Alma 46 shows one man's prompt answer to a driven and gifted politician seeking to destroy "the foundation of liberty." To capture both the response and the character and dynamism of the champion, we need only follow the verbs in the swift yet dense narrative, a verbal outpouring without parallel in the Book of Mormon. And amid the swirl of events, and the escalating anger, there's one verbal action that hits me at the heart: "Moroni prayed."
"When Moroni"
"had heard"
"he was angry"
"he rent"
"he took"
"and wrote"
"and fastened"
"fastened on"
"girded on"
"he took"
"called"
"bowed himself"
"he prayed mightily"
"Moroni prayed"
"he had poured out his soul"
"he named"
"Moroni had said"
"he went forth"
"waving"
"he had written"
"crying with a loud voice, saying"
"Moroni had proclaimed"
"Moroni said"
"when Moroni had said"
"he went forth"
"he sent forth"
"and gathering together. . . to stand against"
At this point, the enemy flees!
But Moroni is not finished with him.
"Now Moroni thought"
"he thought to cut off"
"to take them and bring them back"
"and put Amalickiah to death"
"for he knew"
"this he knew"
"Therefore Moroni thought"
"that he should take"
"he took"
"and marched"
"to cut off"
"he did"
"marched forth"
"headed"
The politician now flees again!
"Moroni, being a man, who was appointed"
"he had power"
"to establish"
"to exercise authority"
"he caused to be put to death"
"he caused the title of liberty to be hoisted"
"Moroni planted the standard of liberty"
Showing posts with label Book of Mormon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book of Mormon. Show all posts
Monday, July 3, 2017
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Book of Mormon Sources and Abridgment and iPhones. What does Helaman or even "Deutero-Isaiah" Show?
We take up the Book of Helaman and, starting with its ancient title page, see in the very last line: "the record of Helaman and his sons, even down to the coming of Christ, which is called the book of Helaman, and so forth." (Et cetera: The 1830 edition shows an ampersand; in today's edition we see "and so forth.") The Book of Helaman, and so forth? The very last verse of the work significantly answers, in ring composition, to the last line of that title page: "And thus ended the book of Helaman, according to the record of Helaman and his sons."
There's still more to that ampersand: Helaman, and so forth, is not only full of Mormon's summarizing comments, it is a "book" "according to the records of Helaman, who was the son of Helaman, and also according to the records of his sons, even down to the coming of Christ--wonderfully down to Christmas! (The last phrase is part of the ancient title, and states the thesis of the whole: the Christ is coming.)
There's still more to that ampersand: Helaman, and so forth, is not only full of Mormon's summarizing comments, it is a "book" "according to the records of Helaman, who was the son of Helaman, and also according to the records of his sons, even down to the coming of Christ--wonderfully down to Christmas! (The last phrase is part of the ancient title, and states the thesis of the whole: the Christ is coming.)
Helaman was the governor and Chief Judge of the Nephites. Who were his sons? Nephi and Lehi. Nephi clearly wrote, but here we learn that Lehi likewise kept his records and that either Nephi or Mormon later added what Lehi wrote to his father's book. All this detail comes from the short but labored and repetitious--and marvelously informative--title page. The headings and subheadings found throughout the Book of Mormon are easy to overlook: the Book of Helaman, for instance, includes ancient subheadings introducing both the prophecies of Nephi and those of Samuel.
And note how the pairing of Nephi and Lehi and that of Nephi and Samuel (in the divisions of the Book of Helaman, son of Helaman), matches the book's pairing of such ancient prophets as Zenos and Zenock, Ezaias and Isaiah (Nephi and Jacob, Mosiah and Abinadi, Alma and Amulek).
And note how the pairing of Nephi and Lehi and that of Nephi and Samuel (in the divisions of the Book of Helaman, son of Helaman), matches the book's pairing of such ancient prophets as Zenos and Zenock, Ezaias and Isaiah (Nephi and Jacob, Mosiah and Abinadi, Alma and Amulek).
Ezaias and Isaiah? What's that all about? What we see is clearly the name Yesha'yahu given in two forms as a simple matter of differentiation; in other words, we see Isaiah and Isaiah, which could answer--might it not?--to First and Second (Deutero-) Isaiah, both of which were seemingly and surprisingly available to the Nephites. Might not these two Isaiahs, both prophets, have also been father and son? and perhaps also prophet and prophetic editor? When we consider the prophetic naming of Helaman's two sons (in Helaman 5), we should also bear in mind how two of Isaiah's sons, Shear-Jashub, Maher-shalal-hash-baz, bear names of sign and prophecy. Shear-Jashub refers to the Return, which is the burden of the second half of the book, or the "Second" Isaiah. "The Book of Isaiah the prophet, and so forth."
That's one way to look at things, a rather unitary way, and it's very much in line with what Hugh Nibley says in Since Cumorah: "If others than Isaiah wrote about half the words in the book, why do we not know their names? The answer is, because of the way is which they worked. They were (as it is now explained) Isaiah's own disciples or students," or his sons, grandsons, and so forth, ampersand. "If anything," says Nibley, "the Book of Mormon attests the busy reshuffling and reediting of separate pages of sacred writings that often go under the name of a single prophet."
The form of the name Ezaias, Ezias, Esaias, etc., in Greek, English, or whatever linguistic cast we may choose to present, functions merely as a semiotic pointer--this Isaiah, not that one. Each is absolutely swallowed up in the other anyhow, ampersand. One of the Nephite chosen Twelve bears the name Isaiah. Doctrine and Covenants 84 tells of yet another Isaiah, in this case semiotically, and thus simply, differentiated as Esaias, who "lived in the days of Abraham." Again, when Doctrine and Covenants 76 addresses all professing partisans, including "some of Esaias, and some of Isaiah," it helps to read the words as being a critique not only of an undue--even a nitpicking--sectarian devotion to a particular prophet or gospel dispensation or book of scripture or even spelling of a name, but also as a critique of overzealous devotion to some kinds of higher criticism: these are the true words of Isaiah, these not; this is genuine Peter, this not; Romans is Pauline, 2nd Timothy not; John is Johannine, the Revelation not; Nephi quotes Deutero-Isaiah and is therefore in error, Joseph Smith mistakenly refers to Elias as other than Elijah, and so forth. Some are thus partisans of such-and-such a theory; some of another. As disciples progress toward sainthood, we shed the partisan line, however learned it may seem, however we may have learned it, and no matter how much we have been draped in "all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto." And let's stop boasting about knowledge of biblical languages, as if a badge of supremacy. By the way, Brother Joseph's differentiation of Elias and Elijah is another instance of a metalinguistic and semiological indicator of difference for two men having the same name, Eliyahu, but different roles to play. How many stumble, or parade, over such matters!
The occurrence of the unusual--and the pairing of Ezaias and Isaiah is unprecedented--signals that the Book of Mormon has something to tell us. When the Doctrine and Covenants chimes in, it's time to perk up our ears.
The Book of Mormon (that is, ensconced Helaman) thus resolves, with deft plainness, a weighty and long-standing difficulty about quotations from what many consider a Deutero-Isaiah. Helaman's ampersand-plus-c(etera) and the side-by-side naming of two Isaiahs in both Helaman 8:20 and Doctrine and Covenants 76:100 together provide us with sufficient answer for those who dispute one Isaian chapter or another making an appearance in the Book of Mormon. As for a pre-exilic Deutero-Isaiah in Father Lehi's hands, consider the chapters his son Nephi includes in his own double book, and what he leaves out--then get over it. Nephi left Jerusalem with a unitary copy of Isaiah, etc. It's as simple as that. (Nephi includes Isaiah 48-49 in his own first book; Isaiah 2-14, and then 29, in his second book; Isaiah 50-52, 55, in Nephi's brother Jacob's record, again in Nephi's second book. Mosiah and a Third Nephi (Trito-Nephi) include Isaiah 52-54.)
The later 20th Century scholarship confirms, says Hugh Nibley, how "the peculiar practices employed in the transmission of inspired writings in the Book of Mormon, as well as the theory and purpose behind those practices, are the very ones that prevailed in Palestine at the time Lehi lived there." Indeed: "We have come across a great tradition of prophetic unity that made it possible for inspired men in every age to translate, abridge, expand, explain, and update the writings of their predecessors without changing a particle of the intended meaning or in any way jeopardizing the earlier rights to authorship. Isaiah remains [one Isaiah], no matter how many prophets repeat his words or how many other prophets he is repeating. The Book of Mormon explains how this can be so, and its explanations would seem to be the solution to the Isaiah problem toward which the scholars are at present moving" (Hugh Nibley, Since Cumorah). When Brother Nibley further cites Hans Wildberger about how Isaiah and Micah, in prophesying of the Mountain of the Lord's House, the Salt Lake Temple, may be quoting from "archaic ritual texts" (or a single ancient text?) might not the Book of Helaman also afford a solution to the "problem toward which scholars are at present moving?" Could that archaic source perhaps be Helaman's Ezaias? or yet another of the name?
That's the sort of thing for which readers should forever be on the lookout, for the Book of Mormon continually invites our awareness as it awakens and enlarges our memories. Just so, the Brass Plates, a supersized and up-to-date Library of Hebrew Scripture in Lehi's hands, once served "to enlarge" "the memory of [his] people" (see Alma 37).
As Professor James Sanders would tell his students: 'Scripture is full of itself''--consciously so. It's kaleidoscopic, with built-in intertextuality that serves a crucial purpose. If otherwise, "it were not possible," as Benjamin tells his sons of Lehi, that he [or we] could have remembered all these things, to have taught them to his children" (Mosiah 1:4). I'd add that "Scripture is also full of the latest world report and abounding in politics"--a BBC of sorts. (I'm thinking of the well-informed Prophets here--they were Prophets to the World.)
The wee but rich Book of Helaman, compressing 51 years into 38 columned pages, cites as vital sources and guiding points of reference: Amulek, Zeezrom, Alma, Nephi, Lehi, Joshua, Zenock, Zenos, Ezaias, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Abraham, Lady Wisdom, Ether, Moses--and Messiah. Hugh Nibley, who labeled Helaman "the Book of Crimes," while also calling it the most spiritually charged book in the entire collection, further noted surprising correspondences between Helaman and the apocryphal Enoch literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. He filled the margins of his own copy with such references.
All that's not going to make for a once-over or easy reading. Helaman's going to require effort, its going to require checking the footnotes and reviewing other stories, so turn the TV off. Yet take away the words and deeds of these prophets, and the authorial expectation that the reader will know what he is referring to--the Red Sea, the Brazen Serpent, Elijah's contest with the priests of Baal, imprisoned Jeremiah--and the message of Helaman falls flat. We'll need Bible literacy to understand the Book of Mormon. On the other hand--so turn the tube back on--too much quoting from these prophets, and Helaman's own delicate narrative line would be lost. So when we speak of Mormon and abridgment, much of his work had to do with pruning citation, and ever more quotes and citation.
