Further evidence for the Zenos theory

My recent dream about how "There's no Second Isaiah" (see my post "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses") prompted me to look into the evidence that the Book of Isaiah had a single author, in contrast to the mainstream position -- usually presented as an established fact -- that chapters 40-66 are by a much later author or authors. So I got an electronic copy of The Indivisible Isaiah: Evidence for the Single Authorship of the Prophetic Book (1964) by Rachel Margalioth and started reading it.

Much of Mrs. Margalioth's method consists of finding distinctive words and expressions that are found in both parts of Isaiah (1-39 and 40-66) but in the writings of no other prophet. The sheer number and specificity of these parallels in style and word choice does indeed make it hard to avoid the conclusion that the book is the work of a single author. As Mrs. Margalioth writes:

This indicates not only a uniformity of style, but also to a uniform trend of thought. This reveals the innermost recesses of human thinking wherein idea and language are woven into one web, and there can be no room for a stranger. This is the style of a man which is the man himself. Our [Jewish] sages must have meant just this when they declared that no two prophets speak in identical style (p. 42).

This got me thinking about Zenos, the otherwise unknown prophet whose work is quoted in three parts of the Book of Mormon. Since these three texts differ greatly in genre and style, it is reasonable to assume that they are quoting three separate Zenos documents rather than a unified "Book of Zenos." For ease of reference, I will give them names:

• 1 Zenos (fragments of which are quoted or paraphrased in 1 Ne. 19:10-17): a prophecy about the distant future, mot notably including the death and resurrection of a Jesus-like figure
• 2 Zenos (quoted in Jacob 5): an extended allegorical story about olive trees
• 3 Zenos (quoted in Alma 33:4-11): a short, psalm-like composition on the subject of answered prayers

That's a pretty small sample -- 102 verses in total, compared to the 1,292 verses of the Book of Isaiah -- but I thought it might be worthwhile to check to see if any of the three Zenos texts share any distinctive wording not found elsewhere. If they do, that would be consistent with Zenos being a real person.

I found no such parallels, which is perhaps not entirely surprising given how short all but one of the texts are.

I did find something else, though. In my 2024 post "Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul," I propose -- building on the work of a Redditor who goes by Stisa79 -- that several other texts in both the Bible and the Book or Mormon also quote or allude to 1 Zenos. I establish this by showing that these uncredited Zenos quotations share distinctive language with the 1 Zenos fragments in 1 Ne. 19 and with each other. One of my commenters then found a paper by Quinten Barney using a similar method to show that two other texts might be influenced by 1 Zenos. I found additional links connecting these two to the texts I had found. I've been meaning to write an exhaustive post about all the scriptural texts that likely quote or allude to 1 Zenos, but I got bogged down in the sheer volume and complexity of all the links I would have to document, and so I haven't finished it yet. Anyway, my current list of texts likely influenced by 1 Zenos is:

• Joel 2
• Malachi 4 (discovered by Stisa79)
• Matthew 23-24 (discovered by Quinten Barney)
• 1 Corinthians 3
• 1 Nephi 22 (discovered by Stisa79)
• 2 Nephi 25-26 (discovered by Stisa79)
• Alma 45
• Helaman 13-15 (discovered by Quinten Barney)

Although I didn't find any direct linguistic links between the 1 Zenos fragments and 3 Zenos, I did find links between 3 Zenos and two of the texts in the above list, which I believe to have been influenced by 1 Zenos. Here are the relevant verses:

Yea, and thou hast also heard me when I have been cast out and have been despised by mine enemies; yea, thou didst hear my cries, and wast angry with mine enemies, and thou didst visit them in thine anger with speedy destruction (Alma 33:10, explicitly quoting 3 Zenos).

And they shall be visited with thunderings, and lightnings, and earthquakes, and all manner of destructions, for the fire of the anger of the Lord shall be kindled against them, . . . And when these things have passed away a speedy destruction cometh unto my people; for . . . when the Spirit ceaseth to strive with man then cometh speedy destruction, and this grieveth my soul (2 Ne. 26:6, 10-11, with strong links to 1 Zenos). 

Yea, I will visit them in my fierce anger, and there shall be those of the fourth generation who shall live, of your enemies, to behold your utter destruction; and this shall surely come except ye repent, saith the Lord; and those of the fourth generation shall visit your destruction (Hel. 13:10, with strong links to 1 Zenos).

Alma 33:10 and Hel, 13:10 are the only verses in all scripture to include the words {enemies, visit, anger, destruction}. With the exception of enemies, the words even occur in the same sequence in both texts.

The phrase "speedy destruction" occurs twice in 2 Ne. 26:10-11, once in Alma 33:10, and nowhere else in scripture. Both passages also include visit and anger.

This obviously falls far short of the sheer volume of parallels connecting the two parts of the Book of Isaiah, but I still think it counts as a little more evidence in favor of the reality of Zenos.

I haven't yet done any intertextual study of Jacob 5 (2 Zenos), more because it's really long and boring than for any more respectable reason. Once I do that, I'll try to put together a single article covering the Zenos text exhaustively.

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.