I set out on this project as a gift for my dad. Growing up there was nothing he and I bonded over more than our mutual love for The Book of Mormon. I have since left the faith in which he raised me, so he has a difficult time understanding me these days. With monumental recent additions to the literary scholarship surrounding The Book of Mormon, I thought it would round some edges between us if I could advocate for the book to be taken seriously within academia. This seemed like it would be easy to do. As a believer I read it many times and had positive experiences with the text, which I think have made me a better person. Also, instead of literary reviews coming out of Brigham Young University exclusively, serious Mormon Studies scholarship is now published in the presses of Oxford, University of North Carolina, and Yale. So, I caught up on the best and most current secondary scholarship and began a fresh read of the text. Let me show you what I found.
Since few readers encounter the text directly outside of Mormonism, I’ll start with a short introduction. Joseph Smith claimed that on September 21, 1823, when he was just seventeen years old, he was visited by an angel (J. Smith, Joseph Smith, Jr. Collection 63). This angel informed Smith that ancient plates with the “appearance of gold” could be found in a cement box, buried in a hill nearby his family farm (And Also the Testimony of the Eight Witnesses 42). The angel commanded him to find the plates and translate them from an unknown language called “Reformed Egyptian” (Moroni 9:32, pp. 671). Over the course of the next seven years, Smith produced The Book of Mormon, claiming that it was this translation. It was published in 1830.
The book tells the story of a family who are the “remnant of the House of Israel” who travel to a new “Land of Promise” to escape the destruction of Jerusalem referenced in The Hebrew Bible under the reign of King Zedekiah (The Book of Mormon, “Title Page”, pp. 1). Upon arriving, the family splits into two ethnic kingdoms: The “Nephites” over whom the third oldest brother, Nephi, rules and the “Lamanites” over whom the two eldest brothers, Laman and Lemuel, rule. The narrative discusses the religious teachings, wars, and politics among these people.
To appreciate the experience of reading The Book of Mormon it is necessary to describe the structure of the text. Assessing who it is that is speaking in any given passage requires the analysis of a tangled web of authors, editors, plates, translators, and manuscripts. The reader is left feeling an ambiguous combination of impenetrable distance from the speaker, as well as overwhelming insistance on the personality of the speaker. The voices throughout are assertive, insisting that they are prophets of God whose teachings are sacred scripture as with voices in The Hebrew Bible who claim “Thus saith The Lord” (Isaiah 43:1, pp. 2414). Yet Smith’s claims make it tedious to keep track of who it is who is speaking. Even the Title Page of the book requires incredible mental effort in this regard. There we read the only attempt at an exhaustive explanation of which narrators we can expect to encounter and are introduced to what Mark Twain calls the “pretentious . . . ‘slow,’ . . . sleepy . . . insipid mess” that is the chimeric mix of the King James English and Nineteenth Century American verbiage throughout (Twain 110).
“An account written by the hand of Mormon upon plates, taken from the plates of Nephi— Wherefore, it is an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites. Written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the house of Israel, and also to Jew and Gentile . . .” (Title Page, pp. 1).
Already we encounter opaque reference to two future voices in the narrative: Mormon the prophet, primary abridger and historian, as well as Nephi the prophet. We also find reference to two of the twenty-six primary documents used in its creation. None of these are extant outside of the book. These are woven to produce The Book of Mormon as we have it today. Finally, we are introduced to four of the six ethnic groups of whom the narrative claims to be a sacred history: Nephites, Lamanites, Mulekites, Jaredites, Jews and Gentiles. Nowhere does the book concisely lay out who these voices are, what texts they wrote, who has edited and/or abridged them, how they have been compiled or by whom, nor how all of this has been given to us in our modern copies. Rather, scholars are required to comb through and provide their interpretations of this puzzle box of provenance. They often are contradictory and few are exhaustive. Here is the best example, provided by John W. Welch, J. Gregory Welch, and Grant Hardy:
That is clearly a complicated text, but to fully appreciate the effect of this on the reader, notice that small section labeled “Title Page.” The graph does not assign any author to this portion of the text. It is the first passage the reader encounters and it, like many others in The Book of Mormon, has no clear “speaker.” Yet the speaker makes emphatic, authoritative, claims which place demands on our credulity. With third person omniscience, the Title Page tells us the following:
Who wrote the subsequent narrative.
