Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Alma 30-63 Scholarship with Jennifer Champoux

Rosalynde Welch: Hi everybody, this is Rosalynde Welch, host of the Maxwell Institute Podcast. Before we get to the podcast today, I wanted to let you know about a new book just out from the Maxwell Insitute’s Living Faith Series, Counsel Please Rise: A Criminal Attorney’s Spiritual Journey. Heather Chestnut, is a criminal defense and civil rights attorney in Salt Lake City, and the book is a memoir of her riveting experiences with clients over the years. Her legal career as well as her experience as a divorced mother and an active church member have been an unexpected tutorial in Christian discipleship and attorney Chestnut has so much common-sense insight to share.

The book reminded me of Bryan Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy, in the way it mixes practical spirituality with fast paced stories from the court room. I’m especially happy about this book because it grew from the Maxwell Institute’s Women Author Initiative several years ago, an effort spearheaded by our friends Melissa Inouye and Kate Holbrook. They were both passionate advocates of this book and they would be so happy so see it in the fall. We’ll have a full launch of the book in the fall, so stay tuned for more events then. But meanwhile, pick up your copy of Counsel Please Rise on the Deseret Book website or retail locations or of course, on Amazon. And with that, please enjoy the Maxwell Institute’s Book of Mormon Studies Podcast.

Welch: Hello and welcome to another episode of Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies podcast. My name is Rosalynde Welch and I'm joined today by Jenny Champoux. Jenny is a scholar of Latter-day Saint visual art. She is a co-editor of the volume Approaching the Tree: Interpreting First Nephi 8, which is hot off the presses from the Maxwell Institute. It's a really beautiful volume all about First Nephi 8.

Jenny is also the director of the Book of Mormon Art Catalog, which the Maxwell Institute also sponsors. This is a wonderful online resource that, as the title would suggest, catalogues Book of Mormon art, the well-known and the lesser known. And we're going to get a real treat today to get to look at some images from the Book of Mormon Art Catalog. So welcome, Jenny.

Jenny Champoux: Thank you so much for having me Rosalynde. It's such an honor to be invited onto this great podcast you're doing.

Welch: Good, well, we're glad you're here. Today we are talking about some highlights of the scholarship from the second half of the Book of Alma. So that would be from Alma 30 to 63. And I'll alert our listeners now that we have a treat at the end of the podcast. We're actually going to be looking at some images from the Book of Mormon art catalog. So if you're listening on audio now, that's great; you may want to switch over to YouTube just for the end of the podcast so that you can see those images as we talk about those as well. So just heads up about that.

I'm going to kick us off today by talking about a really wonderful little book. This is the Brief Theological Introduction to Alma 30-63. Listeners know that I spotlight the Maxwell Institute's BTI almost every time we do one of these scholarship podcasts and this is no exception. This was written by Mark Wrathall. Mark is a professor of philosophy at Corpus Christi College in Oxford and as a philosopher, Dr. Wrathall, is focused on human perception and awareness of the world as we experience it. So he puts the emphasis on that rather than on our beliefs or kind of the hidden foundations of our existence. He's interested in what we do, how we are, and what we see in the world around us. So he's more concerned about kind of our practical stance than our proper knowledge or belief. And so you'll see that flavor come out in what he does here in his Brief Theological Introduction.

I wanted to focus in particular on chapters six and seven in this little book. And these, it's kind of ambitious, I will say. These are, I think, some of the most ambitious chapters in the book, but I also think they're the most rewarding and maybe the most innovative. So in these chapters, Dr. Wrathall is talking about justice and mercy. And we remember that, that these themes of justice and mercy are really prominent all throughout Alma 36, Alma 42, Alma 44, Alma 34. We see them all throughout these chapters here in this part of the Book of Mormon. So I thought it was worth tackling his take on justice and mercy.

So for Dr. Wrathall, he starts from the premise that the defining event in the life of Alma the Younger was his conversion and that this was an event of unexpected, overwhelming mercy. He was in the depths of anguish and bitterness, and in a moment, he was rescued in God's merciful action. And as you know, Alma recounts this experience several times in Mosiah 27, in Alma 36, and then again in Alma 38.

And it's Wrathall's thesis that this experience was absolutely definitive for everything that Alma did afterwards in his ministry and his teaching. And that we can't understand what he teaches about justice and mercy apart from his experience of conversion, his overwhelming firsthand experience of God's mercy. So maybe it's worth it right off the bat just to review a little bit and remind ourselves of what Alma did experience in that moment there. So this is from Alma chapter 36. And I'll paraphrase and skip a little bit, but working basically through verses 12 through 19. So Alma says, “So great had been my iniquities that the very thought of coming into the presence of my God did rack my soul with inexpressible horror. Oh, thought I, that I could be banished and become extinct both soul and body, that I might not be judged of my deeds.” Then he comes to this turning point. “I remembered to have heard my father prophesy unto the people concerning the coming of one Jesus Christ as the Son of God to atone for the sins of the world. Now as my mind caught hold upon this thought, I cried within my heart, Oh Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me, who am in the gall of bitterness, and am encircled about by the everlasting chains of death. And now behold, when I thought this, I could remember my pains no more, yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more."

So everything that Alma subsequently teaches, Wrathall suggests, is really a testimony of this experience of overwhelming mercy. It's his personal awareness of this tension that he experienced between justice and mercy. So I think that's really important to keep in mind that what Alma is giving us in these chapters is not necessarily a kind of coldly analytic, reasoned-from-first-principles account of justice and mercy. Instead, it's a testimony of his own experience.

And I think this is important to note, because we need to recognize that there are different kinds of language and communication in the scriptures. And sometimes we do have portions of kind of reasoned argument from first principles. We might think for a moment of 2 Nephi 2, although even that, of course, has an important social and emotional context as Lehi is sharing his last words with Jacob. But at other times--in fact, most times in scripture--what we're seeing is pastoral or personal teaching and persuasion, which is a different kind of communication than a sort of purely analytical reasoning.

