Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Enos, Jarom, Omni, Words of Mormon Text with Joseph Spencer

Welch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies Podcast. I am here today with my friend Joseph Spencer. Joe is an associate professor of ancient scripture here at Brigham Young University. Joe is my longtime friend and associate and collaborator. Joe is the author of many books and the schemer of many schemes, the dreamer of many dreams. His recent book, Book of Mormon Studies: An Introduction and a Guide which he edited together with several colleagues in religious education, was my inspiration for planning and starting this podcast. There's pretty much nobody else in the world I'd rather spend an hour talking about the Book of Mormon with than Joe Spencer. So Joe, thank you so much for being with us today on the podcast.

Spencer: Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to do it.

Welch: Today we are talking about Enos, Jarem, Omni, and the words of Mormon. So we're combining a lot of single chapter books into one multi-book extravaganza. It covers a lot of years, but not a lot of pages. So there's a lot of interesting things to talk about here. As a reminder to our listeners, the way I've thought about these episodes, this is the first episode where we're talking about these books.

We're not going to walk step by step through every verse of this block, but we will touch on many of them. Instead, I kind of think about these first episodes as a sort of introduction to the text. When I study the Bible, I love to use a critical edition, a study edition of the Bible that often will have an introduction to each book that orients me to relevant features, forms, themes, and just kind of gives me the frameworks that I need to understand what's about to come. So that is what I hope we accomplish today for these books of Enos, Jarom, Omni, and Words of Mormon. So let's start, Jo, thinking about any context that is useful to have in mind as we start in on the book of Enos.

Spencer: Sure. I mean, yeah, Enos, Jeremiah, Words of Mormon, these are all coming in a very specific place in the Book of Mormon. They're coming at the end of what we call the small plates of Nephi. Small plates, of course, open the Book of Mormon for us, right? We don't dive into Mormon's project until we get to Words of Mormon. And so these are very short books come at the tail end of everything leading up to Mormon's project. They're following on this kind of priestly prophetic

tradition. When Nephi creates his two books in the small plates, he then hands these over to Jacob, his brother, and they pass through the line of Jacob down through these books. So we have a kind of adjacent to sort of mainstream Nephite leadership, if you will, certainly of secular or royal leadership or something like that. It's adjacent to that, that this priestly record is unfolding. We're here at the very tail end of it.

And of course, previous books have been a good deal longer. These get very short. Sharon Harris likes to call these the itty bitty books, right? And as a result, it's a very different kind of reading. They cover, as you already mentioned, they cover a lot of years, though in just a few pages. Really, they cover the most amount of time in the fewest pages that you get anywhere else in the Book of Mormon, except maybe Fourth Nephi.

And as a result, they can feel a little sketchy, not in the sense of like, oh, that's a little dangerous, but sketchy, they are a sketch of a lot of history. There's also the context in which to place these, that the rest of the small plates not only are so much larger, Nephi's books are large and long, Jacob's book is much longer than these, but also those have set a kind of precedent for remarkable, prophetic exploration. And what we find in these shorter books, not only is sometimes a kind of, just brief snippets and so on, but a kind of anxiety, right? Uh, how could we ever measure up to what's come before us? Uh, so that when we get to Mormon, it feels like suddenly someone has reclaimed that prophetic mantle after generations of people who just aren't sure that they have anything to add.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's remarkable, as you say, the richness coming off of 2nd Nephi and Jacob. And then we move into these and they can feel a little bit like a spiritual desert. Now, I think people like Sharon Harris, who's written a wonderful theological introduction to these books, has found remarkable depths of meaning here. But it takes a minute to shift. Do you think it's fair to say that there was a kind of decline in Nephite prophetic and religious culture during these years?

Spencer: There does seem to be, eventually, something like that. In the Book of Enos, it's a little harder to know whether there's actually something like a decline. The Book of Jerim, you've got Jerim saying something, I'm not going to write anything about my revelations and prophecies, which suggests it's still going on. He just doesn't know how, what he has to say is going to add to or develop or change the picture. So he declines to write anything.

But by the time you get into the Book of Omni, you've got voices that seem to suggest we're in an awkward period where there does seem to be something like a decline. And it's maybe worth noting that in 35, much, much later in the Book of Mormon, Mormon will refer to the church in Mosiah that takes its rise there at the waters of Mormon as the first church, which was established among the Nephites after their transgression, he calls it. So he suggests that there's some kind of decline going on in this period for sure.

Welch: Yeah, it's very interesting as you say, there's a real sense of the anxiety of influence of these giants of Nephi and Jacob. In literary studies, there's a very famous critical paradigm called the anxiety of influence that a scholar named Harold Bloom pioneered. And his idea, the anxiety about living up to the influence of the literary giants who came before you kind of spurs the writer to make a name for herself and spurs a kind of further creativity in production. But we seem to see something like the opposite here. There's a sense that there's nothing more that I can say. It's all been said. I can't live up to it. That actually seems to curtail their literary production at this time.

Spencer: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. They're more curled up in the fetal position than they are, producing something in light of that anxiety.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah. And it's a shame. This is especially a period where I wish that we could get our eyes on those large plates because there's a lot of really, really consequential history that happens, especially around King Mosiah I and their second exodus and migration to Zarahemla, the beginning of the reign of King Benjamin. But because these are the small plates, the writers don't feel the responsibility to make a full accounting of that history. So as you say, we just get the sketchiest outlines of that really, really important history that we kind of have to just infer because once we get to the Book of Mosiah, we're in it already up to our necks.

Spencer: That's right. It's worth mentioning as well at the same time, because I mean, I'm with you. I want the large plates, my heavens, I want to access to the large plates as a Book of Mormon scholar and just as a reader of the Book of Mormon. At the same time, and we'll talk about this more, I think, when we look a little more closely at Words of Mormon, but I think the best reading of Words of Mormon is that Mormon deliberately wanted a sketchy history here. We'll have to see if we can substantiate that, but there's at least some reason to think that Mormon was quite happy to have a sketchy part of the history.

And Don Bradley has argued, and I think pretty convincingly, that Fourth Nephi and then these short books have some parallels in the way that the arc of history in each of them unfolds. It's something like roughly the same time period stretching between certain kinds of events. So it may be that Mormon is trying in some way to bookend the massive history he's telling in Mosiah, Alma, Helam, and Third Nephi, bookend them with two sketchy histories.

Welch: That's fascinating and it makes a lot of sense. All right, well, let's talk about the structure then of these four books. We are including Words of Mormon, although, you know, Words of Mormon, of course, falls into a very different category than Enos, Jeram, and Omni. But how can we think about the structure of this block of text?

