Come, Follow Me April 15-21: Enos-Words of Mormon
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.
Faith, Hope, and Data Compression in the Small Plates
By Rosalynde F. Welch
When we open the three single-chapter books of Enos, Jarom, and Omni, what we notice first is how short they are. After the beginning account of Enos’s wrestle before God, narrative time accelerates dramatically and we see big swaths of history speed past in just a few verses. Enos summarizes the bulk of his life and ministry in just eight verses (Enos 1:19-26). But that seems positively lengthy compared to Chemish’s single verse (Omni 1:9) and Abinadom’s two (Omni 1:10-11). “That which is sufficient is written. And I make an end,” Abinadom tersely notes (Omni 1:11). It’s as if Nephite history is being compressed into smaller and smaller containers.
Why do these authors write so little, compared to Nephi and Jacob before them? They seem to feel that they don’t have much of importance to say after the avalanche of revelation recorded by their fathers. “For what could I write more than my fathers have written?” Jarom asks. “For have not they revealed the plan of salvation? I say unto you, Yea; and this sufficeth me” (Jarom 1:2). Perhaps the flow of Nephite revelation has slowed. Abinadom writes, “I know of no revelation save that which has been written, neither prophecy; wherefore, that which is sufficient is written” (Omni 1:11).
But there’s a more concrete issue at hand: the remaining space in the plates is dwindling. Jarom alerts us to the problem early: “And as these plates are small … it must needs be that I write a little” (Jarom 1:2). It’s not clear why the Nephite record keepers don’t make more plates; perhaps they lack ore, or feel they lack the divine commission to do so. In any case, by the end of the book of Omni, the final record keeper, Amaleki, writes, “I … am about to lie down in my grave; and these plates are full” (Omni 1:30). He and his progenitors have compressed several centuries of Nephite history into the last few plates, and now the record must end.
While the problem is especially acute in these short books, the need for narrative compression is a prominent theme throughout the Book of Mormon. The particular form of written language that Nephi elects to use for his record, combining “the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2), may have been useful for the way it packed a lot of semantic content into a few written characters. Still, early in the record Nephi is already conscious of the need to ration space on the plates: he will not fully summarize his father’s history, he explains, “for I desire the room [on the plates] that I may write of the things of God” (1 Nephi 6:3).
It's an issue that besets Mormon and Moroni in the large plates, as well. “I cannot write the hundredth part of the things of my people,” Mormon reminds us again and again (WoM 1:5; see also Helaman 3:14, 3 Nephi 5:8 and 26:6, etc). When Moroni takes over the project from his father, he explains that he would continue his father’s record “if I had room upon the plates, but I have not; and ore I have none” (Mormon 8:5). He evidently manages to produce more plates somehow and eventually appends the books of Ether and Moroni to the Nephite history, but the scarcity of plates and the resulting need to compress the record remains a determining parameter in the project.
Readers who reach the 531st page of the Book of Mormon may well feel grateful that the scarce room on the plates forced the book’s writers and editors to compress their history! Still, understanding their compression strategies may tell us more about Nephite history—and even, I’ll suggest, something about faith.
Computer science might have something to teach us here. I am not even a little bit of a computer scientist, but I’ve read enough Wired articles to grasp that there are two primary ways in which multimedia data can be compressed for storage or transmission, for instance to stream content online or post an image on a blog. These two methods are called “lossy” and “lossless” compression. In a nutshell, lossy compression works by deleting some of the information from the file to make it smaller while, hopefully, still retaining enough detail to make the image or sound comprehensible. Lossy compression discards the details, we might say, and produces what might be considered an impoverished result—like a pixelated image, for example--but can reduce file size dramatically.
“Lossless” compression, on the other hand, deletes only redundant or “meta”-data. Lossless algorithms replace repeated patterns or sequences with shorter representations, reducing the overall size of the data while allowing for reconstruction when the original data is “decompressed.” However, the cost of this strategy is less efficiency and thus larger file sizes. Both strategies, then, must negotiate the tradeoff between the level of resolution and the file size: you get higher resolution at the cost of a larger file; you get small file size at the cost of low resolution.
