Approaching the Book of Mormon as a historical text helps make sense of aspects of the book that an exclusive focus on the text as a work of fiction or on its nineteenth-century context overlooks. Several of these aspects relate to the opening books, from 1 Nephi to Enos. One aim of these books is to explain how several objects symbolizing political and religious authority came to be the rightful possessions of the Nephite king, while another important goal is to explain how the Nephite people came to exist in their current form. As that form changed, so did the text.
From this perspective, the story of Lehi and his family looks extremely useful to someone like Benjamin, the head of a Nephite confederation who was trying to form a cohesive people out of disparate parts, or later leaders. Consider how the relationships align:
- Laman (in 1 Nephi) is the eldest brother, just as the Lamanites (in Mosiah) are larger and in possession of the land originally inhabited by Nephites and Lamanites alike. In 1 Nephi, Laman enjoys the support of Lemuel and the sons of Ishmael, but is opposed by Nephi. In Mosiah, the Lamanites have Lemuelite and Ishmaelite allies, while they are opposed by the Nephites.
- Sam and Nephi both belong to the older generation in 1 Nephi, but even though Sam is older than Nephi, he never has much to say; Nephi is the one giving the orders and in charge of the plates. Just as Sam is older, the Mulekites are larger and have an older claim to political rule, but Nephites are in charge, both politically and religiously, and Mosiah is in possession of the plates.
- Then there are Jacob and Joseph, smaller and younger, “born in the wilderness,” although Jacob takes over religious leadership from his older brother Nephi. In the same way, the smaller peoples of Limhi and Alma emerge from the wilderness to join the Nephites, while Alma and his descendants provide the religious leaders among the Nephites despite his people’s small numbers and late arrival. In 2 Nephi 2, Lehi’s blessing to Jacob emphasizes his “tribulations in the wilderness,” just as the account of Alma and his people does in the book of Mosiah.
- The status of Zoram in 1 Nephi is uncertain; Nephi promises him a place among his allies if he’ll take it, but Zoram is not quite part of the family. Similarly, the Zoramites have an uncertain status during the reign of the judges, with religious converts made among them in Alma 31, but a decisive shift toward the Lamanites in Alma 43.
The parallels between the cast of characters in 1 Nephi and the Nephite situation at the end of Benjamin’s reign and the later reign of the judges is close enough that I have some confidence that it is not accidental, and that before 1 Nephi-Enos was part of the Book of Mormon, it constituted an etiology and ethnology of the Nephites that helped to explain and legitimize the Nephite coalition.
The development of 1 Nephi-Enos
If I were to go beyond this to attempt a speculative internal reconstruction of how 1 Nephi-Enos developed as a living text during Nephite history, it might look like this (keeping in mind that “speculative” means “probably wrong, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if something like this actually happened”):
- There are a few scant traces of “Lehite” material, seemingly poetic and perhaps orally transmitted, that presume a Lamanite-Nephite cultural unity; only Laman and Lemuel are mentioned by name in this hypothetical layer.
- The primary textual framework describes the struggle between Nephi and Laman for pre-eminence as Lehi’s rightful heir in a series of episodes that emphasize Nephi’s faithful successes and Laman’s cowardly failures. These episodes also describe the acquisition of several symbols of authority (owned by Benjamin in Nephite times): Laban’s sword, the Liahona, various sets of plates, and perhaps a wooden bow later lost to history. This narrative would have developed several decades prior to Benjamin when the Nephites still lived in close proximity to their Lamanite rivals.
- The Nephite migration to Zarahemla would be associated with some expansion of the text and an expanded cast of ancestors to accommodate people farther from the Nephite/Lamanite homeland, including Sam (for the Mulekites) and perhaps Ishmael as well.
- The addition of Jacob and Joseph corresponds to the incorporation of the peoples of Limhi and Alma during the reign of Benjamin.
- The books of Jacob and Enos reflect changing Nephite cultural realities from the time of Mosiah to the reign of the judges (details below)
- The addition of Zoram to 1 Nephi would seem to fall around the time of efforts to return them to the Nephite coalition, described in the book of Alma.
- I would tend to locate Christian prophecies and the addition of long scriptural quotations (principally Isaiah) to a later phase.