Spencer: Yeah, there's a lot to say. And obviously we kind of need to go book by book here, right? Enos is without question, I think, the book here that gets the most attention, right, of these itty bitty books. And in some ways, justifiably, it tells a fluid story. It's got a narrative we can identify with and find our place in, in a way that maybe Jarom or Omni doesn't grab us.

But Enos has a pretty clear flow then, right? We get a series of three described prayers, narrated prayers. People have made the argument, I think quite convincingly, Sharon Harris above all, that this is probably a long sequence of many prayers, right? Holding over a couple of days, essentially. Or maybe even weeks leading up to this event. But in the narration, there are three. He prays first, of course, for himself. Then this gives way to a prayer for the Nephites, and then finally to a prayer for the Lamanites, so that we see him expanding outward.

The structure sort of walks us out of Enos's own self and into a much larger context. And that structure seems to guide that right up through, is it verse 18 or so? Yeah, verse 18. And then the rest of the chapter seems to be a kind of historical epilogue. With some significant things, I think. He tells us a little bit about what's going on with the Lamanites and a little bit about what's going on with the Nephites and then talks about the conflicts between them. And given the nature of his prayers, that epilogue is fraught, weighty.

Welch: Yes.

Spencer: That seems to be the basic structure of Enos, in some ways straightforward, just this outward expansion from Enos's own.

Welch: And Joe, I'll just jump in to say, you and I have been working this last week or so to promote a book that we are both involved in, Approaching the Tree. And so I've been thinking a lot about Lehi's dream. And in a way, the structure of the Book of Enos is also a kind of theology, right? The way that it moves from the single figure and this kind of inevitable turning outward and enlarging of the sphere of moral concern. That's the very same structure that we see in Lehi's dream, right? Where first Lehi is alone, walks to the tree and partakes, and then immediately is prompted to turn and look for his family. And then the dream just starts to proliferate and get busier and busier. Do you see that same pattern at work?

Spencer: Yeah, for sure. And it's, and there are reasons to think that the Enos story may be in some ways modeled on the dream very deliberately. You've got this kind of wilderness setting. You've got this sinking deep into his heart, this wrestle before God like Lehi wandering in the dark. Right. And so there may be very deliberate echoes.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. So I think it's worth noting that when we're talking about structure, it's not just a kind of mechanical parsing of the text, but there's real meaning, oftentimes spiritual and theological meaning that can be gained from looking at how this thing is put together.

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. And maybe especially in these books in Enos. And it's worth noting, I mean, Sharon Harris, not in her book on Enos, Jerom and Omni, but in an essay that she published a little bit more recently, has argued that it may be significant that the Book of Enos does not begin with the name of Jacob, and it doesn't end with the name of Jerom, right? The sort of genealogical connections outward are either scrubbed or for whatever reason they're not there. Whereas the book of Jacob ends by mentioning Enos, the book of Jeram opens by mentioning Enos, but Enos doesn't mention Jacob by name or Jeram by name. And what Sharon has suggested is that this may be deliberately crafted to be a kind of every man or every person story, right? You're supposed to see yourself as Enos going through this process of expansion.

Welch: Oh, that's wonderful. All right, let's move on. Let's talk about Jarom and Omni. What have you got there?

Spencer: Good. Here, I mean, in some ways, it's not, we don't have as obvious a structure, certainly not a kind of literary structure. These are where, these are the books where things get genuinely sketchy. But it's, but it's worth saying that the book of Jarom opens with two kind of odd moments. In the very first verse, Jarom tells us that now what he's trying to do is keep a genealogy.

And that's of course odd because Nephi explicitly states that the small plates are not to be for genealogy. So Jarom seems to be reshaping the genre of what's happening in the small plates. And one has to wonder, what does that mean? Is this part of a decline or is there some divine reason that they're changing shape, but that maybe introduces the lack to some extent of a rich literary form? And then second, in verse two,

Welch: Hmm. Yeah.

Spencer: He says that these small plates are written for the intent of the benefit of our brethren, the Lamanites. And of course, much of the Book of Mormon is pitched that way, but the small plates are not often pitched that way. The small plates tend to be pitched, this is Nephi writing for his own descendants and also for the Lamanites.

But here by Jarom's time, we now have a kind of new genre and a new audience. And this seems to shape what's happening. As we get into the sort of literary form, if you will, in Jarom and Omni, they've got a new conception of this, is this, this is not, I need to tell a story that's got a theological shape, so much as we've got to record this stuff, make sure that this material is there so that this can end up in the hands of the Lamanites and they know it's provenance or something like this.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Okay, let's think now about the Book of Omni. What can we say about structure in Omni?

Spencer: Yeah, and here the structure just seems in a sense to be little snippets of individuals, right? Writing for a verse or two or three at a time, each of them adding their own things. Each of them has their own sort of different literary form, but the structure of the overarching things just seems to be this choppy person-by-person thing until Amalekai, the last voice in the small plates. And he gives us a very different kind of record.

So he picks up in verse 12 and then continues through to the end of the chapter at verse 30 and does a handful of different things. He backs up and starts to tell a story and walks us through a kind of history that he's lived through and experienced and is tracking all kinds of massive geographical changes and cultural developments and new religious transformations for the Nephites.

and then turns to the side and talks about the discovery of records and interesting things they've learned about antiquity and all of this kind of thing and then after so much not so spiritual sounding stuff in Jeram and Omni suddenly gives us this beautiful couple of verses of exhortation and reflection on spiritual gifts And invites people to come to Christ

And then, after all of that, gives us four verses where he interrupts the whole thing and says, by the way, here's another historical development. So it's a very hodgepodge-y feel in a certain way, as if it's kind of hard, literarily or formally, to restart the engine of Nephite Christianity, something like that, right? How do you reclaim a spiritual heritage after a time when it feels like it hasn't been there?

Welch: Yeah.Yeah, oh, that's really interesting. There is, yeah, there's a sense of kind of starting and stopping, they just can't seem to get the momentum to kind of turn the engine on this thing over and move it forward. You know, if there is a way that we can see continuity through these books, one thing that I've noticed is that when the small plates are handed on to a new keeper, they are handed on from the previous keeper with a commandment, a commandment to write in the plates.