What does all this have to do with the Book of Mormon? It seems to me that the Nephite writers of the small plates, Nephi through Amaleki, choose a “lossy” compression strategy to cram Nephite history into their limited plates, while Mormon uses a “lossless” strategy. Small-plates writers typically discard details to save space: Nephi chooses not to include Lehi’s full record, for instance, while Jarom elects “not [to] write the things of my prophesying, nor of my revelations” (Jarom 1:2), and Abinadom deletes all specifics in his terse statement that “I saw much war and contention between my people, the Nephites, and the Lamanites” (Omni 1:10). After all, these writers know there is a full account, apparently without the space constraints available in the concurrent historical record: Jarom assures his readers that, if they want more detail, they “can go to the other plates of Nephi; for behold, upon them the records of our wars are engraven, according to the writings of the kings” (Jarom 1:14). It’s okay if much of the detail is lost in compression, because an uncompressed version exists.
In his abridgment of the large plates, Mormon chooses a lossless strategy. The book of Helaman, for instance, compresses vast amounts of military and social history into a few chapters by removing only redundant data. In the last half of Alma, Mormon has carefully constructed a number of master patterns of Nephite history, including the so-called “pride cycle,” various military innovations, and Nephite dissenters turned defectors who lead the Lamanite armies against their former people. In the book of Helaman, then, Mormon can simply refer to these archetypal patterns without all the redundant historical specifics, allowing him to fully summarize Nephite history in a very short space. In Helaman 1, for example, the phenomenon of the dissenter Coriantumr and the commander Moronihah can be dispatched efficiently, with no loss of understanding in the reader, allowing Mormon to linger on the emergence of a new pattern, the secret combination. This is a nice example of lossless compression. [1]
Let’s step back to ask some larger questions. Compression of information is an unavoidable necessity, whether in modern information technology, the communal enterprise of inductive science generally, everyday life in our modern information-rich world, or an ancient historian-prophet’s project to abridge the history of a nation. Given this necessity, it might seem that Mormon’s “lossless” compression is preferable to the “lossy” compression of the small plates: wouldn’t we love to have, even in somewhat schematized form, the history of the Nephites as they transitioned from the small, kin-based tribe of Nephi and Jacob to a large, fully developed, class-based society we find at the beginning of Mosiah?
But there’s something to be said in favor of lossy compression, too. Because compressed information has lower resolution, it requires more effort, more creativity, and more investment to interpret it. Think about the satisfaction of gazing at an Impressionist painting versus a hyper-resolved AI image. It seems likely to me that the lossy compression of scripture, requiring such an investment of the reader’s time and effort and personal heart to reconstruct its gaps and deletions, might be uniquely suited to engendering faith: because much is asked from our mind and our heart, much is given, as well.
Perhaps this is why so many of Joseph Smith’s grand revelations began with poring over difficult scripture. [2] And maybe this is what the Lord meant when he prayed not only for those who experienced the full, uncompressed glory of his presence but also for those who would read or hear the compressed version: “Father, I thank thee that thou hast purified those whom I have chosen, because of their faith, and I pray for them, and also for them who shall believe on their words, that they may be purified in me, through faith on their words, even as they are purified in me” (3 Nephi 19:28). Lossy compression is not necessarily inferior or impoverished: it may be an opportunity for creativity, spiritual labor, and new faith.
Still, I am convinced that there can be something important lost when we too quickly seek the efficiency of small file sizes, whether lossy or lossless, and fail to simply wonder in befuddlement at the dazzling abundance of creation. Ubiquitous advice to “live in the moment” (and the branch of philosophy known as phenomenology) seems to respond to the modern dilemma that results from our voracious appetite for information and our proclivity for tidy, manageable file sizes. Sometimes we need to remember the uncompressed, unmanageable, scarcity-defying overflow of God’s reality. And I think that’s the purpose of the third (un)compression strategy we find in the Book of Mormon: the sealing up of the vision of all things.
The prophet Nephi, the apostle John, the brother of Jared and others, we’re told, were shown the uncompressed vision of God’s work: “to them hath he shown all things, and they have written them; and they are sealed up to come forth in their purity,” Nephi writes (1 Nephi 14:26). The brother of Jared saw “all the inhabitants of the earth which had been, and also all that would be; and he withheld them not from his sight, even unto the ends of the earth” (Ether 3:25). These visions were not summarized, abridged, or compressed: they were sealed up.
In the face of such unconstrained seeing, it seems to me, the point is not to digest, process, or take account of what is shown. Instead, it is to marvel, to stand in perplexity and incomprehension, to remove our shoes on holy ground.
[1] An exception to Mormon’s typical “lossless” strategy is 4 Nephi, an extremely “lossy” book in which he seems to shorten the historical record by simply deleting much of the history of the Zion-like society that emerged after Christ’s ministry.
[2] Think of D&C 76, 128, 130—not to mention the Book of Moses and the entire Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible.