Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Ether Scholarship with Morgan Davis

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Maxwell Institute's Book of Mormon Studies Podcast. I'm Rosalynde Welch and I'm joined today by my friend and colleague, Dr. Morgan Davis. Morgan is a research fellow here at the Maxwell Institute with me. Dr. Davis is interested in comparative readings of scripture and we're going to see that come out today in our discussion. In particular, he studies the relationship between the Book of Mormon and the Bible and the Quran. This is a big question that he's been working on for several years now. He's published an article on it and in fact right now he's working on a full-length book on that topic. So welcome to the podcast, Dr. Morgan Davis.

Morgan Davis: Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Welch: Today we are focusing on some of the scholarly literature that's been written around the Book of Ether. The Book of Ether is a fascinating part of the Book of Mormon, a self-contained narrative, and it's been very attractive to all different kinds of literary critics and other scholars of the Book of Mormon who have found fascinating things there to look at. So, we have some fun articles and book chapters to discuss today. Morgan you're going to kick us off by sharing a very important somewhat older literary treatment of the Book of Mormon. So, talk to us about Feasting on the Word by Richard Rust.

Davis: Yeah, Richard Rust wrote this, I guess it was published in 1997. It feels like it's been longer than that. But yeah, he came to the Book of Mormon, I think one of the first real serious scholars to bring the tools of literary critical scholarship to reading the Book of Mormon. There have been others. I think Hugh Nibley did some of that. And of course, there's people like Charles Swift and others from that same time. But this book, I think, is kind of a hidden gem because it introduces the Book of Mormon using a kind of series of discussions of the various literary genres that we encounter in the Book of Mormon. And Professor Rust talks about narrators and narratives and the art of storytelling and how the Book of Mormon engages in that; poetry, which we have some examples of in the Book of Mormon; sermons, letters, and autobiography, and then things like imagery, the allegories and the metaphors of the Book of Mormon, and an important topic called typology, how one thing represents another and foreshadows another.

And then epic, the genre of epic that, you know, literary scholars discuss and debate. And the Book of Mormon as a possible candidate for epic is a debated sort of subject that he addresses. And so, it's an interesting book to read against all these different topics.

Welch: Yeah, and maybe it's worth mentioning, one of the things that's so interesting about this book when you pick it up is that it gives you a snapshot of literary criticism of the Book of Mormon--so reading the Book of Mormon as literature--but pre the Grant Hardy revolution in 2010 when Hardy published his book Understanding the Book of Mormon. And their Hardy introduced this really kind of exciting and electrifying new lens, which is narratology, to read the Book of Mormon foregrounding the narrator--so Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. Listeners to the podcast know that we've talked about that book often. But it's good to know that that's not the only literary approach to the Book of Mormon. And so Rust shows us a kind of what literary criticism of the Book of Mormon looked like before, kind of the narratological turn introduced by Hardy. He's very attuned to things like the poetic and literary beauty of the Book of Mormon, and as you said, the genres and the different forms that we see. He was drawing on a kind of earlier period of intense literary interest in the Book of Mormon that arose in the 1970s, late 70s and early 80s, some of them English professors here at Brigham Young University.

One of my professors, when I was here as a student in the 90s, Bruce Jorgensen, was a key figure in that early literary approach to the Book of Mormon. During the 80s and the early 90s, that kind of subsided a bit. But here in late 1990s, 1997, Richard Rust brings to beautiful fruition this literary approach to the Book of Mormon. And as you said, I think that today scholars like Charles Swift are returning to this approach to the Book of Mormon to find in it, not just kind of authorial intent of the narrator--as fascinating as that is--but also kind of its literary qualities and its beauty and how it tastes. It's no surprise, I think, that he calls it Feasting on the Word, because this is literature that tastes good to us, I think.

Davis: It’s a nice example of how each sort of generation of scholars builds on the insights and the work of previous scholars. And he's, yeah, he's one of those that we still read and still refer to.

Welch: Absolutely. So, what would you kind of want to share with us about Rust' treatment of the Book of Mormon generally and how it relates to the Book of Ether?

Davis: So, he has a couple of places where he brings up the Book of Ether and discusses it.

As a minute, a miniature of the Book of Mormon, a sort of encapsulation of the entire Book of Mormon. And he notes that several of the major themes of the Book of Mormon that are spread across the entire work are all sort of there in the Book of Ether itself with its own narrative. So, for example, he says the book of Ether, like the Book of Mormon, is a record hidden up unto God to come forth by the power of God. He says it will talk about a people who were destroyed. It will answer the question of who their fathers were, and it will be translated by a seer, King Mosiah. It contains a warning about breaking covenant, and in addition to that, the knowledge of those covenants themselves that were had before. It talks about the idea that there will be a translator one day, so Mosiah, but then we have Joseph Smith as the translator of the Book of Mormon itself. And then there's another way, I think, that the Book of Mormon is typified in the Book of Ether, and that's the experience of the brother of Jared in bringing 16 molten stones, which he calls these things, to the Lord.

That's something I think you're going to riff on in a minute too. So, I want I want but yeah, so all that sort of gives us a sense that the book of Ether is recapitulating--or I guess my word would be concentrating--the major themes of the Book of Mormon within itself. It's almost like a microcosm of the Book of Mormon; everything seems to be bigger or more extreme in the book of Ether. For example, the time scales, uh, you know, the brother of Jared is the earliest character in the book of Mormon, right? They, they're a thousand years before anyone else. And then it's narrated from the very end of the Book of Mormon by Moroni, the very last character in the Book of Mormon. So, the time scales are huge, thousands of years across this narrative project. And it's kind of stunning to think about, like, what would that be like to try to write for an audience 1400 years in the future if you are Ether or even Moroni addressing a very distant future audience, trying to convey to that very distant future audience something that even to you is in the very distant past. That's just a daunting project and I don't know if we appreciate that sometimes, but it comes out clearly if you think about it in terms of this concentrate in the book of Ether.

