Isaiah Reads The Book of Mormon, continued
All prophecy is about the past. As soon as a prophecy has been spoken the speaking is in the past, and we validate prophecy by showing that it was made in the past relative to the events we suppose fulfill the prophecy.
Such validation is fairly easy if we have a dated prophecy and know it was in print before the events foretold:
12 I prophesy, in the name of the Lord God, that the commencement of the difficulties which will cause much bloodshed previous to the coming of the Son of Man will be in South Carolina.
13 It may probably arise through the slave question. This a voice declared to me, while I was praying earnestly on the subject, December 25th, 1832.
—Doctrine & Covenants 130:12-13
And this is not the only dated prophecy. There are lots of comments in the scriptures that help us know when a prophet was active:
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.
—Isaiah 6:1
But knowing when prophets were active doesn’t necessarily mean everything ascribed to them was written by them. There are plenty of pseudepigraphical writings ascribed to some biblical figure or other that we know were written much later. Combine this fact with our feeling that no one can know the future, and it’s reasonable to assume that any document describing specific events was written after those events.
It’s also reasonable to try and look at the original historical meaning of a prophet’s work. George D. Smith’s “Isaiah Updated” (Dialogue 16:2) is an example of this approach, discussing Christian readings of Isaiah as anachronistic, not as reflections or developments of Isaian theology. David P. Wright’s “Joseph Smith’s Interpretation of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon” (Dialogue 31:4), which I just came across, may follow the same approach.
Let me repeat, it’s reasonable to want to look at a prophet’s writing in its original historical context. But that word reasonable carries a caveat. Our ability to give reasons, even able reasons, doesn’t mean the reasons we are able to give are always true. There’s a striking example of this in The Book of Alma. In chapter 58 at the end of a long letter to Moroni, Helaman wonders why he hasn’t received reinforcements from the capital:
And if it is not so, behold, we fear that there is some faction in the government, that they do not send more men to our assistance; for we know that they are more numerous than that which they have sent.
— Alma 58:36
By reason of the split between Kingmen and Freemen this is a reasonable suggestion. Moroni takes the reasoning and extends it, firing off a fiery letter to the governor, Pahoran, accusing him of treason and threatening to bring his troops against the capital in a military coup.
Pahoran replies in a reasonable tone giving his reasons for not sending reinforcements–the capitol is under seige, and please do send soldiers.
(Incidentally, I was pondering once about why Moroni finds Helaman’s suggestion reasonable, and why he thinks his extension is reasonable, and it occurred to me that the time devoted to this incident may be Mormon’s way of showing us that Nephite politics was a whole lot more complicated than he has room to tell. Why is Moroni so ready to believe Pahoran guilty of treason? Is it because they are political opponents, like say, Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy without the bond of friendship?)
What I’m suggesting is that fitting the events of Deutero-Isaiah to the Babylonian exile is not the only reasonable interpretation of those chapters.
Avraham Gileadi approached the problem by arguing that Isaiah is an apocalypse–a vision of the last days–complete with all the conventions of the apocalypse, including using present day people and nations as code names for people and nations in the last days.
Adam S. Miler draws on philosopher Walter Benjamin’s writings on messianic history to suggest another approach to anachronism in The Book of Mormon and other scripture.
A messianic approach to history sees history as cyclical, not a steady progressive march to our particular moment of enlightenment, but a repetition of the same sins and warnings over and over. When Ahab and Jezebel arranged to have Naboth stoned because he wouldn’t sell them his vineyard, they weren’t the first to do such a thing.
Neither was David when he took his neighbor’s ewe lamb for his own use, nor was the daughter of Jared when she proposed a way for her father to gain control of the kingdom by using the methods of the ancients,
those masters of the “great secret, that I may murder and get gain.”
Because the same situations come up over and over again the messianic historian can read the present situation back onto the past and see their own day in a past prophecy. And this doesn’t just mean seeing the sins of the past always repeating themselves. Patterns of righteousness also repeat. Joshua shows himself as successor to Moses by crossing the Jordan on dry ground, and Matthew sees Jesus as the new Moses, going out into the wilderness 40 days and nights before returning to the people with the word of God.
For a personal example, when I read Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts’ Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders I learned that the project Mark Hoffman was working on when the whole thing blew up in his face (and the faces of Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets) was The Book of Lehi. I remember thinking that the warning about leaving the 116 manuscript pages alone because people would use them to discredit or destroy Joseph’s work didn’t expire in 1828, or 1830. It was still in effect.
I was reading an earlier warning to a prophet as a prophecy, one that applied to current events. My point is not that I had discovered the true meaning of D&C 3, or even that anyone else would find my reading insightful, but that I had found it natural to do what Nephi taught his people to do and liken the scriptures to my own time.
Adam Miller says Walter Benjamin says this is what messianic readers do–they search the patterns of earlier scriptures to see how they apply to the present day, the result being that anachrony is a characteristic of messianic history, maybe of all scripture. I would add that both times I’ve read “Messianic History: Walter Benjamin and the Book of Mormon” I’ve felt Miller’s embrace of anachrony to be breezy and cheerful.