The textual history of Jacob-Enos
Of the books collected on the small plates, the book of Jacob is the one that most clearly shows how ongoing textual development reflects changes in Nephite society over the course of the reign of the judges. This is especially evident in how the Lamanites are described. Prior to the book of Jacob, particularly in 2 Nephi 5, the division between Nephites and Lamanites is expressed in stark terms: The Lamanites are an indolent, cursed and racially other people, and mixing between Nephites and Lamanites is forcefully prohibited (much as the Lamanites play the role only of enemies and oppressors at the outset of the book of Mosiah). But that stark division is soon qualified and eventually reversed in the book of Jacob, in parallel with developments over the century of Nephite history following the reign of Benjamin.
I would sketch out the textual history of the book of Jacob like this:
- As a text, the original chapters (1-3) support the transition of Jacob, a minor figure and a late addition to the Lehite family, to a position of religious leadership. Historically, this legitimates Alma’s reset of Nephite religion after he and his people emerge from the wilderness. Alma and his descendants remain the primary religious leaders for the next century until Nephite dissolution. The book of Jacob’s original conclusion is found in the last verse of chapter 3: “These plates are called the plates of Jacob, and they were made by the hand of Nephi. And I make an end of speaking these words.”
The differing origin of Alma and his people may have also given them a different view of the Lamanites, as Jacob 2 favorably compares the Lamanites’ righteousness to Nephite wickedness. (Or the late-arriving peoples of Alma and Limhi may not yet have been fully considered Nephites rather than Lamanites themselves.) In Jacob 3, the racialized distinctions between Nephites and Lamanites are called into question. The book of Jacob is aware of the historical prohibition on intermixing, but raises the prospect of its reversal. - The boundaries of the Nephite tribal coalition are later disturbed by the arrival of new refugees from the Lamanites, including the Anti-Nephi-Lehies. Three more chapters in the Book of Jacob make room for them, including the discourse in Jacob 5 about how branches of wild olive trees can be grafted in. The Book of Jacob’s new conclusion comes in the last verse of chapter 6: “Finally, I bid you farewell, until I shall meet you before the pleasing bar of God, which bar striketh the wicked with awful dread and fear. Amen.”
- But one additional chapter was later added to the Book of Jacob. This chapter, on Jacob’s confrontation with Sherem, is best understood (as I have previously suggested) in the context of late Nephite society of Helaman and 3 Nephi when Nephite dissenters were a well-known problem. This chapter ends with Jacob’s third conclusion: “And I make an end of my writing upon these plates, which writing has been small; and to the reader I bid farewell, hoping that many of my brethren may read my words. Brethren, adieu.”
- The book of Enos returns to the theme of religious rehabilitation for “my brethren, the Lamanites.” This remained an important facet of late Nephite society when cultural and religious contact had become common. Given Enos’ contemplation of Nephite destruction and Lamanite survival, I’d guess Enos was a very late addition to the small plate texts.
Or in short: The first three chapters of the Book of Jacob were added to 1-2 Nephi both to validate the religious authority of Alma and his descendants, and to start the process of reversing the exclusion of Lamanites from Nephite society. (In another context, this would be a textbook example of how the figure of a prophet creates a space where innovation and change can be legitimated, as one recent analysis of the function of prophecy puts it.) The book of Jacob has three conclusions today because new sections were added twice at different points in Nephite history, decades and then a century after the reign of Mosiah.
In this historicist reading, the odd cultural discontinuities in Jacob make much more sense.
- Rather than an objective report of how the Nephites went from having nothing, to being tempted by luxury and confronted by dissenters with scribal training, in the space of two generations, the “small plates” were formulated for a culture that had long known wealth and literacy.
- In the same way, 1 Nephi doesn’t remark on the presence of indigenous inhabitants in the Promised Land because its primary function as a living text was not to report the objective experience of a long-ago period of settlement, but to explain the contemporary composition of a tribal coalition within a contentious cultural continuum.