Welch: That's such a good point. I love how you put that, that the Book of Ether in some ways is bigger, it's more extreme, it's more dramatic in certain ways. But it's also smaller. It's concentrated. So, it's smaller in terms of the amount of text. So, you kind of get this extremely concentrated version of the Book of Mormon. Way back in the day, I studied Shakespeare. And oftentimes in Shakespeare plays back in early modern England when they would be performed before the actual play started, they would have something that was called a dumb show, which was a kind of comic, informal version of the play that you were about to see. So, it allowed you to sort of see in a different and shortened form, the action that was about to happen. In fact, if you remember in the play Hamlet, Shakespeare is extremely clever, and he incorporates the dumb show into the play itself.

So, the Book of Ether has always reminded me a little bit of this dumb show, right? It's a recapitulation of the action in a different kind of form, but in a way that sheds light on the Book of Mormon itself. And your point was a good one that by having the Book of Ether there, it teaches us, Moroni can teach us how to interpret the Book of Mormon by showing us how he interprets the Book of Ether. In other words, let's see if I can put this correctly. The Book of Ether stands in relationship to the Nephite people as the ancient record of an indigenous people, right? In the same way that the Book of Mormon stands in relationship to its “Gentile” readers, right, as an ancient record of an indigenous people with very relevant and vibrant lessons for us. Those symmetrical relationships of book to audience give us a chance to understand how to properly interpret and receive the Book of Mormon as a whole.

Davis: And the active interpretation itself as part of that process where Moroni and Mormon both must be kind of transparent about the fact that they're interposing themselves between the actual events and even earlier records and us as their readers in the same way that King Mosiah had to translate the record of Ether. And his people were so anxious to read it and find out what had happened. And yet there's still this, you know, step that must be taken to translate it and make it cognizable to a new audience.

There's one other thing that struck me about this, you know, the idea of the Book of Ether being a sort of concentrate, and that's the question of the sort of big reveal. So, the Book of Mormon itself, everything is pointing, all the arrows point to the big reveal in 3rd Nephi of Jesus Christ and his appearance as the resurrected Lord. And, you know, the Book of Ether even does that. This is the one place where it might take a, you know, a backseat in terms of the, the impressiveness of the event, but maybe not. I mean the, the, the vision of, uh, of Jesus Christ, with the brother of Jared is a very impressive sort of theophany that is like an after clap, a sort of, um, second big reveal that happens. And I just think--

Welch: Yes, it is. It's a second witness. Yes. That's such a good point. Thank you for bringing it up because it's the central point and we would have missed it. The most important way that the Book of Ether recapitulates the Book of Mormon, of course, is in the revelation of the person of Jesus Christ. It happens in a group setting to the Nephites, of course. It happens one-on-one to the brother of Jared. It happens near the end of the Nephite history. It happens at the beginning of the Jaredite history. But nevertheless, Moroni is very clear, and he makes this crystal clear to us as readers: This is the same God. This is the same Jesus Christ. He visited my people. He visited the Jaredites anciently. And so, this is a second witness for you future latter-day readers that Jesus Christ is God for you as well. And that is Moroni's overriding purpose, I think. Once he hits on that, he's got it. He understands his frame and he understand how he's going to present this in a way that will be engaging for his Gentile readers.

Anything else, Morgan, that you'd like to share from Rust at this point, I know we'll return to him in a bit. Okay, good.

Davis: Yeah, I think that's it. That's good.

Welch: Well, let's move on then and I'm going to share, we'll see how quick I can be. Listeners know that I can be a little long-winded, but I'm going to try hard here to be quick and share two pieces that I think are really, first, they're from two great working scholars of the Book of Mormon. One is Fred Axelgaard, one is Amy Easton Flake. And I think they're both good examples of how Book of Mormon scholarship sometimes will have a big revolutionary splash, something like Understanding the Book of Mormon, or the works of Hugh Nibley, John Welch's Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, all of these were kind of era-defining works. But in between those, a lot of crucial work happens, which is incremental work, slowly, carefully, and modestly working out the details of how these paradigms are played out in the Book of Mormon. And that's really, I think, where a lot of times the real muscle of Book of Mormon scholarship happens, are in these smaller articles that just very carefully work out the details.

So, this first one I'm going to touch on briefly, is as I said by Fred Axelgaard, who's been a prolific scholar of the Book of Mormon. He works professionally in the field of international relations, but he's proved to be a very faithful and insightful reader of the Book of Mormon. This article that I'm going to touch on briefly is called “More Than Meets the Eye: How Nephite Prophets Managed the Jaredite Legacy,” and this was published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies in 2017.

So, he points out that there's a lot that we don't know for sure about the Jaredite record. We don't know the relationship between the stone, this mysterious stone record of Coriantumur that was found and translated by King Mosiah I, and then the 24 gold plates found by the people of Limhi that was translated by Mosiah II. We don't know how Mosiah II got the interpreters that he used to translate the book.

Welch: We don't know the relationship of the sealed vision of the brother of Jared to the historical material on the 24 gold plates. So, there's lots of unanswered questions about the provenance and the nitty gritty transmission of the Jaredite record. And so, it's these questions that Fred Axelgaard wants to dive into by just carefully marshaling and examining every single place in the Book of Mormon where the Jaredite record is mentioned. He makes a couple of, well he makes lots of great points, but I'll highlight a couple of them.

Firstly, it's really, he makes a persuasive case that the Jaredite record actually was transmitted in two parts, that the 24 gold plates with the national history that focused on the lineage of Ether or the House of Jared was one thing, but that the visionary text of the Brother of Jared was probably a whole different record on a different set of plates and transmitted together with the others, but separately. He points to just the unwieldy length of the vision. We know how very long it was, and it doesn't really fit in terms of its theme or his genre with the sort of historical, annal-istic tone of the 24 gold plates.

So, he suggests that they were transmitted separately and that they were translated separately. He talks about Mosiah II, who did the first translation of the 24 gold plates. And he argues that Mosiah may not have done a complete translation. For one, he thinks that Mosiah probably would not have translated the vision of the brother of Jared because that was supposed to remain sealed until after the coming of Christ, as you may remember. Well, what would be the best way to keep that from being known? Well, just don't translate it in the first place.

He suggests that Mosiah 2 probably did not translate the material about the secret combinations as well. So that's very interesting. Then he moves on to Mormon. Mormon kind of gives us a couple of glimpses of the Jaredite record, right, sometimes people think that Mormon like ran out of time at the end of his life and just never got around to translating and abridging the Jaredite plates.

But Axelgaard wants to really defend the honor of Mormon here. And he argues strongly that it was never Mormon's intention to do the work of abridging the Jaredite record himself. It simply was too long, too unwieldy. The conditions under which Mormon worked simply were not conducive. So, it's not that Mormon was negligent or procrastinated and didn't get to it. It was never within his prophetic mission, Axelgaard suggests, to translate and abridge the Jaredite record.

So then moving on to Moroni, he says that this was the centerpiece of Moroni's prophetic work that was given to him. It was to retranslate, he argues, and abridge the Jaredite record. So, he argues quite strongly that Moroni, as we were talking about earlier, Moroni doesn't just simply inherit the translation of Mosiah II, but he suggests that Moroni probably retranslated the whole thing.

At the very least, we know he must have translated the visionary section and translated the material on secret combinations. But he thinks that Moroni was a very active translator and a bridge. The Book of Ether is famous for Moroni's very conspicuous editorial interventions, right? He just comes out from behind the curtain and has his say at great length.

Welch: The book of Ether is as much about Moroni as about the Jaredites. And Axelgaard reads that as evidence of how hard and involved and hands-on this process of translating and abridging was for Moroni and that we can really feel Moroni's heart and soul, his theology, his relationship to Christ, all of that comes out in his reworking of the Jaredite material.

And so, he really ends on this note of respect and gratitude for Moroni. “Thanks to Moroni's fulfillment of his divine commission,” he writes, “the impact of this record will reach far into a future that even now we can scarcely imagine.” So, I thought this was a great example of just foundational kind of source criticism. Patiently, carefully, building up incremental understanding of how the book was put together, so that we can appreciate it not only as a religious document, but also, we can respect its reliability. We can understand the magnitude of the contributions of its writers and its editors and its translators, and that we as readers can better understand how to weigh and to sift and interpret its teachings and prophecies. Yeah, so, yeah.

Davis: I love that. Can I just jump in quick with a thought that as you're talking, I was struck by a couple of things. First, yeah, the effort to really kind of understand how much work it took to put this together and I guess the role of imagination, you have to kind of line up the dots. It's like creating constellations in the sky, right? You have these points, how do they fit together, right? And a constellation is one thing, right? That's just completely imaginary. But the idea that these sorts of questions that are left about, well, how much could Mormon have done with this record? Or why wouldn't the full record have been translated by Mosiah? All those kinds of questions line up dots. And then you have a chance to sort of create a through line that explains them. And I think Fred's done a nice job of using his imagination to kind of do that work.

And once you've fleshed out that story of how it comes about, then the second point is I'm impressed by what kind of faith it must have taken Mormon to leave such a big chunk of work to his son, not knowing whether or not he'd even be around to finish it off, whether the conditions would allow him to finish it off, given the terrible events that were happening, the destruction of their world really. And so, yeah, on the one hand, imagining Moroni actually having a lot of time on his hands once he'd gotten someplace safe and gotten the records to a place where he could work with them and spend some time with them. Then it becomes plausible, but it must have taken a leap of faith on Mormon's part to lay that burden down and let his son pick it up.

Welch: Yeah, that's a good point. I love your analogy about the dot to dot, right? And it takes some inference to figure out where those dots should be, but this is the way of all scholarship, right? We do our best, we make inferences, and our claims are somewhat tentative, but they're based on reason. And then when those dots are in place, when we find them to be persuasive, that allows us to do maybe the more fun work, the interpretive work, right? To draw the picture.

Ultimately, the payoff is in the teachings and the theology that comes from the Book of Mormon, but somebody's got to put those dots in place and do that patient, careful work of putting the structure together.

I wanted to turn now briefly to another shorter article. This is a book chapter by another wonderful working scholar of the Book of Mormon. Her name is Amy Easton Flake. Dr. Easton Flake is a professor of ancient scripture here at Brigham Young University and has published in many venues on the Book of Mormon. And I just wanted to touch briefly on a chapter that she has in a book called Illuminating the Jaredite Records. This was published by the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University in 2020 by their Book of Mormon Academy, which we've mentioned before on the podcast. It's a group of scholars over there in religious education who come together and study a passage from the Book of Mormon and then produce these wonderful volumes, anthologies where many different scholars have a chapter.

So, Dr. Easton Flake's chapter in this volume is called “Seeing Moroni and the Book of Ether Through a Study of Narrative Time.” So, we had talked before about how Rust kind of gives us a glimpse of what literary criticism looked like pre-Hardy Revolution, narratological revolution.

Dr. Easton Flake is a good example of post-Hardy Book of Mormon studies where she very much takes this narratological approach where the choices of the Book of Mormon's narrators are foregrounded and we're looking at the how, right? We're looking at the how just as much as the what. And this was the great kind of methodological innovation that Grant Hardy introduced. And her twist on it is that she looks specifically at time and the way that time is handled in the book of Ether. She makes the good point that oftentimes when we think about narrative and how a writer is constructing his or her narrative, we'll think about things like the setting or the plot, the characters, the point of view, the narrators. And these are all things that Hardy touches on. We don't often think about time, right? The way that time is handled. But the way that time is portrayed in the story is just as consequential as any of those other things, and it's really worth looking at. And it's something that Hardy doesn't spend a lot of time on.

Easton Flake looks at duration, in other words, how much time Moroni spends on certain areas of the story. And it's obvious to anybody who's read the Book of Ether that Moroni is most interested in the beginning and the end of the Jaredite nation. So, he spends a lot of time right at the beginning about the founding of the nation and the experience of Jared and the brother of Jared and the migration and the theophany. And then we start zooming, zooming, zooming, zooming through Jaredite history and then find, fast forward, yeah, big time. And then we finally at the end, chapters 13, 14 and 15, we slow down a little bit more and we pay more attention to the ministry of Ether and the ending of the fall of the Jaredite nation.

Welch: She talks about dialogue. Dialogue is one way that an author can slow down the pace, right, by stopping to give you the actual words of characters involved. And she did something fun. She calculated the total number of words of different characters in the Book of Ether and what percentage different characters have of the total amount of dialogue. So, Morgan, would you like to take a guess? Who do you think in the Book of Ether has the most quote words, any single figure in the book of Ether. I wouldn't have gotten this.

Davis: Well, I'm going to guess Moroni himself, but am I close?

Welch: Yeah, it's actually, it's the Lord. It's the Lord himself, yes. Because we get the Lord's communication with the brother of Jared and then with Moroni himself, right? So, we, and we'll get to this in a minute. But I thought that was a fascinating finding. And then she finally, she talks about editorial pauses. This is another way that Moroni can slow down time is by interjecting himself and he stops story time. Story time is just on pause, while he jumps in. And I thought she made an interesting observation, something that I'd noticed before but hadn't quite put together. This is what she writes, "'The overall effect of such pauses in the Book of Ether is to produce an alternative storyline situated not in relaying the past, but in presenting Moroni's current relationship with the Lord and his messages to future readers.'" And that's such a good point that we have, we have two stories happening at the same time.

One is the story of the brother of Jared and his development as a prophet, and the other is the story of Moroni and his development as a prophet. And Moroni clearly saw himself in the brother of Jared. They both receive divine commandment, they receive divine instruction, and they're asked to make or to do something that is very, very challenging. And so, we can see how that plays out. I think also Moroni must have seen himself in the prophet, Ether, as well, right? The final prophet who presides over and witnesses the catastrophic demise of his people. So, I thought she very nicely showed how we have these multiple simultaneous stories happening in the Book of Ether. For me, the value of this kind of work is just that it gives me new tools for digging into it, right? When I have these lenses and these tools that cause me to slow down and dig into the text, I find that's when the Spirit has a chance to speak to me and to work on my heart. It's less often when I'm just cruising through the scriptures that I really have those intense experiences of being able to feel divine power in the text. So, any kind of tool or lens that helps me to slow down and dig in, I appreciate for that reason.

Davis: I love that. And it's another great example of how scholarship builds on previous scholarship. And this is another sort of addition to, you know, yeah, the serious attention to the way the Book of Mormon goes about its work, and in particular the Book of Ether here. And that's where sort of, she leaves an arrow pointing forward for more work, right? She's done this work now for the Book of Ether.

But there's the whole rest of the Book of Mormon now to kind of bring the same lens to and think about narratological time and how time works. And Nephi's, you know, in the small plates, how does it play out there? How does it play out in the large plates outside of the Book of Ether? And I'm sure that those same kinds of, you know, attention to that kind of detail will render, like you said, the same kinds of spiritual insight and rich engagement with the text for readers who roll up their sleeves and do that work for themselves.

Welch: I love it. Roll up your sleeves. Yeah, get out your pencil. Get out your notebook. Take your notes. It'll give you a new way to meet the text and to meet the Lord in the text itself. Great. Well, let's move on now. Let's move back. Let's go back to Rust for a minute. And you're going to talk a little bit more specifically about how Rust thinks about the genre of epic in relationship to the Book of Ether. And then that's going to move us into another special article that I'm excited to talk about with you.

Davis: Yeah, so this tees up a discussion of a comparative article that Joe Spencer provides us. But before we get into that, yeah, it's important to think about epic and the genre of epic. And a couple of scholars, beginning with Hugh Nibley and then continuing with Richard Rust, have considered this question, like, is the Book of Mormon an epic? Does it merit that title or that designation? And there's debates both ways. And you can kind of, I guess it's kind of like the way religious studies scholars debate the meaning of religion, right? That's never going to be fully settled. The definition of that term, defining that term, is the point of religious studies. That's kind of what generates the field itself, is to keep thinking endlessly and never in a final way about what religion is. And in this question of what is epic, we get to debate, you know, does it pertain here? But I think it's a useful question, even if you end up deciding now it's not epic. It's at least useful to consider it because there are elements that feel epic about the Book of Mormon, right? It's written on this grand broad scale. It has massive consequential things happening, right? The fate of the world, the fate of humanity, the fate of entire nations and gods, right? Humans and gods are interconnecting and having a dialogue and a relationship. And so, all those thing’s kind of put us in mind of epic. And so, Rust, you know, he brings in a few literary scholars who define epic as a long narrative poem on a serious subject told in a formal and elevated style and centered on a heroic or quasi divine figure on whose actions depends on the fate of a tribe or a nation or humans. And so, he goes on to say that, you know, the Book of Mormon fits a lot of that except maybe the poetry part, right? It's not written as poetry. Another scholar says that even durable and persuasive epics may appear as prose rather than as verse. So even there, there's some room to consider that the Book of Mormon might be an epic. When it comes down to the Book of Ether itself, the argument gets a little more difficult because the Book of Ether is so short, right? It doesn't have just in its own size that sense of, or that feel of being an epic. And yet it is dealing with these epic themes. So, Hugh Nibley is the one who really kind of argues that maybe if the book of Ether itself, as we have it today, isn't in epic form, it is derived from something that was--that the original work of Ether, the original record of the Jaredites from which it is derived was a much larger, more epic kind of tale.

So, that's enough, right? Just that much of a concession that it may have been originally in epic is enough for Joe Spencer to sort of launch into his project comparing the Book of Mormon to another work that derives from epic, and that's the Bhagavad Gita. Now, the Gita is just one chapter, if it is. I think it's almost if the Book of Mormon.