So Alma's testimony of what it felt like to be suspended, almost torn apart between his knowledge that he had sinned and deserved punishment and the experience of being unexpectedly rescued. That drives his efforts to convince people of the prophecies of Christ, because he wants to relieve their suffering, right? Yet it's important to note that even in this, he never minimizes their guilt under the law, right? He says, as he's speaking to his son, Corianton, “let the justice of God and his mercy and his long suffering have full sway in your heart.” Let it bring you down to the dust in humility. So Alma never wants to minimize the claims of justice. He never wants to kind of harmonize away any tension or contradiction. On the contrary, it seems like he wants to highlight the tension between justice and mercy, “not,” as Wrathall says, “as a contradiction to be resolved, but as a powerful impetus to Christian life.” He wants to harness this tension because it was precisely that tension that moved him to repentance.

So what is this tension between justice and mercy? Maybe this is kind of intuitive for most of us, but justice is the state in which each agent or each person receives or possesses what he or she deserves, right? Where appropriate consequence for wrongdoing is imparted. On the other hand, mercy is the act of relieving suffering without regard to what anybody does or does not deserve, right? It's motivated by compassion, not by desert.

So given these two definitions--and it's worth noting that these aren't the only possible definitions of justice or mercy, and other scholars have used different definitions--but for Wrathall, these are the definitions of justice and mercy that he is using. So under these definitions, there really can be real conflict between the requirements of justice and mercy. And this is what Alma feels so acutely as he says, he deserves to be punished for his wrongdoings, but God shows mercy. As soon as he turns to God in his darkest point, he receives this relief from his suffering apart from what he does or does not deserve.

What's important for Alma here is that if mercy is that mercy cannot destroy justice because if mercy destroys justice, then there's no more tension there. If nothing is deserved or undeserved, then Alma could not have had the transformational experience that he did because this is the key point. When we have an experience of overwhelming mercy, that motivates us to treat other people with mercy. So it's precisely by the tension produced by undeserved forgiveness that humbles us, that we become inclined to extend the same loving mercy to others. And Wrathall writes, “this change to our practical stance is what makes it possible for us to repent.”

I was just thinking here today of the character Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, which I'm reading with my son in his English class right now. But he, as listeners will remember, has this experience of undeserved forgiveness and mercy proffered to him by the bishop. It's a transformational experience and then he becomes a man of great mercy and generosity in his own life. So that's kind of the paradigmatic work of mercy as Alma sees it.

So ultimately, justice and mercy in their tension can work together. And I think Wrathall is so clever in how he points this out. He writes, “God's great and eternal purpose for executing the laws is to produce a better way, which is the way of mercy. In other words, the purpose of justice, receiving mercy from God and then turning and giving mercy in return.” “The ultimate purpose of justice,” he writes, “the work that justice aims to produce is to help us find mercy, not just to receive acts of kindness or pity, but to be transformed so that we become merciful.”

And this is, in fact, kind of the central lesson of Christianity. This is the purpose of the law and the aim of repentance is to bring about in us the recipients of mercy, the bowels of mercy towards other people. Mercy prevents the works of justice in some cases, right? In the fact that, for instance, Alma in his moment of darkness was not punished in the way that he knew he deserved. So mercy can prevent the works of justice, but it does not rob the purpose of justice since teaching people to repent and find mercy is the ultimate reason for the law in the first place.

So what I take away is one, Alma's experience is paramount. And when he talks about justice and mercy, he's always talking about what it was like for him to be transformed in this moment of knowing that what he had done deserved punishment, but instead he was given mercy. And second, that the tension between justice and mercy is actually productive. And we don't need to try to find a way to explain away that tension, that the tension itself is productive and that's what produces the transformative experience. How does that all strike you, Jenny?

Champoux: Oh, Rosalynde, that was so well said. The book is fantastic. And, you know, Wrathall is professor of philosophy. Right? Philosophy? Yeah. And so and so the book opens with sort of laying some

Welch: Yes, that's right, yes.

Champoux: and terms for those of us that may not be as familiar with it. But I found it very rewarding to engage with that and look at these chapters through that lens. You know, these justice and mercy is, it feels like the eternal Sunday School debate. But I thought it was really nicely framed the way you put that.

Welch: Yeah.

Champoux: And I think all of these chapters in these Alma chapters we're looking at starting in Alma 30, we tend to maybe think of them as discrete moments or stories like planting the seed or Alma's conversion. But really it's all kind of one story and these same themes and messages are running through many of these chapters and experiences that Alma is recording here.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. The theology that is most powerful to me is theology that connects directly to human experience and to what it's like to be a human being. And I've had, you know, maybe not as intense as Alma's, definitely not as intense as Alma's experience, but I think all of us as Christians have had experiences where we know that our actions have led us into a state where we're in trouble and we need rescue. And on those occasions where you do receive some kind of rescue or relief, it is transformative and it draws out a kind of gratitude and praise. And it really does fill you with a kind of love that you then want to turn out onto the world around you. So I hope our listeners will understand that, yeah, at its best, philosophy and theology both are really about the human experience--and in theology's case about the Christian experience, what it means to be a disciple. And I think you'll find that in Wrathall’s treatment.

Champoux: Yeah, you know, it's interesting that so many of these themes, I feel like, come up not just in Alma 36 with his conversion experience, but going back a few chapters to Alma 32. So can I share a chapter with you that I've had? Thank you. Thank you.

Welch: Yeah. What a smooth segway, Jenny. That was professionally done. Absolutely, please. Yes.

Champoux: So this is a chapter by Adam Miller in one of the publications from the proceedings of the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar. And the book is called An Experiment on the Word: Reading Alma 32. This was actually published, I think, 10 years ago, back in 2014. And Adam Miller's chapter is called “You Must Needs Say That the Word is Good.” So this was the whole, I know you've talked about this seminar before in the format of it, but there's a group of people for a couple of weeks just looking at Alma 32, and then they each presented a paper, and those papers became chapters in this book. Adam's paper or chapter centers on the necessity of humility, and he defines humility as our inadequacy and our need for God's grace.

