Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: 3rd, 4th Nephi Text with Daniel Belnap

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies podcast. My name is Rosalynde Welch. I'm joined today by Dr. Dan Belnap. Dr. Belnap is a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. He is interested in ritual behavior and ritual studies, which means that he, in the context of the Book of Mormon, he studies the social, political, cultural worlds of the Book of Mormon and how those interact with its doctrinal teachings. I've read a lot of his work. He's a great scholar and a great writer and a very insightful reader of the Book of Mormon and I'm so happy to have him with us today. Welcome Dr. Belnap.

Daniel Belnap: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Welch: Today we are jumping into the text of Third and Fourth Nephi. This is going to be a deep dive into the text, although as always, we won't be walking sequentially through every chapter and verse of these books. Instead, we're going to give you, we hope, some useful paradigms, concepts, and frameworks that will guide you in your own reading of the books of Third and Fourth Nephi.

So, we'll jump in today where I always start, Dan, and that is with any context that's helpful as we begin our reading here in Third Nephi. What should we know about what's been happening and what's about to happen here?

Belnap: So, from Third Nephi, right? So, it starts, Third Nephi starts off with a bang. I guess all the books really kind of start off with a nice little crisis point, right? Helaman did with the crisis of who's going to be the next chief judge. Third Nephi does as well with the questions concerning the fulfillment of Sam, not just Samuel's actually, this is something that we can look at here in a bit, but of these prophecies, right? And have they, has the time been passed

Welch: Yeah.

Belnap: To their fulfillment and if it has, what does that mean? So that's where 3rd Nephi starts off. It starts off, I think, with a church crisis. I mean, we don't get a lot about the church in 3rd Nephi, but when Nephi, as it says in verse two, Nephi the son of Helaman, who was the son of Helaman, son of Alma, son of... When Nephi the son of Helaman had departed out of the land of Zarahemla and was given charge to his son Nephi, if you just kind of, verse three, departed out of the land and disappeared. So, this is reminiscent of Alma the Younger who did the same thing back in Alma chapter 45. He walked off and just was never seen again. On the road to Melech, he just took off. In the case of Alma, the tradition arises that he has been translated. In the case of Nephi, we don't have that at all. Nephi just is gone. And that's got to create a crisis, right?

So, his son, Nephi, now who controls the records or who is a steward over these records, is now to lead the people, and the question is, has the due date passed on the prophecy? So, this is the crisis point that starts 3rd Nephi.

Welch: Yeah, very much so. A moment of great tension. And probably, I love how you pointed out that Mormon is quite canny in how he starts out each book, right? And gives us something right at the very beginning to sink our teeth into. But this transition between Helaman and Third Nephi probably is the one that has the greatest amount of tension and connectivity because right there at the end of Helaman, we of course have the prophetic pronouncement of the signs to come. And then here right at the beginning of 3rd Nephi, we're waiting to see, in fact, if they will come to pass. And I think Mormon wants us as readers to see the prophet was vindicated. The prophecies are true. And then that is the knowledge that frames our observation of the precipitous decline of Nephite culture that occurs shortly after.

Belnap: And what I find, what's intriguing is to that tension, the end of Helaman, the actual last chapter of Helaman 16, sets up a bit of a problem, as some of these signs are starting to come to pass, and Mormon gives you the voice of critics of those signs. You look at verse 20 and 21, there really is, and I've done a little work on this in another context, but there's this sense that some of these signs might've been done by, he quotes, the cunning and mysterious arts of the evil one.

When the signs show up, you come over here to chapter two, and in verse two, these signs and wonders, people became less and less astonished. And it actually says that some began to disbelieve, imagining up some vein thing in their hearts, that it was wrought by men and by the power of the devil to lead and deceive the hearts of the people.

What's intriguing about that is it's clear, it's clear they see phenomena. It's clear they're experiencing a phenomenon. So, what they're doing is explaining away the phenomenon, right? Is it, we can't say it didn't happen, this stuff did happen, but what we can say is it's through the work of some other means. It's not a divine manifestation. It's maybe demonic. It's magic, right? This magic is, its illusion, it's meant to trick us, it's meant to deceive us. We're not saying that there wasn't something, we're just saying it isn't what you say it is.

Welch: This is so interesting. Often the Book of Mormon gives voice to skeptical perspectives, right? It allows its skeptics to have a say, we saw that way back with Sherem and then through Korihor, and now here with these unbelievers. Often in the past, we've seen a kind of human cynicism, right, that this is really about.

Belnap: Thank you.

Welch: The Nephites wanting to usurp power and authority. It all goes back to Nephi who wanted to, you know, wrongfully usurp the plates and the authority. Here we have a different explanation, as you've just pointed out. This is a kind of more...occult, more demonic explanation that the skeptics adopt here.

As always, I think that these moments of skepticism are meant to speak to us as modern readers, right? And speak to our reaction to the Book of Mormon, because there may be skeptical readers of the Book of Mormon. So, this is reaching out, breaking that fourth wall and saying, hey, take a look at what's happening here, Mormon says. These were true prophecies, and the signs indeed were fulfilled.

Welch: And that sets us up nicely now to look sort of with a larger scale at the books of third and fourth Nephi and at their structure as a whole.