We only get the thousandth part of either citation or of story, or something like that, for a hundreth part," of these and many other matters, "cannot be contained in this work [the entire abridgment of the plates of Nephi]" (Helaman 3:14). Editing Mormon, who ultimately has access to "many books and many records of every kind" (v.15), including "many records," "which are particular and very large" (v.13) gives us a list of the 99%: wars, contentions, dissensions, preaching, prophecies, shipping, building of ships, building of temples, building of synagogues, sanctuaries, righteousness, wickedness, murders, robbings, plundering, abominations, whoredoms. The shipping and craftsmanship intrigues the acolyte of Rick Steves, but you'd want to avoid interacting with the tense, preachy, even violent, locals. Note how righteousness is hopelessly outnumbered: 1 to 6; note the ceaseless building, the restless troublers of civility.) Mormon still cannot help but include in his abridgment of Helaman's record what readers today might paradoxically call an "Omni-sized" but endlessly compelling note about far-reaching explorations into lovely, long since abandoned but yet timberless lands of lakes and rivers, the consequent building of houses, temples, synagogues, sanctuaries, and "all manner of their buildings" with cement, and the necessary shipping of timber. The description reminds us of Chaco Grande's timber-consuming construction--an ecological disaster. (Hugh Nibley would mull over this verse.)
To get a feel for Mormon as condenser, pick up a library copy of Ibn Ishaq, the first editor-biographer of the Prophet Muhammad, then scroll through a version online. The unabridged copy in the library, which stuns us with its prolixity, being "particular and very large," preserves the sourcing. It gives each particular isnad, or connecting chain tracing who reported what to whom, etc., while the online version frees the casual reader of such a ponderous chain of reference. What readers have, thanks to prophetic and judicious pruning, may be called the online Book of Mormon. It's all preset for ready reading on iPads and iPhones, and during TV commercials. . .
(For the uses of abridgment in packaging literary works for the media, ponder the following: http://grammarist.com/spelling/abridgment-and-abridgement/ .)
So find a chair--you'll need one--link to Helaman 1, and safely turn it over to your favorite news channel: politics and political theater, campaigns, disputed elections, accusations, curtailment of freedom of speech, growing skepticism, detection, elitism, corruption, collusion, gangs, crimes, assassinations, intense famines, ecological disasters, financial collapses, surprise attacks on urban centers, and ordinary people "visited with terror"--everything you get when the shield of protection slips from an America of favor and promise (see President Boyd K. Packer, Conference Report, April 2004; Elder Neal A. Maxwell, Conference Report October 2001). Such applies equally well to Venezuela or to the United States.
Keeping up with Helaman? You'll need a 24/7 cable news network.
Notes
Though I know no instance of it in print, likely others, perhaps even many other readers have noted the possibility of an Ezaias/Isaiah authorship or dual editorship of what we call the Book of Isaiah. My own thoughts on such a relationship, with the one prophet's name, identity, and book completely enveloped in the other's, simply derives from reading and thinking about Helaman 8 yesterday and today--30 June 2017, yet the idea builds on what Hugh Nibley presents in Since Cumorah, ideas I've mulled over since the age of 10 or 11. The Scriptures of the Restoration give us so many prophetic doubles, double books, "and so forth's." And there are so many possibilities in the Holy Scriptures. The Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament all know but one Isaiah. The Book of Mormon, that great Scripture of the Restoration, with Ezaias and Isaiah, like Urim and Thummim, may show a double-Isaiah, or Isaian figure, likely father and son. It's moments like these in which Scripture enlarges our memory.
As a child, I often read from George Reynolds's Dictionary of the Book of Mormon, which describes Ezias (or Ezaias) as "An ancient Hebrew prophet, referred to by Nephi." Exactly! Because there are multiple kings and prophets in the Book of Mormon who are named Nephi, even Zenephi (Egyptian for "son of Nephi," z3-nb-hy), one particular Nephi might have talked about one Ezaias, another about another; one Isaiah may have spoken about a particular Nephi, or one Esaias of another--and so forth.
I will add that I accept without question that Isaiah's prophecy addressed to Cyrus by name came by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation and was recorded long before the great Cosmocrator appeared on the scene. Here is one of the great moments of prophecy in the history of the world. It is God who appoints a Cosmocrator--Cyrus himself recognized that (see the Cyrus Cylinder). As the Coffin Texts state: God knows every name.
See the various forms of the Ezaias name in the helpful: https://onoma.lib.byu.edu/index.php/EZIAS
That's one way to look at things, a rather unitary way, and it's very much in line with what Hugh Nibley says in Since Cumorah: "If others than Isaiah wrote about half the words in the book, why do we not know their names? The answer is, because of the way is which they worked. They were (as it is now explained) Isaiah's own disciples or students," or his sons, grandsons, and so forth, ampersand. "If anything," says Nibley, "the Book of Mormon attests the busy reshuffling and reediting of separate pages of sacred writings that often go under the name of a single prophet."
The form of the name Ezaias, Ezias, Esaias, etc., in Greek, English, or whatever linguistic cast we may choose to present, functions merely as a semiotic pointer--this Isaiah, not that one. Each is absolutely swallowed up in the other anyhow, ampersand. One of the Nephite chosen Twelve bears the name Isaiah. Doctrine and Covenants 84 tells of yet another Isaiah, in this case semiotically, and thus simply, differentiated as Esaias, who "lived in the days of Abraham." Again, when Doctrine and Covenants 76 addresses all professing partisans, including "some of Esaias, and some of Isaiah," it helps to read the words as being a critique not only of an undue--even a nitpicking--sectarian devotion to a particular prophet or gospel dispensation or book of scripture or even spelling of a name, but also as a critique of overzealous devotion to some kinds of higher criticism: these are the true words of Isaiah, these not; this is genuine Peter, this not; Romans is Pauline, 2nd Timothy not; John is Johannine, the Revelation not; Nephi quotes Deutero-Isaiah and is therefore in error, Joseph Smith mistakenly refers to Elias as other than Elijah, and so forth. Some are thus partisans of such-and-such a theory; some of another. As disciples progress toward sainthood, we shed the partisan line, however learned it may seem, however we may have learned it, and no matter how much we have been draped in "all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto." And let's stop boasting about knowledge of biblical languages, as if a badge of supremacy. By the way, Brother Joseph's differentiation of Elias and Elijah is another instance of a metalinguistic and semiological indicator of difference for two men having the same name, Eliyahu, but different roles to play. How many stumble, or parade, over such matters!
The occurrence of the unusual--and the pairing of Ezaias and Isaiah is unprecedented--signals that the Book of Mormon has something to tell us. When the Doctrine and Covenants chimes in, it's time to perk up our ears.
The Book of Mormon (that is, ensconced Helaman) thus resolves, with deft plainness, a weighty and long-standing difficulty about quotations from what many consider a Deutero-Isaiah. Helaman's ampersand-plus-c(etera) and the side-by-side naming of two Isaiahs in both Helaman 8:20 and Doctrine and Covenants 76:100 together provide us with sufficient answer for those who dispute one Isaian chapter or another making an appearance in the Book of Mormon. As for a pre-exilic Deutero-Isaiah in Father Lehi's hands, consider the chapters his son Nephi includes in his own double book, and what he leaves out--then get over it. Nephi left Jerusalem with a unitary copy of Isaiah, etc. It's as simple as that. (Nephi includes Isaiah 48-49 in his own first book; Isaiah 2-14, and then 29, in his second book; Isaiah 50-52, 55, in Nephi's brother Jacob's record, again in Nephi's second book. Mosiah and a Third Nephi (Trito-Nephi) include Isaiah 52-54.)
The later 20th Century scholarship confirms, says Hugh Nibley, how "the peculiar practices employed in the transmission of inspired writings in the Book of Mormon, as well as the theory and purpose behind those practices, are the very ones that prevailed in Palestine at the time Lehi lived there." Indeed: "We have come across a great tradition of prophetic unity that made it possible for inspired men in every age to translate, abridge, expand, explain, and update the writings of their predecessors without changing a particle of the intended meaning or in any way jeopardizing the earlier rights to authorship. Isaiah remains [one Isaiah], no matter how many prophets repeat his words or how many other prophets he is repeating. The Book of Mormon explains how this can be so, and its explanations would seem to be the solution to the Isaiah problem toward which the scholars are at present moving" (Hugh Nibley, Since Cumorah). When Brother Nibley further cites Hans Wildberger about how Isaiah and Micah, in prophesying of the Mountain of the Lord's House, the Salt Lake Temple, may be quoting from "archaic ritual texts" (or a single ancient text?) might not the Book of Helaman also afford a solution to the "problem toward which scholars are at present moving?" Could that archaic source perhaps be Helaman's Ezaias? or yet another of the name?
That's the sort of thing for which readers should forever be on the lookout, for the Book of Mormon continually invites our awareness as it awakens and enlarges our memories. Just so, the Brass Plates, a supersized and up-to-date Library of Hebrew Scripture in Lehi's hands, once served "to enlarge" "the memory of [his] people" (see Alma 37).
As Professor James Sanders would tell his students: 'Scripture is full of itself''--consciously so. It's kaleidoscopic, with built-in intertextuality that serves a crucial purpose. If otherwise, "it were not possible," as Benjamin tells his sons of Lehi, that he [or we] could have remembered all these things, to have taught them to his children" (Mosiah 1:4). I'd add that "Scripture is also full of the latest world report and abounding in politics"--a BBC of sorts. (I'm thinking of the well-informed Prophets here--they were Prophets to the World.)
The wee but rich Book of Helaman, compressing 51 years into 38 columned pages, cites as vital sources and guiding points of reference: Amulek, Zeezrom, Alma, Nephi, Lehi, Joshua, Zenock, Zenos, Ezaias, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Abraham, Lady Wisdom, Ether, Moses--and Messiah. Hugh Nibley, who labeled Helaman "the Book of Crimes," while also calling it the most spiritually charged book in the entire collection, further noted surprising correspondences between Helaman and the apocryphal Enoch literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. He filled the margins of his own copy with such references.
All that's not going to make for a once-over or easy reading. Helaman's going to require effort, its going to require checking the footnotes and reviewing other stories, so turn the TV off. Yet take away the words and deeds of these prophets, and the authorial expectation that the reader will know what he is referring to--the Red Sea, the Brazen Serpent, Elijah's contest with the priests of Baal, imprisoned Jeremiah--and the message of Helaman falls flat. We'll need Bible literacy to understand the Book of Mormon. On the other hand--so turn the tube back on--too much quoting from these prophets, and Helaman's own delicate narrative line would be lost. So when we speak of Mormon and abridgment, much of his work had to do with pruning citation, and ever more quotes and citation.
We only get the thousandth part of either citation or of story, or something like that, for a hundreth part," of these and many other matters, "cannot be contained in this work [the entire abridgment of the plates of Nephi]" (Helaman 3:14). Editing Mormon, who ultimately has access to "many books and many records of every kind" (v.15), including "many records," "which are particular and very large" (v.13) gives us a list of the 99%: wars, contentions, dissensions, preaching, prophecies, shipping, building of ships, building of temples, building of synagogues, sanctuaries, righteousness, wickedness, murders, robbings, plundering, abominations, whoredoms. The shipping and craftsmanship intrigues the acolyte of Rick Steves, but you'd want to avoid interacting with the tense, preachy, even violent, locals. Note how righteousness is hopelessly outnumbered: 1 to 6; note the ceaseless building, the restless troublers of civility.) Mormon still cannot help but include in his abridgment of Helaman's record what readers today might paradoxically call an "Omni-sized" but endlessly compelling note about far-reaching explorations into lovely, long since abandoned but yet timberless lands of lakes and rivers, the consequent building of houses, temples, synagogues, sanctuaries, and "all manner of their buildings" with cement, and the necessary shipping of timber. The description reminds us of Chaco Grande's timber-consuming construction--an ecological disaster. (Hugh Nibley would mull over this verse.)