If we apply this tendency to look to the past for patterns that fit the present to textual transmission we can imagine the stewards of Isaiah’s records, there in Babylon, seeing that the promise of redemption and return in chapter 52 and others and making a few small changes to highlight that fact, like adding an appositive, to Cyrus, to the phrase “Thus saith the Lord to his anointed” to make 45:1 read “Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus,” or changing a phrase like “that saith of my servant” to make 44:28 read, “That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd.”
The obvious objection to what I’m saying here is that the scribes in Babylon would not have altered a sacred text because it would have been sacrosanct. I think that’s what George D. Smith is getting at when he says in note 2, “the sacred Hebrew texts had been copied and recopied by the Masoretes, carefully counting the letters in each book and noting the middle letter to insure accurate reproduction” (38).
Now I know nothing about Masoretic methods of copying, so I’m perfectly qualified to observe that the Masoretes were scholars and scribes, not prophets. As scholars and scribes they would not have felt authorized to make changes, but that does not mean that the stewards of the records in Babylon 1,500 years earlier would have felt the same way.
According to the Book of Mormon textual transmission is a prophetic calling when there is a prophet available, and includes the right to alter and abridge the text and insert editorial comments. If the scribes in Babylon were ordained to the calling they would have made changes by the authority and inspiration of their calling.
And in my ignorance, one more comment about the Masoretes. The Jewish Publication Society translation of Isaiah follows the Masoretic text, and every page except the prose interlude around chapter 36, and one other page, has some version of the note “Meaning of Heb uncertain,” or “Rhetorical force of Heb uncertain.” The meaning of the Hebrew may have been uncertain to the Masoretes as well, being a millennium and a half removed from the Hebrew of Isaiah.
Let me close by giving three brief examples from the Book of Mormon that may have involved the last steward of the record making changes as he transmitted the text from their language into his.
In I Nephi 8 Lehi recounts a vision of people making their way towards a tree, the Tree of Life. In chapter 11 Nephi asks to see the same vision, but you have to read carefully to realize it’s the same vision because what Nephi describes to us is very different than what Lehi described.
I’ve been rolling this difference over in my mind for a few years, trying to account for it–figure out where it comes from, and it occurred to me as I was preparing this column that what the Spirit is doing is unpacking for Nephi one of the symbols in Lehi’s dream. Nephi’s vision concentrates on the Tree of Life, and what inheres in that symbol.
When I started thinking about the difference between Lehi’s dream and Nephi’s vision several years ago, I had also come across the idea that the more specific a prophecy is the more likely it is to have been written after the fact, and I wondered if I Nephi 13:12-19, a vision of American history, was not a vision to Joseph Smith. He was a seer after all, and had the calling to see and write what he saw.
But I was puzzled about why he saw those particular events. It occurs to me now that the Spirit may have been unpacking another symbol for Joseph, namely the path to the Tree of Life. Joseph could have understood the path toward the Restoration of the Church in images that Nephi might not have understood.
A second instance of Joseph being able to unpack an image because of his background may occur in II Nephi 27. This chapter is part of Nephi’s commentary on Isaiah, and starts out with a direct quote of Isaiah 29. II Nephi 27:3 corresponds to Isaiah 29:8 while 4 and 5 correspond to verses 9-10. Verses 6-23 are not a direct quote of Isaiah. Instead, they develop Isaiah’s simile of a book lowing out of the ground into a prophecy of an actual book. The description of the book’s reception is quite detailed, as these two verses show:
9 But the book shall be delivered unto a man, and he shall deliver the words of the book, which are the words of those who have slumbered in the dust, and he shall deliver these words unto another;
10 But the words which are sealed he shall not deliver, neither shall he deliver the book. For the book shall be sealed by the power of God, and the revelation which was sealed shall be kept in the book until the own due time of the Lord, that they may come forth; for behold, they reveal all things from the foundation of the world unto the end thereof.
These two verses are more detailed than Isaiah’s prophecy and perhaps more detailed than Nephi’s commentary. That might be because Joseph Smith had seen the events unfold and had the language to describe that unfolding.
A third example involves the lost 116 pages. Brant Gardner suggests in The Gift and the Power: Translating the Book of Mormon that The Words of Mormon originally ended at verse 11:
And I know that they will be preserved; for there are great things written upon them, out of which my people and their brethren shall be judged at the great and last day, according to the word of God which is written.
Verses 12-18 sound like a summary of the first part of Mosiah, which was among the 116 pages–hence the lack of colophon for the book. So perhaps those verses are a revelation to Joseph Smith in the voice of Mormon.
We may look a little further at Isaiah next month, but we are surely treading toward the tree and toward the dialogues Jesus had with the Pharisees as he made his own way toward the tree.
In the meantime, I hope you’re enjoying the path as much as I am.
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