They stand within the Book of Mormon as a moment of consummation and fulfillment, as--just as we've been talking about--they stand as a direct rejoinder to the skeptics and the fulfillment of these centuries and centuries of Nephite prophecy. So, let's step back. Let's look at the structure of Third Nephi, and you can add on their Fourth Nephi as well. I hate that Fourth Nephi often gets...often get short shrift, but we're going to be dealing with both of those books today

Welch: We might think sort of more broadly about the shape of Third Nephi, and actually an article that you've written helped me to think about this, Dan.

And that is just kind of from a really, really 10,000-foot level perspective. But it starts out at the beginning with a kind of moment of promise and prophetic vindication, right, with the signs of light and life of the day and the night and the day with no darkness. Then we see a kind of precipitous and total collapse into a time of darkness and a time of chaos. Basically, we see the entire collapse of the Nephite state and the Nephite church, right? So that when Christ comes, He is building from nothing, basically. So, we have this dark interim right here in chapters six through nine, of course, eight and nine, the destructions begin.

And then from that very, very low point, you begin the process of rebuilding a kind of new creation, right? So, we see a new church, a new state, that is sort of built up with Christ at its center, Christ as the lawgiver here at the center, and he builds the people up spiritually and prepares them to enter the kingdom of God, which he has brought with him. So that's another way, sort of in largest structural terms, to see the shape of the book of Third Nephi.

Then in Fourth Nephi, of course, we get to coast along for a little while on that high point, right? And Mormon generously shares with us some details of what that society looks like. But famously, right, before too long, within 200 years, once again, we're on that Nephite roller coaster and we're feeling our stomach and our mouth again as we start to head downhill quickly.

Belnap: Yeah, I think that's a great way to describe that. There does seem to be a relationship between the way he describes the events leading to Christ's arrival and Nephi and Lehi's, right? That Lehi's dream and that Nephi's vision of that dream. I've made the case before, and that you may be, that's what you were alluding to.

Welch: It is. I'll introduce our, I'll tell our readers its title. This is just a wonderful article. “‘There arose a mist of darkness’: The Narrative of Lehi's Dream in Christ's Theophany.” And it's a wonderful lens on 3rd Nephi.

Belnap: So, this goes to a larger narrative arc that I see for the book overall. And I'll see if I can explain it quickly. It seems to me, at least when I read it, that there seems to be this concern. And it's a generalized concern, but it's a pervasive and a constant concern. When you look at the Old Testament, when you look at the Bible, the concept of scattering is never a positive. There isn't really a sense. And certainly, in the foundational documents of Exodus and Leviticus numbers, Deuteronomy, scattering is not a positive. It's a sign that the covenant is broken. It's a sign that God has forgotten, or because of your own wickedness, because of your disobedience. There's always a promise that you'll be able to be brought back if you're repentant. The problem is, is the Nephites don't ever really get to go back, ever. They're never going to go back. There's no going back.

Welch: Right. Jerusalem has been destroyed. There's no way back. Yeah.

Belnap: The land bountiful, that's where the boat is, you're never going back. Lands of their first inheritance, they don't ever really go back. The land of Nephi, they try, and it will fail, it will fail.

Welch: This is of course the reign of Wicked King Noah and the Zeniffite band there.

Belnap: Yeah. And what's fascinating is there is a discussion in there between Abinadi, the prophet, and these priests as to what redemption is. So connected to this whole thing, is I think a theological, spiritual doctrine that's running through the Book of Mormon, which is what exactly is redemption. Because from a biblical model, that's a return home.

They're not returning back home. So, what does, how do they fit the story of redemption from the Bible if we don't actually get to ever go back? Right? So, Nephi talks about redemption, Abinadi talks about redemption. In the second day of Christ's ministry, he's going to spend most of the day demonstrating how they still fit this covenant, right? But they're never going back. What exactly does the gathering mean to a group of people who've been scattered and ever get to go back. So, within that context, what I made the case of was that Lehi's dream becomes a new model, a new cultural narrative that they can use to structure. Nephi's vision takes a very symbolic dream [and makes it] a historical dream. Those are, I don't know who these multiple concourses of people are pressing forward on the path, but he historicizes them and they become now Nephite history.

If Mormon has read that material, he then can use it as a template to describe the events that are coming. Not to mention the fact that Lehi's dream, I think, connects back to though a larger Israelite narrative of creation, where you take unorganized stuff and end up in a cosmos, right? So there's elements of Lehi's dream that you look at and go, that's kind of like the creation of the cosmic story, particularly with this tree of life stuff, right?

Welch: Yeah.

Belnap: So, Mormon's able to look at the events that happen with the destruction of the New World with Christ's death and with Christ's arrival and go, one, I can describe this. First of all, I've got Nephi, who talks about actual mists of darkness, and I can tie that into this narrative so that this event is the culmination of this narrative.

And two, it's going to tie back to this creation stuff, which means I've got a, I've got a similar unorganized state in 3 Nephi chapters 7, 8, 9, leading to a completely new cosmos in chapters 11 and on. So, it's a blending of these two. So, he's got these two narrative structures that he can use to tell this story. And they're about creation and about a very specific Nephite approach to creation.