To get a feel for Mormon as condenser, pick up a library copy of Ibn Ishaq, the first editor-biographer of the Prophet Muhammad, then scroll through a version online. The unabridged copy in the library, which stuns us with its prolixity, being "particular and very large," preserves the sourcing. It gives each particular isnad, or connecting chain tracing who reported what to whom, etc., while the online version frees the casual reader of such a ponderous chain of reference. What readers have, thanks to prophetic and judicious pruning, may be called the online Book of Mormon. It's all preset for ready reading on iPads and iPhones, and during TV commercials. . .
(For the uses of abridgment in packaging literary works for the media, ponder the following: http://grammarist.com/spelling/abridgment-and-abridgement/ .)
So find a chair--you'll need one--link to Helaman 1, and safely turn it over to your favorite news channel: politics and political theater, campaigns, disputed elections, accusations, curtailment of freedom of speech, growing skepticism, detection, elitism, corruption, collusion, gangs, crimes, assassinations, intense famines, ecological disasters, financial collapses, surprise attacks on urban centers, and ordinary people "visited with terror"--everything you get when the shield of protection slips from an America of favor and promise (see President Boyd K. Packer, Conference Report, April 2004; Elder Neal A. Maxwell, Conference Report October 2001). Such applies equally well to Venezuela or to the United States.
Keeping up with Helaman? You'll need a 24/7 cable news network.
Notes
Though I know no instance of it in print, likely others, perhaps even many other readers have noted the possibility of an Ezaias/Isaiah authorship or dual editorship of what we call the Book of Isaiah. My own thoughts on such a relationship, with the one prophet's name, identity, and book completely enveloped in the other's, simply derives from reading and thinking about Helaman 8 yesterday and today--30 June 2017, yet the idea builds on what Hugh Nibley presents in Since Cumorah, ideas I've mulled over since the age of 10 or 11. The Scriptures of the Restoration give us so many prophetic doubles, double books, "and so forth's." And there are so many possibilities in the Holy Scriptures. The Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament all know but one Isaiah. The Book of Mormon, that great Scripture of the Restoration, with Ezaias and Isaiah, like Urim and Thummim, may show a double-Isaiah, or Isaian figure, likely father and son. It's moments like these in which Scripture enlarges our memory.
As a child, I often read from George Reynolds's Dictionary of the Book of Mormon, which describes Ezias (or Ezaias) as "An ancient Hebrew prophet, referred to by Nephi." Exactly! Because there are multiple kings and prophets in the Book of Mormon who are named Nephi, even Zenephi (Egyptian for "son of Nephi," z3-nb-hy), one particular Nephi might have talked about one Ezaias, another about another; one Isaiah may have spoken about a particular Nephi, or one Esaias of another--and so forth.
I will add that I accept without question that Isaiah's prophecy addressed to Cyrus by name came by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation and was recorded long before the great Cosmocrator appeared on the scene. Here is one of the great moments of prophecy in the history of the world. It is God who appoints a Cosmocrator--Cyrus himself recognized that (see the Cyrus Cylinder). As the Coffin Texts state: God knows every name.
See the various forms of the Ezaias name in the helpful: https://onoma.lib.byu.edu/index.php/EZIAS
Monday, July 18, 2016
Two Bridges (First Draft)
My purpose is to cheer on the promising buds of gospel scholarship.
As a Latter-day Saint who prizes thoughtful writing on the Book of Mormon and on the Pearl of Great Price, I will henceforth keep in mind a cautionary note, what I shall call the Two Bridges.
The first bridge is The Bridge to Nowhere. The second evokes strategy--even The Bridge Too Far.
We may, at times, meet sloppy prose, slippery logic, weak argument, incoherent transitions, and bizarre claims about the meaning of the word plausible (it does not connote the flimsiest thread binds Iron Truth), or of the role of authority (a scholar slept Here--disturb not!). Of these faults, the most serious is the lack of judicious discrimination in handling sources.
Here juts The Bridge to Nowhere. . .
Elsewhere, we find intricacy, detail, baroque piles, with multitudinous accompanying signs posted on interminable byways and winding paths: The Highway to Faith Just Ahead. One More Bridge. Watch for Ice.
Before us lies. . . The Bridge Too Far.
These Two Bridges, never fully distinct, may even converge into but One Bridge: the Bridge to Bird Island--that sandbar on Utah Lake on whose north shore Zarahemla once proudly rose (or was it the east shore and the Hill Cumorah?). And what is true of our work on the Book of Mormon may equally apply to work on Abraham or Deuteronomy or Paul.
Keeping well in mind that the Lord asks our patience and our faith, He never requires A Bridge Too Far. Faith sufficient to study, ponder, and plant the seed of belief in the testimony of the Book of Mormon is the "invitation" sent out "to all men" (see Alma 5:33; Alma 32). That testimony comprises not only doctrine but historical narrative as well; for, like the Bible, the Book of Mormon has its own assumptions about itself.
I speak of the work of independent students, what Elder Oaks calls "alternative voices," not of the publications in official Church organs. Who can but admire the careful and thoughtful work the Church sponsors on the Doctrine and Covenants and Church History? (Hint: it's small on speculation.) Faithful Latter-day Saints stand for the truth of the Book of Mormon's doctrine and storyline, but must they further vouch for any particular take, or even consensus, on geology, geography, ethnology, genetics, numerology, law, literary and lit-crit studies, linguistics, source criticism, or on what constitutes a festival or a temple text?
"Of course not," we say, "no one ever suggested any such thing!" Then why do we sometimes push our readings and interpretations to the degree we do? "Well, maybe we get a bit carried away in love and zeal and ice skates. It's like Pokemon Go: it's an exercise; it's fun; we battle monsters! Enemies we hunt up online surround us as we play! The pressure is constant!" Then let's be direct about it--lest we wind up saying to our readers: You really can't understand the book aright until you throw off encrusted tradition and read it with new eyes, that is, with our eyes--and here's the latest scholarship for you to master. Which is the same thing as saying: You jolly well must accept Zarahemla in Alaska, if you really wish to explain both the Mayans and the Mulekites, so well as the absence of snow and jungles in the Book of Mormon.
It's nobody's authorial intent to so present the Case of the Book of Mormon--but what of the reader? What of the reader, fed on the seeds so liberally spread on Bird Island, who comes to believe he or she must answer all the thorny historical and scientific questions anyone could possibly ask of the Book of Mormon, and so resorts to any possible answer, however far-fetched? What of the reader (or author) who has no reason to suppose that what is being promoted as the "latest scholarship" is founded in a decades-ago exploded secondary source? No matter how pleasing the sound, everything must be tested.
Alas! the method and the manner of Bird Island. How many years will it take to root out such a deep disregard for philology? Twenty? Thirty? Could we root it out all at once! Root, hog, or die!
In our very desire to support and supplement and invite faith in the word of God, and to stave off the singularly odd and repetitive attacks of the critic, might we sometimes nevertheless devise linguistic models, ethnological constructs, or geographic certainties of such complicated skein--that all ultimately culminates in A Bridge too Far? Is our immune system in overdrive? The cleverest-seeming scholarship may, at last, serve up many a dish for the gullible. (Look up the dictionary meaning of the word sophisticated.)
Lehi in Arabia? Great. Lehi in South Arabia? Yeah. Lehi's shrine in . . ?
Lehi in America? Fine. Lehi in Mesoamerica? Okay. Lehi in that particular cenote? You jump in first.
Bunyan's Christian, that simple Bible-reading pilgrim, pauses in front of our pyramidal learning, takes in the algae-clogged sandbar, and scratches his head: "Another Slough of Despond, is't not?"
Or might our piles and pyramids of learning by which we say we see, in occasional contradistinction to King Benjamin's tower even distort doctrinal horizons? Sometimes, with Alma, we feel to say: "Ye cannot suppose that this is what it meaneth" (Alma 40:17); or "it mattereth not" (40:5, 8). There are vital reasons why scriptural scholarship, in which history and doctrine are inseparably tied together, is the most difficult scholarship of all.
Besides, the road to faith need not stretch beyond the few and evil days of our mortal probation. Brigham Young read the Book of Mormon closely and prayerfully for two, not twenty, years before seeking baptism. If he had waited twenty years, he would have missed leading the Pioneer Trail. The pageant must go on; the dispensation of the fulness of times unroll. Wagons Ho!
It's time to drop some things cold; it's time to take responsibility for what we publish.
Shall we sing loud just because we find ourselves off-key? What to do? Kicked out of the pulpit; tuned up; then kicked back in--the Brigham Young solution? So very much of what finds publication in Book of Mormon studies over the span of the decades parallels the precarious situation of one or another of these Two Bridges.
Of what, then, may sound Book of Mormon scholarship consist? Of silly Ph.D's? Of startling originality for its own sake? And what's the point of such Scriptural endeavor anyhow? It should--and in sobriety of word and argument--invite what Hugh Nibley calls a second look. It ought not provide the artillery for public rows. Enough already of these interminable online rows about Scripture!
Hugh Nibley, in a footnote buried somewhere or other, speaks of "the peculiar and the specific." Evidence ideally ought to be "both peculiar and specific": that is the high standard Nibley strove for. Did he sometimes reach it? It's clear he thought he occasionally did. And so can we.
Proof, that is to say, "being convinced of a thing," lies within, a subjective choice ever. While the peculiar and the specific do not spell proof, that telling combination is an utterly different thing than the tenuous and the speculative. All Scriptural scholarship among the Latter-day Saints hovers somewhere between one or the other pole; I do not say it hovers safely. And if what goes into publication tends to be both tenuous and speculative (or even jejune and incomprehensible), so be it. Presses must roll--and posthaste! But when a correspondence simply must be pointed out, when it shines so bright as the three stars in the belt of Orion, the student will come to know what is nebulous and what is not.
Notes
Hugh Nibley, "Bird Island."
As a Latter-day Saint who prizes thoughtful writing on the Book of Mormon and on the Pearl of Great Price, I will henceforth keep in mind a cautionary note, what I shall call the Two Bridges.
The first bridge is The Bridge to Nowhere. The second evokes strategy--even The Bridge Too Far.
We may, at times, meet sloppy prose, slippery logic, weak argument, incoherent transitions, and bizarre claims about the meaning of the word plausible (it does not connote the flimsiest thread binds Iron Truth), or of the role of authority (a scholar slept Here--disturb not!). Of these faults, the most serious is the lack of judicious discrimination in handling sources.
Here juts The Bridge to Nowhere. . .
Elsewhere, we find intricacy, detail, baroque piles, with multitudinous accompanying signs posted on interminable byways and winding paths: The Highway to Faith Just Ahead. One More Bridge. Watch for Ice.