And just to set the context here of… Again, we tend to sort of take these things as discrete stories, the Alma 32 planting the seed. But if you think about the context of where Alma is delivering this message, he's gone to the Zoramites who were Nephite dissenters. And there was this group of poor Zoramites that had been cast out. And I remember at the Zoramites, this is where we have the rameumptom in the wealthy people dressed in all their finery and their gold, and they're saying these prayers on top of a tower, these set prayers, and kind of showing off their wealth and status in the synagogue. But there was this group of poor Zoramites that were not, even though they'd helped build the synagogue with their own labor, they were no longer allowed to pray according to their people's tradition there.

Welch: Yeah.

Champoux: Because they were poor and didn't have the jewels and the fine clothing that the rich people did. So they've been cast out of the synagogue and they came to Alma and saying, what are we supposed to do? We would like to worship God, but we can't go in our synagogues. And so this is the context where Alma presents this parable of the seed. He's speaking to these people. And so I think that's important to keep in mind.

Going back to Adam's chapter here, he, so he's thinking about how these Zoramite poor people were humble, but in, well, and actually Alma says this in the chapter that he said, you know, you've been compelled to be humble because you've been cast out and because of your, you know, social situation, but it'd be even better if you didn't have to be compelled if you just were humble because of your faith, right? In the word of God.

Um, uh, and Adam's take on that is actually that we're all compelled to be humble just by necessity of going through this mortal experience, whether it's our socioeconomic situation or just being mortal and knowing that we're never going to measure up and that we're going to make mistakes and, um, and life is going to throw hard, unfair things at us and we're going to hurt other people without meaning to. And that's just all part of...

Welch: Yeah.

Champoux: The mortal experience. And so at some point, Adam says, we're all going to be compelled to be humble. But then there's this other kind of humility that maybe Alma's trying to get at, which is humility that comes as an effect of hearing and receiving the word, the word of God. And this is really where faith comes into play, that it's having faith to receive this word and give it space. So, and that's where Alma talks about planting this seed, right? And Adam points out the important distinction that in Alma 32, the seed is not faith, right? We tend to talk about it that way in primary, but the seed is the word.

Welch: Right. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yes.

Champoux: So let me just read here in Alma chapter 32 verse 28. Alma says, “Now we will compare the word unto a seed. Now if you give place that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold if it be a true seed or a good seed, if you do not cast it out by your unbelief, that you will resist the spirit of the Lord, behold it will begin to swell within your breast. And when you feel these swelling motions, you will begin to say within yourselves, It must needs be that this is a good seed or that the word is good for it beginneth to enlarge my soul. Yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding. Yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.” So that's just the sort of introduction to his parable here of the seed of the word.

And Adam points out that really what Alma is encouraging here is this giving place to something that,

Welch: Yeah.

Champoux: That we're not actually the ones planting the seed. God is planting the seed, and our heart or the spirit is planting the seed. And we have to allow ourselves to just be receptive and give place to it. And I think this is where that humility piece comes in a little bit, is recognizing that we are inadequate, that we can't be self-sufficient. We do need God. We do need God's mercy, like you were talking about.

Welch: Yeah.

Champoux: And then as we just begin to give place to that and acknowledge that only God can transform us, then the seed begins to grow. And we realize that humility is not the horrible thing that the natural man believes it is, right? But it actually can be really delicious in the way that it, I mean, that's, I'm using Alma's words, this delicious fruit that comes from this tree that grows from the seed.

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Champoux: And this humility or acknowledgement of our status connects us to God in a really beautiful way and our reliance on his mercy. So just going back to the Zoramites then, where you have these poor Zoramites, their humility is sort of compelled on them because they've been cast out. They're...

Welch: Yeah.

Champoux: Definitely less than the other people in the town. But then you have the wealthy Zoramites who maybe on some level recognize their humility and try to cover it up by pretending to have greater social status or nicer clothing. And it's, I mean, Adam Miller would say this is pride, right? This attempt to disguise our need for God, right, to suggest that we can do it on our own. But then faith is this experiment on the Word, where you affirm that humility actually is good, and like you said, is a way to connect us with God, but then also change our hearts and change who we are.

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, there were a couple of things that really struck me. Just that central point has been so powerful: that it's not as though there are some people who are humble and some people who aren't. We're all humble because we are all creatures of God. We are all made from dust, right? And we depend on God for everything. The difference is that some people try to suppress that knowledge. We can distract ourselves like the rich, like the rich Zoramites. Some people can't hide it. Those who don't have the material means to kind of hide it, they're forced to acknowledge their dependency.

But then there's this third way. So there's the rich, there's the poor, but then there's this third way, which is the way of faith, which is a kind of...

Champoux: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Welch: Willing affirmation and a willing owning and acknowledgement of our humility. I really liked how he compared the word to pregnancy. The way that the seed is described, you give place to it in your heart and it starts to swell and to grow. And that's so similar to the experience for those of us who have been blessed to bear a child. You give place to it and it's not like you can choose to or not, right? But you can consecrate that experience.

Champoux: Yeah.

Welch: Or not. And as the child grows within you and displaces you physically, literally, you can embrace and bless and consecrate that experience or you can fight against it. But when we embrace it and bless it, then it kind of, this image of, it pushes us out just as the seed is growing, the baby is growing, it pushes us out of ourselves, out into the world and then allows us to relate to other people in this fuller way with mercy because we with loving blessing acknowledge their insufficiency and their humility as well. And we want to treat them in the way that God treats us with mercy. Well, that's so great. And we're going to shift gears now. This article I'm gonna talk about is by John W. Welch. It's called, very simply, “Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.” It was published in 1969 in BYU Studies. At the time when this article was published, John Welch, who is my father-in-law, I'll say, was working on a master's degree in Latin and philosophy at Birmingham University. So he was just shortly home from his mission and still a very, very young man.