Who it is about.
To whom it is addressed.
That it is written under commandment from God.
That the text will be buried and then recovered for a future generation.
That this recovery will require translation.
That it contains the abridgement of multiple texts.
The rhetorical, univocal, purpose of the narrative.
It then concludes by warning the reader that the narrative likely contains many errors, the “mistakes of men,” with the same judgmental blame reversal that is endemic throughout: “Wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ” (Title Page, pp. 1).
Here the barrier between The Book of Mormon and academia becomes apparent. The literary critic does not need to weigh in on the actuality of these plates, angels, or events. However, imagine handing out copies of the book to a class and then telling them to read it over the course of the semester. How can you prepare them? Before even getting to the opening line students find a whirlwind of voices and claims. Who wrote the “Title Page?” Immediately after the “Title Page,” we find a long, meandering, introduction narrated in third person. Then it shifts perspective at the end: “They cross the large waters into the promised land, and so forth. This is according to the account of Nephi; or in other words, I, Nephi, wrote this record” (1 Nephi Introduction, pp. 13) It names several new names and places not mentioned in the “Title Page.” Are these all historical? Are some of them historical and others allegorical? How did Nephi go back to the beginning of his day-to-day record (and at what point) and write an introduction to it, if the whole text is etched into golden plates? How did he find the physical space on the plates to do that? If you are the professor, answering these questions is a monumental task. Moreover, the answer to several of these questions is likely to have profound theological implications. Do these need to be sorted out? Well, let’s go ahead anyway. Over the course of several classes, we teach our students who the voices in the text are. We explain the complex bricolage of texts, para-texts, and marginalia necessary to make the narrative itself internally consistent. We teach the claims Joseph Smith made about the book, together with this Borgesian library of truth claims, and a minimal amount of American and religious history to place it in context. Now we are finally ready to read the first line of the actual narrative:
“I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days” (1 Nephi 1:1, pp. 13).
My question now is: does this seem like a book that will be worth all that preparatory effort and instruction time? Each reader will of course have their own reaction but notice the run on sentence. Of a total of eighty-nine words in the sentence, notice that ten words are repeated along with seven repeated phrases. To me this is not good writing, and I assure you that if you open at random to any page you will find a sentence that is indistinguishable in quality. I think it is also why scholars like Harold Bloom have said of The Book of Mormon “I cannot recommend that the book be read either fully or closely, because it scarcely sustains such reading (American Religion 1209).
The reason passages like these detract from the aesthetic quality is that The Book of Mormon wants its readers to have a clear vision of authorship, theology, and authority in direct contrast to The Bible. The first voice we encounter in the narrative itself is Nephi, who says of The Bible “after the book hath gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church . . . there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God” (1 Nephi 13:28, pp. 42). In contrast with anonymous books in The Bible such as the four Gospels, authors in The Book of Mormon make emphatic declarations that they have written their texts in their own hand. Mormon, for example, intrudes awkwardly into a tale told in third person of a war of attrition between the Nephites and a guerilla band called The Gadianton Robbers to tell us, “I am called Mormon, being called after the land Mormon” (3 Nephi 5:12, pp. 571). To add to this frustrating complexity, the book in which this editorial comment is made is named 3 Nephi. Smith references this authoritative voice and attempt at strict provenance to call the book “the most correct of any book on earth” (J. Smith, Teachings 99-100).
This attempt to reclaim The Bible’s univocality and inerrancy from textual critics in The Book of Mormon seeks to forego the centuries of scribes, councils, documentary hypotheses, and pseudepigrapha admitted by Biblical scholars. It is true that charts like Hardy’s above demonstrate that an overall consistency can be found, but this just makes the departures from this provenance more glaring. Even without them, moreover, the path to a harmony of these claims is jagged and painful to sort out.