Before us lies. . . The Bridge Too Far.
These Two Bridges, never fully distinct, may even converge into but One Bridge: the Bridge to Bird Island--that sandbar on Utah Lake on whose north shore Zarahemla once proudly rose (or was it the east shore and the Hill Cumorah?). And what is true of our work on the Book of Mormon may equally apply to work on Abraham or Deuteronomy or Paul.
Keeping well in mind that the Lord asks our patience and our faith, He never requires A Bridge Too Far. Faith sufficient to study, ponder, and plant the seed of belief in the testimony of the Book of Mormon is the "invitation" sent out "to all men" (see Alma 5:33; Alma 32). That testimony comprises not only doctrine but historical narrative as well; for, like the Bible, the Book of Mormon has its own assumptions about itself.
I speak of the work of independent students, what Elder Oaks calls "alternative voices," not of the publications in official Church organs. Who can but admire the careful and thoughtful work the Church sponsors on the Doctrine and Covenants and Church History? (Hint: it's small on speculation.) Faithful Latter-day Saints stand for the truth of the Book of Mormon's doctrine and storyline, but must they further vouch for any particular take, or even consensus, on geology, geography, ethnology, genetics, numerology, law, literary and lit-crit studies, linguistics, source criticism, or on what constitutes a festival or a temple text?
"Of course not," we say, "no one ever suggested any such thing!" Then why do we sometimes push our readings and interpretations to the degree we do? "Well, maybe we get a bit carried away in love and zeal and ice skates. It's like Pokemon Go: it's an exercise; it's fun; we battle monsters! Enemies we hunt up online surround us as we play! The pressure is constant!" Then let's be direct about it--lest we wind up saying to our readers: You really can't understand the book aright until you throw off encrusted tradition and read it with new eyes, that is, with our eyes--and here's the latest scholarship for you to master. Which is the same thing as saying: You jolly well must accept Zarahemla in Alaska, if you really wish to explain both the Mayans and the Mulekites, so well as the absence of snow and jungles in the Book of Mormon.
It's nobody's authorial intent to so present the Case of the Book of Mormon--but what of the reader? What of the reader, fed on the seeds so liberally spread on Bird Island, who comes to believe he or she must answer all the thorny historical and scientific questions anyone could possibly ask of the Book of Mormon, and so resorts to any possible answer, however far-fetched? What of the reader (or author) who has no reason to suppose that what is being promoted as the "latest scholarship" is founded in a decades-ago exploded secondary source? No matter how pleasing the sound, everything must be tested.
Alas! the method and the manner of Bird Island. How many years will it take to root out such a deep disregard for philology? Twenty? Thirty? Could we root it out all at once! Root, hog, or die!
In our very desire to support and supplement and invite faith in the word of God, and to stave off the singularly odd and repetitive attacks of the critic, might we sometimes nevertheless devise linguistic models, ethnological constructs, or geographic certainties of such complicated skein--that all ultimately culminates in A Bridge too Far? Is our immune system in overdrive? The cleverest-seeming scholarship may, at last, serve up many a dish for the gullible. (Look up the dictionary meaning of the word sophisticated.)
Lehi in Arabia? Great. Lehi in South Arabia? Yeah. Lehi's shrine in . . ?
Lehi in America? Fine. Lehi in Mesoamerica? Okay. Lehi in that particular cenote? You jump in first.
Bunyan's Christian, that simple Bible-reading pilgrim, pauses in front of our pyramidal learning, takes in the algae-clogged sandbar, and scratches his head: "Another Slough of Despond, is't not?"
Or might our piles and pyramids of learning by which we say we see, in occasional contradistinction to King Benjamin's tower even distort doctrinal horizons? Sometimes, with Alma, we feel to say: "Ye cannot suppose that this is what it meaneth" (Alma 40:17); or "it mattereth not" (40:5, 8). There are vital reasons why scriptural scholarship, in which history and doctrine are inseparably tied together, is the most difficult scholarship of all.
Besides, the road to faith need not stretch beyond the few and evil days of our mortal probation. Brigham Young read the Book of Mormon closely and prayerfully for two, not twenty, years before seeking baptism. If he had waited twenty years, he would have missed leading the Pioneer Trail. The pageant must go on; the dispensation of the fulness of times unroll. Wagons Ho!
It's time to drop some things cold; it's time to take responsibility for what we publish.
Shall we sing loud just because we find ourselves off-key? What to do? Kicked out of the pulpit; tuned up; then kicked back in--the Brigham Young solution? So very much of what finds publication in Book of Mormon studies over the span of the decades parallels the precarious situation of one or another of these Two Bridges.
Of what, then, may sound Book of Mormon scholarship consist? Of silly Ph.D's? Of startling originality for its own sake? And what's the point of such Scriptural endeavor anyhow? It should--and in sobriety of word and argument--invite what Hugh Nibley calls a second look. It ought not provide the artillery for public rows. Enough already of these interminable online rows about Scripture!
Hugh Nibley, in a footnote buried somewhere or other, speaks of "the peculiar and the specific." Evidence ideally ought to be "both peculiar and specific": that is the high standard Nibley strove for. Did he sometimes reach it? It's clear he thought he occasionally did. And so can we.
Proof, that is to say, "being convinced of a thing," lies within, a subjective choice ever. While the peculiar and the specific do not spell proof, that telling combination is an utterly different thing than the tenuous and the speculative. All Scriptural scholarship among the Latter-day Saints hovers somewhere between one or the other pole; I do not say it hovers safely. And if what goes into publication tends to be both tenuous and speculative (or even jejune and incomprehensible), so be it. Presses must roll--and posthaste! But when a correspondence simply must be pointed out, when it shines so bright as the three stars in the belt of Orion, the student will come to know what is nebulous and what is not.
Notes
Hugh Nibley, "Bird Island."
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
The Title Page of the Book of Mormon and the Translation of the Book of Abraham
Joseph Smith describes the title page of the Book of Mormon as "a literal translation," even "a genuine and literal translation," of the last unsealed gold plate. In only one other instance does the Prophet specify the original locus of a particular place in scripture: Abraham Chapter 3 derives "from the papyrus now in my house." In other words, Visit my house, and I'll be glad to show you the very hieroglyphs I translated. And note how Joseph, when speaking of the particular gold plate that serves as title page, correlates one plate to one page. Other plates may translate into three or four pages of English, but the point remains: Here is no mystical, pre-decipherment "reading" of hieroglyphs as Symbol, wherein each sign contains of itself sufficient capacity to supply many sentences of esoterica. No. Joseph Smith has been lambasted for, supposedly, believing a single hieroglyph in Egyptian could stand for many words, even paragraphs, in English. That may describe Athanasius Kircher; Joseph Smith can speak for himself. Joseph, who compares the Egyptian writing on the last plate to "all Hebrew writing in general," sees all hieroglyphs, formed or reformed or whatever, as a "running" script. That's his word. "Running": nothing could be more clear (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, 60-61).
We accordingly see Joseph Smith at pains to supply the right adjectives. "The English version" "of the very last leaf" of "the original Book of Mormon" is a "genuine and literal translation" from the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Book of Abraham aims to be "a correct translation." Further, the English version of the Book of Mormon title page "is not by any means a modern composition, either of mine or of any other man." Some wonder whether Joseph Smith himself composed the Book of Abraham solely as an inspired vehicle for introducing a transcendent doctrine--a symbolic link to a symbolic rather than an historical past. Those few so supposing would describe prophetic "trans-lation" as an ingenious re-imaging or re-imagining of the ancient scriptural heritage--a justifiable theological enterprise--and, by so describing, think to detach and thus save inspired comment and composition from the imperatives of scholarship. It doesn't take much imagination, though, to hear the Prophet's frank response: Neither is the Book of Abraham "a modern composition, either of mine or of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation."
As for the revealed explanations of the three Book of Abraham facsimiles, these, too, are not a composition "of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation"--the imprimatur of Joseph the Seer lies powerfully upon them.
We accordingly see Joseph Smith at pains to supply the right adjectives. "The English version" "of the very last leaf" of "the original Book of Mormon" is a "genuine and literal translation" from the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Book of Abraham aims to be "a correct translation." Further, the English version of the Book of Mormon title page "is not by any means a modern composition, either of mine or of any other man." Some wonder whether Joseph Smith himself composed the Book of Abraham solely as an inspired vehicle for introducing a transcendent doctrine--a symbolic link to a symbolic rather than an historical past. Those few so supposing would describe prophetic "trans-lation" as an ingenious re-imaging or re-imagining of the ancient scriptural heritage--a justifiable theological enterprise--and, by so describing, think to detach and thus save inspired comment and composition from the imperatives of scholarship. It doesn't take much imagination, though, to hear the Prophet's frank response: Neither is the Book of Abraham "a modern composition, either of mine or of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation."
As for the revealed explanations of the three Book of Abraham facsimiles, these, too, are not a composition "of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation"--the imprimatur of Joseph the Seer lies powerfully upon them.
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Laban the White and the Wizardry of Allusion
Laban first comes to us in a grammatical nexus that shows possession. Lehi tells Nephi "Thou and thy brothers should go unto the house of Laban, and seek the records." Laban "has" the records; he "keeps" the records. Nephi's breathless account speaks many times of the house of Laban, as well as the servants of Laban, including Zoram, the servant of Laban, of the hands of Laban (those rapacious hands), the garments of Laban, the treasury of Laban, and even the voice of Laban. Indeed throughout the Book of Mormon, we meet the sword of Laban. Nephi, wearing the garments of Laban, and his armor and "his sword," goes to the treasury of Laban, and craftily speaking in the voice of Laban commands the servant of Laban to bring the records.
So why Laban--that unexpected name? For that, we need not repair to the patriarchs nor to the moon, but simply to the moment of birth. Surprised at such an "exceeding white" and large baby, the parents hit on Laban. The Chinese favor the baibai pangpang, the baby born to prosperity and beauty: white white fat fat. But Laban's whiteness, though not leprous, was rather an oddity. "Milky," "chalky," the parents must have muttered. The voice, too, had its unique quality, a timbre of command: the voice of Laban. The whole episode comes to a head--Laban's head--in the dream of a Jerusalem night. The surprising whiteness of the countenance of Laban is now no concern to Nephi: the garments of Laban, the sword of Laban--that shining sword of fine steel, with brilliant golden hilt--the voice of Laban, these suffice to work the trick.
As a personal name in the Hebrew Bible, Laban appears only in the patriarchal narratives (as the nephew of Abraham). He is the kind of relative that helps you one minute and tricks you the next. Rebekah is a beauty: "And Rebekah had a brother, and his name was Laban." There's always a catch.
Besides the little sister, Genesis gives us Rachel, the daughter of Laban, the sheep of Laban, Laban's flocks, the flock of Laban, Laban's cattle, and Laban's sons. We also behold "the countenance of Laban," an inconstant countenance--like "th'inconstant moon."