Welch: Yeah, it's a really wonderful article and you did such a great job of showing how Lehi's dream becomes a kind of archetype when you break it down to its simplest elements of beginning in darkness and chaos, being led by a guide and then being brought to a place of transformative light that then transforms you and turns you outward. And broken down into those that Mormon uses them, right? And to show precisely what we've been working up to through the whole Book of Mormon.

So, starting in this, you know, the mist of darkness, of course, and the chaos and the fear and the cry for deliverance, and then Christ's voice as the kind of rod of iron, right? The word of God and his arm extended as the rod that we grasp onto, then drawing us to him, to his very presence. There's a temple story here too, right? He draws the Nephites to his own very presence and then being in the presence of the Lord, they're recreated. Their society is made new and they themselves are healed and made whole. And then they themselves are filled with this love and want to go out and share it with others.

You make the wonderful point that the smaller group that gets to be there at Christ's first descent, they spend the whole next night going and telling everybody about what has happened so that an even larger crowd can come back the next day to be in Christ's presence. So, it's a really, wonderful reading and it's a wonderful structure for understanding how this whole narrative of 3rd Nephi is put together.

Welch: And it has, as you've been alluding to, it has this really wonderful theological upshot as well, right? Which is that it allows us to see these acts, these divine acts of creation and salvation as really one divine act, as a single manifestation of God's love. And it helps us to understand, I think that puts the idea of the judgment and all these things that are associated with what happens to us after this life, it puts it in this wonderful, hopeful, and uplifting context that our process of salvation is a process of new creation of Recreation. And that's a powerful theological lens as well

Belnap: Yeah, I think I love the concept of the creation in the scriptures overall in the Old Testament. And I really love the unique Nephite spin that gets put on in the Book of Mormon, right? Because they really do. If you look at the language of the darkness, of the rocks moving and this darkness, I don't know what it is. I know plenty of people try to put a meteorological explanation to it. None of them work, as far as I can tell.

I mean, it's so dark that you can't light, that there's no light, none. We should be able to light a fire. Can't light a fire. Well, why? Because everything's wet? No, everything's exceedingly dry. So, it's ash? Well, then just sweep off the ash and light a fire. No. The only reason you wouldn't be able to light a fire is because there's no oxygen, which means everyone should be dead. So I don't know what it is, but I do know it's connected, because he uses it. He calls it mists of darkness.

Welch: Yeah.

Belnap: And that is exactly what Nephi said. So Mormon is directly connecting these two things, Nephi's vision, and Lehi's dream of 600 years ago to this pivotal event of Nephite history, right? And not just Nephite history, of the righteous history, right? Because you've got Nephites, Lamanites, all those that survived this category.

Welch: That's right. That's such an important point. We tend to say the Nephite theophany and Christ's ministry to the Nephites, yes, they were called Nephites at that point, but they included descendants of Laman and Lemuel. It was a mix of the entire Lehite people at that point.

Belnap: I think we call that simply because it's a Nephite record. But it's not describing just full Nephites.

Welch: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, good. Well, let's move on. Let's talk about some of the characters that we see here in Third and Fourth Nephi. We've already talked a lot about Mormon. Mormon, in some ways, his mind and his presence is maybe the most salient of all the characters, even though he doesn't show up in the narrative itself. What other characters should we have our eye on through these books?

Belnap: I think, and not a surprise, most of us think about 3rd Nephi in terms of Christ's theophany, and rightfully so. I mean, this is the culmination. This is the peak of the Nephite story, really. With that said, the first five chapters kind of sum up and roll up this whole Gadianton robber’s story.

Belnap: And it's significant. We tend to skip over it in the sense that we don't think much about it. And he does it quickly, but he doesn't do it thoroughly, is what else. He can set this up. If you look and read at it closely and maybe slowly, you realize the setup to this conflict, in many ways, it's almost as if I've described it as a second--it's a second chaos.

So, if we go back to that creation arc, you've got the actual physical destruction which reflects like the creation, the pre-cosmic chaos, the disorder, the unorganized stuff. But I think one of the things Mormon is doing is he's setting up that there's a social chaos that's already taken place. So that when the physical happens, yeah, society is already way off, right?

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Belnap: Society is out of order. It's in chaos. It's in utter collapse. And so, when the physical destruction happens, it's like, well, yeah, in some ways, that's an after effect of what's already happened socially. So, with that in mind, the material with the Gadianton robbers really is significant. The Gadianton robbers are used in language to describe them almost as that they infest the ground, they're monstrous, right? They live in the wilderness.

Welch: Yeah.

Belnap: These are images of this type of unorganized disorder, would be the, or non-cosmic forces that seek to destroy a cosmos. We tend to think of a cosmos as a physical creation, but a cosmos is anything that is given order, structure, meaning, function, purpose, and therefore society is a cosmos, right?

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Kim Matheson has an interesting reading of the Book of Helaman where she sees the Gadianton robbers in just that way, you know, we've gotten used to seeing the patterns of Nephite society, the Gadianton robbers are very different. As you say, they're in the wilderness, they're not organized, they're secret. We can't see how they work. And they function to kind of erode and dissolve and undermine structures and pillars. So, they really are working in this way to dissolve and reduce and de-organize everything that we've come to expect about the way Nephite Society works.