So there's a really wonderful backstory to this article, “Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.” He wrote 40 years later, I think in 2007, he wrote a kind of retrospective article kind of giving the backstory of how he made this discovery of the literary form of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. He relates how when he came to BYU as a freshman in 1964, he took Hugh Nibley's Honors Book of Mormon class and that covered Nibley's book An Approach to the Book of Mormon, which is a really, really important book. And its central insight is that some of the best evidence for the Book of Mormon's ancient character is to be found not in archaeological sites, but inside the book itself in the literary character of the Book of Mormon. And if this is an ancient text, it should show features of ancient Hebraic texts. So with that insight in mind, he is called on a mission. He goes on a mission to Germany, the South German mission. He was in the city of Regensburg serving there. And on his P-Day, he went to a lecture on the New Testament, which is exactly in character for John Welch. This is exactly what he would do with his P-Day. At this lecture in German on the New Testament, he learned about something called chiasmus, which is a literary form that appears in the Hebrew Bible. And we'll talk about a little bit more in a minute.

So, he woke up that night with this thought in his mind, if chiasmus appears in the Bible, it should also appear in the Book of Mormon, and can I find it? And he found it that night. He found, I think it was Mosiah five, where he found his first instance of this literary feature in the Book of Mormon. So he was sort of on fire with this discovery. He comes home from his mission. He goes straight to find Hugh Nibley, reports to him what he found, and Nibley was very encouraging, and just a few months later, he wrote up this article, his first article on chiasmus, which he submitted to BYU studies and was published just the next year. He went on, of course, to do much more in Book of Mormon Studies than simply the discovery of chiasmus, but he did go on to publish extensively about chiasmus, including an important volume called Chiasmus and Antiquity: Structures, Analysis, Exegesis that has contributions from scholars who are Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint looking at this literary form in a wide variety of ancient texts.

John W. Welch went on to be the founder of FARMS, the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, one of the chief purveyors of the Nibley legacy, as I've just noted and actually he appeared on our last episode of the Book of Mormon Studies podcast. So listeners who have been catching every episode will remember him from that.

So let's dive in now for a second just to this historic article from 1969, “Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.” It has kind of this wonderful paragraph to open up. It sort of knows that it's about to make a splash. And this is what he writes, “A recently recognized phenomenon in the Book of Mormon has now made it possible for us to cite many specific examples of passages in the Book of Mormon which bear the distinct stamp of an ancient Hebraic literary form. The phenomenon which makes that possible is the presence of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon." And there you have it, this kind of announcement.

So he goes on to discuss what chiasmus is. Basically, it's a structural form. It's a poetic form in Hebrew poetry, although it also appeared in Greek and Latin and English-speaking language as well. But Western scholars first became aware of its presence in the Bible in the mid-19th century. And it appears as far back as the eighth and 10th centuries BC, we find it in Isaiah and in Psalms. It's very important to Welch to make the point that Western scholars didn't know much about it until the mid-19th century. He's had to go back and revise that a little bit. It turned out that there were some earlier publications than he had found at this early date in 1969. But for him, that's important because the fact that it appears in the Book of Mormon before Joseph Smith could really, really reasonably, and I agree with him, could reasonably have known about it means that it wasn't something that Joseph Smith made up, even if it were possible to kind of make that up on the fly. It wasn't something that he made up because he couldn't have known about it. So that's a really important point. And a big thrust of this article is what Chiasmus proves about the Book of Mormon's historicity. We'll come back to talk about that a little bit more later on.

But the name chiasmus comes from the Greek letter X, which is chi. And that's because in poetry, chiasmus describes a structure of chi: parallel lines or images or ideas that are laid out in one order and then laid out again in the reverse order. So a really famous example is in Matthew 10:39: “He that finds his life shall lose it; he that loses his life for my sake shall find it.” So you have this reversal of find, lose, lose, find. If you picture that in your mind, draw a line between the finds, draw a line between the loses, and you've got an X, right? So this is how the term, the form was named chiasmus after that, after that Greek letter chi X.

So he finds many beautiful, complex and wonderful instances of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. The central insight is that if chiasmus exists in the Bible, then it should also exist in the Book of Mormon. And he draws two conclusions from this. The first one I already alluded to, which is that “if the Book of Mormon is found to contain chiasmal forms,” he says in very strong terms, “should it not be asserted without further qualification that the book is a product of ancient Hebrew culture?” But there's another, and I think it's really important to note this second conclusion as well, that when we're able to recognize and identify chiasmic forms, that will help us to more faithfully and more richly interpret the text. And that's because in the chiasmus form, it's always the turning point that is the most important thematic element of the passage. So if we can identify that turning point, we can see what was most important to the author. So I'll share here a couple of instances that he found in the Book of Mormon.

So here we are. I'm going to share this. And now I am going to scroll down a little bit. Here's an example that he finds from 1 Nephi 15:9-11. And this is where Nephi is speaking to Laman and Lemuel. And he's admonishing a little bit. So you can see, I don't know that I'll read the whole thing, but you can see how you can format, you can format the passage, into dividing it into ideas, put separate ideas, and he has them laid out using increasing indentation with each new idea. Then he arrives here at the center, “do you not remember the things which the Lord hath said?” And then each of those ideas are repeated in the reverse order. So it's a really beautiful and elegant, very balanced and ordered form of literary device. And it's wonderful to see.

Probably his most famous example is this one here, and I will not read this entire thing to you, but this, of course it's familiar to us because we were just talking about--this is Alma, Alma 36, describing his conversion experience and it is a beautiful and complex, chiasmic structure. It, its turning point is here in the center, “called upon Jesus Christ.” So that is the turning point of the chiasmus. And it's the, the main point that Alma wants to make in this, in this whole experience is that it was his turning to Christ in the midst of his agony and guilt that brought him relief and mercy and that prompted the Lord to extend his mercy and love to him. So he lays it all out here.

My favorite part, and maybe this is my favorite part in the whole article, is after formatting and laying out this long chiasmus over 30 different verses, John Welch sums it up with just a single word here at the end. Maybe you can see that. “Amazing,” he writes. Amazing! Exclamation point. I really love that. And what I love especially about this article is that it's just the wonder and the joy and the excitement that Welch feels at having discovered this beautiful literary form. He loves the Book of Mormon. He's having this moment where he is just blown over by what he has found. And that enthusiasm and excitement never fails to light me up as well. I love to see that here.

This article, as I alluded to at the beginning, it's had a long afterlife and it was actually kind of formative in many ways of the project of FARMS that took place during getting started in the 70s, really up to steam in the 80s and the 90s and the first decade of this century. This kind of work is still ongoing, still very rich and fruitful. It really reignited, this article really reignited the literary structural study of the Book of Mormon. As I said, Nibley had sort of pointed the way.

And then John Welch was the one who really explored all the implications of Nibley's insight. It also kind of led to what some scholars have called “parallelomania” because it proved such a fruitful way to analyze the Book of Mormon. And because it seemed to have such strong apologetic or evidentiary value, many, many scholars now started following in Welch's footsteps and looking for examples of chiasmus and other forms of poetic parallelism in the Book of Mormon. And it became necessary in time to kind of put some criteria in place for what actually qualifies as a meaningful chiasmus or what might have just appeared by chance. And also to understand the limits, the evidentiary limits of the presence of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. And in his 2007 retrospective article, Welch walks maybe his youthful exuberance, which I completely understand in 1969. He walks that back just a bit and says, “the rational arguments cannot generate a testimony of the truthfulness of the book.

The presence of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon gives credence to its origins.” And that's something that I can really agree with, that it gives credence to its ancient character. In the end though, the Book of Mormon doesn't just want us to relate to it as a rational artifact placed dispassionately in history. It wants us to love it passionately and it wants us to be changed by its witness of Christ.

And ultimately, for me, that is the value of chiasmus, the way that it highlights what is most important to these Book of Mormon authors. And again and again, we see what's most important is turning to Jesus Christ.

Champoux: Yeah, that's Rosalynde, fantastic. Just that last point you were making there, it makes me think about Korihor and Alma's experience with Korihor in these early, what Alma 30, 31, 32, right? Where, I guess 30, 31, where it's this sort of debate between like knowledge and signs and then this sort of just faith and internal conversion.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah.

Champoux: So I like what you said there that, right, like just having this knowledge is not going to actually, this knowledge of the chiasmus, the presence of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon is exciting. That shouldn't be what we base our testimony on. But like you said, it does help point us to the important meanings that these prophets were trying to get across. And like you said too, this article has influenced so much other scholarship that has come since then. I'm using today Grant Hardy's annotated, I don't know, can you see that? Annotated Book of Mormon and he has, oh gosh, sorry, he has this in here. And I noticed also Joe, Joseph Spencer, our colleague at BYU, he wrote an article in 2017 in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies.

Welch: Mm-hmm, I can, yeah.

Champoux: Kind of building off of this idea of looking at textual structures that John Welch had started, like you said, but then Joe looks at more of the book-length structures of Alma and finds these really, again, this kind of an X shape where if you divide all of Alma chapters one through 63 into about four quarters, they kind of the first and the third quarter match up in the second and the fourth. So the first and the third, you have Nehor and then Korihor and the sort of the parallels between those two stories. And then looking at the second and fourth, you'd have Ammon and Aaron as two missionary brothers, contrasted with Amalickiah and Ammoron, two brothers who are Nephite dissenters and cause all kinds of problems for God's people.

And Joe's point is that by recognizing those parallels, we can pull out these sort of contrasting approaches to similar situations and sort of contrasting the way that we would want to model our actions versus the way we don't want to. Yeah.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that, that finding the structures there is exciting and beautiful to see it there just for its own sake. But there's this next step that we can take, which is, well, what's the meaning of that? What does it mean? What does it tell us about the intentions of the writers and about the Book of Mormon's own witness? So let's take that next step into the theology that it's conveying. Good.

Champoux: Yeah. Okay.

Welch: Well, let's shift gears again to a really, really fun article, very different from anything else we've been talking about today. And it's going to let us focus a little bit on some of these later chapters in our block, some of the characters that show up in the war chapters. So take us away, Jenny, to tricksters in the Book of Mormon.

Champoux: Okay, great. Yeah, so this would be kind of if we broke this Alma section down, this would be sort of chapters 43 to 63, what we might call the war chapters. And this article is by Samuel Mitchell. It's called “Caught with Guile: Tricksters in the Book of Mormon” from the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies published in 2020.

And what Mitchell does here is looks at this broader historical tradition of tricksters as a literary device that appears really throughout many cultures throughout time. And he seeks to make sense of some morally ambiguous actions in these Book of Mormon war chapters by placing them in a literary context of this trickster motif. So first of all, he does a really nice job of just taking us through some of the motifs of tricksters in literature throughout the world. So let me mention five of them to you. First, a trickster intentionally breaks social or religious rules, and that's where you get that moral ambiguity that comes into play. Second, a trickster demonstrates ingenuity or cleverness.

Third, Mitchell talks about the ultimate motivation of the trickster as being an important part of the story. So in terms of, I guess, their motivations, what's motivating their actions. Sometimes it comes from a place of a desire to improve situations and sometimes it's just to create chaos or motivated by pride or greed or things like that.

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Champoux: Fourth, a trickster usually changes their appearance or identity at some point in the story. So maybe has a disguise or pretends to be someone else. And then usually,

Welch: Yeah. And we can already start picturing disguises show up in the Book of Mormon a lot, right? So I'm sure our listeners are already starting to think, OK, I think I see what he's getting at here. Yeah, go on.

Champoux: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, right away in first Nephi, right, with Nephi putting on Laban's clothes and even pretending to use his voice. And then his true character is usually revealed at a pivotal moment in the story, like in Nephi's case when he comes out to find his brothers. And then lastly, the results of the trickster's actions ends up with a change.

Welch: Yeah.

Champoux: So the trickster uses all these tricks of disguise or cunning or sort of playing with boundaries a little bit in order to, by the end of the story, things have shifted, something's changed. So then Mitchell gives us a few sort of case studies of this and a number of them come from these war chapters in Alma. So first one he talks about is Amalickiah. Now,

This is in chapter 47. Amalickiah, you'll remember, is

Welch: the bad guy, right? Really bad guy.

