Review
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Title: The Vision of All: Twenty-Five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record
Author: Joseph M. Spencer
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Scripture studies
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 312
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 9781589586321
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Cheryl L. Bruno for the Association for Mormon Letters
Many authors have tried to make the biblical book of Isaiah accessible to Mormon readers. Approaches range from traditional scholarly commentaries (Parry, Parry & Peterson, Understanding Isaiah), to lighter, more contemporary works (Bytheway, Isaiah for Airheads; Ridges, Your Study of Isaiah made Easier; Chase, Making Isaiah Plain). There are LDS-influenced translations and studies (Gileadi, The Book of Isaiah: A New Translation with Interpretive Keys from the Book of Mormon; Nyman, Great are the Words of Isaiah), and even several book-length works which concentrate solely on the Isaiah passages in the Book of Mormon (Parry and Welch, Isaiah in the Book of Mormon; Ludlow, Unlocking Isaiah in the Book of Mormon; Bassett, Commentaries on Isaiah in the Book of Mormon). It is this latter undertaking that Joseph M. Spencer embarks upon in his book The Vision of All: Twenty-Five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record. Spencer does not attempt to be detailed in his presentation; rather, he offers a general panorama intended to enlighten the reader upon Nephi’s (and other Book of Mormon authors’) inclusion of Isaiah passages in their writings. He has chosen to arrange these in a “lecture” format.
Before reviewing how well he succeeds, I’ll need to confess my distaste of the use of an overly colloquial approach to a scholarly subject. In my opinion, Spencer begins the book in a desperately chatty tone, though he calms down in later chapters. My advice to writers: don’t ever, ever begin a sentence with the idiomatic “so.” Examples of this in Spencer’s first ten pages: “So let’s get down to business…So it seems that what the book means to accomplish…So when the angel mentions the Jewish prophets…So why do they misunderstand the nature of the book?…So the point of the angel’s words…So this, according to the angel…So, now we have the basic outline…” Perhaps equally as annoying is starting sentences with “Okay,” or “Alright,” as in “Okay, now let’s look at a little more of the text…Okay, let’s gather up the details…Alright, we’ve nailed down two major features,” or even putting them both together: “Okay so here’s what we’ve got in hand…Alright so what is this book?” To further his conversational tone, Spencer uses affectations that read awkwardly: “That’s reason to rejoice, no?…All this couldn’t be much clearer, no?” The author’s conversational style does not give the subject the gravitas that it seems to demand.
While I’m complaining, let me just note that Spencer’s continual refrain “we are running out of time” is extremely distracting. Perhaps this was meant to give the feel of a taped lecture series. But it comes across as an excuse for not developing ideas sufficiently. Spencer ends literally every chapter with: “Alright. We’re rapidly running out of time…Ack. We’re well beyond out of time for today’s discussion…Yikes, we’re quickly running out of time…Well, we’ve gone over time again!…we’re getting near the end of our time today…I don’t want to be caught in the middle of things and end up keeping you over time again, likely far longer than usual!…I’ve got an idea. And I only hope we can do it in the time we’ve got left.” He often gives time constraints as a reason why he is unable to finish a train of thought. This leaves the book feeling segmented and erratic.
In Lecture XII, Spencer laments, “Yikes. Somehow, we’ve got to let this terribly-too-brief review of a long quotation suffice. It’s embarrassing. But we’re out of time, and we’ve got to move on in our next lecture…” (141) Yes, it’s embarrassing. Because, in reality, the author has plenty of time to cover whatever he pleases. I would prefer he simply state that he is limiting his discussion of Jacob’s coverage of Isaiah to a brief summary, rather than overusing the thin convention that he is “out of time.” In other places, the author presents himself as indecisive (249), disagrees with himself (148), or “changes his mind,” rather than plainly declaring that there are several ways a particular passage may be interpreted.
Despite these difficulties, there are several reasons I can recommend The Vision of All. The first, in my estimation, is that the author does not shy away from addressing problems the Mormon reader may encounter while reading Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. While he does not always satisfactorily answer difficulties, he explains the nature of these problems as they arise, in a succinct and matter-of-fact way.