Belnap: So, to that end, this might explain why in 3.5, you have an elaborate ritual structure as to what to do with the last Gaddianton Robber ruler if that makes sense. So, I mean, that's the cutting down of the tree and all of that, right?

Welch: Well, you've made a good case that we shouldn't ignore the Gadianton characters and the action that takes place in these early chapters of Third Nephi. And I agree with you. I think they're integrally related to the ongoing narrative arc.

Belnap: That's exactly it.

Welch: that Mormon is carefully and patiently building for us. And they're also important to understanding the depth of the degradation and destruction of Nephite life from which Christ rebuilds when he comes.

Jesus Christ, of course, is the main character and there's so much that we could say about him and about who he is in 3rd Nephi. A couple of things maybe I'll just mention, and if there's anything that strikes you, you can chime in as well.

3rd Nephi really has an emphasis on Christ as he appears in the gospel of John. In other words, as the way, the truth, and the life. He comes as a divine being and his message to the people throughout is, “Come unto me. Salvation is found in me. Be baptized in my name. Be filled with the Holy Spirit and believe on me."

But there's an interesting flip side to this coin, right? Which is that even though Christ's emphasis is on himself as the fount and source of salvation, he spends a lot of time quoting other prophets. He's very unselfish in the way that he spends his time, and he spends a lot of his time quoting Isaiah, Micah, Malachi, of course, quoting himself on the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon at the Temple. So that's also very, very interesting.

And when he is quoting these old prophets, he doesn't spend a lot of time showing us how they were predicting his own coming. This is something that--throughout the Book of Mormon, we've been told again and again, Zenos and Zenoch and Isaiah, they all pointed towards Christ. You might think that when Christ gets here, as he does, for example, on the road to Emmaus in the New Testament narrative, that he would spend a lot of time showing people, oh, yeah, this is what Isaiah said, and this is how I fulfill that. But that's not what he does at all, right? He spends his time instead focused on the future salvation of the Lamanite remnant. So once again, that seems to me like a very unselfish use of his time. He wants to draw the Nephites to him, but it's in an unselfish way that will always, of course, redound to their own salvation and their own growth.

And of course, here in 3rd Nephi, there's such an emphasis on Christ's own emotional life. And this is something that often I think is missing, or we just get touches of it in the New Testament. But here we see Christ--it must have felt so wonderful to him to be among a people who soon recognize him. It takes them a minute, right, to figure out who he is, but they recognize him, they worship him, they fall at his feet and they kiss his feet and bathe his feet with their tears, and he is filled with compassion and he's filled with joy.

And so it's a really beautiful portrait of, I think, the emotions of the Savior when he is united with his people in this sacred and holy place. The temple, you know, Third Nephi really turns into a kind of temple space there and it takes place historically and physically at the temple itself as well.

Anything else you'd want to add about the Savior as he appears as a God and as a person in this book?

Belnap: I think that last comment is what's significant. 3 Nephi 11, he appears as a god. And unlike the New Testament, where he is mortal, right? This is not a mortal Christ. It is not a mortal Christ. It's an immortal, exalted being. And that's an element that really does differ.

Again, I think the gospel's the same. I mean, the doctrine of Christ isn't going to change from dispensation or region, but the way it gets presented, the Nephites are going to end up with a different approach to it than I think they will in the old world.

For instance, and I'm just going to bounce around through some of this. When you go to 3 Nephi 18, now 3 Nephi 18 is when he institutes the sacrament. You read this in verses 6 and 7, 5, 6 and 7. The multitude, he has them break the bread, blesses it, and he says, “Behold, there is one ordained among you, and to him will I give power, that he shall break bread and bless it, and give it to all those of the church that believe. And this shall he always observe to do, even as I have done, even as I have broken bread and blessed it, and given it to you. And this shall he do in remembrance of my body.”

Now that's, he said the same thing in the Old World, when he broke it up, this is the remembrance of my body, which I have shown unto you, is what he adds to the Nephites. Now, the difference is that they do not see a broken, mortal Christ. They see an immortal, divine Christ. And this body which they've shown unto him, which he showed unto them, is going to hearken back to the experience of 3 Nephi 11. And that is singular in nature. To how many people were there? What does it say in 3 Nephi 17? There were 2,500 people. According to 3 Nephi 11, 2,500 people came up and touched Christ's hands, feet, and side, right? And the word is touched, but it's not really an adequate description as to what they did. They manipulated it. I mean, the word that he uses for the side is, you're going to thrust your hand into my side. Now I've done a little bit of work on that recently too. This is an, a very invasive, very personal, intimate experience they're having with Christ. I mean, it's... Who do you let touch your belly? That's a very select group of people who get to have access to this part of the body, to touch it. And it's not touch, it's not this, right? It is, you're going to stick your hand into my body. What does it feel like?

I mean, what is a resurrected body feel like? Do they feel movement? Is it warm? Do they feel blood? Right? We don't know. I don't know what it's like, but it's clearly living. And so they're coming away with, the reason he says to do that is so that you might know that I am the God of Israel and the God of the whole earth that has been slain for the sins of the world.

