Come, Follow Me March 11-17: 2nd Nephi 26-30
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.
Familiar Spirits
By Morgan Davis
Portions of this week’s reading (2 Nephi 26–30) are among the most clarion declarations in the Book of Mormon—or any scripture, really—of God’s universal love for the entire human family. The “all are alike unto God” of 2 Nephi 26:33 is rightly cited as the incontrovertible counter to any suggestion that God is or has ever been partial to one race or nation or other social demographic over another. It has done and is still doing important work in countering the false ideas that prophets have called on us to “abandon” and “root out” of our hearts and out of the church. It is a tremendous, load-bearing pillar of our scriptural heritage.
There is another related aspect of this week’s reading, though, that draws less attention but has interesting implications for how we think about that first lesson. It is the way Isaiah is quoted, paraphrased, and, we might say, transplanted in these chapters. Grant Hardy has observed that significant sections of this week’s reading (2 Nephi 26:14–27:35) seem to display something very like what came to be called midrash in the rabbinic (Jewish) exegetical tradition: “the creative reinterpretation of a scriptural passage in ways that highlight its hidden significance with regard to new contexts and situations.”[1] That might sound harmless enough, but such re-workings can be surprising, seeming to take liberties with the original text—adding details, filling in gaps, and sometimes even changing the plain meaning of the original.
In this week’s reading, we observe Nephi doing something like that, plucking passages of Isaiah like branches from a tree and planting or grafting them into the new ground or new tree of his own prophetic discourse. It is a bold thing—Hardy’s word is “extraordinary”—for Nephi to engage with scripture in this midrash-like way, generating new understandings and even new scripture. Then again, it shouldn’t surprise us; God does not create ex nihilo (out of nothing), and neither do human beings, including those who find themselves in the position of being stewards over revelation.
Thus, back in 2 Nephi 18, we find Nephi working at the original tree of Isaiah 8, quoting it in full with minor alterations, including the following verse with one slight addition (in bold):
19 And when they shall say unto you: Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and mutter—should not a people seek unto their God for the living to hear from the dead?
As a minor point, the “hear from” seems to be added by Nephi to clarify a passage that has proven difficult even for modern scholars to translate from the Hebrew.[2] But, what are the “familiar spirits” Isaiah mentions? Biblical scholars have shown that necromancy—conjuring the dead—was a common practice in the ancient Near East, and Israel appears to have been no exception.[3] Those who practiced it—the wizards of the KJV—commonly claimed to be masters over certain spirits, as though they were household servants, known as familiāris in the later Roman tradition (hence, the notion of “familiar spirits” in the KJV; alternatively, they were also sometimes referred to as gods.[4]) The necromancer would open a portal to Sheol, the realm of the dead, by digging a deep hole in the ground and offering food and the blood of animal sacrifice “to lure spirits up out of the grave to obtain information.” They were believed to chirp like birds and coo like doves (in KJV language, to “peep and mutter”), which the necromancer would interpret. Then the pit would be closed again “to prevent the spirits from escaping.”[5]
Obviously, this was an apostate kind of revelation-seeking. It violated the first commandment to have no other gods before God (Exodus 20:3), not to mention the specific prohibition of sorcery in Leviticus 19:31. So Isaiah regards the whispering of familiar spirits out of the ground as not a good thing. But Nephi’s reading at 2 Nephi 18:19 introduces the idea that the living can in fact “hear from the dead”—by seeking “unto their God.” God can empower his children to communicate truths across the mortal divide. But how?
Returning to 2 Nephi 26, we find the idea of “familiar spirits” mentioned anew as Nephi performs his grafting project, plucking words and phrases from what we know as Isaiah 29 and splicing them into his own prophetic utterances about the fate of his descendants in the last days. Nearly the entire contents of Isaiah 29:3–5 are found taking root inside six verses of Nephi’s prophecy, with just a few grammatical alterations to make them fit into his prose (2 Nephi 26:14–19). The finished transplant (with Isaiah’s words in bold, following Grant Hardy’s analysis) reads, in part:
For those who shall be destroyed shall speak unto them out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be as one that hath a familiar spirit; for the Lord God will give unto him power, that he may whisper concerning them, even as it were out of the ground; and their speech shall whisper out of the dust (v. 16).
In the original prophecy of Isaiah, God is threatening Jerusalem with destruction at the hands of the Assyrians who will do God’s will in punishing Judah for their infidelity. There, “speaking low out of the dust” means you have been clobbered; there’s scarcely anything left of you to mumble out of the dirt. Nephi doesn’t entirely discount this understanding; his prophecy, too, indicates that his descendants will succumb to near annihilation. But in the way he grafts Isaiah’s language into his own, Nephi also reinforces the countervailing, hopeful idea that God himself can “give [the dead] power” to communicate to the living for redemptive purposes. That power will come because they record and preserve their words to come forth in later generations. It will come through writing their history and their witness for posterity.
Grafted into this context, supplied by Nephi, the KJV term “familiar spirits” takes on a different cast, bears different fruit. In Isaiah, it has a tenebrous association with necromancy, but in Nephi’s recombination, “familiar” expands to include the modern notion of someone well-known through prior experience and even close relation. These voices that will speak out of the dust—out of the hole in the ground that Moroni will dig for the purpose—will sound familiar. Their humble witness of the wages of disobedience to God’s covenant will resonate with a new audience in a way that recalls them—that is, us—to a remembrance of divine promises made and prophetic warnings given to our forbearers and to ourselves.
The truths declared by the Book of Mormon sound familiar to those attuned to receive them because they are timeless. There is no better example of this than the eloquent witness declared at the end of 2 Nephi 26 by a broken-hearted Nephi, who weeps “for the loss of the slain of [his] people” (v. 7), that God nevertheless “loveth the world even that he layeth down his own life that he may draw all men unto him” (v. 24). And this love, equal unto all (v. 33) is the same charity, he says, that we are commanded to have, “and except [we] have charity, [we are] nothing”—like shades in the dust. So says this familiar spirit.
[1] Grant Hardy, ed., The Annotated Book of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 151.
[2] Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1–39: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Yale Bible 19 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 244–45.
[3] Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible 3A (New Haven London: Yale University Press, 2008), 1700.
[4] Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1–39, 245.
[5] Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, 1770.