Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Mosiah Scholarship with Daniel Becerra

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Maxwell Institute's Book of Mormon Studies Podcast. My name is Rosalynde Welch and I'm joined today by my friend Dr. Daniel Becerra.

Daniel is an assistant professor of ancient scripture here at Brigham Young University. His research focuses on the history and texts of early Christianity. He is also an eminent guest on this podcast because he is one of the co-editors of this little book, Book of Mormon Studies, an introduction and guide, which has indeed been my guide as I've put together this podcast, thinking about how to introduce listeners to the basics of this emerging academic field, Book of Mormon Studies. It's an incredibly useful little book for giving you the lay of the land and introducing some of the highlights in the history of people who have read the Book of Mormon from this academic lens. So thank you, Daniel, for joining us today, and thank you for your work on that book.

Daniel Becerra: Yeah, thanks. It's good to be here.

Welch: Yeah. So today, we are going to be focusing on some highlights of the scholarly literature on the Book of Mosiah. We've already had a deep dive into the text with Dr. Nick Frederick. So today we're going to be focusing in on what scholars have found, as they have read these 29 chapters carefully. And Daniel's going to take it away for us first, introducing a really very, actually, unusual and interesting article. So take it away, Daniel.

Becerra: Thanks. Before I get into that, let me give you a kind of sense for why I chose the articles I did. So as you probably talked about in previous episodes, there are different ways to study the Book of Mormon, right? Or different lenses through which we might view it. And those lenses can be distinguished by the kinds of questions that one takes to the text. So historical lenses tend to add questions like who, what, where, when, why? Like, you know, who was King Benjamin? Where did he live? What language is he speaking? When did this take place, etc?Literary questions are like, you know, it's interested in the text itself as opposed to the world behind the text. So what is the structure of this verse? What kind of genre is it? What's the symbolism? What other texts is it alluding to? And then you have theological lenses, which are more concerned with questions about God and salvation and things like that. So my interests-and you have like religious lenses which are like, you know, how does this apply to me and things like that. So if you think about the study of the Book of Mormon is looking through a kaleidoscope, right? And you look at the text, you're asking a certain set of questions and you change the text, or you change the angle of the kaleidoscope and you're asking a new kind of questions and you see new things, right? So questions are how we excavate this. So the questions that I'm primarily interested in the Book of Mormon are theological and ethical questions. So I'm interested in what the book says about God and Jesus and the kind of person one ought to be. So that kind of informs why I chose the articles that I did today. So the articles come from a volume, it's called Are We Not All Beggars?: Reading Mosiah 4. So it's part of, it's the proceeds from, not the proceeds, the proceedings from the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar. So a bunch of scholars, aspiring scholars get together, they spend like two weeks reading, you know, four verses and then they write papers about it. So it comes from there. The editors are yourself and a woman named Diana Brown, whose training is in sociology if I'm not mistaken. So the first article I want to talk about is hers. It's called King Benjamin's, or even at this time, King Benjamin's Religion of Awareness. And the purpose of this article is to kind of, she wants to read Benjamin's response as a or sermon as a response to the question, what should religion look like? Okay. And she also wants to push back against this character of religion that it's fundamentally a kind of self-serving transactional enterprise that people engage in primarily to help themselves. Okay. So this is her goal. How does Benjamin's sermon speak to this question and does it push back against it, Right? So she points out a few things in the sermon to make this point. And as I'm going through, if anything kind of jumps out at you, feel free to stop me or ask a question for clarification. I can kind of do my best.

Welch: Okay, that sounds good

Becerra: So to make this larger argument that religion, at least in Benjamin's mind, is not all about self-serving, I do certain things to get myself into heaven. She points out first Benjamin's ideal of submissiveness in his sermon. So he says, you know, we have to become submissive like a child. Okay, that's what kind of salvation entails. And she notes that At least in the end goal in Benjamin's mind, at least as it pertains to mortal life, is not to be lifted up or exalted in any sense, right? It's to be keenly aware of how low one actually is. Benjamin uses the language lower than the dust of the earth. And then to be keenly attentive to the needs of others. These are interrelated things, so the assumption is that as one becomes aware of their own lowliness and dependency on God, that they're more able to recognize and sympathize, and empathize with the loneliness and dependency of other people. And the hope is that this translates into wanting to help them. Like the idea that when you're wounded, you're able to see the woundedness of other people and you're more inclined to reach out because of that. So she also notes that it's not just a matter of action for Benjamin. You know, he talks a lot about helping the needy and reaching out and things like that too, but Benjamin's ultimate goal is not just to alleviate need, right? It's to change the hearts of people. And you see this when he's talking about, you know, I would that you say in your hearts that I not give, that I give not because I have not, but if I had, I would give, right? So here, like he's wanting the transformation of the heart. And even if that transformation isn't reflected in me giving to the poor, the transformation is what's important, right?

Welch: Yeah, so he'--and tell me if I, correct me if I'm wrong. At this moment in time, King Benjamin is speaking specifically to people who are poor, right? People who actually don't have; they're just living from day to day. So they don't have any excess. So they see the beggar. But--and so he's not letting them off the hook anyway, right? He's saying you just because you're poor doesn't mean that you're absolved of any responsibility to the beggar. You too have a responsibility, but it's a kind of internal responsibility. It's about being aware of the beggar and opening your eyes to him or her. Is that where we're at?