This touch, this haptic touch, which is what it's called, this... it's one of the primary fundamental ways we learn and make concepts. The way you probably learned the word apple, right? Now you can recognize a set of abstract letters. But you probably learned it by touching one first, feeling it, manhandling it, and someone going, that's an apple. And then you can see a picture of one and go, oh, I know what that is. I felt it. That's an apple. And then you can see the letters for it and go, oh, I know what those letters are. It's that thing I touched. So, when it comes to the sacrament for the Nephites, they're not going to remember a broken body. And they're not going to remember a body that suffered as much as they are going to remember a body that was resurrected that let them touch it.

Welch: That's fascinating. So, he's a God, he's a divine being, yet he is embodied. And it's crucial to him that they understand that and that in the most experiential, immediate, embodied way, they, with their own bodies, contact his body.

It strikes me, and I'm just riffing on this a little now, but there's a way in which they come to be in Christ, right, as they thrust their hands into His side. They are in Him in a way. And then, as they partake of the sacrament and as He teaches them what that means, Christ then is in them. And so we're seeing here, and Christ returns to this on several occasions, this idea of indwelling that we see in the Gospel of John, right, His wish and His prayer to the Father, that just as He and the Father are in one another, so the believers can be in them together and we will all dwell in one another. So in this very kind of physical and embodied way, we see that happening through this moment of touching and then ingesting the body in Christ.

Belnap: Well, and he develops it even further if you look in 3rd Nephi 18 verse 25: so having now, giving them the sacrament and then talking about the membership about who gets to come to services, for lack of a better term, the congregation and pointing out that you don't turn anyone away. This is going to be completely inclusive. You will make sure that even if they can't partake in the sacrament, you want them there. And then light of the world stuff. So verse 25, and you see that I've “commanded that none of you should go away, but rather commanded that you should come unto me”--that's what we were just talking about--”that you might feel and see.” That feel is alluding back to the events of 3rd Nephi 11, right? And then you get this, to me, wonderfully ambiguous clause after, even so, shall you do unto the world. Do what? Invite people to come and feel Christ or to make ourselves as open, as vulnerable, as accepting to be felt. Now I don't think he's saying I want people to come up and manhandle you that way, but what exactly is it that we are supposed to do under the world? This to me I find intriguing as to... this is new. This is what I want you to do moving forward as a people. I want you; I invited you to come into me to feel me and see me. Now, go and do unto the world.

Welch: This is wonderful. And this is again, this relates back to the creation archetype, right? That when we are recreated by a divine being, by our God, we ourselves are now given this creative power. We now have this creative spark, this divine nature in us that makes us creators. And so just in the same way now, as Christ has made himself available to us in this saving way, he tells us, go to, make yourselves available in this same unselfish, saving, loving way to other people so that they can be drawn to me.

Belnap: Right? And when you read the sacrament that way, it then changes, at least it did for me, it changes then the way that you would understand or put into context Moroni chapter 4, where you get the sacramental prayer 400 years later. But this is to a Nephite or the righteous, whatever you want to call them. “O God, the eternal father, we ask in the name of thy son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it, that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy son." What body did they see? What body did they experience? It wasn't a mortal broken body. It was an immortal exalted Christ's body. The sacrament didn't point them to the same type of Christ that we sometimes do. I've heard in sacrament, we go, well, we think about, we commemorate maybe the pain and suffering of Christ. And I go.

Welch: Mm-hmm.

Belnap: Cool, but that isn't what the Nephites did. Their remembrance of Christ is a different Christ.

Welch: Yeah. And yet it's significant, don't you think, Dan, that yes, he's exalted, he is resurrected, he is glorified, and he glorifies them. And yet he retains the prints of the nails and the wound in his side. So, he has been permanently changed by his mortal experience. And he shares with us a knowledge--a bodily knowledge--of pain and suffering that no doubt he retains, although he has transcended it now.

Belnap: Yeah, and so what this gives us is even a wider understanding or perspective or experience that we can have in our own sacrament. Our sacrament prayer is taken from Doctrine and Covenants 20, but it's word for word the same as Moroni chapter 5, suggesting then we take that blend of that New Testament introduction of the sacrament and a Book of Mormon introduction of the sacrament, and the sacrament becomes inclusive of just Christ's everything. It's both his mortal ministry and his exalted state. Doctrine and Covenants 27, right? By 1835, Joseph has added a whole bunch of new stuff to it, new revelatory material, and there the sacrament points you towards a future event. So, I've got a sacrament that can point me towards the past, towards something that is present, and something to the future.

Welch: This is an amazing reading of the sacrament. I've never thought of it in this way. And I love how your mind works. Dr. Belnap here, there, and everywhere in drawing these elements together into new patterns that help us understand our lived experience in a more powerful way. I love that.

Belnap: It’s good stuff.

Welch: Let's, I loved what you shared with us about unity, oneness in the sacrament, and I want to talk more about some of these themes, but I'm nothing if not a slave to my outline. So let's quickly, before we touch a little bit more on the themes in 3rd Nephi, is there anything that we want to touch on about the literary or textual forms in 3rd and 4th Nephi? You've already given us a wonderful overview of Mormon's editorial comments, which he interjects throughout, of course, introducing himself--” I am a disciple of Christ”--in chapter five, but he also appears in chapters 10, 26, 28 here. What other textual or literary forms should we keep our eye out for in 3rd and 4th Nephi?

