Idolatry or idleness

A few passages in the Book of Mormon appear to contain errors immediately followed by corrections. This is probably the most obvious instance:

. . . and thus we see that they buried their weapons of peace, or they buried the weapons of war, for peace (Alma 24:19).

Since "weapons of peace" doesn't make any sense, the "or" seems to be a correction, meaning "or rather." Since one can't easily erase an error once it has been engraved on a gold plate, it makes sense that errors would be corrected in this way. Alternatively, "weapons of peace" could have been Joseph Smith's slip of the tongue rather than a mistake on the plates, but that seems less likely, since his scribe could have just crossed out the incorrect phrase and written the correct one. The mistake itself could have been made in any language, though.

The following example from Alma, though, seems like it must have been a slip of the tongue on Joseph's part, since it is only in English that idolatry and idleness sound similar.

For those who did not belong to their church did indulge themselves in sorceries, and in idolatry or idleness, and in babblings, and in envyings and strife . . . (Alma 1:32).

This seems to be an error and correction because "idolatry or idleness" is such an odd expression otherwise. The two concepts seem to be unrelated, but they do sound similar in English. However, another possibility is that the text really is equating idolatry with idleness to make some point -- something along the lines of "fasting and prayer, or otherwise rejoicing and prayer" (D&C 59:14). Three other passages in the Book of Mormon, which pair idolatry with idleness but without using similar-sounding words, suggest that this is in fact the case:

Now they were a lazy and an idolatrous people; therefore they were desirous to bring us into bondage, that they might glut themselves with the labors of our hands; yea, that they might feast themselves upon the flocks of our fields (Mosiah 9:12).

Yea, and thus they were supported in their laziness, and in their idolatry, and in their whoredoms, by the taxes which king Noah had put upon his people; thus did the people labor exceedingly to support iniquity (Mosiah 11:6).

Thus they were a very indolent people, many of whom did worship idols, and the curse of God had fallen upon them because of the traditions of their fathers; notwithstanding the promises of the Lord were extended unto them on the conditions of repentance (Alma 17:15).

This juxtaposition does not occur in the Bible. The closest thing I can think of conceptually is the occasional references to idols as "vanities," for example:

They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities: and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation (Deut. 32:31).

The Hebrew words translated "vanities," and pretty clearly referring to the worship of "that which is not God," means "emptiness, futility, uselessness" and is thus conceptually akin to idleness. So perhaps that is the idea behind the "laziness and idolatry" passages in the Book of Mormon: useless people who worship useless things.

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.