But it's just one small, thin chapter from a much larger encyclopedic-length work called the Mahabharata, which I am told it's the longest poem in existence. It's the very largest single work of poetry. And so truly an epic. By almost any definition, the Mahabharata is epic. And so, like the Book of Ether, the Bhagavad Gita has been sort of excerpted out of it and sort of denatured from its original context. And so, to understand either of these two books, it's important to sort of recontextualize them and again using imagination, sort of resituate them in these sorts of epic contexts that they come from. And once you do that, you start to see some things.

And so, Joe Spencer is interested in how both texts preach and commend to their audience a virtue. In the case of the Bhagavad Gita, the virtue is devotion. So, I should back up and explain a little bit just for anyone who hasn't read or isn't familiar with the Bhagavad Gita. It’s mostly a devotional text, but the larger context is of an interfamilial conflict. Again, another sort of interesting comparative echo with the Book of Mormon, right? This sort of civil war between brothers or cousins that has come about. And how that all comes to be is the larger story of the Mahabharata. And

Davis: The main character in the Bhagavad Gita is a man named Arjuna, who finds himself on the brink of this sort of final conflict with his cousins. And he's distraught over it. Even though he and his clan are in the right, he's distressed about the prospect of having to kill his own members of his own extended family. And so, he's distraught.

He's talking about this with his charioteer as they go into battle and his charioteer happens to be Krishna. And Arjuna doesn't know it at first, but Krishna is a god, right? An avatar of one of the great Hindu gods. And so, as their conversation proceeds, Arjuna starts to notice that this charioteer, there's more to him than meets the eye. There's something going on. And so anyway, he eventually recognizes that Krishna is a divinity and asks him to reveal himself fully to him. And so, he's given this sort of grand vision of Krishna in his universal form that encompasses everything, and he witnesses this awe-inspiring spectacle beyond human comprehension, beyond what words can convey. And he realizes the sort of limitless magnificence of Krishna and becomes aware of his ultimate reality and of him as the source of all existence. So, this sort of unveiling happens. So that's the sort of crescendo, right? of the entire Mahabharata. It happens right here in the, and that's why I guess the Bhagavad Gita gets sort of excerpted out and read on its own sometimes. And so, Joe Spencer points out that it's because of Arjuna's devotion that Krishna is willing to reveal himself as he does. Arjuna has sort of demonstrated his devoutness and his sincerity and so that full revelation comes through devotion.

So, he contrasts that or compares that to the faith of the brother of Jared. He says the parallels between Arjuna's devotion and the brother of Jared's faith are striking. Each in its epic setting essentially produces a startling revelation of the divine, a situation in which the divine figure responds favorably to reveal his true nature. And of course, we're talking in the case of the brother of Jared about his encounter with the Lord on the mountain as he sees the finger of the Lord and then says, oh my gosh, you know, he's stunned and then the Lord says, wow, did you see more than this? And he says, no, show thyself to me, right? And then he sees the Lord as Jesus Christ, pre-mortal sort of spirit body of Jesus Christ. And so, both mark a kind of revolution in religion, linked in each case with an expansion of the possibility of approaching the divine. In the case of the Bhagavad Gita, Spencer notes that whereas before interactions with a divinity were the province of sort of elites, you know, special classes of people, right, priests and philosophers and so forth.

It now becomes possible for someone like Arjuna to see the fullness of divinity. And in the same way, Moroni discourses on how faith is a gateway to spiritual knowledge, right, that anyone, including even the Gentiles, and especially the Gentiles, they must come up to that faith that the brother of Jared had and exercise faith to achieve the same kind of spiritual insight that the brother of Jared had received. So, all of that is sort of just an interesting comparison of how the spiritual possibilities expand to a larger audience through the revolution of these visions.

Welch: Yeah, it's so fascinating and it genuinely is really illuminating to compare these two texts. They're so different in some ways and yet the central vision is so compelling and so similar and then Joe just shows how they kind of, I think he says in the case of the Bhagavad Gita, the initial kind of humanness is shown to open onto the God's actual great transcendence.

Whereas on the contrary for the brother of Jared, you know, he makes the point that the brother of Jared initially only saw Christ in a cloud. So, he probably had this unembodied--the cloud kind of is the symbol of his unembodied transcendent state. And then, so he had, it goes in the opposite direction there where God's transcendence is shown to reach its culmination in his particularity, in his human body as the brother of Jared sees him, as he will be unflushed thousands of years in the future. And so, it was really illuminating to put these two texts side by side like that.

To me, the point that stood out the most was the implications for us. And I treat this in a chapter of my own book on Ether, which we'll talk about here in just a minute. But in one of those chapters, I say that one of the central problems that preoccupies Moroni is exactly how the future Gentiles to whom he's so oriented, he sees us in vision, I call him at one point the first prophet of the latter days because he genuinely saw our day and could diagnose our ills. So, the question that worried him was, how are these Gentiles going to be saved because they're not of the house of Israel? So, they're not born into the covenant. And all along in, you know, Nephi has helped us understand the covenant and Christ go hand in hand as these joint engines of our salvation.

But exactly how, I think, hasn't been worked out. And I think here he finds his answer, right? That Gentiles can be saved in Christ even though they are not born into the covenant. They can be numbered among the covenant through faith. Faith is the key because of course, the brother of Jared and the Jaredite people were also non-covenantal people, pre-Abrahamic. They predated the Abrahamic covenant. And so, they...The fact that the brother of Jared could see Christ through his faithfulness and receive salvation, that provides a model for latter-day Gentiles that through our faith, if we can exercise the kind of mighty faith in Christ that the brother of Jared did, we too can be numbered among those of the covenant and can be saved in Christ that way.