Belnap: That's a great question. I don't see. Okay, so there are other literary forms. There's no question. But they are set up and contextualized for you already. So, Isaiah, it's very poetic, right? So, we're going to get some wonderful Hebrew poetry. But you already know that because he says I'm going to quote you, Isaiah.

Welch: That's right, they're not exactly hidden. It's worth noting though that it's been a while, right? We got really used to Isaiah--long quotations and the wonderful kind of rich likening interpretation that Nephi and even Jacob do--but it's kind of been a long dry spell through the large plates. And then with Christ, we return to these wonderful, wonderful long quotations and rich interpretation of the prophetic Old Testament figures.

Belnap: Isaiah that Christ does quote though is a well-known Isaiah passage in the Book of Mormon, right? If you look over the Isaiah usages in the Book of Mormon, Nephi, Jacob, Abinadi, 2 Nephi chapter 27, though that's a bit of an outlier, Christ, last page of the Book of Mormon has Moroni paraphrasing sections from Isaiah 52 and Psalm 54. Isaiah 52 is the Isaiah passage that resonates or is used the most in the Book of Mormon. The priests of Noah and Abinadi, they are debating what redemption is based on this particular Isaiah passage. Jacob uses it, at least the first little bit of it at the end of his speech in 2 Nephi 6-10, of his Isaiah portion. Christ is going to develop off of Isaiah 52. It's not just any Isaiah that he uses. It's a specific set of Isaiah. So while the form is clearly Isaiah, it's again, I'm struck by this is a particular passage that means something to what it means to be Nephite.

The angel, the angel that gave Nephi his vision used parts of Isaiah 52--this is this that particular sentence, that particular line may be the most quoted passage of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. And so you're looking at this, you're looking at this Isaiah 52 and going, what's going on?

Christ's message to the gathered here in Bountiful is a message that has to resonate with them in their situation. Sometimes for me when I hear people sometimes talk about the Book of Mormon, they go, well, it was written for me. And my response is, you're right, Mormon's version is written to you. But the events that Mormon's describing wasn't.

This message isn't to us in the sense that we're the primary audience that Christ spoke to. There's no way Christ said to these people, okay, just so you know, this is now a message to people 2,000 years in the future, you can take your nap. Right? It's got to mean something for them. And when you look at this, boy, it speaks to a group of people who feel scattered. And in fact, he says that verse 12. One of the purposes I'm here for is to tell you from the Father directly. And that's when you, when we talked about who are figures in 3 Nephi that we ought to look for, I'll tell you one, the Father, right? Christ is there, but everything that he's done, he's saying, I've been sent by the Father. I've been sent by the Father to do this. I've been sent by the Father to give you Malachi, because they don't have Malachi, right? So, he's going to go through Malachi 3, 4, the Father told me to do these things.

The Father has commanded me to do this. What Christ is doing in many ways is reinstituting this relationship with the Father.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah, I'm really persuaded by that, that he's chosen his Isaiah very, very carefully, speaking to Nephite identity. And we've been talking about recreation, trying to recreate the Nephite sense of community and sense of self, but based on their covenant relationship with him, rather than on, as we've seen and as we will see again, on their wealth, on their social status, on their relation to other ethnic groups, right? These other bases of Nephite identity that have proven to be a sandy foundation for them, right? Genuinely, everything is leveled now, and he is trying to rebuild their sense of who they are as a covenant community in relation to Christ and to the Father. That's wonderful.

Belnap: Well, and listen, so as he sets up the Isaiah, you go to 35, 20, and go to verse 25, and behold, you are the children of the prophets, and you are the house of Israel, and you are the covenant which the Father made with your fathers, saying unto Abraham, In a nice age shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed. I mean, it's explicit. You are children of this covenant. Now, what he's tied it to is that Abrahamic responsibility.

Welch: Yes.

Belnap: Through thee and thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." And with that, now again, we don't have the time to do it, but I think what you can see the Nephite prophets doing, Jacob, Nephi, Abinadi, all of them have begun to establish this idea that maybe scattering isn't a bad thing. The allegory of the olive tree is a powerful allegory in which you learn a lot about scattering and gathering, and there you find that the Lord scatters sometimes, because how else do I bless the entire vineyard if I don't actually get the tree everywhere. Right? And so, there were people who have maybe the biblical text, they look at scattering and go, we're broken, we're abandoned, this is our fault. This is to which the Book of Mormon prophets using Isaiah have been saying, no, maybe we're looking at scattering wrong. This allegory of the olive tree, which plays a fundamental role in the Book of Mormon, describes moving branches to other parts of the vineyard. And

Welch: Yeah.

Belnap: And we talk about how they get to be gathered back. But if you look real closely at that allegory, that last third scene where the Lord says, okay, here's my plan. I'm going to take all these branches and do things about it. He never gets rid of those baby trees. He never gets rid of them. They'll stay where they are. It's just some of those branches go back to the mother tree and some of the mother's tree branches go to these baby trees. Which you are then told in the allegory, why? Because I'm Lord of the whole vineyard.

