ford Theater) are quite good. However, I do not perceive the actual attack on President Lincoln.

This gibes with my own experience -- that the relative "importance" or salience of different aspects of the target seems to have no effect on remote viewing, and that often peripheral elements are perceived at the expense of the main target. Still, getting clear images of Washington, D.C., both times is impressive, given that this was part of an experiment with dozens of sessions, with targets ranging from an 18th-century naval battle to the largest crater on the Moon. Brown's perceptions of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were so clear that they were chosen as cover illustrations for the paperback edition of the book. But one major problem, which Brown fails to mention, is that there was obviously no Lincoln Memorial at the time of Lincoln's assassination. This element of his viewing is a glaring anachronism.

Nevertheless, Brown perceived the Lincoln Memorial in direct low-level terms. It's not as if he got a general impression of Washington and then filled in the details based on his own knowledge -- not consciously, at any rate. Here are the figures mentioned in the text I have quoted above:

In Brown's notes, D means "deduction" -- in both senses of that word. Viewers are supposed to focus on low-level sensory-type information and avoid making logical inferences, but when inferences present themselves, they're supposed to jot them down as a way of getting them out of their system ("deducting" them) to minimize their contaminating effect. So for the Lincoln Memorial, what Brown perceived was the shape in the sketch, plus the ideas of "smooth surface, heavy, stone, short, angular." From these direct perceptions came the deductions "Lincoln Memorial, tomb, monument." Likewise, "Washington Monument" is a deduction from the perceptions "stone, heavy, thick, flat sides."

If Brown's sketch of the Washington Monument looks a bit short, and if "thick" seems an odd way of characterizing the structure, that's actually a point in his favor. Though Brown doesn't mention it, at the time of Lincoln's assassination, the Washington Monument was still under construction and looked like this:

So in these sessions we have a combination of impressive "revealed" content -- the Washington Monument not in its familiar form but as it appeared in 1865 -- combined with the obvious error of a Lincoln Memorial already existing before Lincoln had even died. The Lincoln Memorial might have crept into Brown's vision because it is a standard D.C. landmark, or because it is conceptually related to the idea of Lincoln's assassination, but in any case it was clearly inserted into the picture by Brown's mind with its 20th-century perspective, not by the target itself.

Nevertheless, the two perceptions -- the historically correct Washington Monument (analogous to Joseph Smith's nailing some little-known Hebraism) and the howler of an 1865 Lincoln Memorial (analogous to quoting Deutero-Isaiah or whatever) -- were received by Brown in the same way, with no way of distinguishing the true vision from the corrupted one. It was me both times, baba, me first and second also me.

While Joseph Smith's seership was obviously not the same thing as modern military-style remote viewing, my working hypothesis is that they had a lot in common, and that even if the entire text of the Book of Mormon was directly perceived by Joseph Smith, as if written by the finger of God, it was nevertheless filtered through his mind and compromised by his own understanding and mental associations -- most notably by the fact that his was a mind positively saturated with the King James Version of the Bible.

The question, then, is why. I have been using words like corrupted and compromised, but this was the way the Lord chose to have the text revealed. He could presumably have given the plates to a scholar, provided a Rosetta stone, and had the book translated in a more straightforward way, but he chose to do it through seership instead, ensuring the production of a hybrid work with massive 19th-century influences. This must have been optimal for his purposes. There is great value in having an accurate record of ancient religious thoughts and practices, but, to coin a phrase, "a Bible, a Bible, we have got a Bible." The Book of Mormon is something different. As Ezra Taft Benson said, "The Nephites never had the book; neither did the Lamanites of ancient times. It was meant for us."