I don't know if this is a problem that really keeps us awake at night anymore. I think that theological problem was largely solved by the apostle Paul in the book of Romans. So, I think we have a good understanding that all people have equal access to Christ, but I think it was a problem that really preoccupied Moroni and that he found his answer right here in faith. The faith of the brother of Jared is the model for the faith of the Gentiles in the latter days.

Davis: Good point, yeah. There's so much that happens after you've made that connection, but you have to make the connection first. And yeah, Moroni, like you said, he finds the answer in the brother of Jared, a non-Israelite, pre-Christian man of faith, whose faith then becomes knowledge, right? And that's another sort of transformation that Hardy notes.

Welch: Well, maybe this is a good moment then to transition. This is kind of a special day for me throughout this whole series. Now we're very close to the Book of Mormon, but we've highlighted in each episode the Maxwell Institute's brief theological introduction to whatever book we're looking at in that episode. And today we're looking at the Book of Ether, and I happen to have written the brief theological introduction to the Book of Ether with this beautiful... Oh, thank you, thank you. Mostly I'm holding it up so you can appreciate the beautiful woodcut illustration by Brian Kershisnik on the cover. It's so stunning.

Maybe I'll take a second just to say, I often will hold this up so that our listeners and watchers can see the cover. These books feel so good in your hand. I'll give a shout out to the book designer, Doug Thomas. The quality of the paper, the beauty of the design, and just everything about it from its size to its shape to its tactile feel are a pleasure to read. So well done, I had nothing to do with any of that. Well done to the production team there.

I wanted to share one chapter, chapter four, from my brief theological introduction. And I start with another question that I think haunts Moroni. How does language become scripture? All of us write things down every day on our phones with pen and paper, laundry list, a note to our family. How does written language become scripture? How and especially when can ordinary language become infused with the power and spiritual authority of scripture? And, since we know, and Moroni knows better than any of us that scriptures. How can human imperfection and human limitation be overcome so that a text can become … “scripturalized” is the word. That's not a very lovely word at all, but it's a useful word that scholars use to talk about this process. Moroni knows that the work that he is working on has an incredible import for the future. It will be the very means of salvation history, the fulfillment of covenant for Jews and for Gentiles. The coming forth of the Book of Mormon will inaugurate the Zion-building project to prepare the world for the coming of Christ. This book, it needs to be up for the task and he's asking himself, is he up for the task to wrap it up and put it in its final form in which it will come forth?

My overall suggestion in this chapter four is that the 16 stones that the brother of Jared fabricates and then brings and offers to the Lord for his divine touch, that these 16 stones are a symbol that allowed Moroni and us as readers to understand what scripture is and how scripture can make that transformation from language to powerful text that can act on our hearts.

And then in addition, I think that to understand Moroni's theory of scripture, we have to grasp his understanding of Christ and the character of Christ's own divine power. So those are the two points that I try to make in this chapter. And I start with something that I just noticed. It was one of these little things that I started to notice and then became obsessed with and really opened the Book of Mormon for me. And that is that Moroni and Mormon often use this little phrase, “these things,” as a shorthand for their work of scripture making. I just started to notice this short phrase, “these things,” pop up again and again, and I started to take note of how they were used. And I saw that in many cases, not every case, but many, most cases, they're used to describe the work that Mormon and Moroni are doing to produce and bring forth the Book of Mormon.

Welch: Our listeners most famously probably remember in Moroni 10-4, “when you shall receive these things, I would exhort you that you should ask God if these things are not true.” So, there we see how this phrase is used. When you start to really dig in though, “these things” isn't so much the physical object, right? Those, Mormon, and Moroni just call them the plates. And it's not actually so much the teachings that are contained in the book. Those they tend to call words, right? Rather, “these things” is often used when they're discussing the future coming forth of the Book of Mormon. And as I just mentioned, this is a moment that Moroni and even Mormon and Nephi imagined many times when the Book of Mormon will come forth in the latter days to do the work that it's destined to do. Will it be a success, or will it be a failure?

And so that's the context, this context of great tension where we see this word, “these things.” So, I started to wonder what exactly do they have in mind by these things? So, I consulted Webster's 1828 Dictionary, which can be a helpful resource to see as Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon, what words would he have used to convey certain meanings. And so, in that dictionary, we see that the primary sense of the word “thing” in this dictionary is not an object. Like maybe we would think about it just like some object, a thing. This is a thing right here. No, the primary meaning of “thing” is an event or a happening in 1828.

And so, this helped me to understand that for Mormon and Moroni, these things that they're talking about are the events or the happenings of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon as it would be in the latter days when it is received and read by its readers, precisely the way that it's used in Moroni 10-4, which we just read, right? Writing needs a faithful reader to become scripture. Until then, when it's just an object, when it's just writing on plates, its potential and its power are locked away. It's the reader, not the writer so much, who holds the key to unlock scriptural power and potential in language. That's what I think we should draw from this phrase, “these things,” and the way that it is used.

And Ether 12 allows us to really zoom in on this. How is it that these things, the Book of Mormon, will be made strong? And in this discussion here in Ether 12 of weakness and grace, as you'll remember Morgan, and we'll touch on this in a moment, he uses this phrase, these things, right? Specifically in this context, how will these things, the Book of Mormon, be made strong to the Gentiles? What happens if the Gentiles reject it? And the Lord reassures him, they will be made strong unto them, unto its readers, when the Lord touches them, the readers, with grace and with charity. So Mormon is reassured in that moment that the success of the Book of Mormon will be determined by the way that it's received by its reader, who is acted upon by the Spirit, by divine influence. And this, I think, really quells his anxiety. No longer does he have this kind of writer-centered theology of scripture, where it all hangs on him and his ability to do it perfectly. Now he has a reader-centered theology of scripture, where it's not the infallibility of the writer, it is scripture is made powerful by a special kind of reading, right? A special kind of reading that's characterized by faith and by charity, not by miraculous writing or language. Miraculous writing and language do exist, but scripture doesn't have to be that. And this is a great reassurance to Moroni that he in fact can undertake this work that he's been given. So, then I noticed that this same

Welch: Sort of pregnant phrase, these things, also shows up in the brother of Jared's mouth right at the climactic moment when he offers the stones that he has made, which so far are just ordinary stones, right? Although they are the product of his intense labor, he offers these stones to the Lord and asks the Lord to touch them, illuminate them, and give them divine power. This is what the brother of Jared prays in Ether chapter three, verse three: “Oh Lord, look upon me in pity and turn away thine anger from this thy people. Suffer not that they shall go forth across this raging deep in darkness but behold these things which I have molten out of the rock." So, there's that phrase again.