- In 1 Nephi, Nephi’s return to Jerusalem to retrieve the plates is a major event because it legitimates Nephite leadership through the ownership of various artifacts associated with political and religious authority. It is immediately followed by the barely noted return to Jerusalem to retrieve the family of Ishmael, which serves to explain the much less fraught question of where the Lamanites’ allies come from.
- The political value to Benjamin of Lehi’s blessings to Laman, Lemuel, Sam and Zoram – telling them to listen to their brother Nephi – should be apparent, as should the significance to Alma of Lehi’s extensive blessing on Jacob.
Just like at least some elements of the Old Testament make more sense in a post-exilic context because the Old Testament was a living text that was used and transmitted by post-exilic readers, elements of 1 Nephi-Enos make more sense if understood as a text that was actively read and interpreted during later Nephite history. Treating Mosiah through 3 Nephi 7 as historical makes the Book of Mormon more comprehensible by providing the initial context in which 1 Nephi-Enos was read and interpreted. With real human minds to read and respond to the small plates, it makes sense to ask how contemporaries of Alma or Helaman could have understood 1 Nephi, while “What did you think of Chapter 4, Mr. Frodo?” doesn’t.
* * *
I’ve got one more post coming up on what all of this has to do with rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity. The argument I’m sketching out is probably not attractive if Hebraisms or a 600 BC-421 AD timeline are important to you. I wouldn’t say either one is impossible, just that I’m not strongly committed either way. One real possibility is that 1 Nephi took the form it did because someone like Nephi existed in 600 BC. But that is someone else’s argument to make.
Jonathan,
I guess I just do not see it. Are you claiming that the first part of the Book of Mormon was added later on in the Nephite record to validate the Nephite position but that it wasnt real history? I’m not sure what you are saying.
The thing is – this could all be true AND the small plates were passed down.
All text acquire additions, accretions, emendations, etc. over time. And Nephi was likely very concerned with his legitimacy (writing decades after the fact).
For example, some scholars find traces of a brief period of slavery in the Desert for Lehi and his tribe before they embarked on the sea voyage.
Say that did happen. Why would Nephi omit it? Likely because it didn’t help bolster his case. The incident with the Brass Plates and all the other stuff may be 100% factual history down to the smallest detail, but were specifically selected for rhetorical and thematic reasons, whereas other things that likely happened during a years long sojourn in the desert are alluded to, glossed over, or omitted entirely (not even counting the years after they got across the waters).
In a comment to your previous post, I suggested that even if Mosiah-3 Nephi 7 is truly a translation of a historical record, everything before Mosiah could be a Joseph Smith product that summarized the origin story that had been in the 116 pages. I don’t see anything here that refutes that idea. All of the patterns you mention could have been present in the 116 pages—the small plates need never have existed.
But your post raises another intriguing possibility—namely that the small plates did exist, but that they were authored by Mormon posing as Nephi precisely to create the parallels you highlight. Once again, the patterns would have appeared in the 116 pages, but perhaps when Mormon was finished abridging the large plates, he decided that the origin story needed a tighter, more theologically robust second draft and so created the small plates.
I’m no more committed to that scenario than to my original, but I thought it worth throwing out there.
I still see problems related to the large plates that I mentioned on your previous post.
1) Mormon says in Words of Mormon that he abridged Nephi’s longer record
2) Mormon assumed that longer record had much more information from the real Nephi.
3) It seems most likely the the major details of Nephi’s life would match up with 1 Nephi. Otherwise, Mormon would have thought something was up.
4) Joseph Smith translated Mormon’s abridgment of that longer record as the lost 116 (Don Bradley thinks it was a lot longer than 116). If the details of Nephi’s life in the the lost 116 were very different from 1 Nephi, I’m sure that JS and Martin Harris would have thought that was very strange.
5) I do think your theory needs to deal with these points. What about the large plates that included Nephi’s writings that Mormon abridged that Harris lost?
Again, interesting. I suspect this will be the topic of the next post and if so I’ll wait, but where did the notion that the Nephites are descendants of Israelites who fled from Jerusalem come from in your model? If the existence of a historical Nephi is not an essential feature in your model, then I’m guessing it has to be from Joseph Smith.
Ivan, yes, I’m not ruling that out.
