For example: \”One of the earliest and central episodes of 1 Nephi is the return to Jerusalem to retrieve the Brass Plates, which were not just any sacred text, but the complete and unchanging Word of God etched in metal, just as it had once been carved in stone. For Nephi, the Brass Plates do not just contain information; they embody the whole project of storing all conceivable information for later retrieval. To these records he attributes the ability to contain all history, the entirety of religion, knowledge of his past ancestry and future posterity, a guarantee of language and culture, and the origin and ultimate fate of the world. All of this, he presumes, can be encoded as text, preserved indefinitely, and retrieved at will by reading the Brass Plates.\”

This paragraph includes a number of enormous interpretive leaps. Justification of its claims would require an extensive hermeneutic at the level of the text, and a hermeneutic, I should add, that seems to me doomed to failure (or at least quite vulnerable to objections).

That said, I think you are right to begin to raise questions about how the endurability of the brass plates—as much as the abstracted content of the brass plates—affected Nephi\’s thinking about writing. But I think there is a great deal more to be said by way of laying foundations for such a discussion.

Sadly, I don’t think there’s much apologetic potential in a study of literacy in the Book of Mormon.

There might be some apologetics to be had in the fact that the Book of Mormon narrative begins in the apex of Judean literacy. (I can’t believe I just broke my own vow not to engage in anything remotely resembling apologetics… But while I’m at it, Exodus 21 prescribes the conditions in which killing is justifiable. Nephi seems to have these in mind when he sets the scene of the slaughter.)

I liked what you said about Nephi’s reading of Isaiah and its connection to “likening” the scriptures, a verse that is much less innocuous than we have taken it to be, since it asks us, in a way, to divorce scripture from context, as Nephi does with his use of Isaiah to generate thoughts about the Nephite future. Isaiah seems to be for Nephi a catalyst to revelation rather than a text that has encrypted within it information relevant to his people.

No. It would be retaliation. It would only be self defense if slaying Laban would prevent an iminent threat to Nephi’s life.

“2. because it was not premeditated (Nephi had no idea how he was going to get the plates)”

Most murder isn’t premeditated, and it’s still murder.

“3. because the Lord delivered Laban into Nephi’s hand.”

The Lord delivered Joseph’s brothers into his hand, but that wasn’t an excuse to butcher them all.

Nephi says that he was following God’s instructions when he killed Laban. Whether that’s true or not is something only God can judge. It’s not a defense that would or should work before any earthly tribunal.

Yes, so long as we don’t go too far with the idea. I don’t think the scriptures (especially Hebraic) were meant to be read without breathing life into them. They’re really more like the living roots of a plant than the dead foundation stones of a house–though they are both. And so what we see is the BoM prophets continuously reading a “living” narrative from the scriptures–one that springs from the past but lives in the present as it is manifest in their peculiar circumstances.

And this brings me to Nate’s comment–Dost my reading of your comment deceive me or are suggesting that Nephi favors narrative? Hmm?

PS. I wouldn’t characterize the slaying of Laban as cold-blooded murder. But that’s a topic for a different post.

Perhaps I am the only one in the audience so petty as to have difficulty overlooking such odd incongruities in the context of higher criticism.

As far as literacy and the Book of Mormon, I am a teacher and I am very interested in literacy, good teaching, and learning. Last year when I read the Book of Mormon, I had that on my mind a lot. It was amazing to me the list of \’good teaching\’ practices and \’how to learn\’ principles that I found. The spirit directs what we learn from our scripture reading, so it is the spirit we should seek while reading.

I do think, though, that Jacob and Nephi offer more interesting figures for contrasting modes of literacy than Nephi and Laman. With Jacob and Nephi, we at least have several chapters to work with. But Laman never gets a chance to speak for himself; in some ways Laman and Lemuel are caricatures, even comic characters, whose ability to read is consciously treated as defective. Also, I suspect that the final analysis of a contrast between Nephi’s and Laman’s reading would come to the unsurprising conclusion of Nephi = good and Laman = double plus ungood.

As Chris and Clark and my post suggest, Nephite literacy offers plenty of potential for a post-something-or-other reading of the Book of Mormon. Did I mention that, of all things it might be, the Book of Mormon is not a simple book?