Becerra: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, even with the, like, if the goal was just to get the beggar the resources he or she needs, right, then the poor people who didn't have those resources would be off the hook. But that's not it, right? The goal is the change of heart, both for the person who doesn't have resources to share and for the person who does, because they need to be impelled to share those when they do have them, right? So it's about character and perception of oneself and others more than it's about action or the effects of that action. And she makes a really interesting argument that I hadn't thought about before, is that part of the ideal response to somebody in need, as Benjamin understands it in Diana Brown's
reading, has to do with how we relate to time. So she proposes that our social location or, you know, our financial status or our culture or whatever, and specifically our financial security, it can influence how we relate to time. So she says, and I'm quoting here, “the well-off or the financially well-off can sit back and contemplate the passage of time, monitoring their progress and preparing for the future. The vulnerable, meanwhile, are thrust into a state where sheer survival is the goal. To them, time is not a dot marking their place along a journey. It is an immediate and stressful now." Okay, and that's the end of the quote. So put a little bit differently, the future and all of its possibilities might be more visible in the kind of temporal landscape of somebody who is financially well off, right? Whereas with the disadvantaged, the landscape, how they perceive time, it's full of fog and they can only see like a few feet in front of them, right? And they're not thinking about what's over that hill 10 miles away. They're thinking about just not tripping over the rocks in front of them, right?

Welch: So sort of necessity there they're kind of forced to live in the moment.

Becerra: Exactly.

Welch: They're so reliant on the universe on God on other people. They can't even plan steps ahead

Becerra: Yeah, exactly. So Benjamin, in a sense, is encouraging his listeners to try to see the world through this more limited landscape of time, right? Through the eyes of a beggar. So in this kind of understanding, living a good life involves changing one's view of the world to fit those who are in need. Like we have to appropriate their eyes and their perspective. And the hope is that as we do that, that's gonna translate into some kind of ethical action, right? So both the feeling, both feeling the desire to help and actually helping require you to kind of view time in this more immediate and urgent way. And you get this sense when Benjamin like explicitly invites people to see themselves as beggars. He says, and behold, even at this time, you have been calling on his name and begging for remission of your sins. And has he suffered that you've begged in vain? No, he's poured out of spirit upon you, right? So he's saying, look, you're not beggars in the material sense of the word, right? But you are beggars in a certain sense, in a spiritual sense. So use that as a vehicle to understand what these other people are experiencing and allow that to shape your soul on a productive way. So the final kind of premise in Brown's argument is that Benjamin wants his listeners to reframe how they understand the promise of prosperity given to their ancestors in the Book of Mormon, right? So there's this thread of discourse in the Book of Mormon that if you keep the commandments, you're gonna prosper. If you don't, you won't, you'll be destroyed, right? And Brown is reading this story of Benjamin as perhaps the people that Benjamin is talking to, the people who are less inclined to help the needy, the people who think that they have brought this disadvantage on themselves. Maybe this kind of thinking that if we're good, we're gonna be blessed materially, that's the kind of logic that's informing how they respond to these people. So Benjamin's like, no, that's not the right way to think about it.

Welch: Well, and they specifically run it backwards, right? Which isn't justified by the text. It's one thing to say, you know, if you are righteous, you will be blessed, you will prosper in some way. But that's not the same as saying that if you are not prosperous, you are not righteous, right?

Becerra: Right, or if you're wealthy you're righteous. Right? Yeah.

Welch: None of those conclusions follow and yet, I think as humans, we so often jump to that kind of generalization. And just as you say, and as Brown points out, King Benjamin's use of the beggar as an example, it specifically refutes that way of warping the prosperity promise, yeah.

Becerra: Yeah, exactly. And you see this like textually in the New Testament too. So she points out how a common formulation of the promise is that you know, in second Nephi 4.4, in as much as you shall keep my commandments, you shall prosper in the land. And in as much as you will not keep my commandments, it doesn't say you won't be prosperous. It just says that you'll be cut off from my presence, right? So in this sense, the prosperity to expect from obedience is not necessarily temporal, but spiritual with the presence of God with you, right? So Benjamin, again, he wants his people to avoid the assumption that one's temporal conditions are a reflection of their spiritual conditions, in the way that you say. And he drives this home by talking about he himself, who's a king, who arguably has the highest status in the society, right? He's mortal, he's old, he's getting frail. He says he's subject to all matter of infirmities of body and mind. He says, “I am like yourselves, I am no better than yourselves.” So he's kind of leveling the social hierarchy to say, look it doesn't even with like, I think he would say that he's, he actually does say that I'm trying to do my best and I've, you know, my, my garments are clean from your blood. So he's living a righteous life. And even in that righteous life, he still is lacking in some sense in very important ways, right? So the takeaway here is that there's nothing you can do to earn a blessed state before God because we're all unprofitable servants, right? And we'll always be in God's debt. Anything you do, you're not gonna even the playing field. So rather we should see our, as a consequence, we should see our blessedness as a gift from God and then allow that understanding to translate into giving gifts from others. So ultimately, theologically speaking, this is an invitation to imitate God's benevolence in the sense that he gives us things that we don't earn. So we should look at others and give them things that maybe they don't, they can't provide for themselves, right? And he assumes that once people make this kind of internal change in their heart and perspective that righteous conduct will follow them, obviously. So going back to the original question that Brown is kind of pushing back against, you know, whether religion is self-serving and how does Benjamin come down on this question? Brown suggests that for Benjamin, religion is not self-serving because we can't actually earn anything from God. Like regardless of what we do, it's not like we're getting, like, right?

Welch: Yeah. Yeah.

Becerra: All we can do is remember our own nothingness and his goodness and then just allow that to orient ourselves to others outward in love.

Welch: Yeah, exactly. We can't ever accumulate credit in God's eyes because as soon as we do anything, as soon as we draw breath in the morning, let alone do a good deed, He's already given us that breath. He's already giving us our life from moment to moment. So there's no possible way to build up kind of credit and then hold that up to God and say, you know, I deserve what I get. We're forced always to recognize our dependence on his, as you say, his generosity. And all that he asks is that we then turn around and in the same way bestow that kind of unearned grace on the people around us..

Becerra: Right. Yeah, right. It's not an economic transaction, right?

