Come, Follow Me February 26-March 3: 2nd Nephi 11-19
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Scripture and Vision: Revelation in Audiovisual or Textual Form
By Rosalynde F. Welch
“To be a prophet is both a distinction and an affliction,” writes Abraham Heschel. “The prophet bears scorn and reproach. He is stigmatized as a madman by his contemporaries, and, by some modern scholars, as abnormal.”[1] A renowned Jewish theologian, philosopher, and social activist writing in mid-century America, Heschel in 1962 authored a classic study of biblical prophets--titled, appropriately, The Prophets--that explores the characteristic temperament and the contemporary relevance of God’s chosen servants. Reading Heschel alongside Second Nephi sheds new light on Nephi’s character, especially on a remarkably personal passage of self-disclosure in chapter 11, which I’ll get to below.
The mature Nephi, whom we come to know between the lines of his second book, is no stranger in Heschel’s gallery of afflicted Old Testament prophets. “O wretched man that I am!” he cries (2 Nephi 4:17). When he instructs his heart “do not anger again because of mine enemies,” he reveals as much about his hidden anguish as about his inner resolve. “Do not slacken my strength because of mine afflictions” (2 Nephi 4:29). Second Nephi gives us a portrait of the prophet as a tragic figure--alienated, burdened, reproached by voices from without and within.
Yet Heschel shows that the prophet’s lot is not unmitigated suffering. “Being a prophet is also joy, elation, delight,” he writes.[2] The prophet’s delight is the Lord’s word. Thus Jeremiah exclaims, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart” (Jeremiah 15:16). In this respect, too, Nephi is like his fathers in Hebrew prophecy: “My soul delighteth in the scriptures, and my heart pondereth them … Behold, my soul delighteth in the things of the Lord; and my heart pondereth continually upon the things which I have seen and heard” (2 Nephi 4:15-16). In the absence of other consolations--physical comfort, familial solace, social and intellectual novelty--words of Christ are sweet in his belly, and Nephi feasts on them without restraint (see 2 Nephi 32:2).
Set beside Jeremiah in this way, we see that Nephi adds detail to the prophet’s catalog of delights. Whereas Jeremiah finds a general joy in the Lord’s words, Nephi differentiates “the scriptures” and “the things which I have seen and heard” (2 Nephi 4: 15, 16; compare 1 Nephi 1:18). Nephi here clearly establishes two sources of God’s word--the scriptures, and what he has seen and heard in vision--as twin objects of delight and prophetic pondering.[3]
Both scripture and vision are mediums for revelation, but they rely on different communication strategies: the scriptures are textual, verbal, stable, and durable, the visions are audio-visual, experiential, responsive, and evanescent--at least until they are fixed in text.[4] Nephi prizes both, it’s clear, and he uses each to better probe the meaning of the other--as when he explains Isaiah to his brothers using the image of the mist of darkness from Lehi’s dream (see 1 Nephi 22:12).
Nephi’s appreciation of the different comparative advantages of textual and audio-visual revelation resonates for readers in 2024, whose media consumption has, especially in the past decade, exploded in volume and migrated overwhelmingly to the audio-visual medium of video delivered by smartphone. Examples are easily multiplied in our general media environment: the ubiquity of short-form video content on social media, the rise of audiobooks, the entertainment maw of Netflix. In our religious environment, too, audio-visual modes of communication appear to be overtaking the textual: we’ve long listen-watched General Conference, but now we also have church-sanctioned scripture videos, all manner of short-form religious video content that populates social media, and the seemingly never-ending proliferation of scripture-themed podcasts.
Presuming that this deluge of video and audio content responds to consumer demand, it represents our collective revealed preference for audiovisual material over text. Audiovisual forms are effortless to consume, sensorily rich, and, arguably, elicit spiritual emotion more readily than text. This then raises a further question: given Nephi’s apparently ready access to visionary--that is, audiovisual--revelation with its manifest advantages, why does he continue to pore over the ancient texts? As Grant Hardy frames the question, “Why is he so fascinated with ancient prophecies, especially since by his own account he had direct access to God through revelations?”[5] What is it that the scripture offers him that vision apparently cannot? And does the value that Nephi places on text teach us something about its persistent value, even in a consumer landscape overrun with audiovisual content?