And from the very beginning with Nephi, it's been very important, it was very important for Nephi to make that clear that he was writing in obedience to commandment from the Lord. And that commandment is transferred from keeper to keeper. And so at each moment when the plates are transferred, you'll see them reiterate, I write by commandment. But what's interesting is that by the end, it's largely the commandment of our fathers. It seems as though they kind of see this as a kind of cultural or genealogical tradition, this is kind of what our family does. And perhaps they've lost the sense that actually this is a commandment originally from the Lord and that the work that we're doing here is a divine work that will have a divine purpose in the latter days. It seems to be kind of more just like a family annals in a way. Until as you say, Amalekai seems to have a broader vision there at the very end.

Spencer: Yeah, yeah, and that feels all over again, maybe like what happens in Enos, right? They sort of narrowed in on themselves and then we watch with the Amalekai broadening back out and a recognition of much bigger goings on. Words of Mormon, of course, is a very different thing in terms of genre, voice, etc., than what we're getting in these other smaller books. And in some ways, it's maybe a little odd to couple it with them, though it does seem to have been written on the same small plates. And it refers to things in the Book of Omni, right? Mormon will refer back to the rise of King Benjamin and these things. But suddenly we've jumped hundreds of years, half a millennium, later in history, and we're hearing now Mormon's voice, who will be guiding us through a long history after this point. Words of Mormon has been, over the last few decades really, a kind of point of contention in Book of Mormon studies, because it feels in a lot of ways as if, literarily, it's two things, two very different things.

The first, is it 11 verses? Yeah, the first 11 verses feel like Mormon explaining his project and talking about what he's doing and how he's putting his sources together. But then verse 12 suddenly feels like history, as if he's putting the tee in the ground and putting the ball on it so that he can hit hard at the beginning of Mosiah. Right. Really sort of working our way up there. And that's actually led to a lot of theorizing about whether

Welch: Hahaha.

Spencer: These might actually be two originally distinct sources that because of the loss of the 116 pages got stitched together awkwardly. Some people have wondered whether Joseph Smith himself had to be divinely inspired to write verses 12 and on to kind of patch up what had been lost and so on. I think there are other ways to make sense of all of that than that theory, but there is a real tension within words of Mormon. It's kind of two different things at once: what Mormon's doing, editorial reflection, followed by narrative in a very, very brief, very kind of itty bitty book style of moving quickly through history.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you talked about it being stitched together. And I often think about this point in the Book of Mormon as the seam, right? The main seam. And it's maybe a seam that's a little bit itchy on the skin. And there are a couple of details that are lost and it is very jerky, as you say, as we're not only introduced to a whole new personality and a whole new approach to record keeping, but we're in a vastly different time period, just for a moment. And then we're put back into the flow of time.

But as you say, in a way it all comes together to set us up to rejoin the large plates and to be ready to understand who King Benjamin is and understand the significance of what he accomplishes among the Nephites. Yeah. Okay. Well, with that then, now let's talk about some of the characters and personalities that we see, the minds that we see at work in these pages.

Spencer: Yeah. I mean, so circling back to the beginning, Enos is, of course, as we've already said, he seems to be this kind of everybody character, right? Can stand in for anyone in a certain way. It's hard to get a clear sense for him as a person, right? He's clearly indebted in deep ways to his father. That's very obvious. Those first couple of verses are kind of hiccupy in Enos.

Welch: Yeah.

Spencer: It's maybe worth just feeling the flow of that, right? It came to pass that, I, Enos, knowing my father, that he was a just man, for he taught me in his language, and you're wondering when this, it came to pass, is gonna come to fruition, right? And also in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and blessed be the name of my God for it, and I will tell you of the wrestle which I had before God, before that I received remission of my sins, finally the event, right? That it came to pass, it's to be introducing. So he's sort of tangled up with his father.

Welch: Yes.

Spencer: and trying to figure out what it means to inherit this religious project that the Nephites have had just gotten off the ground, really, with Nephi and Jacob. And as his story unfolds, we get a sense for a certain kind of... We've talked about anxiety, that might be the right word for it, right? This kind of, he's hungering, he's worried he's uh he has to talk about his guilt that has swept away. In 21st century context we'd say he's in his head right um sort of worried about who he is and where he fits into this story uh and the fact that he'll plead for things only to have god say yeah i'm gonna do that because your parents and your grandparents already asked for this uh shows him sort of trying to

Spencer: of what's gone before him. Is he asking for something new, or is he just finding his way into what has been? Enos feels in a certain way very unsure, but becomes sure as the story unfolds.

Welch: Yeah, that's a nice way to look at it. I noted how influenced he seems by his father's teachings. He definitely, the shadow of Jacob, hangs over this short book of Enos for good, of course. Jacob had sort of developed two different ways of thinking about the Messiah, thinking about the work of the Messiah. One is this kind of larger collective, covenant-mediated way, and one is this more personal way that hangs on questions of guilt and judgment and salvation. Jacob preaches in some ways quite strongly. He talks about the monster of death and hell, and there's a kind of darkness to Jacob. I think we can see that coming through, and you can sort of see Enos working to get out from under the shadow of that darkness and learn from it, right? And take from it the moral seriousness that is required, but not get crushed by that.

Spencer: Yeah, yeah. And maybe it's precisely as a result that I'm always struck by verse 13 that also feels hiccupy, like those first verses, right? Here you can see him, it's this kind of sinuous desire he's trying to track in his prayers, right? “This was the desire which I desired of him, that if it should so be that my people the Nephites should fall into transgression and by any means be destroyed, and the Lamanites should not be destroyed, that the Lord God would preserve a record of my people, and he fights even if it so be by the power of his holy arm, that it might be brought forth some future day unto the Lamanites, that perhaps they might be brought unto salvation.” That's a very tortured prayer, right? Or a very tortured desire, but it shows Enoch sort of working out all the things he's inherited and figuring out the shape of it and what it means once he can wield it himself, right? Yeah, all that heaviness of Jacob's...

Welch: Yeah.

Spencer: boy, will this all work out? Will God fully come through on all these promises and so on? And Enos has inherited that and has to sort of stabilize, formalize it, right?

Welch: Yeah, very nice. All right, what else we have here among these authors of the small plates?

Spencer: Yeah, Jarom is harder to get your head around, right? He shows us less of himself than Ines does, in part simply because he hides behind, is a little strong, but he seems to sort of hide behind the history he has to tell. Maybe the most telling moment comes in these couple of verses. It's verses 10, 11 and 12, where Jarom is...

telling us about the state of the Nephites at the time, and talking about the threatening and the kinds of things that have to be held over their heads and so on, so that this will finally keep the people from being destroyed. You get a kind of sense of desperation. Despair is maybe too strong, right? But a certain kind of, this is a person who is living in potentially dark times or watching the Nephites slip.