For example, in an early chapter, Spencer speaks of the conclusion of “the vast majority of Isaiah scholars…that the two halves of Isaiah were produced by at least two distinct prophets working in fundamentally different historical and geographical settings” (20). Spencer points out that if these scholars are right, “it spells serious trouble for the Book of Mormon” (21).
I am happy to see Spencer take the problem of Deutero-Isaiah seriously. Though the book of Isaiah contains some internal unity, there is much historical, theological, literary, and linguistic evidence that several authors contributed to the work. The theory does not rest simplistically, as some have argued, upon the scholars’ disbelief in the supernatural reality of prophecy. As Spencer explains, “major parts of the Book of Isaiah that appear in the Book of Mormon shouldn’t have been produced until well after Lehi took his family away from Jerusalem” (21). He suggests that we earnestly consider the work of non-Mormon Isaiah scholars: “We as Mormons have to find a complicated balance between the consensus among Isaiah scholars and the conclusions we’re bound to because of our belief in the Book of Mormon’s truth” (21).
Spencer follows with some ideas that I find less “striking” than he. He remarks that our recognition of multiple authorship of Isaiah need not “commit us to certain historical reconstructions of how the Book of Isaiah came into final form. We’re free to suspend judgment on that point” (23). In fact, the believer in strict Book of Mormon historicity *must* suspend judgment here! But at the very least, Spencer is willing to concede that “we’d do best to see that there really is a turn from the Assyrian era to the post-Babylonian era as we work through the Book of Isaiah” (23).
In this vein, Spencer tackles the borrowing that Lehi does of New Testament language when introducing John the Baptist (62-65), and Nephi’s use of the language of the post-exilic book of Malachi (116). Neither Book of Mormon prophet should have had access to such late wordings. As in the previous case, I’m not satisfied with the way the author answers these questions, but I’m impressed with his willingness to bring them up, and I believe that his discussion can be a jumping-off point for students to consider these issues and come to their own conclusions.
Latter-day Saint authors and authorities have made several idiosyncratic interpretations of Isaiah passages which do not accord with the best scholarship or with Isaiah’s intent. Spencer does his best to address these when they occur. For instance, the linking of Isaiah 14 with Satan is problematic (67-68). There is disagreement between the Book of Mormon Isaiah usage of the rod of Jesse and its treatment in the Doctrine and Covenants (213). Jacob’s language can be read as anti-semitic (132). A passage which has been identified as Messianic is clearly not so intended when read in context (209-210). In fact, Spencer provides an entire lecture devoted to the question of Messianic texts (203-214). I found this chapter illuminating and instructive. Here, Spencer finally puts his colloquial language to good use as he paraphrases a difficult passage:
Look, Ahaz, God himself will give you a sign. A young woman here in the city will get pregnant soon and then give birth, naming her child “God is with us!” as a gesture of the trust you lack. And then before that kid’s old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, the Syrian and Ephraimite kings you think are so threatening will both be dead! (209)
“Isaiah’s message,” Spencer explains. “You can see immediately why it makes little sense in context to understand it as a reference to Jesus. How would the birth of Jesus, seven and a half centuries away, serve as a sign to Ahaz regarding the imminent demise of his enemies?” Spencer strikes an important balance as he walks the reader through this prophecy: “Hopefully you can see why scholars aren’t terribly convinced that there’s much of anything messianic going on in Isaiah 7.”
Yet, Spencer acknowledges that it is possible that Nephi saw something messianic here. “One can certainly claim that the Christian is free to find here a trace—a type or shadow—of Jesus Christ…but the most honest way of doing this is to make that claim while at the same time recognizing how those without belief in Christ responsibly and legitimately read the text in another way” (210). Spencer then compares this prophecy with others more clearly Messianic.
The overarching goal of this “lecture series” is to present Spencer’s synthesis of the Book of Mormon’s Isaiah. On the whole, he is successful in portraying the grander themes of a remnant of Israel being shaped by war and tribulation into a covenant people. Spencer engages Isaiah closely to show how the nuances of the text connect into the general themes. He unpacks Nephi’s practice of “likening” more than any author I have read.
