Review

Title: The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Maxwell Institute Study Edition
Author: Grant Hardy, editor; with textual notes from Royal Skousen’s Critical Text Project, and original woodcuts by Brian Kershisnik
Publisher: Maxwell Institute, Brigham Young University; Deseret Book; Religious Studies Center, BYU
Genre: Scripture
Year Published: 2018
Number of pages: 648
Price: $34.99

Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters

Right now you are probably saying “A Book of Mormon. A Book of Mormon. We have got a Book of Mormon, and we need no more Book of Mormon.” So why do I feel the need? For me, it’s the editor, Grant Hardy. His name alone promises a rewarding study. Hardy has worked hard to make this book more accessible to the reader who is curious about this bit of American literature, this book of curious workmanship.

He published his first attempt in 2003 with the University of Illinois Press. Entitled The Book of Mormon: a reader’s edition, Hardy “intended to help non-Mormons understand what it is that Mormons see in this sometimes obscure text” (vii-viii). He undertook this “by reformatting the 1920 text, now in the public domain” — i.e. no longer under copyright by the LDS Church — “in accordance with the editorial style of most modern editions of the Bible, which includes paragraphs, poetic stanzas, quotation marks, and content headings” (vii). This is in contrast to my 1920 and 1981 Church-published editions, which are printed in two columns, insistently divided into verses, without even the paragraph symbol the King James Bible uses to mark paragraphs — although they do have content headings, but for chapters only. Most of those are summaries of the coming chapter, divided by dashes into the equivalent of paragraphs. I usually ignore them, thinking I know the chapters from repeated readings.

So what has changed since the 1981 edition, that I, familiar with the text and the conventions used in printing it, should welcome a new study edition? Well, Royal Skousen’s work in establishing the text of the Book of Mormon has been published. The Joseph Smith Papers are being published. And the Church revised the text of the 1981 edition in 2013.

In his introductory “Brief History of the Text,” Hardy notes that “This Maxwell Institute Study Edition reproduces the official 1981 (2013) text exactly, aside from the modifications in punctuation needed” for paragraphing, printing poetry in stanzas, and addition of quote marks. The use of the official text, along with such features as inclusion of “the original chapter divisions (since these were apparently on the gold plates … )” and the welcome use of “superscripted verse numbers” (xvi), among other features, makes this edition far easier to read.

Much of Hardy’s work with the 1920 text itself resulted in Understanding the Book of Mormon: a reader’s guide, published in 2010 by Oxford University Press (a book for which Hardy received the AML award in literary criticism for 2010). Because of his excellent criticism, I was curious to see how Hardy addresses the text of the 2013 revision, and how this Study Edition would differ from his Reader’s Edition. I expected this edition to be a real expedition into Mormon’s book, especially for one who think he knows the story.

And so it has proven to be.

I decided to read it like a novel, straight through, perhaps not as obsessively as Parley Pratt did, but still straight through. The paragraphing helps with that. But, being an obsessive reader of footnotes, I found that one of the most welcome innovations in this edition is the recording of almost every change in wording in the footnotes. This includes changes from the original manuscript to, say, the printer’s manuscript; changes from the 1830 edition in the 1837, 1840 and 1920 LDS editions; and changes from them in the 1981 and 2013 editions. It also includes conjectural emendations from Skousen’s work, and from work by other scholars. And Hardy is scrupulous in his use of other people’s scholarship.

Some of the changes he includes are understandable corrections, such as 1 Nephi 15.35, which read in the original manuscript “And there is a place prepared, yea, even that awful hell of which I have spoken, and the devil is the proprietor of it; wherefore the final state of the souls of men is to dwell in the kingdom of God, or to be cast out because of that justice of which I have spoken.” Proprietor was replaced with preparator in the Printer’s manuscript, and printed thus in the 1830 and 1981 editions. Hardy does not mention that in the 1837, 1840 and 1920 editions, the word is “foundation,” which is why it was changed in 1981 back to “preparator;” but he does mention that Skousen, in his Analysis of Textual Variants, proposes the emendation “soul of man” for “souls of men.” That kind of detail is one feature that makes this a “study edition.”

Another is the paragraphing and punctuation. One of the features of the original and printer’s manuscripts is that both were largely unpunctuated. By indenting embedded texts, like Nephi and Jacob’s quotations from Isaiah, Hardy makes it easier to concentrate on the verse, which he prints as verse, and tell it from their commentary. It helps me follow the flow of the poetry, and understand the poetry better. He even detects elements of midrash in their commentary, and identifies them as such in the text.

This kind of punctuation is something Royal Skousen by-and-large eschewed in establishing the text. In his edition The Book of Mormon: the earliest text, published by Yale University Press in 2009, Skousen used the original manuscript, the printer’s manuscript, and the 1830 edition to attempt to establish what the earliest text was. He began work on his critical text in 1988, and has published transcripts of both manuscripts, and 6 volumes of his Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, the latter in two editions, and the former most recently published in the Joseph Smith Papers. One form of punctuation Skousen did use was to print his “earliest text” in “sense lines,” which is easier to read than the unparagraphed blocks of text in the earliest edition of 1830. Sometimes it looks like Leaves of Grass.

So, with all that scholarship coming after 1981, I am grateful to Hardy for his hard work in piecing together so much information. I am also grateful for his literary criticism. For example, in verse 2 of Jarom we read: “And as these plates are small, and as these things are written for the intent of the benefit of our brethren the Lamanites, wherefore it must needs be that I write a little.” In a note on the word “Lamanites,” Hardy says “Jarom makes clear here what prior authors were reluctant to reveal: the small plates were written for the benefit of Lamanites in the future.” This is a reminder that Nephi saw in his vision of the Tree the future of his people, and saw that his descendants would be obliterated by the Lamanites. This also accounts for the melancholy in Jacob’s final farewell, in chapter 7, which Hardy prints as verse:

The time passed away with us,
and also our lives passed away
like as it were unto us a dream,
we being a lonesome and a solemn people,
wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem,
born in tribulation, in a wilderness,
and hated of our brethren,
which caused wars and contentions;
wherefore, we did mourn out our days.

These are some of my favorite lines in the Book of Mormon, and as I was reading in 2 Nephi 5.27, where Nephi says “we lived after the manner of happiness”, and 2 Nephi 10. 20-22, where Jacob urges the same thing, it struck me that Jacob changed at the end. I turned to Jacob 7.26, wrote a note in the margin, then noticed that Hardy says in one footnote “This melancholy assessment contrasts with Jacob’s more optimistic views at 2 Ne 10.20-22” — and, in another footnote, that the phrase in both the original and the printer’s manuscripts, the phrase that ends the next line is “in a wild wilderness,” which makes it just that bit more melancholy.

So I may be taking delight in small matters — but being able to take delight in re-reading a book I have read and studied for over 50 years is a joy.