And you can feel the weight of that just enough, I think, in those verses. Another thing worth mentioning about Jarom, and this I'm just stealing straight from Sharon Harris in her book, but she notes that Jarom is the first person who doesn't use what feel like derogatory terms in a 21st century context for the Lamanites, right? Nephi will speak of filthiness. Jacob will speak of filthiness. Enos will speak of filthiness. Jarom doesn't.

And that may give us a kind of insight into his character as well. He seems to be the kind of person who is willing to sift a bit what he's received and almost filter, right? Preserve what is beautiful and maybe downplay some things that feel a little less comfortable.

Spencer: Once we get to the book of Omni, it's very hard to get our heads around these characters, right? And even when you have someone saying, for example, Omni himself in verse two, saying, I of myself am a wicked man, it's not entirely clear how to take that, right? Is that a kind of humility on his part or a certain kind of self-deprecation, but he's actually a decent guy? Or should we just read this as a straightforward confession? This guy's a bad dude. I don't know, right?

Welch: Yeah. Yeah.

Spencer: really hard to sort of reach behind and get them. You do get the sense that there's a kind of perfunctory, you were saying this before, right, a kind of perfunctory spirit at this point. But whether that shows us what they're like when they're not writing in this record is hard to tell.

Amalekai is obviously a different sort of character, fired up, excited about change, sort of catching the winds of his time and letting them guide him toward a deep spirituality.

But Mormon maybe is the one we ought to dwell on here most. This is our first taste of who Mormon is, and we're gonna be with him for a lot of this book. And I think we learned a few things about Mormon in this little book called Words of Mormon. So let me highlight a couple of things here. I mean, one, he introduces us as someone who has witnessed almost all the destruction of his people. That itself should draw our attention, right? He's working in tragic contexts and dealing with severe trauma. And that gives us some sense, I think, of just where he's coming from.

He's got this obviously important and intense relationship with his son, which he's mentioning as soon as verse two. And then when he starts to talk about the project and how it's taking shape, I think we learned something about Mormon. We learned that he has already abridged the large plates all the way down to King Benjamin when he learns of the existence of the small plates. And I suspect that he read something in the large plates that triggered his awareness, right? I suspect he read something maybe the moment where Benjamin says, hey, this guy Amaleki showed up with this record and gave it to me and Mormon Reap. Yeah, exactly. So he's like, wait, if that ended up in Benjamin's possession, it might be in my archive. Off he goes.

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, what was that? Yeah. Yeah.

Spencer: But that tells us something I think already. Mormon has not compassed the entire library he has in his possession. He's been working with a kind of single track mind to this point, maybe doing something like an abridgment without a clear vision of exactly where he feels like God is sending him. And then reads the small plates and apparently is very deeply shaped by them. He tells us in verse five, that he “chose these things to finish his record upon them.” And this because he's pleased with the very specific things found in it. Verse four tells us about finding prophecies of the coming of Christ, and then also things prophesied concerning us, he says. So he finds in the small plates, apparently kind of double message that orients him. They're talking about the coming of Christ and what Christ's atonement will mean. And also they're telling us about the...

Welch: Mm-hmm.

Spencer: the fate of Nephites and Lamanites in the long run, which echoes the title page of the Book of Mormon. You can see the shape of the whole project coming out of the small plates for Mormon. We've got to see what great things the Lord has done for the ancestors of the Lamanites, and we've got to see that Jesus is the Christ, the eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations. And it seems Mormon may have gotten that focus that he passes on to Moroni right from the small plates. That verse 5, then...

Welch: Yes.

Spencer: “I chose these things to finish my record upon them.” Highly ambiguous verse, and it's been read in a lot of ways. My own inclination these days, we'll see if I agree with myself in another year, but my inclination these days is to see Mormon as saying, I abandoned my first version of this project. I had done this abridgment, then I read these small plates and I didn't just add them to my record. I chose them as the foundation of my record and set the earlier abridgement aside.

I have recently found myself wondering whether God may have given Joseph and Martin the abandoned project of Mormon because God knew they would lose it, right? And Mormon's intention from the beginning, not from the very beginning, but from this point onward was in fact for us to receive exactly what we have, the small plates capped by then.

Welch: Mm, yeah.

Spencer: Mormon's project moving forward from that and taking that double focus into his own writings. The reason to bring all that up, though, I think, is it shows us something of Mormon's character. He's a careful reader, but a kind of developing reader. He doesn't have his project all mapped out. He doesn't know exactly what he wants to have accomplished. And he's responsive in the moment to new developments and new revelatory directions and letting that then guide what he's doing. And we'll see that again later in his record as well.

Welch: Yeah, that's really wonderful. And it really does make me think, you know, prior to having read and found and studied the small plates, who did Mormon think his audience was? What did he understand the purpose of this project to be? He clearly showed himself to be a man of great obedience, to be willing to undertake this life-eating project, right? All of his...all of his spare time and free time and emotional and spiritual energy was going into it.

But before having read the small plates and understood the grand outline of salvation history in the last days, how could he have understood what he was doing? But you can see how having read those, he then latches onto the promise that these words are for the Lamanite remnant in the last days. And he gets them very specifically in mind as his audience, he is writing for them, to persuade them that Jesus is the Christ and to remind them first and foremost of who they are, that they are part of the covenant.

I find that very moving and it connects in a way to something that we see just before and that is the theme of brothers and lateral movement, versus father to son, lineal movement. The small plates typically go from father to son to father to son.

But there are a couple of very key moments where they move laterally to a brother. First of all, of course, with Nephi to Jacob. Why did Nephi not pass the plates along to his own son? We don't know that. We can infer various answers. But then once again, in the Book of Omni, there is a lateral move where Chemish is the brother of Amaron, not the son.

So we see the records and the project moving not to one's own offspring, that is kind of for one's own evolutionary or genealogical benefit, but for the benefit of your brother's children. And in the largest scope, that's of course what the Nephites are doing, writing for the benefit of the Lamanite remnant in the last days.

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. And in that vein, I mean, the way that Omni ends, as Sharon Harris again, has pointed out so beautifully, that sort of final historical tack on after the closing exhortation to come to Christ says, I've got a brother and I don't know where he is. He went up with this group to the land of Zarahemla and they've not returned and I don't know where he is. Sharon Harris reads that as a kind of, does anyone know? Does anyone have any information? I want to see my brother again. And I think that's a beautiful reading.

