Rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity II: A historicist reading and reconstruction of 1 Nephi-Enos

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”):

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. The addition of Jacob and Joseph corresponds to the incorporation of the peoples of Limhi and Alma during the reign of Benjamin.
5. The books of Jacob and Enos reflect changing Nephite cultural realities from the time of Mosiah to the reign of the judges (details below)
6. 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.
7. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. 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.”
4. 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.

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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.