Last Lemming, in this case, neither Mormon nor Joseph Smith work as authors of the small plates. For both of them, the Nephite civilization lies in the past, so you don’t have the same dynamic response of the text to a changing reality over the course of history.
Stephen, I’m not seeing any major problems in Words of Mormon. The phrase “the plates of Nephi” is a classic case of the “book of Thomas” problem from medieval studies. Is it the book written by Thomas Aquinas, by a different Thomas, a book owned by someone named Thomas, a book owned by the church of St. Thomas, a book about someone named Thomas, or something else? (The answer is that all these are possible.) The same is going to apply to the “plates of Nephi,” as there are multiple people, places and institutions with the name “Nephi” and they all have potential relationships with sets of plates, and I don’t think we can insist on Mormon knowing the answer. I don’t think we can assume the longer record started with a historical Nephi or contained much about him – it could just as easily have started off with “I, Mosiah, being a true descendant of Nephi, did lead my people against the Lamanites…” etc. Even on the traditionally accepted timeline, there’s a lot of blank space prior to Mosiah.
RLD, that’s a good question. For this model, the idea of Israelites fleeing from Jerusalem to America is still important, something that existed prior to Joseph Smith. I’m flexible about how that story gets transmitted and applied, however. Think of the Scandinavian kings who traced their ancestry to fleeing Trojans – the kings were real, but they had adopted another story as part of their own, and this was recorded as fact by the greatest scholar of medieval Scandinavia.
So we can imagine some very weird possibilities. Mike Winder’s recent series of posts sees the Mulekites as an indigenous people narratively grafted into the Nephites. But there are other possibilities, including that the Mulekites were the only Israelites by descent, and that the other Nephites merely adopted their origin story to make Nephi rule more palatable; or that the Lamanites were the only Israelites by descent, and that the Nephites wrote themselves into their story to make themselves stronger rivals; or that Abinadi was the only actual Israelite in the Book of Mormon, and that everyone else adopted his story, starting with Alma; or that there are no actual Israelites, and what crossed the ocean to the New World was not Israelite DNA, but an origin story.
I find it difficult to believe that Mormon’s “abridgment from the plates of Nephi, down to the reign of this king Benjamin” (3) didn’t start with Nephi. I think you really have to twist your logic in knots to try to make that claim.
And I think that Mormon’s claim that the small plates contained “many of the words of Nephi” is an indication that the large plates had a lot more of what Nephi said. And also indicate that Mormon knew who Nephi was APART from the small plates. I think it’s pretty clear that the large plates started with Nephi. Why would they be called the “plates of Nephi” otherwise? And why would Mormon suggest familiarity with the person Nephi on the small plates if he had no records other than the small plates that talked about Nephi?
If the large plates started with Mosiah, the history on the small plates would have been a much bigger deal and Mormon certainly would have noticed. “We have NO history of this important guy Nephi or our ancestors before Mosiah except this little summary on this small plates. Boy, these small plates are therefore SO important to us because they give us our HISTORY that we wouldn’t have otherwise known, since all our records start with Mosiah.”
And yet he says no such thing, because he makes it pretty clear that the plates of Nephi started with Nephi and had a whole lot more of the history (beginning with Nephi) than the small plates did. I think it’s pretty clear that the large plates of Nephi started with Nephi or Mormon would have noted it.
Yes, if King Zarahemla responded to “Our ancestors fled from the land of Jerusalem during the first year of the reign of King Zedekiah…” with “Well, MY ancestor WAS King Zedekiah!” with no reason for making the claim other than it would increase his legitimacy, he would be in good company in the ancient world.
I’d say I understated what a big deal the small plates would be to Mormon if the large plates started with Mosiah. The small plates would be the biggest historical find a Nephite could possibly find. The purported words the holy ancestor that they all take their name after (Nephites) and that Mormon claimed to be a descendent of. That would be huge!
But that’s not how Mormon described the small plates. They “contained this small account of the prophets, from Jacob down to the reign of this king Benjamin, and also many of the words of Nephi” (3). Again if Mormon said it was a “small account of the prophets” that suggests he had a BIGGER account of those prophets. And it also makes it pretty clear that he had other writings by Nephi.