Nephi's Laban, who is a famous kinsman, also commands his tens of thousands and his fifty, that last battalion being, says Hugh Nibley, Jerusalem's "permanent garrison." While there is room for comparison between Genesis and 1 Nephi, Laban, the military strongman, is his own man set in his own time. What Nephi gives us in Laban is "an eloquent commentary of the ripeness of Jerusalem for destruction" (Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert, 96-98).
Besides the little sister, Genesis gives us Rachel, the daughter of Laban, the sheep of Laban, Laban's flocks, the flock of Laban, Laban's cattle, and Laban's sons. We also behold "the countenance of Laban," an inconstant countenance--like "th'inconstant moon."
Nephi's Laban, who is a famous kinsman, also commands his tens of thousands and his fifty, that last battalion being, says Hugh Nibley, Jerusalem's "permanent garrison." While there is room for comparison between Genesis and 1 Nephi, Laban, the military strongman, is his own man set in his own time. What Nephi gives us in Laban is "an eloquent commentary of the ripeness of Jerusalem for destruction" (Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert, 96-98).
Though Nephi's vividly narrated encounter with his own kinsman need not be read in light of distant Jacob's encounter with his crafty father-in-law, the Laban of Nephi shares something of his namesake's character. Nephi doesn't drop literary allusions to the patriarchal schemer; he doesn't really need to: the name alone evokes the man. The Encyclopaedia Judaica sums things up nicely--or not so nicely: "Laban cheated Jacob." "Laban emerges as a greedy and crafty man" (EJ 12:406-407). He chases people down in pursuit of his stolen property--or is it their property? So, too, Laban cheated Nephi. Book of Mormon Laban emerges as a greedy man, who, like Rebekah's welcoming brother, exhibits something of that easy, lulling hospitality mingled with craft. As his name is, so is he (1 Samuel 25:25).
Hugh Nibley speaks of "the pompous Laban": "He was a large man, short-tempered, crafty, and deceitful, and to the bargain cruel, greedy, unscrupulous, weak, and given to drink" (Lehi in the Desert, 97). Crafty? Laban invited Lehi's sons into his house on two occasions; they sat and talked in cousinly comfort before he sprung the trap. Here is craft, disguised by a pleasant, urbane manner--he duped the cousins twice--and unmasked in a sudden, overt violence: Laban blazes with anger, lusts after property, issues accusation and sentence; then, sends others to do the chasing. In his wrath, no matter how cleverly wrought, he remains as much Nabal as Laban--a fool and a lazy drunkard, seated and shouting orders.
Laban ("white," or even "exceedingly white"), say the rabbis, signifies "shining in wickedness" (EJ 12:407). Shining in wickedness, perhaps an angel of light, Nephi's Laban may be, but he is decidedly not a bride-switcher: that takes a truer duplicity. Crafty Laban ultimately meets his match in Jacob the trickster. Practical Nephi is no trickster: he finds Laban dead drunk in the streets and lops his head off with his own sword.
Nephi's justification for his violence points a careful reader to the story of David and Nabal, that Nabal who brashly denies David and his band of wilderness brothers their polite request for hospitality. Hospitality makes for a delicate thing, a point of honor, in all three stories, and Rashi famously takes Laban as anagram of Nabal (fool). Whether Nephi ever thought of these things is beside the point; Scripture invites intertextual reading at every turn of the page, and the wise student keeps his eyes open for both comparison and difference. (The article to read is Alan Goff, "How Should We Then Read? Reading the Book of Mormon after the Fall," FARMS Review, 21/1 (2009): 137-78.)
According to Professor Goff: "If we are going to see in the Nephi/Laban story an allusion, we must grant that the record is textually sophisticated and view the connection as intentional rather than incidental. Allusion presupposes intention, as 'an inadvertent allusion is a kind of solecism.' I assert that the connections between the Laban story in the Book of Mormon and the Laban/Nabal stories in the Bible are intentional and that the ideal reader of the book will recognize the allusions."
I like what Brother Goff is saying because I enjoy reading Robert Alter, James Sanders, and Michael Fishbane, though I'm just as sure Nephi had no such aim in mind: he's telling us what happened to him one night in Jerusalem. And I have no idea whether "an inadvertent allusion" can or cannot be; neither am I sure how any allusion may register "a kind of solecism." Nephi knew God had delivered Jacob, Joseph, and Moses, and, true, he came to see his deliverance as being like that of the fathers; he speaks to his brothers about Moses in the wilderness so often that the reader wonders whether Nephi saw his own desert encampments as proximate the very places where "Israel's tents [did] shine so bright." Such identification with tenting Israel goes beyond allusion, as Noel Reynolds and others have noted. Even so, the idea that Nephi intentionally and artistically worked a filimentary allusiveness into his narrative runs contrary to his forthright nature and style. Ask Laban.
I spent a lot of time in Robert Alter's books--once upon a time. I recommend them, but the magic wears off readily. It's life itself, especially the life of old Jerusalem, that runs deep and gives us books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. And the written record of the race, especially Scripture, comes a running brook. Culture does its own work: it weaves its own patterns, some of startling complexity. A divine purpose stands over all. The Book of Mormon came first to a people drenched in Bible story, as Nephi himself noted (1 Nephi 12-13). And to these plain Puritan folk, Joseph Smith's neighbors, Nephi offers a plain narrative; the manifold gems studding his work solely, though tellingly, reflect the rich cultural heritage of one who walked in a land of prophets and kings.
Hugh Nibley saw in Laban the Levantine governor, Zakar-Baal, arrogantly receiving "as he sat in his house." We might catch glimpses of Laban elsewhere, but we find him "in his house" only in a particular cultural milieu. Nephi's Laban, in thumbnail sketch, passes the high test of what Nibley calls the "peculiar" and the "specific" (see Since Cumorah, Chapter 9 n. 80). For diligent readers, everything goes into the mix; even so, guiding principles such as the peculiar and the specific ought to control what we ultimately say about the Book of Mormon.
Nephi does note likenesses, quotations, and allusions everywhere in the prophetic word: Isaiah, Zenos, Neum. Nephi was learned, "somewhat," he says--it could get worse, he's telling us--in all "the learning of the Jews." 1 Nephi 22 thus affords a rich prototype of what may be found in rabbinic commentary.
Alan Goff offers students of the Book of Mormon the keys to the "treasury of Laban." Once the records are in our own hands, and one in our hands with the blessed Bible, we turn the pages as led or as we will.
Of one thing we may be sure, the sons of Lehi must have been asleep at the switch to parade so much of gold, silver, and precious things before the eyes of Laban. It was their second appeal to their uncle's better angel; they already knew of his touchiness and imperious anger--he had "thrust" Laman from his house--yet they somehow never suspected his rapaciousness or his alcoholism.
We must turn to cultural folkways to explain the surprising attempt to dazzle Laban with the family wealth. Such naivete only reveals the brothers' own touchiness in honor, a touchiness born of "goodly parents": they were trying to prove a point of honor. Laban likely owed Lehi a gift or two for past favors, and Laman, who had first politely requested the records from Laban, was not, as accused, "a robber"; the brothers, though amazed at Laban's lack of cultivation in the games of reciprocity, were willing to pay an exorbitant price to show good faith. But the old ties of kinship meant nothing to Laban: killing and taking was his way.
Hugh Nibley speaks of "the pompous Laban": "He was a large man, short-tempered, crafty, and deceitful, and to the bargain cruel, greedy, unscrupulous, weak, and given to drink" (Lehi in the Desert, 97). Crafty? Laban invited Lehi's sons into his house on two occasions; they sat and talked in cousinly comfort before he sprung the trap. Here is craft, disguised by a pleasant, urbane manner--he duped the cousins twice--and unmasked in a sudden, overt violence: Laban blazes with anger, lusts after property, issues accusation and sentence; then, sends others to do the chasing. In his wrath, no matter how cleverly wrought, he remains as much Nabal as Laban--a fool and a lazy drunkard, seated and shouting orders.
Laban ("white," or even "exceedingly white"), say the rabbis, signifies "shining in wickedness" (EJ 12:407). Shining in wickedness, perhaps an angel of light, Nephi's Laban may be, but he is decidedly not a bride-switcher: that takes a truer duplicity. Crafty Laban ultimately meets his match in Jacob the trickster. Practical Nephi is no trickster: he finds Laban dead drunk in the streets and lops his head off with his own sword.
Nephi's justification for his violence points a careful reader to the story of David and Nabal, that Nabal who brashly denies David and his band of wilderness brothers their polite request for hospitality. Hospitality makes for a delicate thing, a point of honor, in all three stories, and Rashi famously takes Laban as anagram of Nabal (fool). Whether Nephi ever thought of these things is beside the point; Scripture invites intertextual reading at every turn of the page, and the wise student keeps his eyes open for both comparison and difference. (The article to read is Alan Goff, "How Should We Then Read? Reading the Book of Mormon after the Fall," FARMS Review, 21/1 (2009): 137-78.)
According to Professor Goff: "If we are going to see in the Nephi/Laban story an allusion, we must grant that the record is textually sophisticated and view the connection as intentional rather than incidental. Allusion presupposes intention, as 'an inadvertent allusion is a kind of solecism.' I assert that the connections between the Laban story in the Book of Mormon and the Laban/Nabal stories in the Bible are intentional and that the ideal reader of the book will recognize the allusions."
I like what Brother Goff is saying because I enjoy reading Robert Alter, James Sanders, and Michael Fishbane, though I'm just as sure Nephi had no such aim in mind: he's telling us what happened to him one night in Jerusalem. And I have no idea whether "an inadvertent allusion" can or cannot be; neither am I sure how any allusion may register "a kind of solecism." Nephi knew God had delivered Jacob, Joseph, and Moses, and, true, he came to see his deliverance as being like that of the fathers; he speaks to his brothers about Moses in the wilderness so often that the reader wonders whether Nephi saw his own desert encampments as proximate the very places where "Israel's tents [did] shine so bright." Such identification with tenting Israel goes beyond allusion, as Noel Reynolds and others have noted. Even so, the idea that Nephi intentionally and artistically worked a filimentary allusiveness into his narrative runs contrary to his forthright nature and style. Ask Laban.
I spent a lot of time in Robert Alter's books--once upon a time. I recommend them, but the magic wears off readily. It's life itself, especially the life of old Jerusalem, that runs deep and gives us books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. And the written record of the race, especially Scripture, comes a running brook. Culture does its own work: it weaves its own patterns, some of startling complexity. A divine purpose stands over all. The Book of Mormon came first to a people drenched in Bible story, as Nephi himself noted (1 Nephi 12-13). And to these plain Puritan folk, Joseph Smith's neighbors, Nephi offers a plain narrative; the manifold gems studding his work solely, though tellingly, reflect the rich cultural heritage of one who walked in a land of prophets and kings.
Hugh Nibley saw in Laban the Levantine governor, Zakar-Baal, arrogantly receiving "as he sat in his house." We might catch glimpses of Laban elsewhere, but we find him "in his house" only in a particular cultural milieu. Nephi's Laban, in thumbnail sketch, passes the high test of what Nibley calls the "peculiar" and the "specific" (see Since Cumorah, Chapter 9 n. 80). For diligent readers, everything goes into the mix; even so, guiding principles such as the peculiar and the specific ought to control what we ultimately say about the Book of Mormon.