In one sense, it must be admitted that this complexity is impressive. Joseph Smith claimed to have discovered the plates when he was seventeen years old, and we have evidence from his mother Lucy Mack Smith that he began to work on the narrative seriously that same year. The family began the habit of finishing their daily work as early as possible so that every night they could gather around the fire and listen to Smith recount “the most amusing recitals that could be imagined” of the Nephite and Lamanite “dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode” (L. M. Smith 345). He was not well educated; in fact, he said “we were deprived of the bennifit [sic.] of an education. Suffice it to say I was mearly [sic.] instructed in reading writing and the ground rules of Arithmatic [sic.] which constuted [sic.] my whole literary acquirements” (qtd. in Bushman 41).
This defecit between the complex accomplishment of producing The Book of Mormon and the apparent insufficiency of Smith’s maturity and education has made the text a holy sign within Mormonism, similar to the claim from adherents of Islam that it is impossible for Muhammed to have written the Qur’an. It may also be the reason why so many believers love the book, but few have given it serious literary analysis, while secular academia has essentially rejected it as a major contribution to the American literary canon. Nothing evades scholarship quite like a miracle does. Nevertheless, what would a strict literary review look like?
First, let’s discuss the more compelling moments. There are several instances of beautiful poetry. They hit the reader at unexpected moments, and often in the middle of ponderous sermons or historical narratives. This makes them even more impactful. In the fourth chapter of 2 Nephi, for example, Nephi is in the middle of a tangent in which he attempts to explain some of the convoluted structure to the text mentioned above. He mentions lessons that his father Lehi has taught him and his siblings, “many of which sayings are written upon mine other plates; for a more history part are written upon mine other plates. And upon these I write the things of my soul, and many of the scriptures which are engraven upon the plates of brass.” And then suddenly he gives us a beautiful psalm:
Notwithstanding the great goodness of the Lord,
in showing me his great and marvelous works,
my heart exclaimeth:
“O wretched man that I am!”
Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh;
my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities.
I am encompassed about,
because of the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me.
And when I desire to rejoice,
my heart groaneth because of my sins;
nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted (2 Nephi 4:13-19, pp. 97).
Nephi is a flat narrator. His worldview is simple and unchanging. At this point we have been reading his voice for one hundred pages in which he rarely provides moments of pathos or hints that he feels much at all. When encountering nature, Nephi’s descriptions are terse: “the river emptied into the fountain of The Red Sea” ( 1 Nephi 2:8, pp. 15). These tender expressions, however, are clearly shared from the heart. They stand out in a dramatic way. Nephi dwells emotionally on the experience of being a Christian and seeking to be Christ-like but finding oneself incapable of sustaining this standard. The poem reflects the psychological experience of akrasia or knowing what one ought to do while mourning the fact that one fails to do it. Poetic expressions like this recur in a few other places, such as the missionary Alma’s exclamation, “O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth, and cry repentance unto every people” (Alma 29:1, pp. 393). Many readers have noticed that these poetic moments exhibit complex structures, typically antimetabole, also known as chiasmus. This is a reverse parallel structure, either in rhyming scheme, or in the organization of propositions. It gives the passage an ABCDCBA structure, in which the second half of a passage either reverses the rhyming scheme in the first half or repeats the propositions in reverse order. A clear example of this is Mosiah 5:10-12. Here is a breakdown of this passage, with the parallel propositions in bold:
a) And now… whosoever shall not take upon him the name of Christ
b) must be called by some other name;
c) therefore, he findeth himself on the left hand of God.
d) And I would that ye should remember also,
e) that this is the name… that never should be blotted out,
f) except it be through transgression;
f') therefore, take heed that ye do not transgress,
e') that the name be not blotted out of your hearts.
d') I say unto you, I would that ye should remember to retain the name written always in your hearts,
c') that ye are not found on the left hand of God,
b') but that ye hear and know the voice by which ye shall be called,
a') and also, the name by which he shall call you (243).