Welch: No, yeah. You know, I loved this article. I thought that she made a couple of really, really good points that I hadn't thought about before, that have to do with the Book of Mormon's overarching ethics of wealth. And this is a theme, of course, that runs through especially the large plates where we see how wealth again and again is the source of the Nephites' downfall. It's the source of the pride that leads to their downfall. And I want to be careful here because I don't want to romanticize poverty. Grinding poverty is not pretty. It's not beautiful and we should seek to alleviate it. So I don't want to romanticize poverty, but there's a way in which I think the Book of Mormon's ideal reader is somebody who is poor in the sense, as you say, that, that they recognize--they're forced to recognize their dependence. There's no possible way that they can pretend like they are self-sufficient. And there's a couple of ways in which that perspective actually gives you a kind of spiritual, I don't want to say advantage, but a spiritual ability. And so she points out, first of all, as you mentioned, that it gives you a different sense of time. And this is the time that Christ asks us to live in, right? He says, consider the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin. He wants us to live in that place where we're not worried about providing for ourselves, but we're acknowledging our reliance on him. That's a lot easier in some ways when you're poor and you can't hide behind your wealth. And the other way she points out is that the poor are able to see the beggar. Before you can respond to the beggar, either materially if you have money or spiritually and emotionally if you don't, you have to see them there. And she makes the point that for the poor because they share so much in common with the beggar who is truly destitute, it's easier for them to see them. And that awareness kind of comes naturally, whereas it doesn't. The wealthy have to sort of discipline themselves and constantly remind themselves of their own nothingness. Whereas it kind of comes naturally as a gift of their way of life for the poor. So I thought that was a really, I hadn't really thought about that before, but I thought they were very convincing points that Brown makes in this piece.

Becerra: Yeah, and that's kind of the rationale behind the rhetorical move that Benjamin makes when he says, you rich people, you're rich, yeah, but like think about the ways in which you're a beggar. Like that seems to be the vehicle, like you're still, like you owe everything you have to God, you're always begging for forgiveness of your sins. So like he's using that experience there as a vehicle to help them understand people who see the world differently and then temporaly. And we can revisit some of these themes too when we get to the second article that I prepared.

Welch: Yeah, these themes are gonna be running throughout our whole conversation today. Most of our pieces just sort of by happenstance focus on King Benjamin's address, which I am not sad about at all because it is so powerful. Well, I'll take the reins now for a minute, Daniel, and share another piece of scholarship on the Book of Mosiah, and that is--listeners will recognize that almost every time I preview the brief theological introduction. This one, the brief theological introduction to the Book of Mosiah was written by James Faulconer, my former colleague here at the Maxwell Institute. And it's a really great one. They're all really good. But I wanted to draw attention in particular to a kind of provocative wager that he makes in the second chapter. And he makes the wager that the book of Mosiah, in the end, is not about, is not fundamentally about the best form of government and the best way of doing politics. In fact, he argues that it actually shows the futility of politics. And this goes against the grain because a lot of scholars have looked at it and said, actually, Mormon's primary question and his primary purpose through this book is the question of government and what kind of government.

Becerra: And so contextually you're talking about how there's a shift from a monarchy to a system of judges and there's like rationale given for why this is better and that's better and things like that.

Welch: Exactly, that's exactly it. Thanks, Daniel. So over the, over the course of the Book of Mosiah, you have this good king contrasted with this bad king, you see Alma refusing to be a king. And then at the end of the book, you see the sons of Mosiah refusing to be kings, and you see Mosiah the Second walking through, in this letter to his people, walking through this sort of involved deliberation about what he should do. And in the end, as we know, he decides to shift the form of government to a kind of reign of judges that is responsive to the voice of the people in certain ways. And so a big question for the rest of the Book of Mormon is: was that a good move or a bad move? Because we'll see in the Book of Alma that it introduces a lot of instability to Zarahemla, a Nephite culture that has some bad outcomes. And yet, having a wicked king also has disastrous outcomes as Mosiah had seen when he read the record of the Zeniffite colony in Lehi-Nephi and saw what had happened with King Noah and also probably, Jim points out, when he translated the Jaredite record and saw how wicked kings sort of hastened the demise of that people. So there's no doubt that this theme is active in the book of Mosiah. Jim argues that in the end, the real theological message of the book is that politics are futile and the atonement is the only thing that can really make people good. He sees this born out, Jim sees this born out in the fact that, when Benjamin at the end of his sermon, is both, crowning his son, Mosiah, and, and proclaiming him as the new king and giving them a new name, he actually confers the new divine name before naming the new king. So he sees that as showing a kind of priority that Benjamin recognizes: that ultimately it's being adopted by God, becoming the children of Christ, and this spiritual new birth that happens through the atonement that is far more efficacious and decisive than the form of government.

Becerra: Yeah, exactly. So in some sense, government is, I mean, problematic government is more the symptom than the actual problem, right? So it's like if you have a king and you get this in Mosiah, for example, in Mosiah 29, if you have a king who's righteous, there's no problem. If you have judges who's righteous, there's no problem, right? But both of those can go astray. Both those systems of government can be problematic if the individual who occupies a certain position is wicked, right? So if you're a good person, the way you express that in, you know, in politics is going to be good, right? So like a good tree, good fruit kind of thing.

Welch: Yeah, that's right. And going even further, if we read between the lines, we see that Mosiah II, King Benjamin's son on whom he conferred the kingdom, was a righteous king, one of the best. And yet, even though he was a righteous king, we had these unbelievers that pop up, start to crop up near the end of the Book of Mosiah, and we see the cracks, right? We see the cracks in Nephite society already forming Why? Not because Mosiah was a bad king, but because the younger generation hadn't been changed, right? They hadn't experienced the mighty change of heart and they hadn't been spiritually reborn. And that's why things start going wrong. So this is Jim Faulkner's thesis here about the book of Mosiah. And in the end, I think I find it fairly persuasive.