Nephi does note likenesses, quotations, and allusions everywhere in the prophetic word: Isaiah, Zenos, Neum. Nephi was learned, "somewhat," he says--it could get worse, he's telling us--in all "the learning of the Jews." 1 Nephi 22 thus affords a rich prototype of what may be found in rabbinic commentary.
Alan Goff offers students of the Book of Mormon the keys to the "treasury of Laban." Once the records are in our own hands, and one in our hands with the blessed Bible, we turn the pages as led or as we will.
Of one thing we may be sure, the sons of Lehi must have been asleep at the switch to parade so much of gold, silver, and precious things before the eyes of Laban. It was their second appeal to their uncle's better angel; they already knew of his touchiness and imperious anger--he had "thrust" Laman from his house--yet they somehow never suspected his rapaciousness or his alcoholism.
We must turn to cultural folkways to explain the surprising attempt to dazzle Laban with the family wealth. Such naivete only reveals the brothers' own touchiness in honor, a touchiness born of "goodly parents": they were trying to prove a point of honor. Laban likely owed Lehi a gift or two for past favors, and Laman, who had first politely requested the records from Laban, was not, as accused, "a robber"; the brothers, though amazed at Laban's lack of cultivation in the games of reciprocity, were willing to pay an exorbitant price to show good faith. But the old ties of kinship meant nothing to Laban: killing and taking was his way.
So why Laban--that unexpected name? For that, we need not repair to the patriarchs nor to the moon, but simply to the moment of birth. Surprised at such an "exceeding white" and large baby, the parents hit on Laban. The Chinese favor the baibai pangpang, the baby born to prosperity and beauty: white white fat fat. But Laban's whiteness, though not leprous, was rather an oddity. "Milky," "chalky," the parents must have muttered. The voice, too, had its unique quality, a timbre of command: the voice of Laban. The whole episode comes to a head--Laban's head--in the dream of a Jerusalem night. The surprising whiteness of the countenance of Laban is now no concern to Nephi: the garments of Laban, the sword of Laban--that shining sword of fine steel, with brilliant golden hilt--the voice of Laban, these suffice to work the trick.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Some Thoughts on the Study of the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ
The testimony of the two witnesses of Christ, the Bible and the Book of Mormon, runs together. The flood of truth "shall grow together" "unto the laying down of contentions, and establishing peace" (2 Nephi 3:12). We do not take up Scripture to contend, for by Scripture comes the millennial peace.
Such rising scriptural convergence changes for all time the very nature of Scripture, even as it bursts open the sluices for yet "other books" to swell the tide. The Book of Mormon, in expression of its own witness, both signifies and clarifies the Bible and thus contains "the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ." That being so, can we ever truly separate, even in casual speech, what has so fruitfully grown together?
See Doctrine and Covenants 20:9; Boyd K. Packer, "The Reason for Our Hope," Conference Report, October 2014; Neal A. Maxwell, "The Book of Mormon: A Great Answer to 'The Great Question,'" The Voice of My Servants: Apostolic Messages on Teaching, Learning, and Scripture, 221-38.
Hugh Nibley felt the Book of Mormon to run deeper even than Shakespeare: We should not be surprised at finding traces and echoes on every side. Conjuring up enemies and apostates on every side is a different matter; the waters of life will inevitably flow into the dry patches, "unto the confounding of false doctrines," if we will keep up with our reading and sharing (2 Nephi 3:12).
To find and to trace, and to listen well, is inevitably to write--and to write well. But I hope readers of the Book of Mormon will dust off scholasticism and a clinging Alexandrian staleness. I hope those who take up the Book of Mormon as their theme will be so caught up into the heavens that their words will ring with a high beauty. I hope writers will let endless geographies alone, let insincere critics alone, let entirely alone online debates (see Titus 3:9; 1 Timothy 1:4).
May we teach, not tilt.
Latter-day Saints, by the millions, give themselves to daily study. Such spirited and spiritual absorption among the general membership partakes of more intellectual horsepower and yields more insight than do the methods of the schools. And how sophomoric to label someone else's reading devotional and one's own, academic (2 Nephi 9:28)--how close to sophistry. There is no advanced Book of Mormon scholarship beyond the scope of child or teen. Even so, none of us can daily approach the Book of Mormon from every angle or, daily, multiply comment beyond measure.
See Elder David A. Bednar, "Three Methods of Scripture Study," CES Fireside, 4 February 2007.
One method stands superior to the rest:
We must all discover the scriptures for ourselves.
Then we must walk in their light.
Such rising scriptural convergence changes for all time the very nature of Scripture, even as it bursts open the sluices for yet "other books" to swell the tide. The Book of Mormon, in expression of its own witness, both signifies and clarifies the Bible and thus contains "the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ." That being so, can we ever truly separate, even in casual speech, what has so fruitfully grown together?
See Doctrine and Covenants 20:9; Boyd K. Packer, "The Reason for Our Hope," Conference Report, October 2014; Neal A. Maxwell, "The Book of Mormon: A Great Answer to 'The Great Question,'" The Voice of My Servants: Apostolic Messages on Teaching, Learning, and Scripture, 221-38.
Hugh Nibley felt the Book of Mormon to run deeper even than Shakespeare: We should not be surprised at finding traces and echoes on every side. Conjuring up enemies and apostates on every side is a different matter; the waters of life will inevitably flow into the dry patches, "unto the confounding of false doctrines," if we will keep up with our reading and sharing (2 Nephi 3:12).
To find and to trace, and to listen well, is inevitably to write--and to write well. But I hope readers of the Book of Mormon will dust off scholasticism and a clinging Alexandrian staleness. I hope those who take up the Book of Mormon as their theme will be so caught up into the heavens that their words will ring with a high beauty. I hope writers will let endless geographies alone, let insincere critics alone, let entirely alone online debates (see Titus 3:9; 1 Timothy 1:4).
May we teach, not tilt.
Latter-day Saints, by the millions, give themselves to daily study. Such spirited and spiritual absorption among the general membership partakes of more intellectual horsepower and yields more insight than do the methods of the schools. And how sophomoric to label someone else's reading devotional and one's own, academic (2 Nephi 9:28)--how close to sophistry. There is no advanced Book of Mormon scholarship beyond the scope of child or teen. Even so, none of us can daily approach the Book of Mormon from every angle or, daily, multiply comment beyond measure.
See Elder David A. Bednar, "Three Methods of Scripture Study," CES Fireside, 4 February 2007.
One method stands superior to the rest:
We must all discover the scriptures for ourselves.
Then we must walk in their light.
Monday, July 6, 2015
Detecting Nephi: Detection in Helaman Chapter 9 (Part Two)
Detect is one of the unanticipated words of the Book of Mormon. It pops out of the air. Readers, bred on Poe and Conan Doyle, see in it a bit of fun. Dorothy Sayers would point us to the riddles of Solomon and Daniel. We may find in Helaman a trace of detective literature. . .
So what does Helaman mean by "detect this man"? It's not Sherlock Holmes, and it also goes beyond the plain dictionary meaning.
I This Man
The demonstrative pronoun also merits a look through the magnifying glass: "We will detect this man." In many languages the demonstrative pronoun can carry a powerful pejorative punch. In Hebrew ha-ish ha-zeh, lit. "the man, the this," often signals despite, criminalization, and accusation. Think of Shebna in Isaiah 22:15: ha-sokhen ha-zeh ("the premier, the this": "this (so-called) premier"). This pretender is about to fall from his high office. Even more biting are the deictic forms hallaz or hallezeh (Here comes this dreamer). This man, in Helaman's Nephite, answers, in both spirit and form, to hallezeh: We will detect hallezeh. And as Baruch Levine notes, these pejorative pronominal expressions only appear in direct discourse--another linguistic detail Helaman gets right.
But Helaman works even more subtlety into the narrative, for, in their pointed expression this man, the unrighteous judges unwittingly place Nephi in the prophetic role of "this man, Moses." Here is the doctrine of the one righteous man, a favorite Book of Mormon theme for Hugh Nibley. "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". . .[and] if God gave unto this man such power, then why should ye dispute among yourselves, and say that he hath given unto me no power[?]. . .Ye [thus] deny not only my words, but ye also deny. . . the words which were spoken by this man, Moses, who had such great power given unto him" (Helaman 8:11-13).
Not only do we see power added to knowledge as Leitwoerter par excellence in Helaman 7-9, Nephi's emphatic use of the demonstrative, in logical argument, trumps its echoed pejorative use in the pretended detection of "the pretended prophet." The demonstrative pronoun, subtly but significantly interwoven into the narrative, works much of its magic as metadiscourse, and not solely as a deictic marker in an isolated instance of direct speech. That is to say, as a linguistic marker, it becomes even more essential to the ironic workings of the narrative, than to the one-liner occasion of speech. And Helaman's irony is never more effective: "We will detect this man" leads reader and judge alike to the discovery in Nephi of a man like Moses. One man, armed with knowledge and power, can champion the cause of God.
II First Definitions
On to the verb. Because it appears to fall to the prerogative of judges, we might understand the verb detect as a technical term in Nephite law, as would be the case for words such as interrogate or discovery. But detect need not be a technical term to be a lawyerly word. An air of cynicism, of craft, here attaches to detect; it connotes cunning and "divers questions," rather than discovery. We get the sense judges are using the word quite often these days and that such detection serves them well. It's so simple, and it requires no magnifying glass: the judges detect who has money and who has none; by means of their secret signs they detect who belongs to Society, and who does not. In their choice of detect, the judges only reveal themselves.
Because the Book of Helaman comes to us in English, we start with the Oxford English Dictionary, IV, 544. We first learn that detect comes from the Latin detegere, unroof, take off a covering: "to uncover, discover, detect." The judges seek to uncover the true murderer of the Chief Judge; they will discover what Nephi, as confederate, knows about the matter. Such a plain reading of detect gives the idea, but not the whole idea.
Detecting Nephi may require more than removing a roof. Explain the meaning, if you will be so kind, of the following line, spoken by the disguised duke--the undetected duke--in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure:
I never heard the absent duke much detected for women.
Does Shakespeare mean to say that the detecting duke never took either missing-persons or infidelity cases? or that he himself was the object of such like detection? Perhaps he means the duke, unlike Guy Noir, never heard the knock of the femme fatale at his office door? And why the intensifier: much detected? In "much detected" lies much happy irony.
I never heard the absent duke much detected for women.
Definition 2a in the OED reads: "To expose (a person) by divulging his secrets or making known his guilt or crime; to inform against, accuse." The usage is often self-referential: I detect myself! The OED marks definition 2a: obsolete.
"Detected, that is, accused, impeached, charged," Halliwell (ed.) The Works of William Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, (1854), 146.
By willing to detect this man, the elites are already formulating an official accusation. We will accuse this man. We will expose this man as a fraud. We will force him to confess his "fault." The decision about Nephi's "fault," which is based on will rather than evidence, precedes the humiliating interrogation. Breaking under the "struggle session," Nephi shall detect himself: divulge his secret confederacy and inform against his "confederate" brother.