We can also read it as a kind of the final gesture in Omni is this, if I could only hand this on to my brother, but he's gone. But that's the move the whole of the record is going to make, right? If I could only hand this on to the Lamanite, says Moroni, yet it's not the time. This will have to be buried up and wait for the right moment. But in the end, it will come to, yeah, that lateral move to the brothers, the sisters of the Nephites rather than to their own children.

Welch: Wonderful. Well, let's move on from thinking about the personalities and the minds. We could talk a bit about what we see about Mosiah and Benjamin, but we'll cover that when we get to the Book of Mosiah. We should mention the Mulekites, of course, make their appearance here as well. But we'll cover that again when we get to the Book of Mosiah. Let's talk about any literary or rhetorical forms that we see here. We've already touched on this a little bit just in the kind of awkwardness and seeming lack of form. But anything to point out here in addition to that, Joe?

Spencer: Yeah, I mean, and of course we've dwelt also on the possibility of a certain kind of deliberately typological story in the Book of Enos, right? Is he telling the story in a way that ensures that it will be, and has been, let's be clear, right, received as a story for every single reader? This is my story and yours. Let's go pray in the woods and let's pray at length and see what we can learn of God. But yeah, in a lot of ways we've kind of covered this terrain.

Welch: Yes.

Spencer: pretty decently. It's striking, of course, and this is something you don't really feel until you get into Mormon's project right after, but it remains striking that this is still very first person. This is I-You speech all the way through. It's, I will tell you of my wrestle, says Enos, right? It's Jarom saying, look, we're keeping this genealogy so that you reader know certain things about us.

Welch: Yes.

Spencer: and so on through to Amaleki who would inform us, right? And then even Mormon, though in Mosiah and Alma and so on, he's going to hide behind the history himself. In words of Mormon, he's talking directly to us, I want to inform you about these records and how this is developing and so on. We feel very, at the level of literary form, we feel very intimate here with the authors in a way that will begin to disappear as soon as we get out of these small books.

Welch: Nice, nice. Thinking for a moment about Enos, if I recall correctly, Sharon Harris, whom we keep on referring to because she's a wonderful and very important scholar on these books, she has even suggested that the story of Enos' conversion not only has a kind of every man structure that invites us to put ourselves in there, but perhaps even could have had a kind of liturgical purpose. In other words, it may have been used formally in a kind of worship.

Spencer: Hmm.

Welch: as a set prayer or a ritually recited type of meditation on coming to God.

Spencer: Yeah. And, and if the dream of the tree of life lies behind it in some way, right, it may be some way of taking the dream of the tree of life and liturgizing it, right, like rendering it a kind of here's how you practice the dream, right, by, by following this kind of order of prayer.

Maybe it's worth mentioning as well that we see here for a moment a new literary form, which is translation. So Nephi, of course, has drawn deeply on the words of Isaiah, but he hasn't had to translate those words necessarily. But here we have Mosiah the first, who.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah

Welch: with the help of the interpreter stones is able to translate the Jaredite stone that is brought to him. So this idea, although we don't get his translation word for word of the stone in these books or anywhere in the Book of Mormon, we start to glimpse the importance of the idea of miraculous translation as a theme that will develop through the Book of Mormon.

Spencer: Yeah, that's nice. And as a result, we get a kind of first, for the first time, we get this fraught inaccessible background, right? Where translation comes in as a theme, it also means that there's something that not everyone has access to, right? Only those who have the right facility and languages, or in this case, the right gift from God, has access to those mysteries. And then for the rest of the Book of Mormon, until we come to the Book of Ether, there's always going to be this kind of mystery hovering over the text.

Welch: Yeah.

Spencer: I don't know if this was your experience, Rosalyn, but it was very striking to me the first time through the Book of Mormon with each of my kids, how obsessed they were with these bones and with these Northland and what's going on until we get to the Book of Ether and it's all revealed, right? And then after that, it's all spoiled and they know the story. But the first time through, each of them was just so lit up by this, like, what's going on up North? Right? And this is where that's introduced and sort of the story gets more complex suddenly.

Welch: Ha ha ha. Yes.

Joseph: There are other peoples and a kind of ancient past that no one knows quite what to make of, and translation has to come in to do that just as it does with the restoration. There's another past and an inaccessible mystery that suddenly translation opens a door to in the restoration.

Welch: That's right. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, and there is such a charisma and mystique around these objects, right? These ancient objects that seem to carry a kind of aura from the past. And they contain these voices that are the voices of ghosts speaking to us from the dust. Yes, it captures the imagination. It captures the mind. It captures. It speaks to the heart in a way. One last thing that I'd mention is that

Spencer: Yeah.

Welch: This is something that Grant Hardy pointed out, as I've recently been going through his annotated Book of Mormon, but Amalekki's final, very beautiful ending draws phrases from many of the Nephite founders, especially Nephi and Jacob. This is a form of writing that Nephi himself kind of developed and pioneered, working with the prophecies of Isaiah.

And you've written about this more than anybody, Joe, but, you know, Nephi finds a way to weave phrases and ideas from Isaiah into a kind of whole new prophecy that has to do with his own people. It seems as though Amalekai has picked up on that way of writing. And so he now, rather than drawing from Isaiah, he is drawing from Nephi and Jacob and Lehi and weaving their phrases into his own religious expression.

Spencer: Yeah, yeah, and part of what's striking about that too is just how much Moroni seems to depend on Amalekai's exhortations, right? Moroni will himself circle back to this and do the same thing again, what Amalekai has done with Nephi and Jacob and so on. Moroni will do with Amalekai.

Welch: And in a way, that's kind of how scripture works, right? That's something that seems to be foundational to the way that scripture gains its spiritual depths, is that it's layer upon layer upon layer of prophetic mind that has immersed itself in the texts of the past, but then can metabolize those texts into a new prophecy under the guidance of the spirit. It's interesting that we can think sort of technically, like there's a kind of technique to prophecy that the spirit can use to build capacity for flexibility in spiritual interpretation that can be relevant at many different times and places. And it seems as though part of it is through this kind of layered allusion and intertextuality between sacred texts.

Spencer: Yeah, that's a really important point, especially because in an age that is so saturated with history, right, we're so aware of our past, and we have, thanks to modernity, we have this strong sense of history almost as a kind of science. We want to use technical apparatuses in order to reconstruct exactly what happened in its original context. That kind of cultural force works against, in a certain way, the nature of prophecy.