Becerra: There's an interesting thing going on like rhetorically and theologically when Benjamin talks about service, because he makes this statement when you're in the service of your fellow human beings, you're only in the service of your God, right? So like he's seeing himself in the individuals that we serve, God is, right? He's equating himself in some sense to those individuals. So like he invites us maybe to look at people and to try to see, look at people perhaps especially people were inclined to ignore or look down upon--and to look for the image of God in them and to find that interaction, to find God in that interaction, right? So part of the logic here is that you know, we serve others, we serve God by serving others because they are, God is a part of who they are. Like, it's this kind of helping us to see each other as or helping to see the divine fingerprint on everyone, as it were.

Welch: I love the way you put that, the divine fingerprint. And it poses its own kind of conundrum, right? Jim very nicely kind of analyzes the logic here. He says, if we don't serve God, we are indebted to God. If we do serve God, we are still unprofitable servants and still indebted to him, like we were saying earlier. And you might say, okay, well, I won't try to serve God at all, I'll try to serve others. But if we serve others, we are serving God.

Becerra: Yeah.

Welch: So, once again, we're right back in that position of being indebted to God. So then the question is, well, why serve him at all? If we're going to be indebted to him, no matter what, why serve him at all? And Jim's answer to that question is that we serve God in order to know him. We serve him because the relationship between master and servant is the only way that we can be in relation to him. And we want, we are necessarily in relation to him as his creatures. So in the end, we serve him based on no outcome at all. Our service is totally divorced from the outcome, but it's just about the relationship.

Becerra: Yeah, good. And I feel like getting to that part, I mean, we've been talking about kind of ethics and changing perspective and things like that. So that might be a good transition to this. The second article I wanted to talk about, which is all about kind of awakening to this new sense of self, which then translates into a new relationship with God. So this article is called Three Awakenings, Encounter, Exchange, and Salvation in Mosiah 2 through 4. So this is also in this volume that I mentioned earlier. It's written by, this article is written by the Rosalynde Welch. So I am contractually obligated by virtue of my presence on this.

Welch: Yes, it was. I want you to know, I want you to know this is totally, totally Daniel's idea. In fact, I'm kind of like, oh, are you sure? So, but I'm, I'm flattered.

Becerra: Like I'm not saying I'm getting a kickback here, but no. Rosalind had nothing to do with this. So this is an article where again, the entire purpose of the volume is to reflect on Benjamin's speech here. So this is, what happened with me with this article? So I read through it and I was like, oh yeah, that's a great argument. And I read through it again, I was like, wait, am I really understanding what's going, like she's just a lot of big words. It's clear you dabble in literature. Like, so as I go through it, feel free to correct me or like nuance what I understand you to be doing. But I feel like I got the gist of it and I'm in agreement, which is why I chose it. Right. So the purpose of I understand it. So you want to look at like the structure, the literary structure of Benjamin's sermon and see what that structure like serves to highlight and then to ask the question.
How do those highlights inform our reading of the text, right? So the argument you want to make is that there is a close relationship between creation and salvation In Benjamin's mind, right? That's important to understand. So you identify three different kind of interrelated movements in the sermon all of which are united by this theme of awakening, to help bring the readers attention to this relationship between creation and salvation So they're awakened in way one, way two, way three. And these all help them get to this conclusion that, okay, creation and salvation are inseparably linked. Is that a fair kind of, okay, good?

Welch: Yeah. Yes, exactly. And so these are three different points in the, I guess going from Mosiah 2 through 4, where the actual word awakening or awake shows up. Yeah.

Becerra: Yeah, exactly. That's kind of the linguistic trigger there. All right, so the first awakening you define as a sinner's awakening to their dependency on God. So this is a person coming to the realization of God's nearness and their own inadequacies and dependency on God. So you see this unfolding originally first in Mosiah 2, right? So a person is becoming awakened to the reality of judgment that awaits them in their sinful state or awakened to the sense of their own guilt.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, can I just add a little detail to that, which is that this comes in this scene at the end of chapter two, that's actually very dark, right? Benjamin is imagining on the one hand the blessed and happy state of those who do well, but on the other hand, the misery of the sinner in judgment before God. And it's actually kind of a difficult passage to read. But as you say, what I noticed is that in verse 38, It says that he awakens his, sorry, “the demands of divine justice to awaken his immortal soul to a lively sense of his own guilt, which doth cause him to shrink from the presence of the Lord.” So yeah, what I kind of read there is that his awakening is an awakening to the idea that he is in relation to God and always has been. He hasn't stood on his own two feet, as if he were a profitable servant.

Becerra: Right.

Welch: He's always been an unprofitable servant, always been indebted to God, and that this realization can be incredibly painful and can make us shrink from the presence of God and want to say, no, I'm separate from you. You have nothing to do with me. I'm my own person. But it's miserable to realize, no, I am an unprofitable servant.

Becerra: Yeah. Yeah, but even in that discomfort, like it's profitable, as you're saying, because, yeah, it shakes you out of the illusion of self-sufficiency, right? You can become aware of your complete and utter conditionality and dependency on God. There's this Greek orthodox theologian who's talking about the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he says something to the effect of, like, for these individuals and for humanity as well, there is no being without being in relation, which is to say, like we can't understand our being with respect to an individual in isolation. Like if I exist, it is because, in some sense, I am connected to God and dependent on God, right? And it's here that we're introduced to this idea that I love that creation and salvation are linked in such a way that creation does not end in Eden, right? So Benjamin invokes this language from Genesis when he says that God is preserving you from day to day lending you breath. Right? So this is Genesis 1, 26-27, and moving on. Right? So in the same way that God breathed the breath of life into Adam and Eden, so he does the humanity on a daily basis and grants them salvation, which is eternal life. So again, like God is continually creating us in some sense throughout the course of their life. And it'll, we'll unpack a little bit more what that means, but a really cool kind of theological kernel there that bears fruit later on. So awakening scene two, we're into Mosiah three. This is Benjamin kind of literally and
figuratively a waking up to the angel's call. Like seemingly he's asleep perhaps, or maybe not, but Benjamin, you know, he's doing something and the angel says, awaken. He says I awakened, right? And you read Benjamin's interactions with the angel as a kind of like a symbol or maybe like a microcosm for the change that occurs between humans and divinity as humans start to participate in this new creation.