Nephi may give us a clue to the value of text when he returns to the theme of his joy in God’s word in 2 Nephi 11. Here, he focuses on the delights of textual scripture alone as he introduces his long quotation of Isaiah spanning chapters 12 through 24: “And now I, Nephi, write more of the words of Isaiah, for my soul delighteth in his words” (2 Nephi 11:2). Before launching into Isaiah’s oracles of judgment and comfort, Nephi expands on the four-fold pleasure he finds in them:
● “My soul delighteth in proving unto my people the truth of the coming of Christ” (v 4)
● “My soul delighteth in the covenants of the Lord which he hath made to our fathers” (v 5)
● “My soul delighteth in his grace, and in his justice, and power, and mercy in the great and eternal plan of deliverance from death” (v 5)
● “My soul delighteth in proving unto my people that save Christ should come all men must perish” (v 6)
What draws my attention here--among many things that might be said about Christ, covenant, grace, and the plan of deliverance--is Nephi’s double reference to “proving unto my people,” using the words of Isaiah, that Christ will and must come. What might Nephi mean by “proof” in this context, and does it have anything to do with the textual form of Isaiah’s prophecies? Perhaps Nephi prizes the capacity of verbal language to capture complex thought, deductive reason, syllogism?
Here Heschel may offer insight again. He writes, “There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses.”[6] If Nephi fits the mold of Heschel’s Hebrew prophets, as he seems to, perhaps what he means by “proof” is closer, in this context, to what we would call “witnessing.” It’s not that Isaiah’s record possesses some evidentiary value sufficient to satisfy the canons of logic that Christ of necessity must come. Rather, it seems, the delight that Isaiah’s record provides Nephi is something closer to the pleasures of company and conversation.
After all, Nephi shares a rare experience with Isaiah: he “verily saw my Redeemer, even as I have seen him” (2 Nephi 11:2). He goes on to name his brother Jacob as another eyewitness of Christ and explains that he has elected to “send their words forth unto my children to prove unto them that my words are true. Wherefore, by the words of three, God hath said, I will establish my word. Nevertheless, God sendeth more witnesses, and he proveth all his words” (2 Nephi 11:3). Here is Nephi’s clearest indication that the “proof” of Christ he refers to is a preponderance of eyewitnesses; in Heschel’s phrase, “there are only witnesses.”
Thus, it seems that experiential, qualitative--possibly even audiovisual--witness of God is a kind of gold standard for first-hand subjective prophetic testimony. But for intersubjective witness--the braiding together of multiple witnesses into the stronger testimony that Nephi calls “proof”--it seems that text is the medium of choice. Written language has qualities of precision, density, durability, and portability, together with a necessary distance from the writer that elicits interpretation, that offers, it seems, unparalleled creative communication between human minds. And in the prophetic spark that jumps from Isaiah’s words, Nephi finds unparalleled delight.
For my money, this gets it just right. Audiovisual communication has its comparative advantages, even in religious and spiritual settings. But there’s something irreplaceable about text as the medium for meeting a prophet’s mind. As Heschel writes, echoing Nephi’s praise in 2 Nephi 11:5 of God’s grace, justice, power, and mercy with uncanny precision, “The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony--to His power and judgment, to His justice and mercy.”[7] The pleasure of deep immersion in a prophet’s testimony afforded by text will, I hope, motivate us as a people to maintain the capacities of attention and interpretation needed to access that delight through reading together.
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, 20.
[2] Ibid, 22.
[3] The entire purpose of the book of First Nephi, in one sense, has been to establish the provenance of the two great sources of the astonishing revelatory creativity on display in Second Nephi: namely, the brass plates containing Isaiah’s words, and Lehi’s dream informing Nephi’s vision. This insight, and others in what follows, is taken from from Joseph Spencer’s First Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction.
[4] Lehi’s brass ball, of course, displays a form of textuality that is as evanescent and responsive as vision.
[5] Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide, 59.
[6] Heschel, 27.
[7] Ibid., 27.