If we're trying to get back to the earliest original version of a revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants, it's not the version that prophetically we have in our texts, right? Joseph Smith felt the prophetic freedom to take even the words he had heard from God and reshape and rewrite them in light of developments in church history. Here's Mormon, his entire project is to take this massive library and not just summarize it, but shape it prophetically and redirect it.

It's a kind of anti-historical move, but precisely because history here doesn't get trapped in the past, right? It remains alive. Isaiah's words continue to mean for Nephi and hopefully for us, right? The nature of the prophetic is a different way of thinking about what the past is. The past remains open and present and living, and as a result, if we allow it to be hardened, we're somehow going to lose the prophetic spirit.

Welch: Yeah, that's perfectly expressed. And I think that leads us nicely into the next topic I'd like to cover, which is some of the most important themes. Of course, we could spend hours talking about every theme, but what are some of the most important themes that you see coming out in these four small books?

Spencer: Yeah, I mean, there are themes a-plenty. If there are a few that really grab my attention, I mean, faith is very subtly weaving its way through Enos's story. And that's one I want to make sure we think about a little bit. Let me highlight a couple of passages, in fact, just to draw that out. He speaks, of course, of faith as

I shouldn't even say he does, right? God speaks of faith to him, and that's what sort of triggers this story. He has his guilt swept away, and then he asks God, and this is in verse 7, Lord, how is it done? And God's answer, which is a little odd because he doesn't tell him how, he tells him why, but he says, because of thy faith in Christ. And this introduces faith. And by the end of the verse tells him, go to it, thy faith hath made thee whole.

Faith orients the first prayer, apparently. What has driven him in his prayer is faith, but it's only a kind of bare faith, so to speak, all we're told of is faith. But a few verses on, as he begins to pray about the Nephites very specifically, we get a different formulation. So this is in verse 11, after he's received this word of God concerning the future of the Nephites in their faith. After that, I, Enos, had heard these words, my faith began to be unshaken in the Lord. And now he begins to pray for the Lamanites. We go from a certain kind of bare faith to a faith unshaken, and we can see some kind of a deepening going on. And it might seem like, okay, that's the two-step process. That's all we need. We go from faith to unshaken faith, end of story. But part of what's striking is that then faith returns again in the whole prayer over the Lamanites, and in a couple of ways.

The two parts that really strike me, in verse 14 he talks about their struggles to restore the Lamanites to the true faith, which suggests here that faith is becoming something more than one's individual faith that might be shaken or unshaken. But then especially in verse 18, as the story of the prayer of the Lamanites comes to its end, he's told, "'Thy fathers have also required of me this thing, and it shall be done unto them according to their faith, for their faith was like unto thine.'"

Spencer: Now we get an explicitly shared faith. And that strikes me as very interesting in a number of ways, and maybe shows us that Enos is reading Nephi carefully. Faith is developing in this rich way over those couple of verses, or those three prayers. We go from faith to unshaken faith, to a shared faith across generations and across peoples. That feels like 2 Nephi 31. In 2 Nephi 31, Nephi talks about how you come to the point of baptism.

And he says, you come this far with unshaken faith. So he sees faith developing into unshaken faith before you come to baptism. But then he says, once you've gone through this narrow gate, is everything done? And says, no, of course, famously, you've got to press forward. And now when he talks about pressing forward, everything feels communal. It becomes shared. He talks about going forward, feasting on the word of Christ, which sounds like this sitting at a table with others in a slow aesthetic process of experiencing food rather than simply

a taste or a bite. He talks about a perfect brightness of hope and a love of God and of all human beings, which opens faith into hope and charity and expands its scope. But he also talks about a certain kind of communion with Christ. He says that you got here—when he talks about unshaken faith—you got here relying wholly on Christ's merits, but he talks about going forward steadfast in Christ, so that now, rather than Christ being this kind of thing you lean on or reach out to,

Christ becomes the person you identify with in community. And so I wonder if Enos is giving us a taste of Nephi. It's one thing to go from faith to unshaken faith, but it's another thing entirely when that faith becomes a kind of shared collective communal thing. It matters that our faith is something shared with the saints, that there's something we come together to pray for, something we come together to seek out in worship, rather than just a kind of privatized individual experience.

Welch: That is really great. And it really makes me think the idea of a faith that persists, a steadfast faith, is an important theme across the entire Book of Mormon. From the very beginning when Lehi prophesies over Laman and Lemuel, and I think it's Lemuel where he says, may you be steadfast and immovable like this valley.

Once Mormon takes the reins of the narrative, it seems as though one lens that Mormon has is that Nephite faith, although they were blessed and privileged to have the plates of brass and to be the original keepers of the messianic prophecies of Christ, Nephite faith is unsteady. They are always apostatizing, losing their faith, having to be chastened and corrected and brought back.

Whereas the Lamanites, it takes them a while to get there, but once Christianity takes hold in Lamanite culture, their faith is steadfast. This is a point that Mormon makes several times contrasting the Nephites with the Lamanites. And this is just an inference, but you know, Nephite culture, as we'll see as we move into Mosiah and Alma and Helaman, it was prone to division. It was prone to pridefulness and stratification.

And maybe because of that, that's why they were never able to achieve the kind of stability of communal faith. That's that final step that can allow the faith to remain unshaken and to persist and be steadfast over time. Whereas perhaps in some way, Lamanite culture was more amenable to that kind of shared and communal faith.

Spencer: That's really interesting. In another context, I've been thinking a great deal lately about just what the difference in cultures is between Nephites and Lamanites. I mean, all the textual evidence suggests that Lamanites are semi-nomadic, which of course, historically, sociologically, tend to be far less hierarchical, far less sort of driven by classes and structures and so on. And does that kind of a space in which you have to rely on others because you won't eat if you don't collectively work toward this goal, it's not just baked into the structure of society. Does that create a space within which faith can be kind of unshaken?

And maybe that tells us something about the work of the saints in the church, right? This has to be a kind of collective shared goal. It's a kind of semi-nomadic project for us, right? It's not baked into the structure of our society. It's this thing we elect to do together as sisters and brothers and pursue.

Welch: Yeah. That's so interesting, Joe. What else do you want to point to in terms of important themes through these passages?

Spencer: Yeah, I mean, obviously one thing that's stretched across these as it has been from Nephi onward is the theme of covenant, right? Nephi is making such a big deal about this. I mean, in the very first original chapter, we've got God speaking to him and saying, inasmuch as you shall keep the commandments, you're going to be led to a land of promise and prosper and all of this kind of thing. And then Lehi is emphasizing that within Nephi's record, and Nephi is trying to track its fulfillment in various ways.