This is an effective pedagogical structure. Anyone who has attended a seminar on public speaking has heard the advice to “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what it is you told them” (K. Williams). That is what this poetic structure is doing. It is a strategy often used in The Bible as in Amos 5:4-6. The entire account of the global flood in Genesis 6:10 – 9:18 is an extended chiasm, and The Book of Mormon has incredibly long sermons in chiastic structure. The entire chapter of Alma 36 is a chiasm, with the central thesis being “I heard my father prophesy unto the people concerning the coming of one Jesus Christ, a Son of God” (417). This means that over the course of about seven hundred words the prophet Alma gives us seventeen propositions and then gives them again in reverse order. It is in fact impressive that Joseph Smith had the ability to dictate such a long passage with this kind of rigorous structure, tedious though it might be to read. It also should be noted that Dr. Seuss did the same thing in “Green Eggs and Ham.”
There is another passage in The Book of Mormon that touched me. It is now my favorite verse. Chapters two through five of Mosiah provide a fascinating sermon from a king simply named Benjamin. It is his final address to his people in which he abdicates the throne to his son Mosiah. He reveals to his people that the Messiah will be called Jesus Christ and teaches them Christian soteriology. This is a bit awkward, since Nephi had already revealed this to them almost four hundred years earlier. But he also advocates for his people to care for the poor and provides insight into the flaws of monarchy. The verse that moved me is chapter four, verse twenty-seven. After listing many commandments to the people, he kindly urges them to “see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength” (242). Setting aside the patriarchal exclusion of womanhood here, I find this to be a powerful statement against ableism. It is the answer to the akrasia lamented by Nephi earlier. Sometimes we are too ill, depressed, anxious, frightened, hurt, or exhausted to behave as we ought. Benjamin would like us to know that there is nothing wrong with this. Fatimah Salleh has said of this passage: “This is probably one of the most beautiful things said to people in caregiving work: you are not asked to do more than what you can. You are not the sacrifice here” (Salleh and Hemming 33).
Beautiful as these moments are, however, they also help to illustrate the flaws in The Book of Mormon. Nephi’s psalm briefly interrupts his otherwise muddled explanation of his record-keeping methods. King Benjamin’s kindness is sullied by the redundancy of his prophecy and the harshness of calling his subjects “unprofitable servants” and telling them that they “cannot say that ye are even as much as the dust of the earth” (Mosiah 2: 25-26, pp. 234). They are also the rare exception to the rule of boredom one encounters in the text. While the book contains over two hundred thousand total words, Grant Hardy is only able to identify just over two thousand unique root words. This should give some perspective on the repetitive nature of the language in The Book of Mormon. One thousand, four hundred, and thirty verses begin with the phrase “and it came to pass.” (Hardy, Reader's Edition 17). Sustained reading of large passages from the book was impossible for me.
It is also worth noting that the lack of diverse language here strongly calls into question the claims that it is too complex and well written for a twenty-four-year-old farmer to be its author. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was eighteen years old. It seems that lemmatization has not been applied to this text, the way that Grant Hardy has done with The Book of Mormon, but the type-token ratio in Frankenstein is 8.6% compared to 5.5% in The Book of Mormon. This puts The Book of Mormon at a fifth grade reading level, versus seven to twelfth grade for Frankenstein (Hales 3).