Mormon treats the small plates as a nice little find, not as a lost history of Nephi that the Nephites knew nothing about until Mormon found the small plates.
The text makes if pretty clear that the large plates of Nephi were started by Nephi. If the Nephi’s large plates were all was fabricated, then that’s another matter. But Mormon clearly believed he had others writings by Nephi and that Nephi started the large plates of Nephi.
Orson Scott Card had that I idea years ago — the one about Zarahemla falsely claiming royal ancestry to protect his right to rule — and while it’s certainly intriguing I could never buy into it. There’s something about the Nephites taking the reins of kingship that seems to suggest (to me at any rate) that they had a priesthood of sorts–and *that* more than anything else was what legitimized their right to rule. My sense is that such a swift transition of power must’ve come about because of something rather obvious–like the priesthood–because if there had been resistance on the part of Zarahemla he could have easily driven Mosiah out.
Interesting speculation, I like the comparisons part of this post the most, good analysis.
My pet theory is that the Nephites arrived late in one of the Mulekites’ “many wars and serious contentions” when both sides were exhausted but knew they’d face bloody vengeance if they gave in to the other. Putting a neutral party in charge and decreeing that only a Nephite could be king going forward thus gave them a chance at peace. There’s precedent for that too. I imagine Mosiah(1) must have been an impressive leader to make it appealing.
When Mosiah(2) functionally lifted that restriction by letting everyone declare themselves to be Nephites (Mosiah 25:13) it didn’t take long for civil war to break out again.
Stephen, let me back up to your original 5 points, because I think I’m getting into an argument about things where we don’t actually disagree. I think the longer record mentioned by Mormon, and the shorter record, were both largely in agreement about the person of Nephi and Nephite history. I don’t know what was in the missing section, but I don’t think it contradicted 1 Nephi-Enos.
Here’s what I DON’T think happened, and what might explain the disagreement. I don’t think Mormon picked up a thousand-year-old set of plates manufactured by Nephi himself, abridged it, and then compared it to another thousand-year-old set of plates manufactured by Nephi and found that the two records agreed because they both contained writings by Nephi himself from a thousand years earlier.
Here’s what I DO think happened: Mormon abridged a variety of records, which in turn drew on other records of various ages, many or all of which had been copied multiple times. Few if any of these were autograph copies, and there were likely previous editors or compilers. This abridgement covered Nephite history from (Lost 116 pages) to Mosiah to Mormon’s own time (but he really didn’t have much to work with after 3 Nephi 7 or so). Then he includes a second record, the “small plates” – but of course they agree with the other records Mormon abridges, because:
1. The “small plates” took shape during the same time the larger record was being created and evolved along with them.
2. Mormon selected them precisely because they supported his understanding of Nephite history.
3. All these records are frozen in the form they had around the end of record-keeping Nephite civilization, around 3 Nephi 7.
The reason I think that happened is because this is how other examples of language, literacy and literature work. Languages in complex cultural contexts (like that of the Nephites) change significantly over the space of centuries, important texts circulate widely and get copied multiple times, each copy results in changes and updates, and texts are updated to become more true (in the understanding of their readers).
So I think that Mormon was working with late copies of all the records, including the small plates, because they would have been much more common, and they would have been much easier for Mormon to read (just like it’s much easier for us to read 18th century English than 16th century English).
Kibs, I don’t think this topic is a good fit for you, and I don’t think your comments are useful for it, and they were starting to get in the way, so they have been consigned to oblivion.
Your last response to Stephen F clarified a lot for me. But I think you are imposing an Old World model on the whole process, as if engraving on metal plates is the equivalent of writing on papyrus or parchment or whatever. I don’t see it that way. To paraphrase Doc Brown–in 500BC, gold plates were “a little hard to come by.”
If you are suggesting that Mormon was working off of nonmetalic records, then you have more than doubled the archeological challenges. The lack of engraved plates in the archeological record can (almost) plausibly be attributed to their not having found the right cave yet. But if people were keeping (and copying over and over) records on other media in the New World, one has to wonder where the evidence for that might be. The records may have disintegrated, but the writing utensils would have survived.