When you get to Jacob, he's reiterating this in certain contexts. And in these itty bitty books, it's just everywhere. It's being repeated over and over and over again, establishing it as the motif of the whole Book of Mormon, really. And so this is clearly a theme running through these chapters, though, interestingly, with some variations which are telling. And I think the most significant of these is in the Book of...

lost my place, Omni, yeah. It's in Omni verse six. So this is Amaron writing before he hands the record to Chemish. But he says, the Lord would not, well, he's talking about the wicked part of the Nephites, the more wicked part of the Nephites being destroyed. It says, “the Lord would not suffer after he had led them out of the land of Jerusalem and kept and preserved them from falling into the hands of their enemies. Yet he would not suffer that the words should not be verified which he spake unto our fathers, saying that, Inasmuchas ye will not keep my commandments, ye shall not prosper in the land."

What's so striking about that is that's not the word that was spoken to the fathers, right? They were told, inasmuchas you do keep the commandments, you will prosper. But he's added a negation in each of those, inasmuchas you do not, you will not prosper. What was actually said about not keeping commandments from the beginning and reiterated was, inasmuchas you do not keep the commandments of the Lord.

Spencer: He ties it to this question of prosperity instead. And you can sort of feel the changing nature of Nephite culture here. The covenants themselves have become unstable in their eyes. They are in some sense rather than worrying about whether they're going to be cut off from the presence of the Lord, the worry now is will we prosper, right? There's a certain kind of earthy or mundane nature to the way they're thinking about these things.

So that when Amalekai comes on the scene and King Mosiah is moving and so on, we're going to have to hope for the possibility of restoring that fully robust and God driven dimension of the covenant instead of this kind of national understanding. So this is clearly a theme. And if we're watching it carefully, we can see, we can see the covenant itself being almost redefined among the Nephites in a dangerous way.

Welch:Yeah. Oh, that's really, really fascinating. Joe, I had never noticed that or put that together, but it makes so much sense if they have a kind of mechanistic or transactional sort of misinterpretation of covenant here where obedience brings prosperity in the form of wealth and riches. I think that makes King Benjamin's speech, which is just on the horizon here, all the more powerful then where he for them holds up the beggar.

Spencer: Yeah.

Welch: The beggar becomes this figure of spiritual transformation and their relationship to the beggar is what mediates and kind of reflects the degree of their discipleship of Jesus Christ in the context of a kind of misinterpretation of the prosperity covenant that becomes all the more powerful, I think.

Spencer: That's really nice and the King Noah story just on the other side of it, right? I mean, strictly speaking, if you have a promise that says, if you keep the commandments, you will prosper, that doesn't tell us what happens at all if you don't keep the commandments, right? And it doesn't tell us that if you're prosperous, that means you kept the commandments, right? Strictly speaking, all it tells us is that if you keep the commandments, then prosperity will come for this people, right?

Welch: Yeah. Yeah.

Spencer: What's striking is when you say, if you don't keep the commandments, you will not prosper, is now you've made a direct equivalence between keeping the commandments and prosperity, because if you keep it, then you will prosper, and if you don't, you won't, and become equivalent. And that's exactly what we see in King Noah's culture, is that they're saying, look Abinadi, we know we're righteous because look around, we're prospering. So they make that reversal that you can see beginning to be reflected in Nephite culture here that Benjamin will simply undo.

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's precisely his point, right? Is that you see the beggar who is suffering, you cannot conclude that he has not kept the commandments. That negative formulation of the covenant, he's sort of directly refuting in that moment. Fascinating. All right. Anything else you want to direct our attention to in terms of themes here?

Spencer:The only other thing I'd mention, which is of course something we've already been talking about earlier, but just worth really highlighting, is that Mormon, it's subtle here, but if we've read the title page carefully, then it's not so subtle, but he really does nail down the two guiding foci for the whole of the book. And so it's not as strong a theme across these chapters in a certain way, but it has been in 1st and 2nd Nephi and Jacob, and Mormon here forces it back to the surface before launching his record, and that's, we've got to keep an eye on the coming of Christ and we've got to keep an eye on what's going to happen with Nephites and Lamanites.

As I say, it's not forced on us here, but it is here. Obviously, that's where Enos is headed in his prayer, right? And you've got that beautiful verse in Jeram where he talks about speaking of Christ as though he had already come among us, which is something Adam Miller has written beautifully about. But you've certainly got these themes, but Mormon forces him right to the surface and says, watch for this. Watch for this.

Welch: And related to that, we have a little bit more about the law of Moses and the relationship between their observance of the law of Moses and their belief in the messianic prophecies. Nephi has talked about this in some detail in 2 Nephi, but in Jerim it comes up again. He tries to explain, and it's not easy. It seems as though it's not easy for him to explain, but how it is that the Nephites observe the law of Moses, but that does not preclude them from having access to a kind of saving faith in Christ, although it seems as though many of them did never make that leap. For him, the law of Moses typifies the Savior, typifies the coming of Christ. So talk to us a little bit about that relationship between law of Moses and Christian faith.

Spencer: Yeah, yeah, I mean here it's really a lot in a lot of ways. Jarom is the only one that gives us a really beautiful way of trying to come at it in these small books. Right. But I think he's building on Nephi and Jacob in really amazing ways. And Jacob 7, of course, the story of Sherem, you've got it's Sherem himself who comes up with this formula. But I think it's brilliant. Right. That you “convert the law of Moses into the worship of a being who's coming many hundreds of years hence.”

That's a beautiful formulation, right? The law, not only I have to be converted, but the law as well, right? The law has to be converted to Christ. And Jacob is clearly trying to think about that because Sherem cannot grapple with a law that points to Christ. But Nephi in a lot of ways gives me, I think the, I shouldn't say the clearest formulation, but in some ways the richest formulation. And this is in 2 Nephi 25. It's a kind of...

Welch: Huh. Yeah, yes.

Spencer: circuitous passage. Clearly Nephi is trying to talk his way through a complicated idea that he's worried his children will not get, but what I love about what he says is we have to understand the law always as pointing to Christ and to its fulfillment in Christ, and that I think gets at it beautifully. The law has to be fulfilled, but it's not to be fulfilled by the people of Israel, it's to be fulfilled by Christ.

So the right way to keep the law, to hold the law, to protect the law or guard the law is always to ensure that it is pointing to Christ. And I think, at least for my money, like that's the same message for you and for me today. I'm not under the law of Moses, but I'm under laws, right? And if I think that those laws are about the burden I'm supposed to carry and everything depends on whether I somehow pull it off, I've missed it.

