Come, Follow Me April 8-14: Jacob 5-7
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.
The Prophet Zenos and God's Work of Preservation
By Jeffrey G. Cannon
In Jacob 5, Jacob transcribes onto the plates the words of an extrabiblical prophet named Zenos. As elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, Jacob assumes his immediate audience and his later readers are already familiar with Zenos. In fact, the chapter begins with Jacob asking his audience “do ye not remember to have read the words of the prophet Zenos” (Jacob 5:1). Jacob then transcribes a story in which Zenos tells of a man he identifies as “the master of the vineyard” who sees that his prized olive tree has begun to decay. To preserve the tree, he undertakes a program of pruning, fertilizing, and grafting over several seasons, producing different results. Zenos tells us the olive tree represents the House of Israel (Jacob 5:3) but he is unspecific about the other elements and characters in the story.
Jacob interprets the allegory in chapter 6. Placing his own people into the story, he reminds them “how merciful is our God unto us, for he remembereth the house of Israel, both roots and branches” (v. 4). Continuing his identification of his own people with Israel and with the tree from Zenos’s story, Jacob asks, “After ye have been nourished by the good word of God all the day long, will ye bring forth evil fruit, that ye must be hewn down and cast into the fire” (v. 7)? For Jacob, this is a very personal story about God’s repeated efforts to preserve and rescue Israel from the effects of their own disobedience.
This story’s journey into our hands is also one of preservation through multiple seasons. Zenos’s writings are unknown outside the Book of Mormon. They were presumably included on the Brass Plates, yet despite Zenos’s clear importance to Lehi and his family, the scribes who remained with the main body of Israel and compiled the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament, did not include them. Zenos seems to have had little importance for those in the Old World, but they found a receptive audience among the remnant of Israel that was preserved by being led to the New World. His moving allegory of God’s love for His children would be lost to us had Jacob not included it.
Perhaps it was their separation from the main body of Israel that led the Nephites to find such importance in Zenos’s words. Zenos shows up in a couple of places in the Book of Mormon. In addition to his allegory representing Israel being spread throughout the earth, Zenos’s now-lost writings seem to have displayed a special concern for preserving remnants of Israel in diaspora. Elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, Nephi quotes Zenos’s prophecies about “those who should inhabit the isles of the sea, more especially given unto those who are of the house of Israel” (1 Nephi 19:10). Alma the Younger quotes Zenos when teaching the Zoramites who had separated themselves from the Nephites and were subsequently cast out of the synagogues that God hears the sincere prayers of all, even those who have been separated from Israel: “Thou art merciful, O God, for thou hast heard my prayer, even when I was in the wilderness” (Alma 33:4). Interestingly, Samuel the Lamanite also calls out Zenos among “the many other prophets, concerning the restoration of our brethren, the Lamanites, again to the knowledge of the truth” (Helaman 15:11). Finally, Mormon invokes Zenos when commenting on the fulfilment of prophecies of the coming of Christ: “Yea, the prophet Zenos did testify of these things, and also Zenock spake concerning these things, because they testified particularly concerning us, who are the remnant of their seed” (3 Nephi 10:16). These passages preserve only a small glimpse of a recurring theme of preservation in Zenos’s larger prophetic corpus.
Zenos’s modern history continues the story of preservation. Martin Harris’s loss of the manuscript containing Joseph Smith’s first efforts to translate the Book of Mormon is well known. Rather than retranslate the same portion from Mormon’s abridgement, the Lord commanded Joseph to work from the plates of Nephi. It is not known whether the text of Zenos’s allegory was included in the lost manuscript. If not, it may be among the “many things engraven on the plates of Nephi which do throw greater views upon my gospel” (Doctrine and Covenants 10:45).
Those words might also have been lost in subsequent years. Only a few small remnants of the original manuscript of Joseph Smith’s translation for Jacob 5–7 are known to exist today. On October 2, 1841, Joseph placed the Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon into the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House.[1] There it sat for more than four decades until Lewis C. Bidamon, Emma Smith’s second husband, tore down the wall and removed what was left of the manuscript. Water had seeped into the cornerstone, causing significant damage. Reportedly, due to the moisture, “much of it had become a mass of pulp, and only small portions of it were legible.”[2] In later years, Bidamon gave pieces of the manuscript to visitors passing through Nauvoo. Only about 28 percent of the original manuscript is known to have survived. Many of those fragments have been collected by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which now owns about 90 percent of them. Sadly, much of what remains is so faded that it is difficult or impossible to read.
Fortunately, however, the text of the Book of Mormon and its message have been preserved in other ways. After Joseph Smith completed the work of translation, Oliver Cowdery made a copy of the Original Manuscript, from which the printer, John Gilbert, did the painstaking work of setting the type.[3] The first edition of the Book of Mormon was available for sale in March 1830. Zenos’s allegory appears on pages 131 through 139. It has since been reprinted many times and translated into more than 100 languages, preserving the message of God’s love and His covenant with Israel to “the nethermost parts of the vineyard.”
[1] The Lord commanded the Saints to build the Nauvoo House to accommodate visitors to Nauvoo earlier that year (Revelation, January 19, 1841 [D&C 124:22–24]).
[2] Ebenezer Robinson, “Items of Personal History of the Editor,” The Return, August 1890, 316.
[3] This copy became known as the Printer’s Manuscript, which Cowdery kept until his death, when he gave it to his brother-in-law and fellow Book of Mormon witness, David Whitmer. The manuscript remained in the Whitmer family until 1903, when it was sold to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now Community of Christ. After more than a century of faithful stewardship, Community of Christ sold the Printer’s Manuscript to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2017.