In my own study of the Book of Mormon Isaiah, I have been delighted by the similarity of Nephi’s “likening” to the ancient Jewish convention of “pesher.” Pesher is an interpretive commentary upon the Hebrew scriptures, commonly found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Rather than an interpretation of the original Bible passage, pesher explains what the passage means in the day and age of the commentator, particularly for his own community. For example, the Habukkuk Pesher (1QpHab) quotes verses from the biblical book of Habukkuk which are strongly analogous to the Masoretic text. Then, introduced by the word “pesher,” a commentary begins, with the author suggesting the relevance of Habakkuk to his own time. Nephi uses Isaiah in a remarkably similar manner.
Spencer demonstrates many instances where Nephi lifts the prophecies of Isaiah out of that prophet’s time and “likens” them to his own people—a remnant of Israel. In many cases he also brings the prophecies forward to the latter day:
Nephi’s interested in what Isaiah has to say, but he’s interested because he sees there a basic pattern for God’s working with Israel and the Gentiles quite generally. And he wants to see if he can’t align Isaiah’s text with that much, much larger history—the history he saw in his own visionary experiences outside Jerusalem (79).
Spencer’s apologetics are sometimes subtle and persuasive, and sometimes more clunky. For example, he does some preliminary work on the possible meaning of variants in the Book of Mormon Isaiah text. In one place, he portrays Nephi as seeing Isaiah’s writings “as a kind of figure for a much larger pattern…And so he’s begun, under inspiration, to tamper with Isaiah’s writings, clearly in an attempt to get his readers to see what it would mean to read Isaiah as speaking to all of scattered Israel” (107-108).
In another place, Spencer is less adept, as he explains the more fragmentary and halting rendition of Isaiah 6 in the Book of Mormon: “Woe me! For I am undone! Because I, a man of unclean lips—and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips—for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts!” (2 ). Spencer defends the variant thus: “Isaiah’s at a complete loss, tripping over his words as he announces what he takes to be his inevitable swift demise” (174). Note that Spencer uses the original Book of Mormon text here. In fact, all of his Book of Mormon quotes come from the findings of Royal Skousen in The Earliest Text, published by Yale University Press–though he uses his own punctuation (See p. 51).
Building upon Skousen’s work, Spencer whets the appetite for those who may wish to explore the intriguing area of Book of Mormon variants. Also of interest to those who accept the Book of Mormon as literally true is the distinction Spencer makes between Lehi’s, Jacob’s, and Nephi’s applications of Isaiah’s words (66-69, 127-129). In doing so, he personalizes these prophets, presenting them as real people with unique perspectives.
Though he concentrates on a comprehensive view of Isaiah in Nephi’s record, Spencer adds some noteworthy details to spark the reader’s attention along the way. My favorite tidbit is his exegesis of Isaiah’s vision of God, mentioned above. After encountering the Lord, Isaiah laments that he, a man of “unclean lips,” has seen the Divine Being. Spencer provides an original interpretation of this passage, noting that the Hebrew word for “lips” can also be translated “tongue,” the two words referring to language. “What if we read Isaiah as attributing his fear before the appearance of the Lord in major part to his inability to speak the divine language?” Spencer asks.
He’s seen God, but he lacks the ability to shout forth articulate anthems of praise like the seraphs arranged about God’s throne. A speaker only of human languages, of what the Apostle Paul calls “the tongues of men” as opposed to “the tongue of angels” (), Isaiah’s alarmed at having come into the presence of the divine council (175).
I must be honest: I am disturbed by many parts of this book. Beside my problems with its presentation, I see oversimplification, equivocation, lack of clarity in several key places…and three typographical errors. (Yikes!) However, Joseph M. Spencer does accomplish his goal of providing a firm and forthright structure upon which to read the Book of Mormon’s Isaiah passages. Within the pages of The Vision of All can be found both brilliant insight and moments of illumination, both of which make it a memorable read.