Belnap: I'm not just this Lord of five trees. This whole vineyard's mine. And I want all the fruit to be good. So how can I make sure that all the fruit's good if I don't take my best tree and move it all over this vineyard? Does that make sense? When the Book of Mormon talks about the Abrahamic covenant, it doesn't explicitly talk about seed and land and priesthood. What it talks about is, “through thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”

Welch: Yep, absolutely, absolutely. All the kindreds of the earth. And this is what Christ himself stresses when he talks about the Abrahamic covenant, when he's among them, is how in the latter days, through the interaction of the Gentiles and the house of Israel and other peoples as well, though we don't know as much about that, God will intervene in these large scale ways, especially through the production of scripture and the transmission of scripture from one people to another, to gather in this new way, right?

And I'm really struck by what you say: that scattering may not be a bad thing and gathering may not mean exactly what we've thought it does, which is that just a simple rewind, right? We rewind and we go back to where we started from. It's something different in the Book of Mormon. And it seems like this relates to the idea of the new Jerusalem, right? The new Jerusalem in the Book of Mormon is a kind of new holy city. It's a new Jerusalem for the scattered branch of Israel because they're not going back. But the Lord has a plan to be among them where they are in their local context through the building of this new holy city.

Belnap: I think it's a great way to describe that. You go back to 3 Nephi 19 here in these first few verses, and one of the things he says is verse 14, the Father hath commanded me that I give you this land for your inheritance. But that was done 600 years ago. I got a group of people who for 600 years have never believed that this is fulfillment. If Christ comes to you and says, hey, the Father explicitly sent me to tell you this really is it, they're not thinking about it the right way.

To that concept of gathering, verse 13. “And then shall the remnants, which have been scattered abroad upon the face of the earth, be gathered in.” We think that means, oh, that's going to be a return into the east and from the west and from the south from the north, and they shall be brought to the knowledge of the Lord their God. This gathering is tied to receiving knowledge, right?

And what I find intriguing about that is, is what that suggests is, there's going to be all these places where you could be gathered to get the knowledge. It doesn't mean return back to an actual place, per se, but to places where there's gathering. And now all of a sudden, I have a doctrine as to why there's a church. These different congregations are where you gather to be brought to a knowledge of the Lord your Redeemer.

Welch: Yes, I love that. And I think we could make it even more personal in a way. This archetype of the scattering and the gathering, it has a kind of personal application as well, which is that when we go through afflictions, when our lives are reduced to darkness and rubble, the rebuilding that we see in Christ may not be a simple rewind where everything that we lost is restored to us.

It may be a moving forward and it may be a new kind of rebuilding that the Savior offers us. And if we're so fixated on going back to the way that it used to be, we may not recognize the new Jerusalem and the new life in Christ, the new creation that He is offering to us there.

Belnap: I love it. I mean, that's a great way to do it. And again, it's in Lehi's dream. Lehi's dream is never about going back. It's about moving to a new place. That tree is not where Lehi started from. It's a new place. And when you read the dream, it doesn't even sound like it's the final place. It's just a resting place to something else, right? This has been a theme that's been developing through the Book of Mormon that culminates with Christ who points out, oh no, you're still children of the covenant, but we scattered you for a reason. This wasn't because of wickedness, it's because how else can we bless everybody else on the earth if we don't scatter you? If we all keep you all in one place, then what's the point?

Welch: I love how you've just really brought this whole conversation full circle. And we've seen how everything from the structure to the characters to the themes and the forms have all been working together in a beautifully artful way to teach us what it means to come to Christ, to be gathered in Him, to open our minds to new paradigms and new archetypes that will lead us to Him. This has been great.

Dan, I always close these conversations by trading a favorite scripture or passage with my guest. So, I'd love to do that today as well. If it's okay, I'll share with you a couple of verses that are meaningful to me and then I'll turn it to you to share something with me and our listeners.

I was really struck by a couple of times when I came across a word that I've tracked in my reading of the Book of Mormon, and that is the word astonishment. Astonishment.

It's a word that I first noticed in 1 Nephi 16 when Lehi encounters the brass ball and he opens his tent, he looks at it, he sees this curious object of fine workmanship and he is struck by astonishment. And so ever since that, I watch out for moments where I see that word astonishment because I think it has something to tell us about revelation and how it is that we can notice and make sure we don't miss what it is that God is trying to communicate to us and show it to us.

So, I noticed this word astonishment a couple of times in 3 Nephi. First of all, in chapter 1 verse 17, when the signs are beginning to be fulfilled, “all the people upon the face of the whole earth from the west to the east, both in the land north and in the land south, were so exceedingly astonished that they fell to the earth.”

So, these signs are more than just kind of prophetic vindication, although they are that. But they are revelation. They are communication from God. Signs are communication. And what he's telling them is, I'm coming. I'm coming to you. And I think their astonishment in that moment signals that they get the message. They see it. They recognize that God is trying to break into their world.

Tell them something new, give them something new, if they will just recognize it. So then I think it's especially telling then in the next chapter, chapter two, right there in verse one, “the people began to forget the signs and wonders which they had heard and began to be less and less astonished at a sign or a wonder from heaven in so much that they began to be hard in their hearts.”