And I think this is where Moroni makes the connection between his work and the work of the brother of Jared. There are these two parallel stories happening at the same time. The brother of Jared's anxiety in approaching the Lord, Moroni's anxiety about the fate of the plates of the Book of Mormon. But in all these cases, the Lord accepts the humble human offering, and He gives it divine light and divine power. Of course, the brother of Jared's stones is illuminated. They shine forth in the darkness of the Jaredite barges as we read in chapter three. Likewise, Moroni sees the coming forth of the Book of Mormon in the exact same imagery, right? In Mormon chapter eight. This is confusing because you say Mormon, but this is Moroni in chapter eight and he writes this, this the Book of Mormon “shall be brought out of darkness into light according to the word of God.

Yea, it shall be brought out of the earth, and it shall shine forth out of darkness, and come unto the knowledge of the people, and it shall be done by the power of God." So once again, we see that same phrase that puts the Jaredite stones and the Book of Mormon, the work of producing and receiving the Book of Mormon as parallel symbols for each other. So, the stones become light at the very moment that they are offered forth. The plates become scripture at the very moment that they are offered forth and received by a reader. God is absolutely involved in transforming language into scripture.

But it happens now of reception, at the moment of reading, when you and I, Morgan, pick up the Book of Mormon and crack its cover and pray for grace and faith to fill our hearts. That's the moment when the Book of Mormon receives its scriptural power. It's a spiritual process. And to me, that's...To me, that's a very powerful insight. It involves me, right? It implicates me as the reader, and it allows me to share some of that responsibility with Moroni. Moroni had his responsibility. I have my responsibility as a reader, and I play a role in the scriptural power of the Book of Mormon itself.

Davis: I just love how you've drawn those two sorts of questions together. You have a very concrete sort of image of the finger of the Lord touching physical stones and lighting them up with physical light. And it's such a very, you know, of this world sort of image, even though it involves the divine presence, it's still a very, it's easy to picture it in your mind, right?

And yet it connects to a much more abstract process of allowing our hearts to be transformed. Just in the same way that God touches the stones, God can touch our hearts. And it's a less obvious thing. You can't paint it really, you know, the way Arnold Freiberg or somebody else painted the stones being touched and lit up. But it is the same kind of transformation. And I just love that you've brought those images together and showed us that we can read the Book of Mormon on multiple levels. A child can understand the story of the Lord touching these stones. And then on that can be built this deeper level of understanding about spiritual transformation.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you mentioned the finger, the finger of Christ, and maybe I'll just say one more thing about that, because I think this might set us up for something that you're going to share with us later. But I was really struck by that image of the finger. It wasn't the whole hand, it wasn't the whole arm, it was just the finger, and I started thinking about the finger of the Lord and what that might convey as a symbol. In the scriptures, oftentimes we'll see the hand of the Lord or the arm of the Lord. And these are both images that convey the mighty power, right? Divine power to intervene in history and to act in mighty and powerful and apparent ways. But the finger, the divine finger, I think works in a little different way. And I make the case that a finger is not very big. It really is only powerful in conjunction with a hand and with other fingers, but a finger is weak. So, I argue that the finger of the Lord might in some ways lead us to think about divine weakness, which is a concept that can be jarring, I think, at first because we want our God to be powerful. We are relying on Him to rescue us and save us. So, we want our God to be powerful. But Paul, really, the apostle Paul really leads us to think about Christ as an embodiment of divine weakness. And I think as Latter-day Saints, we can look to D&C 121 to understand what that means, right?

Divine weakness is about a God who relinquishes control and dominion and compulsion, and who works by persuasion and by long suffering and gentleness and meekness and love unfeigned. And that helped me to think newly about this moment in this scene between the brother of Jared and the Lord. And maybe you remember this moment, Morgan, when the brother of Jared sees the finger of the Lord and then he falls in fear. He's overwhelmed in fear. And we actually--this moment is narrated twice. This is where Amy Sinflake helps us because she points out how actually this is narrated twice. And the first time there's one explanation given, right? The Lord asks, Moroni, why did you fall? And he says, because I was afraid that you would smite me. I was worried about violence from your finger. The second time through, Moroni gives a slightly different explanation of why the brother of Jared was overwhelmed and fell.

He says, “he saw the finger of Jesus, which when he saw, he fell with fear, for he knew that it was the finger of the Lord.” So why was it that simply knowledge of the finger of the Lord, not a concern about divine violence, but knowledge that what he was seeing was the finger of the Lord, why would that make him fear? Well, maybe it was precisely because the finger that he saw was “as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood.”

He realizes that his God is not this superhuman superhero of immense size and power. His finger, the finger of the God he is depending on to carry his people safely across the ocean, it looks like his own finger. It looks no more powerful or impressive than his own finger. And I think this is, I think what for a moment makes him fear. This is the God that I'm calling on, this is the God that I'm depending on to save me and to save my people. Can he, do it? And he comes to faith, right? He comes to faith. He rises when the Lord invites him to stand. He stands and he meets his Lord, and he sees in the spirit body of Christ his divine power. So, he's able to summon the faith in a God who is “weak” in certain respects in the ways that we just talked about, right? Who governs not by overwhelming force or by overwhelming coercion, but by love and by persuasion and by small and simple means.