Welch: Yeah, and it sort of is in the play of perspectives, right? So when you first open, and it just happens so fast, you can kind of gloss over it, but when it first happens, Benjamin's asleep. So we must be seeing things from the perspective of the angel, right? But then in that next phrase, this is in verse two of chapter three, and I awoke and behold, he stood before me. So suddenly you have this reversal and you're seeing it from Benjamin's perspective. And it's as though the angel has kind of called Benjamin into wakefulness and now Benjamin by his gaze and his view, his beholding, has sort of brought the angel into being as well. So they're sort of together in this scene. They are creating it together, right? They're creating this interaction together, yeah.

Becerra: Yeah, and it's in this, I mean, so you maybe gesture towards this, I don't know how explicit it was, but there's an asymmetry there to begin with, right? You have Benjamin existing in a moment in time in which asymmetry is clear and present before the individual. If we were to kind of abstract this, the change that's going on, it might be representative of just perceiving the gap between human and divine nature and perceiving the ways in which we are active versus how God is active, perceiving our dependency, going back to awakening number two, right? And the consequence of this kind of wake-up call as it was, as it were, hopefully, it kind of, it impels us to kind of consciously participate in God as much as possible, which leads us to kind of the next form of awakening, right? Unless there's anything that you want to add to awakening number two there, yeah.

Welch: Yeah. Now, that was really well summarized, yeah.

Becerra: Okay, good. So awakening number three, we're into Mosiah four. This is the people awakening to their own nothingness, right? So it's kind of an incur, it entails a reoccurrence of awakening one and two. So this scene, Benjamin's people have just become aware of their own carnal state of nothingness and they fall to the earth and they cry out for help, right? So now Benjamin is essentially playing the same role as the angel, right? Which is to awaken the people to the means and conditions of salvation through Jesus Christ, okay, so articulating the same kind of message that the angel said to him. And in so doing, he unfolds what salvation looks like, you know, this new creation, becoming a new creature, being born again, that we mentioned earlier. So salvation, as Benjamin seems to frame it, is as much awakening to one's old nothingness and vulnerability and limitations and transience, as it is the experience of God taking that kind of unformed earthly matter and shaping it into his image and likeness, right? So the relationship here is that salvation is an iterative process, right? It continues, as much as it is an eschatological one. which is to say it's about something that happens in mortality and it's entering into the pearly gates, so to speak. And these three scenes of awakening in some sense kind of help us see what that looks like in real time. And the value of this piece is that we tend to view salvation and creation as largely kind of separate things. Like creation is pathological, meaning that it happened in the beginning. Salvation is eschatological, meaning that it happens after the final judgment, right? But in your reading, you're collapsing these two things, or you're demonstrating how Benjamin does that in a way that I think is true, not only to how the Book of Mormon talks about these things, but to my own experience as well, and the kind of moral formation and cultivation of soul and virtue that happens throughout the course of one's life.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. You know, I just have to thank you, Daniel. It is an incredible gift to have a thoughtful and intelligent reader read your work. So this really has been a treat for me to hear
you kind of reflect on it and reflect it back to me. You did, yes, you very well understood and I think you very lucidly laid out. This is a complex piece and I use words like phenomenology and
this isn't exactly a public-facing piece, but it really does get at some themes in the Book of Mormon that are most live and vibrant to me as a disciple. And just as you said, it's this idea that creation is ongoing. Which brings, I mean, on the one hand, that brings incredible hope because it means that God can do something new in the world. And that there can be an escape from what feels like the determinisms of history. If God is still creating the world, something new can happen. But there's another flip side to the idea that creation is still happening and that's that. I have to acknowledge my dependency on him every day, with every breath. I can never think of myself as that profitable servant because I'm always continually being replenished and renewed by God's creative power. And then in the same way, just as you said, what it means to find salvation in Christ likewise is an ongoing process. And it's something that is happening now and today. I see that theme in the Book of Mormon starting way back in 1 Nephi 8 when Lehi partakes of the fruit of the tree of life there. And it isn't like the angel says, look, this is where you're going to go at the end of your life. He in the dream, in the real-time of the dream, he partakes of that fruit then. And he experiences the overwhelming sweetness and lightness. And that's wonderful, right? That's so great. But there's another side to it, which is that it's ongoing. It's not just a one-and-done, but it's ongoing. And so you see that sadness comes after that. He partakes of the fruit and yet immediately then he experiences sorrow as some of his family opts not to come. And in the same way, Benjamin is saying, it's not just a one-and-done. but for the rest of your life, you are going to have to remember, retain in remembrance, your own nothingness, and your own dependency on God. But when you do that, your character will be transformed and you'll be able to live in these kind of peaceable, neighborly, fruitful ways. So it's a hopeful vision in the end, but it's a strenuous vision, right? It's not just, God does the work and it's done. It's an ongoing process that we are called to participate in with God as partners in his work and his glory.

Becerra: And it's interesting, I joke about this with my students sometimes, so like, it's very, a very prominent form of discourse in, you know, our tradition is that we're all children of God, right? Like we're, we, and the value of that, you know, the primary song, for example, is to help us feel loved and valued and that God's looking out for us and stuff like that. But the other side of that coin is that we're also nothing and worthless and less than the dust of the earth and there aren't any primary songs about that, right? So one of the assignments I wanna give to my students is like, write a primary song about that. And like, show me how that, like if that aspect of our self-understanding is supposed to facilitate this transformation that God desires to happen within us like I feel like we're not tapping into the potential of viewing ourselves in that way. And that's a difficult thing and it's part of this ongoing creation, right? But it's something that we neglect often for. for prioritizing, which is absolutely appropriate, this idea that God loves us, and things like that. But at the same time, even in that love, we are nothing.