So, we talked about earlier, right? The kind of skepticism and cynicism that can lead us to deny what we saw, right? To deny the communications that we received from the Lord because we don't want to hear what he's telling us, right? We don't want to hear the message, which is that we must repent, and we have to turn to Christ. So, their astonishment is kind of an index of their receptivity to revelation.

And so then finally, just kind of bringing it full circle, and in chapter 10, when they've heard the voice for hours and they've of course just come through this horrendous and traumatic experience but then have had the silence and then the voice of Christ. So here we are in verse 2 of chapter 10. “For so great was the astonishment of the people that they did cease lamenting and howling for the loss of their kindred which had been slain. Therefore, there was silence in all the land for the space of many hours.”

So, this is where the astonishment returns and they begin to see again from the darkness, the light is dawning, and God is coming to them again and they will be in his presence. Of course, Christ himself is the greatest of all revelations. Christ is the revelation of God to us. And so, I think their astonishment here sort of marks the beginning of their healing that they'll experience here in the presence of Christ. So, I love the way that word astonishment sort of leads us through the ups and downs of the Nephite people. And I invite you and all of our listeners to watch out for that word because I think it's meaningful. And I think when it shows up, you can learn something about revelation.

Belnap: That is cool. I love that.

Welch: Well, what would you like to share with us, Dan?

Belnap: In a darkness that's so thick that you can't see the hand in front of you, and there's no way to do light, what happens to your body? What's the physiological effects of being in this darkness? What would have happened? It's a sensory deprivation chamber, and yet it isn't. I'm being, the one primary sense that I have, vision, is gone. But what's that doing to the rest of my senses? Is my sense of smell heightened? Is my sense of hearing heightened? Is my sense of touch, right? Am I more aware of, there's a different awareness now to the environment when I've stripped the vision from it, right? And so much of our spiritual discussion is centered around visual type language. Do you “see” it, right? So, for me, one of the things that's so beautiful is in this darkness, when they hear the voice of Christ, verse 14 of 3 Nephi 9. “Yea verily I say to you, if you will come unto me, you shall have eternal life." This is the same invite. And we're going to see that fulfillment when you have 3 Nephi 11, 3 Nephi 18. “Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you.” Now for me, that imagery, it's in the darkness. You cannot see it.

And while I understand that it's metaphor, the idea, because it's Lehi's dream, the iron rod, at least in the second part of that dream, is only there when the mists of darkness are... We sometimes think the iron rods outside the mists of darkness and then you hold onto it and walk into the mists. That's not the way Lehi's dream sets that up. The mists of darkness are there and then you find the iron rod in it if that makes sense. Just like Lehi was in the darkness and then the angel showed up, or that being or whatever it is. It's not that these things were already there, and then the darkness comes. It's, no, you're in the darkness and that's when you will see this or experience this. And in this case, this, my arm of mercy is extended towards you. In this metaphorical setting, if I'm in the dark and I cannot go anywhere and I'm absolutely stuck, which they are, right? But if it's now me and we're all in mist of darkness sometimes, and sometimes those mists are so dark and so pervasive that you cannot see your hand in front of your face.

And what happens? Like most of us would, we freeze in place, and we are unsure what to do, and we don't know how to move forward, and we're stuck, and that is a terrifying place to be, a terrifying place to be.

So, in that situation, hear the voice of Christ. My arm is extended towards you. It's there. Now you're going to have to feel for it, but that means you're going to have to take a step forward and you're going to have to reach out and you're going to have to find my hand. But I promise you it's there. I promise you it's there. My arm of mercy is extended towards you. Whosoever will come, him will I receive. We've got to act.

But the promises of the arm of mercy is there, and it's extended. And this imagery in the Book of Mormon, this arm of mercy that is extended, you would have Old Testament texts of the Lord's outstretched arms, but those are symbols of judgment. My arms are stretched out still. I've destroyed you, but my arm is stretched out. I've still got more. But in the Book of Mormon, this arm being extended is one associated with mercy. It's a Nephite image. It's not a biblical image. And it's a powerful one.

Belnap: of God's extended arm that is always out there and always is in that midst. I find a lot of hope in that. And to that end, I find it cool that when Christ does actually appear and they can finally see him, they don't know who they're looking at. But his voice, he repeats the same thing that he said in the darkness. And then it says in verse 9, and it came to pass that he stretched forth his hand.

Right? To those that would have been there and who heard his voice in the darkness of his arm that is extended out, that's exactly what they saw when they finally saw him. I mean.

Welch: His arm of mercy extended towards them. We take a step forward and we feel for it, but we know that it will be there.

Belnap: It's there. And that's been the Nephite promise from the beginning to all of you Nephites who feel that you don't belong, that there's no place for you, that you're broken, that you're scattered, you're abandoned, you're cut off, isolated, boom, that God doesn't remember you, that darkness of all of those feelings that surrounds you, His arm of mercy has always been extended towards you if you reach out to find it. I think it's one of the primary messages of the Book of Mormon.

Welch: And I think that's the perfect place for us to end today. Dr. Dan Belnap, thank you so much for being with us today on the Book of Mormon Studies podcast.

Belnap: My pleasure.