Champoux: Yeah, he had been a Nephite. He's a dissenter, right? Nephite dissenter. He goes over to the Lamanites who are living in the land of Nephi. That's a little confusing, but he goes over to join up with the Lamanites. He pretends to be a loyal servant of the Lamanite king and the king wants to gather up his men for battle against the Nephites. And a lot of them don't want to do it. They're scared, or they just don't want to go. So Amalickiah tells the Lamanite king, let me go round them up. Give me a group of men, of soldiers, and we'll go out and round up the rest of them. So the king agrees to this.

Amalickiah takes takes this group out to round up these other guys. Now the other guys who didn't want to fight have actually gone off sort of in the wilderness together so that they don't have to fight. And they've appointed a leader named Lehonti. Am I saying that right? So Amalickiah goes and instead of rounding them up and bringing them back to the king, he actually arranges a secret meeting with this Lehonti. And he tells Lehonti, hey, I'll let you surround my own troops tonight if you make me second in command of your army. Yeah, really tricky, right? So Lehonti agrees. In the morning, you know, Amalickiah's troops wake up and they're surrounded. So he's betrayed his own men. And then they, rather than being killed, they fall in with Lehonti's group. And, you know, I mean, I feel like Lehonti should have seen this coming, but then Amalickiah poisons him.

Welch: Uh, yeah. Yeah.

Champoux: And so guess who is now the captain of this giant army? It's Amalickiah. He returns to the Lamanite king with this giant army. And as his servants go up to greet the king, Amalickiah has one of his servants stab the king and kill him.

Welch: Hahaha! Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Champoux: But he blames the king's own servants who then run away out of fear. So they're out of the picture. They're not there to defend themselves. He blames the king's servants. The queen and the people believe Amalickiah. He actually marries the widowed queen. And now Amalickiah is king of the Lamanites. Yeah. Yeah.

Welch: Well done, Jenny. That is an extremely complex story. And I think you hit all the points there. It's complicated, right? And that's part of the point of the trickster who creates these complications.

Champoux: Yeah.

Right, and it wasn't with-- Amalickiah is interesting because it's not even just one thing. It wasn't like, oh, he just poisoned the captain so he could become the commander himself. But it's this whole like, I mean, it took some time for him to like think through and work out all of these steps to his ultimate plan. It's kind of like a Shakespeare play, it feels like, right? Yeah.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah, I agree, right? The long arc of the devious, ambitious power seeker. Yeah.

Champoux: Yeah.

Right, yeah. So now what's interesting is when you have these sort of bad tricksters in the Book of Mormon, Mitchell points out that they are often flagged with these, what he calls trigger words. So words like fraud or cunning or deceit. These are the words we see with Amalickiah. We don't see words like that with Captain Moroni.

Captain Moroni sometimes engages in activities that feel unethical. He talks about using stratagems and even, you know, Mormon who's redacting this history makes the point to throw in little qualifications like Moroni was gonna use the stratagem but...

Welch: Uh-huh.

Champoux: But he knew it was actually okay to do this because his ultimate motivation was for the good of the people and the freedom and the religious liberty and for God. So, I mean, go ahead, yeah.

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was a really interesting part of this article for me was the questions around ambiguity and is it okay if scripture contains morally ambiguous characters or situations? He points out that the Bible of course contains trickster figures as well. The patriarch Jacob is one of the most famous ones, right? And he uses this trick to kind of try to get more property from his father-in-law, Laban. And so in the Bible though, these tricksters genuinely are ambiguous. They're not coded in the same way that they are in the Book of Mormon with these words, right, that let you know whether they're the good kind or the bad kind. It really is more ambiguous.

In the Book of Mormon, just as you say, he points out that typically Mormon, as he's redacting it, will let you know what to think about these characters. So in one way, that might be seen as a way to reduce the ambiguity in the scriptural text, as if Mormon is saying, I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I don't want you to think that Amalickiah is like a good guy to follow. And on the flip side, I want you to know that Captain Moroni is a good guy to follow, even though he uses stratagems. So it could be Mormon trying to damp down any ambiguity, or maybe on the other side, the tricksters are there in order to introduce an element of ambiguity, because that draws readers in, right? When there's something that you have to figure out, it kind of draws your attention and your interest. So I was left with this article still kind of with this fruitful question of what is the role of ambiguity in scripture?

Champoux: I think Mitchell here in this article would say that, Mormon's trying to maybe shape the reader's perspective a little bit before we get to that. So we're already set up to have a certain understanding of Moroni and his motivations as a religious man of God who's trying to just defend his people and his religion and his country. I don't know, what are your thoughts, Rosalynde?

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's okay for it to be an open question. And I tend to think that it's fruitful, that ultimately it adds interest, draws us in, and requires us to get involved with the text in a way that I think the Book of Mormon really wants us to. I don't think it wants us to be just passive consumers. So I tend to like moments of ambiguity in the text. And yeah, and so I think it's fascinating to see how tricksters, how this trickster character can really introduce that and add a little bit of sparkle and intrigue to our experience of reading these war chapters.

Champoux: Yeah, I really liked this article just because it brought a lens to these chapters that I hadn't ever seen explored before. Yeah.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Very fun. Well, next time you're on your way through Alma, or actually through the whole Book of Mormon, right? Keep your eye out for disguises. Keep your eye out for stratagems and for tricksters and see how when they show up on the scene, something's about to change. The status quo is about to change. Keep your eye out for that and you'll have a new reading experience this time through.

Well, Jenny, we're going to end with something really, really fun here and unusual. This is the moment that I alluded to earlier when we're going to start looking at a few images from the Book of Mormon Art Catalog. So for listeners who are just listening on audio, you can listen to our verbal comments on it, or you can hop over to YouTube and watch this portion of the podcast on video there.

But first of all, tell us just a little bit about the Book of Mormon Art Catalog and then share with us the images that you've picked out today.