Welch: I know I think maybe especially us, and you know, maybe going back to our discussion of prosperity, for those of us, and this probably doesn't describe all of our listeners, but for those of us who live in somewhat comfortable and prosperous circumstances, maybe it's especially unpleasant or just seems irrelevant to think of ourselves as nothing and as dust, right? We've talked, I talked with Nick in the last episode about the kind of anthropology or the examination of human nature that shows up in the book of Mosiah. And it's this very bimodal, right? Bipartite. There's two parts to it. One is, as you say, we're children of God made in His image. The other is that we're the dust of the earth and we're nothing. And we tend to like to focus on the first rather than the second. They have to be understood together because, you know, we're not, Nobody is worthless in the moral sense, right? Every single human being has moral and ethical status as a child of God, so they have to be understood in conjunction, but it strikes me that it's very parallel to what we see in the Christology, in the examination of Christ that King Benjamin gives us, where Christ on the one hand is this very exalted being, the Lord God, omnipotent Father of heaven and earth, but he comes down. And he inhabits a tabernacle of clay that makes him vulnerable and he gets tired, he gets hungry, he gets thirsty, he's tempted, right? So we have the same kind of two-sided view of the divine nature that we do of the human nature. And I think when we see them together, then we understand the fruitfulness that can come from understanding ourselves as nothing and as dust.

Becerra: Yeah. Good.

Welch: Great. Well, this has been such a great discussion and it's perfect because it leads to really well to where I want to end. But I'm going to take you on a little detour first if that's okay. All right. You know, one of my primary goals for this podcast is to get people excited about the Book of Mormon and get them in their scriptures. My secondary goal is to teach them a little bit about the field of Book of Mormon studies as it has emerged over the past. you know, almost 70 years now. And so I'm going to do a little bit of that teaching right now if that's okay. And I'm going to talk about a man named Hugh Nibley. And I'm guessing that the name Hugh Nibley is probably familiar to most of our listeners. If you're like me, I grew up in a Latter-day Saint household, just kind of hearing this name Hugh Nibley, and I'd see it on books on the shelves and it kind of took on this mystique as if he were a kind of mythological figure, you know. There was often great deference and almost reverence attached to his name. As I've come to read his works more thoroughly and understand who he was as a scholar, it makes me laugh that I once held him as this kind of mystical figure because, in reality, he was incredibly funny, incredibly witty, down to earth, very acerbic and sarcastic and eccentric. And he would have laughed at the thought that I once held him as a kind of eminent figure. But Hugh Nibley was probably the most formative influence on the shape of Book of Mormon Studies as we have it today, I would say. He was active as a scholar for decades, beginning in the 50s through the '60s, '70s, and into the '80s, even in the '90s, when I was at BYU, he still had an office here and was still working on a book. So Hugh Nibley was the pioneer of two influential forms of Book of Mormon scholarship. And the first one we might call textual historicism. Hugh Nibley had a really big idea, and it was an incredibly important one. And his big understanding, his great insight, was that if the Book of Mormon is an authentic ancient text, then it will internally reflect the culture of the ancient Near East. So he said to scholars in effect, don't worry about looking for Mesoamerican archeology, which had been kind of the primary approach to Book of Mormon historicity to that point. He said, look inside the book look inside the covers of the book, and that is where you will find evidence for the ancient character of the Book of Mormon. So this insight and this form of scholarship is probably best encapsulated in his volume that's entitled An Approach to the Book of Mormon. And this was electrifying to a whole generation of scholars who loved the Book of Mormon. And who realized they now had a way to defend its authenticity. And that was by carefully examining and reading very closely the contents of the Book of Mormon and looking for parallels to things in the Hebrew Bible or other things in the ancient world. And if you could find those parallels, then that was a way of defending the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. One of the great harvests of that form of scholarship on the Book of Mormon is that it got scholars reading the book itself very carefully, doing these close readings that have yielded really fruitful understandings of how the text is put together and what it's saying. So I'm going to share one article with you that is in the image of that form of textual historicism that was pioneered by Hugh Nibley. But he has a whole other very powerful and exciting form of Book of Mormon scholarship that in many ways he also pioneered. And we might call that ideology or ethical critique. So examining the text of the Book of Mormon from a particular ideological commitment--for Nibley, he had a deep sense of anti-commercial agrarianism, right? That was where he came from. His vision of the good, of the good world and the good life was one in which farming was the basis of society and business was kind of a necessary evil and commercial enterprise was a necessary evil. So from that perspective, he then read the Book of Mormon very, very carefully. He saw scripture as a kind of living text that should speak with authority to its modern readers and should direct our lives, should call us to repentance in our modern excesses.

Becerra: So to be clear, he's, sorry, so he's, he has this kind of social location, right? He values these, you know, agrarian values, or he wants to see life look like this. And he's reading the Book of Mormon to see how it speaks to his own questions and concerns. In the same way, for example, a woman might read it with, to see how it speaks to women's concerns. An African American, African American, certainly somebody who's interested in social ethics might read it with respect to social ethical, social ethical concerns, right?

Welch: Yes.

Becerra: So these ideological readings are reading it both from the position of a certain social location and with respect to the concerns of people in that social location as well. Yeah, yeah.