Interesting
Jonathan,
Sincere question: I’m wondering how you feel about Alma’s description of the brass plates–that they would never lose their brightness and so forth–and that according to Lehi they would one day be taken to all nations.
No doubt they will go to all nations much like the Book of Mormon has–that is, the text itself and not the actual plates. And yet Alma seems to imply that the plates themselves will be preserved for the very purpose of protecting the text.
In other words, I kinda wonder if Mormon might have had access to the originals–in spite of the fact that copying was a regular practice among the Nephites.
Well, we do know that some writing was going on because of Moroni’s note that “the Hebrew hath been altered by us also.” So there was more writing going on than just the set of plates. Furthermore, just off the top of my head I can think of the flammable scriptures of the inhabitants of Ammonihah.
I’m wondering if there’s a place for oral transmission in our consideration of Nephite history. Could their scriptures have been mnemonic aids (like quipu) as opposed to written texts? Could there have been circulating oral retellings of the Nephite founding epics which Mormon had to compare and consider?
I think about the scroll of the Law found by Hilkiah during the reign of Josiah. Its contents are unrecoverable but it’s generally believed to have contained the earliest iterations of the Deuteronomistic history, as a prop used by Hilkiah and/or Josiah to back up their campaign of theological reform. It doesn’t seem outlandish to me that Mosiah I or one of his predecessors could have done something similar with the plates as the product.
L. Lemming, you’re right about the Old World models – that’s my academic background, after all. In one of the linked posts I go through the arguments about why I think my assumptions and instincts aren’t leading me too far astray. It’s clear that not all Nephite writing was on metal plates (that would be very weird, plus Hoosier’s note abut flammable scriptures). Archeologically it’s not too much of a stretch, given the nearly complete destruction of pre-Columbian writing apart from inscriptions on stone. But see below for some other thoughts.
Jack, maybe? See below.
Hoosier, at various points in the Book of Mormon, writing is certainly treated as a memory aid. And if not through formal recitation, then there was certainly informal oral discussion and transmission, so Mormon isn’t approaching Nephite history as a blank slate. (And Deuteronomy has been on my mind.)
Stephen, tune back in for a bit. I have an alternate proposal. See below.
Thinking about my previous response to Stephen, I don’t think I want to rule out the possibility of Mormon working with a couple of centuries-old collections of plates after all.
A few people have brought up the issue of the plates’ existence as artifacts, and I’ve been wishing it away by gesturing at copying and wide circulation. There are advantages to that, like it’s easier to imagine Mormon being able to read a late copy, but that’s a problem that other literate cultures have solved through sacred or scribal languages. And relying on multiple copies and wide circulation has its own disadvantages. So here’s how an artifact-based variation of my argument might look. Call it variant 2a:
Let’s assume that Mosiah(1) brings the large plates along when the Nephites head off to Zarahemla. They’re centuries old at that point, but they’re important as a symbol that he’s the true successor of Nephi and/or Lehi. Some minor figure out of the book of Omni brings along the small plates, which eventually end up in the possession of the Nephite kings. While the Nephite civilization certainly produced other writings, these two artifacts are unique and carefully preserved. There were probably other copies made of them, probably on much cheaper materials, but the sets of plates had a unique place in the Nephite archive and come down into Mormon’s possession.
Does this shoot down my theory that the small plates were a living text that primarily describe the Nephite coalition at the time of Benjamin and later? I don’t think so. It might make fine-scale, word- and sentence-level changes more difficult to imagine, but what we know of the plates suggest that they were amenable to supplementation. Plates could be inserted and added.
I’d probably have to change some details in this scenario, but I think the analysis still works for Jacob/Alma. He’s a very minor figure in 1 Nephi, then jumps in importance in the assorted texts that comprise 2 Nephi, while the book of Jacob is easily accommodated by just adding more plates (and a new conclusion) as needed. Textually, it still looks like a compilation with a narrative core and later accretions. Even with this type of luxury archive, we can still imagine the figure of Jacob being largely added at a much later date in Nephite history. So even assuming good correspondence between the large plate and small plate histories, Mormon would be unlikely to find any glaring contradictions, as 2 Nephi and Jacob are mostly devoted to prophetic preaching instead of Nephite politics.
Does that work?