And I think this is the faith, this is the flavor of faith that we in the latter days are being asked to emulate. It's this faith in a God who governs by persuasion and not by coercion. And that can be hard, like I said, because we want a God who's large and in charge and is going to make sure that we are carried home safely. Instead, we must develop the trust and the faith and the love for a Savior who saves us by persuasion and by love and by invitation and by persistence, who will never ever give up, but who will always allow each one of his children, the agency to make their own choices, and will allow the world to play out as it does, where agency has real consequences and a real force. I think that requires a different kind of faith, a deeper kind of faith and a more demanding kind of faith.

Davis: You know, I was really struck as you were talking about that, that, that, well, there's another image that comes up for me. And again, this can only happen maybe for a latter-day reader of the book of Mormon, because I think of the image from the New Testament of Jesus, um, stooping on the ground, uh, when they bring, I think it's the, it's the woman taken in adultery, right? And they're accusing her before him. And what, what does he do while all that accusation is happening?

He's tracing in the ground with his finger, waiting. He's waiting for the right moment, waiting for his turn to speak, and tracing, I think maybe we're supposed to see there an echo perhaps of the writing of the 10 Commandments on the tablets before Moses perhaps, right? So, this juxtaposition of the mighty, powerful, overwhelming presence of God divine being, but now in a moment of, of, yeah, patience and waiting. Um, and yet he's about to deliver a powerful punch, right? But he is waiting for the right moment, waiting for the reception, the receptivity of his audience. And anyway, I just, I just couldn't help but connect those two images. Cause I, I do think that the brother of Jared must have been overwhelmed to realize this being is surprising. It's not always the overwhelming experience. It's going to sometimes be the quiet, gentle waiting.

Welch: Yes. Yeah, the God that was hidden in the cloud is different than he expected to see and drew forth from him a different kind of faith. Well, Morgan, our listeners know that I always end these episodes by asking to share a favorite passage or scripture with each other. I just shared with you my favorite part, which is when the brother of Jared sees the finger of the Lord. So, I'll turn the time over to you now to take us home and to finish our episode by sharing with us some thoughts and some passages from the book of Ether that have the most spiritual meaning for you personally.

Davis: Well, I'm a weak person, so I always love this very reassuring passage that everyone has probably read and some of us have memorized because it's so pertinent to so much of what we suffer and experience in life, Ether 12.27. “And if men come unto me, I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness, that they may be humble. And my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me. For if they humble themselves before me and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them." And then he goes on to talk about how he will show the Gentiles that they need to acknowledge their weakness and learn to have charity, right, and faith, and that those are the things that bring us to righteousness.

As he talks about weakness, I think there's a. I think sometimes we make a mistake in assuming that what he means there is sin. Um, the, the, the weakness equates to sin. Sometimes it does, right? Our weaknesses can be our sins, but in other ways, sin is the result or the outcome of a certain response to our innate weaknesses. So, I think of weakness as our vulnerability to fear, right, to pain, to want, to anger, to desire. It's our woundedness. It's our mortal condition.

But even more than that, it's our sort of vulnerability in general. Some of our weakness is very human. We're forgetful. We're physically weak. We can only do so much and so forth. But some of our weakness is shared with the divine. Our Heavenly Father is a person who is open to relationships with other beings who break his heart and cause him to weep. And this sort of openness and this vulnerability can be thought of as the weakness of God in 1 Corinthians chapter one. We have this beautiful passage where Paul talks about Christ being crucified and his crucifixion is a stumbling block and foolishness to many. But to the chosen, Christ is, “the power of God and the wisdom of God, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” So, Christ is God doing the unexpected. He's demonstrating the wisdom in what seems foolish and the strength, not just in what seems to be weakness, but through actual weakness. He is, he has made himself totally vulnerable and that capacity to be wounded, to be hurt, to want something so badly and not be able to achieve it because of circumstances that we can't fully determine, because other people have agency, because circumstances are such that we can't control everything, not even Christ, not even God is willing to interpose himself in that way.

And so, it creates this really profound vulnerability. And Jesus came to reveal that. So, the verse in Ether becomes a version of the Beatitudes. Right, it's as if Jesus is saying “blessed are the weak for they shall be strong.” What sort of strength are we talking about here? Is the intent that, is the intent that we overcome all our weakness so that we're never vulnerable again?

So, that we're never prone to have our heart broken again? No, that can't be what the goal is, because that very vulnerability and openness is what makes God the kind of God that we want to worship and have an everlasting relationship with. And those very seeds are given as gifts to us as well. “I give unto men weakness.” These vulnerabilities, these heartaches are part of God's gift to us and an invitation to join with him in the kind of life that he lives. And Christ still bears the scars, right? This openness and this vulnerability continue. I think that's kind of, for me, that's what I see in the stigmata, right, the scars that Christ still bears today, as though to say I'm still wounded, I'm still willing to be wounded to make myself available and open to relationship with you struggling, floundering, imperfect beings that I love more than anything. Find something powerful in the common sort of heritage of weakness that we share with our divine Creator.

Welch: I love that. You said two things that are always going to stay with me. One is Ether 12:27 as a beatitude, right? Belonging there in the Sermon on the Mount, blessed are the weak. For you shall be made strong, but with that asterisk, right? Not to take away our weakness because our weaknesses are a divinely given gift. And the second thing you said that really struck me is that our weakness is not primarily sin. Sin might be what happens when we refuse to accept our weakness as gifts. Sin is what happens when we reject the weakness that was divinely given to us and refuse to see it as a part of our divine nature. That's where sin comes in. That's where we start to rely on the arm of flesh, and we close our heart to God when we deny our weakness.

Davis: We seek to cover our weaknesses, right, or cover our sins, and be strong to project ourselves as stronger than we are, or ever have any right to be.

Welch: Yeah. Well, Morgan, I think that is the perfect place to conclude our conversation today. I so appreciate your preparation and your faith and your testimony, which you've shared with us so powerfully here today. Thank you for being on the Maxwell Institute's Book of Mormon Studies Podcast.

Davis: It's been wonderful. Thank you.