Welch: Yeah, that's exactly it. Thanks for drawing that out. Because although he brought his own very specific kind of set of values to the text, he modeled a way of reading it and of understanding its power that then could be used by people with another set of values that they bring to the text. So probably the best place to look for Nibley's work in this vein is the volume called Approaching Zion. So I'm going to also share a short piece from Approaching Zion. So you'll get to see kind of the fruits of the Nibley legacy, and you're going to see that they look very, very different. So the first one that I wanted to talk about was a chapter in a really important book. The name of the book is King Benjamin's Speech. That Ye May Learn Wisdom. It was published by Farms in 1998. It's a big book. My father-in-law used to call it Big Ben. It's a big book that brought together contributions from many scholars in this kind of textual historicist vein. And one of the classic pieces from that volume, I think, is a chapter called “Kingship, Coronation, and Covenant in Mosiah 1-6.” And it was written by a man named Stephen Ricks. And it's sort of at the end in his conclusion, I think he has a really concise statement of the aims and methods of this form of scholarship. And this is what he wrote, “As Hugh Nibley has noted on numerous occasions, one of the best means of establishing a text's authenticity lies in examining the degree to which it accurately reflects in its smaller details, the milieu from which it claims to derive. So with the Book of Mormon, the extent to which it correctly mirrors the culture of the ancient Near East, especially those that were either unknown or unexamined in Joseph Smith's time, may provide one of the best tests of the book's genuineness. And then he says, in this study, we have found numerous elements in the ancient ideology of kingship that are reflected accurately in Benjamin's speech.” So there's an emphasis here on proving evidences for the Book of Mormon's genuineness, as he puts it here. And you kind of go on a hunt. Yeah, go ahead, Daniel.

Becerra: And this is in a different kind of theoretical tenor than the articles that we were talking about earlier in the sense that whereas the primary goal here is what supports the idea that the Book of Mormon is true and it's ancient, right? Whereas a more theological approach, which is at least the articles that I was talking to, is more concerned with it's less concerned about demonstrating that and more concerned about reading the text and exploring the implications for understanding of God and ethical behavior and things like that. And like I talked about the kaleidoscope, like the historical approach of Nibali is like this, right, ideological, and then you twist it, and that's theological. So when you ask the test different questions, you get different, you see different things, and different things come out, right? The questions are different questions are how you excavate different things from the text. So yeah, go ahead, sorry.

Welch: Exactly. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And thanks for drawing out that contrast. Of course, theological readers of the Book of Mormon also believe that it is true and historical. it is actually quite striking. Ricks goes through and he's read extensively in the Hebrew Bible itself and also in secondary literature on coronation ceremonies in the ancient Near East. And he finds seven elements that were characteristic of ancient coronation ceremonies that show up in these chapters here of King Benjamin's conferral of the kingdom on Mosiah. So everything from the temple as the site of the speech and the ceremony to the tower, the kind of passing on of the sacred records, the consecration of the new king, the public proclamation, the new name, right? He sees this as parallel to the throne name that a new king would receive when he exceeds to the throne in the ancient world. And finally, the divine adoption of the king, this idea in the ancient world that when a man became king, he was adopted by God, and he sees that as parallel to the kind of new birth becoming the children of Christ that we see in Mosiah 5. And it's a great example of this kind of textual historicism that Hugh Nibley pioneered. So now I'd like to shift gears and provide another reading of these chapters, this time through Nibley's own voice. And this is his chapter, “Gifts,” in the volume Approaching Zion. And I love this chapter. I will say, I recommend the book Approaching Zion. It is, it's long and you don't have to read it cover to cover, but it is really, really fun. And as I said earlier, Nibley is funny. He's acerbic. He's extremely sharp. And in his, in his callouts, and so it's a lot of fun to read. So in this book, or sorry in this chapter, “Gifts,” he starts with the idea of Eden, this garden that is created and gifted to Adam and Eve as a gracious act of God. The Lord instructs Adam to go to dress it and keep it, but the reality is that it was given to him as a gift. So there we see you know Adam must work, but he doesn't work to earn the garden. The garden was given to him. Well, what happens? They have to leave the garden and he sees in this story of Cain and Abel, the fatal turn in human society, the recognition that one can turn human life into property. And he sees this as a kind of genesis of a drive. for greed and material consumption and status by means of wealth. He traces this all through the Book of Mormon. As we were discussing earlier, this is a really important theme and the Book of Mormon has a real kind of polemic against greed and wealth. And so he traces that whole theme through the Book of Mormon. And then he comes to ask these very pointed questions. He says this, if everything is given to us by God, do we have to work? The answer is, of course, the gifts do not excuse us from work. They leave us free to do the real work. And for Nibley, of course, the only real work was studying the scriptures, doing church work, and farming. That's the real work. He says we don't need anything beyond that. He cites the D&C at section 6, verse 7, “seek not for riches, but for wisdom. and behold the mysteries of God shall be unfolded to you, and then you shall be made rich. Behold, he that hath eternal life is rich." And I'll say Nibley lived this way. He really did practice what he preached and lived in an extremely modest lifestyle and didn't seek for anything beyond just the bare necessities. He says God supplies us with our bodies and their upkeep free of charge. Are you starting to hear echoes of Benjamin here?

Becerra: Yeah.

Welch: And he says nothing else is needful. Faith, hope, and charity, he says, here's one of his great one-liners. “Faith, hope, and charity, if we don't have them, we have nothing. And if we do have them, we have nothing to worry about.” He's full of these great one-liners. So then he finally gets to King Benjamin's address, and he does a kind of close reading of the address. And here's the conclusion that he gets to. In return for the gift of life and revelation, God asks only two things. The first of those is to recognize his gifts for what they are and not to take credit to ourselves. “And now I ask, can you say aught of yourselves?” This is in chapter two, verse 25. “For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same being?” So none of us has even earned our own keep. We are all unprofitable servants and God asks us to acknowledge that. And then the second thing that he asks of us, as we've been talking about throughout this conversation today, he asks us not to withhold from others his gifts to us, as if we had some special right to them, right? He says all that I ask of you is to live peaceably, not suffer your children to go hungry or naked, not succor those that stand in need, or sorry, do succor those that stand in need, administer of your substance, not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain.