Champoux: Oh, thank you. Yeah, so the Book of Mormon Art Catalog is a digital database. It's open access. So it's just free for anyone to hop on bookofmormonartcatalog.org. It's funded by the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies and the Neal Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, both at BYU and grateful for that support. And we've been just cataloging any artwork we can find related or based on content from the Book of Mormon. So right now we have close to 4,200 images. It's come from 55 countries, about 700 artists, unique artists. And it's just a really fun way to see the way people are engaging with the scriptures. And a lot of times, honestly, it helps me see the scriptures in a new way. Sometimes I'll see a work of art and I'll think, well, wait a minute, who is that? What's going on here? Maybe this is a little different angle on the scene than I typically see visualized. And that will send me back to the scriptures to read it again. Well, what do I actually know about Abinadi? I mean, just recently I was looking at some pictures of Abinadi and most of them show him as a very old man, the white beard, white hair.

Welch: Mm-hmm.

Champoux: And then Minerva Teichert has one where he's a young man. I thought, well, wait a minute, what did the scriptures say? And I went back and they don't really say, we don't, yeah.

Welch: Yeah, they don't specify his age, I don't think.

Champoux: But what, you know, that I thought for me, here's a man who was willing to risk his life and lay down his life to preach the word of God to these people. And, and if he's, you know, 20 years old or 70 years old, does that change my feelings about his courage and his sacrifice? So I think art definitely influences the way we think about scripture and the way we talk about scripture. I like the way the art catalog is revealing additional approaches to scenes that we've seen kind of the same way over and over. And also revealing some of the gaps in the art where we just we have some passages of scripture that there just very is very very little visual representation and it yeah.

Welch: Oh, interesting. So certain passages haven't attracted the attention of artists for whatever reason. So when you go to catalog that, that really makes visible kind of where these holes are. Interesting.

Champoux: Exactly. Yeah. So it's a fun project. You can use it for your, you know, your scripture study. You can search it by scripture chapter. So as you're studying with your family or if you're teaching seminary or Sunday school, you can find all the artwork that goes with those chapters that you're working on. And yeah.

Welch: Yeah, that's a really great feature of the website is the fantastic filters that you have. I use it myself for all the reasons that you've just suggested--as a devotional aid to study, as an interpretive tool in teaching. And yeah, it's really easy to search. You've done a fantastic job with that. So you can find what you want based on the scripture or on the style, on characteristics of the artist, him or herself. So it's really, really great. Yeah.

Champoux: Thanks, Rosalynde. So I brought three images to show you today that go along with our readings for today. So can I, let me see if I can do it.

Welch: Great, yes. We practiced this yesterday, so Jenny's gonna be really smooth here.

Champoux: We did. Oh yeah. All right, how's that?

Welch: Perfect. Yeah.

Champoux: That's the smoothest I've ever done a screen share.

Welch: Congratulations.

Champoux: Thank you, thank you. All right, so this piece is by an artist named Jonathan Linton. It's called “Faith, Hope and Charity.” He did this in 2012. Linton is in Virginia. So I'll just walk you through a little bit here. We have Faith on the left, she's kind of in a half-kneel. So these are three personifications of Faith, Hope, and Charity. So Faith on the left, she is the one who's planted the seed that's growing into a plant. And you see her right hand is reaching out, sort of beckoning us to come and join her.

And then across from her sitting on the ground is Hope. And Hope is waiting expectantly for this tree to grow and produce the fruit that she will one day enjoy. And you can kind of see that in her attitude of reaching up towards this third figure, which is Charity. And Charity is holding a light up in her hands. And this is the light that allows the plant to grow. And so this goes so nicely with Alma's preaching, really, I mean, really in all of Alma 30 to 43. I feel like these themes of faith, hope, and charity come up again and again in different ways. I like that this is not just a sort of illustrative moment. So he's not, he could have just depicted Alma talking to people, which would be great too. But I like that this presents something a little differently.

It's more of a thematic sort of visualization. And I think it does something interesting to have these three personifications together. And it is obviously very drawing on, very classical or neoclassical kind of styles and symbolism here. But, you know, in that Latter-day Saint theology seminar book that we were looking at Adam's chapter from, one of the other chapters in that book was by Joe Spencer. And he talked about how for him, he sees faith as fidelity to a past encounter.

So like Alma had this encounter with an angel in Alma 36. And then for him, faith going forward is his fidelity to his belief in what that angelic messenger told him. And then Joe says, “hope then is this recognition of future possibilities.” This goes along a little bit with what we were saying in Adam Miller's chapter about this sort of recognition of things that might still be or like a change in the way things are. And Joe kind of left it at that and I thought, well, what about charity? So if faith is the past and hope is the future, is charity the present? Is charity the work of mercy in the present? Which that kind of love for others and charity, can only and always only be done in the present, right? You can only love in the present moment. You can only extend mercy to others in the present. So I thought that added an interesting dimension to this piece of thinking about these layers of time in the past, present, and future and how they relate to the way faith, hope, and charity work together.

Welch: Yeah, that's such a great insight. I'm really struck by that idea that love operates in the present. When I saw this, what I first thought she was holding, what Charity was holding, was the fruit from Lehi's dream tree, right? The shining luminescent fruit that is whiter and brighter than anything else he's ever seen, which would actually fit really nicely into your idea of love, you know, being charity, being the present and the fruit, of course, being the love of Christ. And I love that idea that maybe it's the light from the pure love of Christ that is what encourages and draws our own, the seed within our own hearts to grow and to flourish.

Champoux: Right. Yeah. Oh, I like that a lot. Yeah. I think that reading works very well. That what is that light except, right, the light of Christ and yeah.

Welch: Yeah. Great. Well, what else do you have?

Champoux: Okay. This is very different. This is by Ben Crowder. It's a digital illustration he did just last year in 2023. Crowder is from Utah.

And this is called, “Harrowed Up No More.” So referring to Alma 36 and Alma's account of his conversion. I would call this a sort of abstract minimalist style. So again, he's--even more than the last piece by Linton--he's thematizing the ideas rather than illustrating the narrative itself. Yeah.

Welch: Yeah, I see that.