Worse than this, however, are the narrative issues. Characters in The Book of Mormon exhibit no nuance. Whether it is discussing single individuals or entire nations of people, they are placed into simple buckets of “good” and “evil.” The opening plot is the departure of Lehi and his family from Jerusalem to a new “land of promise.” During this journey we are first introduced to righteous Nephi and his wicked brothers Laman and Lemuel. In almost every chapter there is an example of Laman and Lemuel rebelling or plotting to murder Nephi. Nephi never questions orders. He never wrestles with complex moral dilemmas. The flat, puerile, static and sexless portrayal of Nephi is “as if he were not a male mammal at all” (Hitchens 226). His most famous declaration, quoted often by believers, is the best example both of his exhausting self-righteousness and Vogel’s complaints about “digression, redundancy, and wordiness”
“I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them. And it came to pass that when my father had heard these words he was exceeding glad, for he knew that I had been blessed of the Lord” (1 Nephi 3:7-8, pp. 19)
Nephi is a template for all the book’s heroes. Jacob, Moroni, Alma, Helaman, and so many others are painted in the same two-dimensional beige. Villains are similarly constructed as absolute evil. Korihor, Nehor, Amalickiah, Kishkumen, and Tubaloth all have different names, but they could be lifted out of their own scenes and replaced with each other. But it isn’t just the characters who are boring. So are the plotlines. The template is: God creates a problem, God’s servant is unable to solve the problem, God solves or does not solve the problem. This makes the narrators and characters not only unrelatable to the reader, but irrelevant to the outcomes of the story. In one scene Nephi, Laman, and Lemuel are sent home from the wilderness back to Jerusalem because God forgot to have Lehi bring the family scriptures with them. Laman and Lemuel rebel and attempt to beat Nephi to death with sticks. Nephi rebukes them and then he is rescued by an angel. In another Nephi is commanded to build a ship so that the family can cross “the great waters” to the “land of promise.” Because Nephi is incapable of building this ship Laman and Lemuel rebel and try to kill Nephi. Nephi rebukes them, then “stretches forth” his hand to shut them up with a godly zap. God then directly teaches Nephi how to build the ship. On the seas, Laman and Lemuel rebel. They tie Nephi to the mast of their ship to murder him with exposure. Nephi rebukes them and then God leads them to the promised land with a miraculous compass. These are only three examples of many plot-points with this exact same pattern (1 Nephi ch. 2-14).
Conflicts rely on the liberal use of Deus ex Machina. When preachers give sermons, whole congregations of people faint as they are overpowered by religious conversion. Often they rise from these ecstatic comas and unanimously declare their new found faith with verbatim statements (Alma 18: 22 - 43; Mosiah 4: 1-3). I can’t contend that things of this kind have never happened. I can’t even argue that they aren’t happening somewhere to someone right now. What I can say is that God has never acted this directly in my own life. God has never acted this directly in the life of any person I have ever met. It is difficult to apply lessons from the book to one’s own lived experience because everyday life does not exist in The Book of Mormon. Instead, we have perfect disciples, perfect villains, and constant divine intervention.
This is not only boring, but also hurtful. This is because of the pompous, judgmental, tone of the prophets. The commandments are impossibly harsh standards, and the imitation of these static “righteous” heroes is explicitly demanded. “Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men. Behold, he was a man like unto Ammon, the son of Mosiah, yea, and even the other sons of Mosiah, yea, and also Alma and his sons, for they were all men of God (Alma 48: 17-18, pp. 454). Imagine being a teenager experiencing the intense hormones of puberty. Life is becoming complicated. You are experimenting and feeling your first sexual urges and you have been raised with these characters as your examples of living a good life, with all other ways being wicked. Now read this passage from Alma 39:5. Alma is preaching to his son Corianton who is experimenting with sex. “Know ye not, my son, that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood” (426-427)? I don’t know how this makes you feel, but it made me feel like I might as well be murdering someone every time I masturbate.
I am afraid I cannot recommend The Book of Mormon for academic scholarship. Its claims as a proof text are preposterous. It is barely consistent internally. It is long. It is repetitious. It lacks artistic dynamics. It inhabits a world far too simple to be real. Its characters are too binary and do not change. Its advice is too scarce and its commandments are too frequent. Neither apply outside the framework of the straw-man cosmos imagined within its pages. If others can sift through the various and shifting claims from Joseph Smith to the confused and contradictory babel of papers and plates posited in the text itself, and find a message which speaks to them, I cannot. Mark Twain already knew in 1873 why The Book of Mormon would not be included in anthologies of world, American, or sacred literature. It wasn’t because Smith’s story was untenable, or because adding to The Bible is sacrilege. It wasn’t because of anachronisms such as premature horses, steel, cement, codices, elephants, submarines, and Hebrew scriptures quoted but which had not yet been written. It was because it is, in fact, “chloroform in print” (Roughing It 110).
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