But if I see that as a law that will be fulfilled in Christ, and hence this law, even my failures in it, point me to Christ, now the law is being held rightly.

Welch: I think that's perfect. And I think it relates to something else that I see these authors trying to get at, which is the way in which the law points to Christ. There is a strongly chronological kind of predictive element of these prophecies. It's true. They are looking forward to a point in time when Christ will come and there is a kind of predictive quality to Nephite prophecy. But I think it's much more than that.

And I think that Nephi, precisely as you've said, can foresee some of the problems, which is that if that's all that you understand the law doing, it's kind of making a prediction, when Christ comes, then the law is totally defunct and no longer has any influence to shape your soul. I think he sees the law as doing something much deeper than simply predicting that Christ will come. But the law in some way is structured like Christ. And so obedience to the law makes us Christ-like and attention to the law allows us to see Christ in the world around us wherever we are, whether he has already come or he's yet to come.

When we see life through the lens of obedience to a law that was gracefully given to us, we will be able to see Christ in all things around us. I think that's what Nephi wanted for his people. I think that's what Moroni wants for us in the latter days, is to see Christ present with us in all things. And the law is one way, properly understood, that we can get there.

Spencer: Yeah, that's beautifully put.

Welch: All right, Joe, as we are coming up on the end of our conversation here, I wanted to ask you to share with us a passage that means something to you personally. We've been approaching this as scholars. I love to--I could talk to you for hours about the Book of Mormon as scholars, but the Book of Mormon is also a book of scripture for you and me. And we find Christ in its pages as believers in its truth. So what is a moment in these books that speaks to you as a disciple and as a believer?

Spencer: Yeah, we've talked about a lot of passages along the way that speak to me profoundly, and I think we've brought a lot of that out. I hope we've kind of straddled that line between being scholars and disciples all the way through this conversation. Right. But I'll bring up one other passage that we haven't touched on that really does speak to me. It's Jarom 1-2. And this is, I mean, it says he's sort of setting up what he wants to do in the book. And he's talking about this now being for the intent of

Welch: Yeah.

Spencer: speaking to the Lamanites and so on. But in the second half of verse two is where he feels this weight of what could he say that hasn't been said or something, right? So here's what he says, but I shall not write things of my prophesying nor of my revelations. For what could I write more than my fathers have written? For have not they revealed the plan of salvation? I say unto you, Yea, and this sufficeth me. There are two things here that really speak to me.

The first is, I mean, I feel him, my heavens, I feel him. It feels to me like my life as a scholar, but also just my life as a person sitting in the pew, I'll call myself happy if all I have done over the course of my life is figured out what some of the prophets have said, right? I don't have to have something additional to add. I don't have to have some sort of prophecy or revelation of my own that somehow

expands or goes beyond, it is enough for me. I love that this suffices me. It's enough for me just to figure out what they have said before me. So I'm touched that here we have a prophetic voice even, not a scholarly voice but a prophetic voice, that's willing to say sometimes it's right just to sit with what has been said. We don't need something new. We need to probe more deeply and understand what we already have.

instead of constantly hoping there's some mystery around the corner. The other thing that really grabs me here is this, when he says, have not they, the people who have written before him in the small plates, have not they revealed the plan of salvation? We're so used as Latter-day Saints to hearing in the phrase the plan of salvation, something like, you know, pre-mortal existence, then coming to earth, and then death, and then some spirit world stuff, and then resurrection, and final judgment, and here are some kingdoms of glory, and so on.

Welch: Yeah.

Spencer: But of course, nothing like that is what Nephi or Jacob have talked about, right? They haven't been talking about a long map through our eternal destiny. They've been laying out how God has made a plan for earthly history, how God is going to bend and shape what Gentiles are doing in Europe so that they'll come to the promised land and then interact with a Lamanite remnant and then reclaim them and recover them so that...

Israel's promises can be fulfilled and Gentiles can be alerted to the truth of the gospel and Christ can come into the midst of that full restorationist picture. That's the plan of salvation it seems he's got to be referring to. Part of the reason that touches me, I mean one it's clarifying for me right, at a kind of intellectual or interpretive level, but it's also touching at a spiritual level simply because it is so easy for me to think.

for all of us to think when we think of the plan of salvation as if it's a kind of private affair. This is about whether I've done the right things and whether I'm good enough and whether I will get to the celestial kingdom. Am I thinking celestial enough or whatever it is, right? But if the plan of salvation, as these prophets are talking about it, is about what God is doing over massive amounts of time, what He's doing with whole peoples and interactions and so on.

Welch: Thank you.

Spencer: It calms me down when I'm worried about a member of my family who is struggling or wandering, when I'm worried about a member of my ward and whether they're coming or involved, or whether I'm worrying about my own struggles and questions and so on. Recognizing that really God is doing something gigantic gives me a certain sense of peace in the midst of all that. God will get His work done.

Welch: Mm-hmm.

Spencer: And his work is way, way bigger than just my daily worry, my obsessive concern with whether things go as I really hope they do. So I find it in that kind of talk of the plan of salvation, a real comfort.

Welch: I love that. Well, I will share a couple of verses from Omni, and this is here at the very end as Amalekai is wrapping up in verse 25. This is kind of where he wraps up. Wherefore I shall deliver up these plates unto him, that is King Benjamin, exhorting all men to come unto God, the Holy One of Israel, and believe in prophesying and in revelations and in the ministering of angels and in the gift of speaking with tongues and in the gift of interpreting tongues and in all things which are good. For there is nothing which is good save it comes from the Lord and that which is evil cometh from the devil. And now my beloved brother, and I would that you should come unto Christ, who is the Holy One of Israel, and partake of his salvation and the power of his redemption. Yea, come unto him and offer your whole souls as an offering unto him, and continue in fasting and praying and endure to the end. And as the Lord liveth, ye will be saved."

It's just such a masterful summary and integration and tying together of the highlights of The Small Plates and of the incredibly vibrant prophetic culture that Nephi inaugurated with his extraordinary, epical gift to ask, to seek, and then to know. Nephi's courage to be willing to know when that knowledge brought grief to him. I see Nephi's courage and Nephi's faith and Nephi's gifts echoing through these verses. And it fills me with gratitude and with love for who Nephi was and for Amalekai, for knowing and loving Nephi in that same way.

Welch: Joe Spencer, thank you so much for spending this hour with us today. Your erudition, your knowledge, and especially your love of the Book of Mormon is evident in every word that you utter. So thank you for sharing with us today.

Spencer: Thank you.

Welch: Bye bye.