Champoux: So he's using colors and shapes to create meaning in a very timeless way. So rather than showing a sort of, you know, ancient American prophet wrestling in a coma in his sins, he's sort of universalized it by using these geometric shapes and colors. You know, if we didn't see the title, “Harrowed Up No More,” we wouldn't necessarily know that this relates to Alma's experience, which I think can be good and bad, right? I mean, I think on the one hand, it's nice that it universalizes it, that it can mean something to all of us that, I mean, these stories of conversion and change occur not just to Alma, but to Paul in the New Testament, to other figures, to people we know, to ourselves right now. And so, this idea that this kind of change is always possible for each one of us through the grace of God.

Um, so yeah.

Welch: I love the texture and color, right? And I'm far from an artist, but this really powerful word “harrowed up,” it kind of expresses the chaos that Alma was feeling in his soul and the disruption. And you can definitely see that reflected here in the chaotic textures of the red squares. And then of course that red--kind of the color of guilt--and then just the beautiful contrast in the in the clarity and the luminescence and the sort of smooth openness of the white rectangle there, which I assume represents the angel and then more deeply the merciful love of God that's being extended to him there.

Champoux: That's interesting, Rosalynde. I hadn't thought of this as symbolizing people, but maybe it is the Alma and the sons of Mosiah and the angel. That, yeah. Hmm.

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. There's one extra person though, I think, right? Because there's four sons of Mosiah and one Alma. So there would be an extra square if that were a kind of figurative reading. But yeah, it's possible that there maybe is a bit more of a representational dimension here than it might appear at first glance.

Champoux: That's really, that hadn't occurred to me, but I like that. I think it's possible to read it that way. I think it's also possible to see it again, just in this sort of more thematic idea of moving from a state of brokenness and roughness and fracture. If we, you know, we tend to read left to right in our Western culture. So if we're moving left to right, then we move from this state of fractured, brokenness, roughness to this unified redeemed wholeness by symbolizing that white shape at the end.

Welch: Yeah. Beautiful.

Champoux: Okay, I have one more.

Welch: Okay, good. Let's see.

Champoux: So this is a little bit more of what we're used to seeing in our church manuals, figurative painting by J Ward. It's called “Seed of Faith” from 2006. Ward is from Utah. This is actually in our 2024 Come Follow Me Book of Mormon manual.

The artist said in an artist statement, he said, “the image depicts a young Ammonite mother in a tender teaching moment, planting a seed of faith in a young boy who at manhood would become one of Helaman's valiant soldiers.” So I love the tenderness in this piece and the way it focuses on this familial relationship of these Ammonites or the anti-Nephi-Lehies as they were previously called. The title, I think, is not quite right. Seed of Faith, right?

Welch: Right, the seed is not faith, the seed is the word. Yeah.

Champoux: Right, exactly, yeah. But I do like the way this connects the later war chapters, so these stripling warriors that show up in Alma 53, Alma 56, with, they connect with here the earlier parable of the seed told by Alma in chapter 32. And I think that's a really nice sort of unifying of these broader themes throughout the Book of Alma. I do like the focus on the mother here, even the way she has another baby strapped...

Welch: I love that, yes.

Champoux: To her, just peeking out. And, you know, I think it's nice he's included some pottery or like kind of setting a scene of domestic life, thinking about the role that these women had in being mothers who taught their sons to grow up and do something that was really brave and courageous and difficult. These mothers have actually been through a lot. They've been through a lot of war. They've been through a lot of upheaval. They've gone through this incredible conversion going back to, with King Lamoni who had this incredible conversion experience. And then like life has not been easy for them. And yet they, you know, that the sons talk so much about, or they talk about how, you know, the mothers taught them the ways of God and, you know, brought them up in the right way and taught them not to fear. And I just, I love the way he's brought that little planting the seed idea to these later chapters.

Welch: Yeah, I love that too. I think it's actually a really profound point that the Book of Mormon makes many times in different ways, and that is that we encounter the Word of God in the mouth of another person. And that might come to us through a text, right? Through the voice of a prophet that we're reading in an ancient text like Abinadi. But we always encounter the proclamation of Christ spoken or said to us in another person's voice. So there's always a social context for learning and for knowledge. Kind of like what I was getting at with, I think, Wrathall's treatment, that to understand what Alma is doing with justice and mercy, it's not just abstract ideas. It's rooted in his own life experience and his own relationships with the sons of Mosiah there.

And that's how spiritual knowledge can grow, I think is in these social contexts of teaching and of learning, of nurturing, of self-giving. That's how the seed finds place in our hearts. So, I love this image and I think whether or not it gets the details of the parable, the sermon of the seed perfectly right, I think it communicates something very, very true about how the seed is planted and that is in community, in context with other minds and with other agents.

Champoux: Oh, that's a really nice point. I like that idea of community. I feel like too, the way that this piece ties some of these different strands together, like I was saying earlier, I just, I feel like rather than seeing these all as discrete moments, it's really, they're all tying into one message of the gospel.

And I see the tree of life imagery comes through really strongly in all of these chapters, where you have Alma talking about planting this seed that grows up into a tree. He talks about the sweet white fruit that it will grow, which makes us think of Lehi's dream in 1 Nephi 8. And Alma also brings in all this creation imagery in his description, recalling the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life there and the Tree of Knowledge. And then also his conversion experience reminds me a lot of Lehi's experience of going through this dark and dreary waste, and then calling out to God for mercy and only then finding the tree with this, you know, delicious fruit. And then, you know, I don't know, even in Alma 42, he talks about, he explicitly talks about the two garden of Eden trees and how because Adam and Eve tasted of the tree with the the fruit of the tree of knowledge, then God and his mercy kept us for a time away from the tree of life so we could have this probationary time to repent and learn and grow.

But ultimately, I think that tree of life is always extended to us through the mercy of Jesus Christ and his grace.

Welch: Jenny, I think that is a wonderful place to end. Yes, Lehi's dream is an incredibly powerful archetype that shows up again and again and again at these key moments throughout the Book of Mormon. And its overarching message is that the tree is there and its fruit is extended to us and the invitation is open for us to come unto Christ. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Book of Mormon Studies podcast. This has been just wonderful.

Champoux: Thank you, Rosalynde, this was fun.

Welch: Bye bye.