Detection, however, following this last definition, is not simply about establishing through investigation Nephi's "fault," or complicity, in the governor's assassination, or about finding the "true murderer"; it's mostly about exposing a self-proclaimed "some great man" and "prophet," who seeks to "convert" everyone, as a fraud. The judges hustle Nephi from fault to fraud.
The modern detective does not appear by name or in method until the 1840s, and our great detectives work their magic clue-by-clue. The detecting Gadiantons could not be any more different; the judges are in a wild rush to make known Nephi's guilt and thus expose him as a false prophet by any means possible, legal, evidentiary, or not. Poirot and Holmes, step aside! Such railroading, a standard judicial proceeding in American and Egyptian media-cum-courts today, as everybody knows, has not a touch of wit or grace.
To detect, in this game of wits--accusation and counter-accusation--consists of pressuring Nephi with "divers questions" to "cross" and trip him up, and a show of bribes. The show of bribes would not have been in the public eye: the judges likely put the people on hold, while subjecting an already dejected and lamenting Nephi to a rapid-fire "struggle session." But the crowd, to whom the decision had been leaked, stood by in anticipation of the scheduled news-conference, verdict, and summary execution. Hugh Nibley sees the interrogation as unfolding in public, bribes and all as part of the show, "with the judges at their best." During China's Cultural Revolution such "struggle sessions" were always a public pummeling--so Nibley may be right. The contrast betweet public fair play and open debate versus secretive, confederate, and conspiratorial private doings (and knowledge) makes up another theme of these chapters. Nephite fair play, according to Nibley, is the only thing that keeps Nephi alive throughout the day, even as the prophetic signs continue to unfold to his ultimate vindication (Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 387-388).
Detect, more surely than any other word in the text, thus signals that great contest in which each side tries to expose and even destroy the other as illegitimate claimant to power or as a secret confederate of criminals. But Nephi, the "honest man," never uses the word, nor has need: all truth is present to his view. In their very use of the word, the elites, to the amusement of the reader, expose only their own ignorance and their love of darkness and intrigue.
Why expose Nephi? The judges, in detecting Nephi as "confederate" of a brotherhood, propose anything but an true act of de-tegere. They want Nephi to name names, yes; but their overriding purpose is to silence him as quickly as possible, and thus thatch over their own secret combination. By exposing Nephi, they cover themselves. On his garden tower, Nephi presented himself openly and spoke freely--there was no search for cover; Seantum hides under his roof.
III Detection as Oracular Narrative and Narrative Oracle
The elites finally leave dejected Nephi to detect Seantum. Ironically, their detection and interrogation follow Nephi's instructions to the letter. Of themselves, they ask nothing, find nothing, detect nothing. Detection tellingly comes as a Sign. So is the questioning and examination oracle or analytic detection literature? All is one: the action of detecting comes significantly wrapped in a prophetic oracle.
Has Nephi, the pretended prophet. . .agreed with thee, in the which ye have murdered Seezoram, who is your brother?. .
He shall say unto you Nay. . .
Have ye murdered your brother?
And he shall stand with fear, and wist not what to say. . .
He shall deny. . .he shall make as if he were astonished. . . he shall declare unto you that he is innocent. . .
Ye shall examine him, and ye shall find blood upon the skirts of his cloak. . .
From whence cometh this blood?
Do we not know that it is the blood of your brother?
And then shall he tremble, and shall look pale, even as if death had come upon him. . .
Because of this fear and this paleness which has come upon your face, behold, we know that thou art guilty.
And then shall greater fear come upon him; and then shall he confess" (9:27-35).
The tell-tale signatures of guilt but rarely appear in the writings of the ancients, but comparable to Helaman is a place in the Ayurveda (900 BC?):
"A person who gives poison may be recognized. He does not answer questions, or they are evasive answers; he speaks nonsense, rubs the great toe along the ground, and shivers; his face is discolored; he rubs the roots of the hair with his fingers; and he tries by every means to leave the house."
True detection comes at the last: the prompted judges observe signs of paleness and terror in Seantum's face and voice and manner and, finally, even "examine" the skirts of his cloak for delicate traces of blood. Here is a seeming moment of triumph for the elites; yet Nephi has won the game, and the secret combination, of whom Seantum was a leading and promising light, has suffered irremediable injury in the eyes of the people. They now know the truth about "the great Chief Judge" and his family, the great man whose murder they were so poignantly mourning. The idea of the "great man" is swept away and the mourners, weeping dramatically turning to anger and argument, march off in a huff. Sic transit gloria mundi--and the stage is empty, leaving Nephi, like all the prophets of Christ, "standing alone."
In all literature, no one resembles Nephi so much as solitary Elijah, and it is the story of the false accusation and judicial murder of Naboth that forcibly comes to mind (1 Kings 21). The very difference in the two narratives heightens the suspense, as unanticipated twists make of Nephi, at first, Naboth, at denouement, Elijah. Was all this interplay of narrative intended solely for a latter-day readership? Helaman certainly also had his ancient admirers. Professor John W. Welch rightly sets alongside Helaman 9 the story of Joshua and Achan (Joshua 7; The Legal Cases in The Book of Mormon). But in the case of Achan, finding comes by oracular lot, not by oracular narrative as narrated prophetic sign. The taking of Achan works, step-by-step, by objective instrument, or, as technique; the prophet, by contrast, himself instrument, appears in dramatic subjectivity: flesh-and-blood, face-to-face--and facing kings. Helaman "had his eye fixed" on "one of the prophets": he looks back to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nathan, and in particular, Elijah (Doctrine and Covenants 128:17). And oracular Elijah, in detection's denouement, plays Dupin or Lord Peter Wimsey far better than either Solomon or Daniel, Dorothy Sayer's prototypes:
"Hast thou killed and taken possession?"
"And Ahab said to Elijah,
Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?
And he answered, I have found thee"
(1 Kings 21:19-20; Heb. matzah, find; cf. Helaman 9:31).
IV Detecting Nephi: Coming to Acknowledgment
In the OED's third definition of detect, we find the clue to unravel the full significance of Helaman's narrative--and it plays out as irony. It's one thing to "find blood upon the skirts," and another
3. "To find out, discover (a person) in the secret possession of some quality, or performance of some act; to find out the real character of."
Facing accusations of complicity in the teeth of a shaken crowd, Nephi's whole concern is now to prove "that I am an honest man, and that I am sent unto you of God." Proof of honesty will not only save the man from death; of foremost concern to Nephi, it will save a prophet from death under shadow of fraud, it will confirm his witness and, by conviction, stir the wavering people to repentance. Indeed honest Nephi is not detectable; his true character resists unrighteous detection. At story's end the judges do detect Nephi--and, here, the irony--they find out that "this man" is in the secret and true possession of the sure prophetic witness, and they find that his real character mirrors his assertion: "I am an honest man."
Detecting Nephi is a powerful coming to acknowledgment through signs, evidences, and examinations. The pain and humiliation of the judges has come full circle from prophetic exposure to forced acknowledgment. By detecting Nephi, their own qualities, secrets, and character stand exposed, a house without roof. The narrative tells us no more about these specific judges; there is no slaughter as on Carmel, nor a sudden fall from power, though the confidence of the people has been shaken to the core. Justified Nephi escapes death--that is all. Nevertheless. the tell-tale signs marking out the "true murderer" but tell the loss of their own "great cities," a prophetic toll of doom they rejected out-of-hand just the day before. Nephi's victory spells a zero-sum game. Zarahemla stands detected. She will soon "be taken away" by her enemies.
Nephi alone stands beyond detection: some in the crowd think him a prophet, others say "he is a god." They never fully see him as he is. Nephi is left "standing alone in their midst."
Jesus stands separate.
Mihaly Munkacsy's Christ Before Pilate portrays Jesus on trial before assembled humanity. The debate rages on, the Divinity of Jesus Christ the "Great Question" on all minds (see Alma 34:5). Though at the center of the painting, as of the debate, Jesus stands increasingly unnoticed. Captivated by argument, germane or no, few now turn their gaze toward Him: certainly none penetrates the calm Divinity of His mind. None disturb His silence. Pilate absorbed, attuned only to his own inner debate, looks on Jesus with a scowl. He doesn't really see Jesus. No one does. All are distracted or abstracted. At that very moment, stands Mankind Before Jesus.
Notes
1) Stuart Lasine has written on detection and riddling in the Bible and Apocrypha: "Solomon, Daniel, and the Detective Story: The Social Functions of a Literary Genre."
2) For the well-known pejorative use of the demonstrative in Classical Greek and Hebrew, now see Scott B. Noegel, "The 'Other' Demonstrative Pronouns: Pejorative Colloquialisms in Biblical Hebrew," Jewish Bible Quarterly 33:1 (2005), 23-30; I believe the usage has also been noted in print for the Book of Mormon.
3) Ayurveda: Paul V. Trovillo, "History of Lie Detection," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 29:6 (1939), 849.
4) The reader may wish to compare the semantics of detection in the Doctrine and Covenants: "But the hypocrites shall be detected and shall be cut off" (50:8); "The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light!" (128:20); "you may therefore detect him [the devil, by his attempt to deceive] (129:8).
So what does Helaman mean by "detect this man"? It's not Sherlock Holmes, and it also goes beyond the plain dictionary meaning.
I This Man
The demonstrative pronoun also merits a look through the magnifying glass: "We will detect this man." In many languages the demonstrative pronoun can carry a powerful pejorative punch. In Hebrew ha-ish ha-zeh, lit. "the man, the this," often signals despite, criminalization, and accusation. Think of Shebna in Isaiah 22:15: ha-sokhen ha-zeh ("the premier, the this": "this (so-called) premier"). This pretender is about to fall from his high office. Even more biting are the deictic forms hallaz or hallezeh (Here comes this dreamer). This man, in Helaman's Nephite, answers, in both spirit and form, to hallezeh: We will detect hallezeh. And as Baruch Levine notes, these pejorative pronominal expressions only appear in direct discourse--another linguistic detail Helaman gets right.
But Helaman works even more subtlety into the narrative, for, in their pointed expression this man, the unrighteous judges unwittingly place Nephi in the prophetic role of "this man, Moses." Here is the doctrine of the one righteous man, a favorite Book of Mormon theme for Hugh Nibley. "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". . .[and] if God gave unto this man such power, then why should ye dispute among yourselves, and say that he hath given unto me no power[?]. . .Ye [thus] deny not only my words, but ye also deny. . . the words which were spoken by this man, Moses, who had such great power given unto him" (Helaman 8:11-13).
Not only do we see power added to knowledge as Leitwoerter par excellence in Helaman 7-9, Nephi's emphatic use of the demonstrative, in logical argument, trumps its echoed pejorative use in the pretended detection of "the pretended prophet." The demonstrative pronoun, subtly but significantly interwoven into the narrative, works much of its magic as metadiscourse, and not solely as a deictic marker in an isolated instance of direct speech. That is to say, as a linguistic marker, it becomes even more essential to the ironic workings of the narrative, than to the one-liner occasion of speech. And Helaman's irony is never more effective: "We will detect this man" leads reader and judge alike to the discovery in Nephi of a man like Moses. One man, armed with knowledge and power, can champion the cause of God.