Becerra: Yeah, and that's evocative of what Jacob talks about. I forget what chapter it is, but essentially says, don't think that your wealth belongs to you. It belongs to God. Right. So like it pushes back against this idea that, you know, what we have in our possession is something that we own as opposed to our stewardship we've been given. So and the difference is, if you view something that you if you view your material resources as something that you own, then you feel OK doing what you want with it. Right. But if you see it as a stewardship from God, then you recognize that you're accountable to him for how you use it, and he's prescribed appropriate ways to use it. And one of the ways is creating the circumstances in which people don't have to be thinking so much about material resources that they can't engage in these more worthwhile things like shaping the soul.

Welch: Yes. And he would say, you need a lot less than you think you do. God, what God gave you with your body and your breath and kind of the ability to go out and till the earth, that's really all you need. Everything else that we think we need, we really don't. Now you can quarrel with Nibley. But that he brought this incredibly clarion, excuse me, clarion call to simplicity. and to focusing on the gospel and to focusing on the scriptures and our fellow beings. And not surprisingly, it was to the sermon of King Benjamin that he turned to draw that out.

Becerra: Yeah, good.

Welch: Well, this has been an awesome discussion. I love how all of the themes have kind of tied together in a beautiful way. We always end our discussions by sharing with each other a favorite scripture. So Daniel, would you share with me something from the Book of Mosiah that has been meaningful to you?

Becerra: Yeah, so if you haven't already seen, I'm a big fan of King Benjamin, so let me finish with Benjamin, Mosiah 3.19. So this is context here as Benjamin is explaining the importance of Christ to his people. For the natural man is an enemy to God and has been from the fall of Adam and will be forever and ever unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit and putteth off the natural man and becomeeth a saint through the atonement of Jesus of Christ the Lord and becomeeth as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father." So I like this verse because, I mean, my area of expertise is moral formation, which essentially is concerned with, you know, humanity's current state and their goal and then how to bridge the gap between the two. And I feel like this verse is the most concise articulation of that journey of transformation in the Book of Mormon. Also, I really like the emphasis on becoming. In our tradition, we tend to focus a lot on testimony and on obedience. It's about what we know or believe and about what we do. But Benjamin seems to be pushing back against this idea. He seems to think that the goal is to become a certain kind of person and perhaps belief and obedience to the commandments of God, those are vehicles for that kind of transformation. So the gospel of Jesus Christ is not so much a system of belief or a code of conduct. It's a system of becoming intended to govern our thoughts and behaviors in a way that results in a more Christ-like soul. And so that's kind of what I see coming out of this verse. I also like it because it's one of those verses that you have to slow down on. There are things in it that taste good to me and there are also things that rub me the wrong way in the verse. And the consequence of this is that it makes me slow down and pause and be introspective. Like, you know, virtues like love and patience and humility mentioned in that verse. It's like, okay, I want to dwell on that. What exactly does that mean? And then you have this language of being submissive and a father inflicting things on its child like I don't that doesn't sit as well with me. So like I'm forced to kind of sit back and reflect on, OK, what exactly is being said here? And just the it just really invites the kind of engagement that I feel like leads to productive experience with scripture.

Welch: That's such a good point because we don't want to just gloss over the parts that are hard for us to read. And there is, like I said, there are some parts like that in King Benjamin's sermon, right, where he's talking about the atonement and the agony of the sinner after this life. And that's really difficult to read, and it's hard to reconcile with the loving God and all these things. But if we just skip over them, I think we're likely to miss what's really happening. So the parts that are hard, when they slow us down, they can increase our understanding of the wonderful parts too. And they can help us have a real experience with the scriptures instead of just kind of glossing over them to check it off on our day or to glean a verse here or there.

Becerra: Right. And I wanna give that sometimes that's probably the purpose. Like Benjamin uses language about dust because it's intentionally harsh. Like it forces you to reflect on it and it forces you to confront what it means. And like in that engagement with the language, like it can be transformative if you approach it the right way.

Welch: Yeah, I agree. Well, I'll share a scripture that's actually related to what you just read. And I've been thinking about it in a new way just over the last day or two as I've been studying this. And so this is picking up on the theme of children because children show up a lot all through King Benjamin's address. And here in the latter part of Chapter Three, he's talking about the Atonement. Let's see, let's look at verse, maybe just verse 18, right before you were reading. “For behold, he judges, that is Christ, he judges, and his judgment is just. And the infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy, but men drink damnation to their own souls, except they humble themselves and become as little children, and believe that salvation was and is, and is to come in and through the atoning blood of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent.” So in the past, and then he goes on to read what you just read, right? Where we have to become as a child. In the past, I understood this teaching to mean kind of solely that because children don't have yet full knowledge, they can't be held fully accountable for their sins, and so Christ's atonement will cover that, right? It will take their sins on them. So because of their innocence, they can't be culpable. And so they're okay. And I think that's part of what's going on, but it's actually much richer than that, right? It's actually much more than just about a kind of accounting for blame and culpability. It's really about this transformation of our spirit. The reason why children are saved in Christ is because of their character because they are meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit. That is why. So the whole goal is not to kind of zero out some sense of sin and retribution in the, in the eternal account book. It's to change our character and to make us like a child, like the Christ child, right? Submissive, just as Christ is submissive, the son is submissive to the father in Christ. the son is submissive to the father in our human world. So we strive to being submissive to the father spiritually.

Becerra: Yeah, it's not about the absence of sin, it's about the presence of virtue, right? Yeah, good.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been great, Daniel. Thank you so much for joining us today. Any last words that you want to give or do you think we've said it all?

Becerra: No, I think we got it.

Welch: All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today on the Maxwell Institute's Book of Mormon Studies Podcast.

Becerra: Thanks for having me.