II First Definitions
On to the verb. Because it appears to fall to the prerogative of judges, we might understand the verb detect as a technical term in Nephite law, as would be the case for words such as interrogate or discovery. But detect need not be a technical term to be a lawyerly word. An air of cynicism, of craft, here attaches to detect; it connotes cunning and "divers questions," rather than discovery. We get the sense judges are using the word quite often these days and that such detection serves them well. It's so simple, and it requires no magnifying glass: the judges detect who has money and who has none; by means of their secret signs they detect who belongs to Society, and who does not. In their choice of detect, the judges only reveal themselves.
Because the Book of Helaman comes to us in English, we start with the Oxford English Dictionary, IV, 544. We first learn that detect comes from the Latin detegere, unroof, take off a covering: "to uncover, discover, detect." The judges seek to uncover the true murderer of the Chief Judge; they will discover what Nephi, as confederate, knows about the matter. Such a plain reading of detect gives the idea, but not the whole idea.
Detecting Nephi may require more than removing a roof. Explain the meaning, if you will be so kind, of the following line, spoken by the disguised duke--the undetected duke--in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure:
I never heard the absent duke much detected for women.
Does Shakespeare mean to say that the detecting duke never took either missing-persons or infidelity cases? or that he himself was the object of such like detection? Perhaps he means the duke, unlike Guy Noir, never heard the knock of the femme fatale at his office door? And why the intensifier: much detected? In "much detected" lies much happy irony.
I never heard the absent duke much detected for women.
Definition 2a in the OED reads: "To expose (a person) by divulging his secrets or making known his guilt or crime; to inform against, accuse." The usage is often self-referential: I detect myself! The OED marks definition 2a: obsolete.
"Detected, that is, accused, impeached, charged," Halliwell (ed.) The Works of William Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, (1854), 146.
By willing to detect this man, the elites are already formulating an official accusation. We will accuse this man. We will expose this man as a fraud. We will force him to confess his "fault." The decision about Nephi's "fault," which is based on will rather than evidence, precedes the humiliating interrogation. Breaking under the "struggle session," Nephi shall detect himself: divulge his secret confederacy and inform against his "confederate" brother.
Detection, however, following this last definition, is not simply about establishing through investigation Nephi's "fault," or complicity, in the governor's assassination, or about finding the "true murderer"; it's mostly about exposing a self-proclaimed "some great man" and "prophet," who seeks to "convert" everyone, as a fraud. The judges hustle Nephi from fault to fraud.
The modern detective does not appear by name or in method until the 1840s, and our great detectives work their magic clue-by-clue. The detecting Gadiantons could not be any more different; the judges are in a wild rush to make known Nephi's guilt and thus expose him as a false prophet by any means possible, legal, evidentiary, or not. Poirot and Holmes, step aside! Such railroading, a standard judicial proceeding in American and Egyptian media-cum-courts today, as everybody knows, has not a touch of wit or grace.
To detect, in this game of wits--accusation and counter-accusation--consists of pressuring Nephi with "divers questions" to "cross" and trip him up, and a show of bribes. The show of bribes would not have been in the public eye: the judges likely put the people on hold, while subjecting an already dejected and lamenting Nephi to a rapid-fire "struggle session." But the crowd, to whom the decision had been leaked, stood by in anticipation of the scheduled news-conference, verdict, and summary execution. Hugh Nibley sees the interrogation as unfolding in public, bribes and all as part of the show, "with the judges at their best." During China's Cultural Revolution such "struggle sessions" were always a public pummeling--so Nibley may be right. The contrast betweet public fair play and open debate versus secretive, confederate, and conspiratorial private doings (and knowledge) makes up another theme of these chapters. Nephite fair play, according to Nibley, is the only thing that keeps Nephi alive throughout the day, even as the prophetic signs continue to unfold to his ultimate vindication (Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 387-388).
Detect, more surely than any other word in the text, thus signals that great contest in which each side tries to expose and even destroy the other as illegitimate claimant to power or as a secret confederate of criminals. But Nephi, the "honest man," never uses the word, nor has need: all truth is present to his view. In their very use of the word, the elites, to the amusement of the reader, expose only their own ignorance and their love of darkness and intrigue.
Why expose Nephi? The judges, in detecting Nephi as "confederate" of a brotherhood, propose anything but an true act of de-tegere. They want Nephi to name names, yes; but their overriding purpose is to silence him as quickly as possible, and thus thatch over their own secret combination. By exposing Nephi, they cover themselves. On his garden tower, Nephi presented himself openly and spoke freely--there was no search for cover; Seantum hides under his roof.
III Detection as Oracular Narrative and Narrative Oracle
The elites finally leave dejected Nephi to detect Seantum. Ironically, their detection and interrogation follow Nephi's instructions to the letter. Of themselves, they ask nothing, find nothing, detect nothing. Detection tellingly comes as a Sign. So is the questioning and examination oracle or analytic detection literature? All is one: the action of detecting comes significantly wrapped in a prophetic oracle.
Has Nephi, the pretended prophet. . .agreed with thee, in the which ye have murdered Seezoram, who is your brother?. .
He shall say unto you Nay. . .
Have ye murdered your brother?
And he shall stand with fear, and wist not what to say. . .
He shall deny. . .he shall make as if he were astonished. . . he shall declare unto you that he is innocent. . .
Ye shall examine him, and ye shall find blood upon the skirts of his cloak. . .
From whence cometh this blood?
Do we not know that it is the blood of your brother?
And then shall he tremble, and shall look pale, even as if death had come upon him. . .
Because of this fear and this paleness which has come upon your face, behold, we know that thou art guilty.
And then shall greater fear come upon him; and then shall he confess" (9:27-35).
The tell-tale signatures of guilt but rarely appear in the writings of the ancients, but comparable to Helaman is a place in the Ayurveda (900 BC?):
"A person who gives poison may be recognized. He does not answer questions, or they are evasive answers; he speaks nonsense, rubs the great toe along the ground, and shivers; his face is discolored; he rubs the roots of the hair with his fingers; and he tries by every means to leave the house."
True detection comes at the last: the prompted judges observe signs of paleness and terror in Seantum's face and voice and manner and, finally, even "examine" the skirts of his cloak for delicate traces of blood. Here is a seeming moment of triumph for the elites; yet Nephi has won the game, and the secret combination, of whom Seantum was a leading and promising light, has suffered irremediable injury in the eyes of the people. They now know the truth about "the great Chief Judge" and his family, the great man whose murder they were so poignantly mourning. The idea of the "great man" is swept away and the mourners, weeping dramatically turning to anger and argument, march off in a huff. Sic transit gloria mundi--and the stage is empty, leaving Nephi, like all the prophets of Christ, "standing alone."
In all literature, no one resembles Nephi so much as solitary Elijah, and it is the story of the false accusation and judicial murder of Naboth that forcibly comes to mind (1 Kings 21). The very difference in the two narratives heightens the suspense, as unanticipated twists make of Nephi, at first, Naboth, at denouement, Elijah. Was all this interplay of narrative intended solely for a latter-day readership? Helaman certainly also had his ancient admirers. Professor John W. Welch rightly sets alongside Helaman 9 the story of Joshua and Achan (Joshua 7; The Legal Cases in The Book of Mormon). But in the case of Achan, finding comes by oracular lot, not by oracular narrative as narrated prophetic sign. The taking of Achan works, step-by-step, by objective instrument, or, as technique; the prophet, by contrast, himself instrument, appears in dramatic subjectivity: flesh-and-blood, face-to-face--and facing kings. Helaman "had his eye fixed" on "one of the prophets": he looks back to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nathan, and in particular, Elijah (Doctrine and Covenants 128:17). And oracular Elijah, in detection's denouement, plays Dupin or Lord Peter Wimsey far better than either Solomon or Daniel, Dorothy Sayer's prototypes:
"Hast thou killed and taken possession?"
"And Ahab said to Elijah,
Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?
And he answered, I have found thee"
(1 Kings 21:19-20; Heb. matzah, find; cf. Helaman 9:31).
IV Detecting Nephi: Coming to Acknowledgment
In the OED's third definition of detect, we find the clue to unravel the full significance of Helaman's narrative--and it plays out as irony. It's one thing to "find blood upon the skirts," and another
3. "To find out, discover (a person) in the secret possession of some quality, or performance of some act; to find out the real character of."
Facing accusations of complicity in the teeth of a shaken crowd, Nephi's whole concern is now to prove "that I am an honest man, and that I am sent unto you of God." Proof of honesty will not only save the man from death; of foremost concern to Nephi, it will save a prophet from death under shadow of fraud, it will confirm his witness and, by conviction, stir the wavering people to repentance. Indeed honest Nephi is not detectable; his true character resists unrighteous detection. At story's end the judges do detect Nephi--and, here, the irony--they find out that "this man" is in the secret and true possession of the sure prophetic witness, and they find that his real character mirrors his assertion: "I am an honest man."
Detecting Nephi is a powerful coming to acknowledgment through signs, evidences, and examinations. The pain and humiliation of the judges has come full circle from prophetic exposure to forced acknowledgment. By detecting Nephi, their own qualities, secrets, and character stand exposed, a house without roof. The narrative tells us no more about these specific judges; there is no slaughter as on Carmel, nor a sudden fall from power, though the confidence of the people has been shaken to the core. Justified Nephi escapes death--that is all. Nevertheless. the tell-tale signs marking out the "true murderer" but tell the loss of their own "great cities," a prophetic toll of doom they rejected out-of-hand just the day before. Nephi's victory spells a zero-sum game. Zarahemla stands detected. She will soon "be taken away" by her enemies.
Nephi alone stands beyond detection: some in the crowd think him a prophet, others say "he is a god." They never fully see him as he is. Nephi is left "standing alone in their midst."
Jesus stands separate.
Mihaly Munkacsy's Christ Before Pilate portrays Jesus on trial before assembled humanity. The debate rages on, the Divinity of Jesus Christ the "Great Question" on all minds (see Alma 34:5). Though at the center of the painting, as of the debate, Jesus stands increasingly unnoticed. Captivated by argument, germane or no, few now turn their gaze toward Him: certainly none penetrates the calm Divinity of His mind. None disturb His silence. Pilate absorbed, attuned only to his own inner debate, looks on Jesus with a scowl. He doesn't really see Jesus. No one does. All are distracted or abstracted. At that very moment, stands Mankind Before Jesus.
Notes
1) Stuart Lasine has written on detection and riddling in the Bible and Apocrypha: "Solomon, Daniel, and the Detective Story: The Social Functions of a Literary Genre."
2) For the well-known pejorative use of the demonstrative in Classical Greek and Hebrew, now see Scott B. Noegel, "The 'Other' Demonstrative Pronouns: Pejorative Colloquialisms in Biblical Hebrew," Jewish Bible Quarterly 33:1 (2005), 23-30; I believe the usage has also been noted in print for the Book of Mormon.
3) Ayurveda: Paul V. Trovillo, "History of Lie Detection," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 29:6 (1939), 849.
4) The reader may wish to compare the semantics of detection in the Doctrine and Covenants: "But the hypocrites shall be detected and shall be cut off" (50:8); "The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light!" (128:20); "you may therefore detect him [the devil, by his attempt to deceive] (129:8).
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