ePub feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship ePub feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Abstract: In Words of Mormon 1:8, Mormon declares, “And my prayer to God is concerning my brethren, that they may once again come to the knowledge of God, yea, the redemption of Christ; that they may once again be a delightsome people.” The expression “that they may once again” plausibly reflects the Hebrew idiom wayyôsipû or wayyôsipû ʿôd. Mormon’s apparent double-use of the wayyôsipû (ʿôd) idiom in Words of Mormon 1:8 (or some Nephite scribal equivalent), like 2 Nephi 5:2–3, recalls language in the Joseph story (Genesis 37:5, 8). The original Lamanite covenant, as an extension of the Abrahamic covenant, involved the complete abandonment of fraternal hatred and the violent means through which they had given expression to it (see Alma 24:12–13; 15–18); Mormon declared that a similar commitment would again be necessary when the descendants of Lehi (“the remnant of this people who are spared,” Mormon 7:1) were restored to the covenant in the future (Mormon 7:4–5). Thus, Mormon’s prayer—in the tradition of the prayers of Nephi, Enos, and others—is that the descendants of the Lamanites (and Nephite dissenters) would, through iterative divine action, regain their covenant identity as the seed of Joseph and partakers of the Abrahamic covenant.





A previous study1 proposes that Nephi permuted biblical wordplay on the name Joseph from Genesis 37:5, 8 (“and they hated him yet the more [wayyôsipû ʿôd]”) as a means of drawing autobiographical parallels between himself and his ancestor Joseph (the patriarch) [Page 166]throughout his small plates record.2 Nephi’s use of this biblical wordplay culminates in the statement that marked a tipping point in his relationship with his brothers, paving the way for a final separation in mortality from them: “Behold, it came to pass that I, Nephi, did cry much unto the Lord my God, because of the anger of my brethren. But behold, their anger did increase [yāsap] against me, insomuch that they did seek to take away my life” (2 Nephi 5:2).

The name Joseph (“may he [God] add”) derives from the verb yāsap, which means “to add” or “increase,”3 but can also have the more nuanced senses “to continue to do, carry on doing” something or “to do [something] again, more.”4 I have further proposed that Nephi used a wordplay on the name of Joseph in terms of yāsap when he juxtaposed quotations from Isaiah 11:11 and 29:14 in 2 Nephi 25:17, 21 (“And the Lord will set his hand again [yôsîp] the second time to restore his people from their lost and fallen state. Wherefore, he will proceed [yôsīp] to do a marvelous work and a wonder among the children of men . . . that the promise may be fulfilled unto Joseph”) and 2 Nephi 29:1 (“But behold, there shall be many—at that day when I shall proceed [yôsīp] to do a marvelous work among them, that I may remember my covenants which I have made unto the children of men, that I may set my hand again [*wĕʾōsîp yādî] the second time to recover my people”)...

Abstract: T. J. Uriona has offered two new theories about the meaning of Nephi’s term “skin of blackness” in 2 Nephi 5:21. He suggests that Nephi’s term may indicate impending death and/or it may be a literal reference to diseased or deathly skin. Both theories are based on a motif in an ancient Neo-Assyrian treaty that curses people to have skin as black as pitch and crude oil. I submit that these two theories are inconsistent with the larger context in the Book of Mormon.





In “Understanding the Lamanite Mark” published last year in Interpreter,1 I proposed that the dark mark on the skin that distinguished Lamanites from Nephites was a self-inflicted sacrilegious mark cut into the skin in defiance of the law of Moses. This profane ancient mark on the skin was permanent in nature, like a modern tattoo. (Of course, this doesn’t mean that all of today’s tattoos reflect rebellion against God. Today’s tattoos are adopted for many non-rebellious reasons.) Profane marks made by incision, simply called “marks” in the Bible, were specifically prohibited by the law of Moses (Leviticus 19:28). People who had covenanted with God to obey this law would only have adopted these marks in rebellion against him and his law. Those who continued to keep the law would have seen these marks as evidence of apostasy.

When the Lord says, “I will set a mark upon” Lamanites and others [Page 156](Alma 3:14–16), and when Nephi says that “the Lord did cause a skin of blackness to come upon” Lamanites (2 Nephi 5:21–22), their words don’t preclude a self-inflicted mark. The Lord sometimes says “I will” and “I will cause” to depict actions that he knows will be taken by men and women of their own free will (see, for example, Mosiah 12:5 and Helaman 15:16–17). Also, the passive voice can be used in phrases like “came upon” or “was set upon” (see Jacob 3:5 and Alma 3:6, 10) to describe a self-inflicted mark. Mormon demonstrates this when he says, “[T]hey [the Amlicites] also [like the Lamanites] had a mark set upon them; yea, they set the mark upon themselves” (Alma 3:13). Mormon also quotes the Lord, who says, “I will set a mark upon” Lamanites and others (Alma 3:14–16). Mormon explains that the Amlicites fulfilled these specific “words of God” as “they began to mark themselves” (Alma 3:18; see also Alma 3:13–16). Thus, Mormon clarifies that God “set a mark upon” the Amlicites as they marked themselves. Reason suggests that God may have “set a mark upon” the Lamanites as they marked themselves in a similar manner, which Mormon calls “the manner of the Lamanites” (Alma 3:4).

My paper explains in detail how this biblical meaning of the word mark, together with biblical meanings of other related words, the archaeological record, and relevant passages in the Book of Mormon (taking into account their primarily Early Modern English vocabulary and syntax) combine to support the view that the Lamanite mark was a self-imposed, permanent, profane mark on the skin.

Two New Theories

In this research note, I review two new theories about the Lamanite mark, both of which reflect proposals made by T. J. Uriona. In December 2023, BYU Studies published Uriona’s article, “‘Life and Death, Blessing and Cursing’: New Context for ‘Skin of Blackness’ in the Book of Mormon.”2 Uriona proposes what he sees as new context for the curse that the Lord brought upon Laman and Lemuel. This proposal, while novel,

Review of Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Emer Harris & Dennison Lott Harris: Owner of the First Copy of the Book of Mormon, Witness of the “Last Charge” of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2023). 235 pages, 67 illustrations, appendix, references, $29.00 (paperback).

Abstract: Jeffrey Bradshaw has, in a single well-researched volume, provided a gift to those interested in the lives of early Church members. In Emer Harris & Dennison Lott Harris, Bradshaw brings out of obscurity the remarkable life of one of Martin Harris’s brothers and illustrates the contribution of that life to the initial decades of the Restoration.





Whether you’re a descendant of Emer Harris and his son Dennison or a Church historian, Emer Harris & Dennison Lott Harris: Owner of the First Copy of the Book of Mormon, Witness of the “Last Charge” of Joseph Smith is a must-have reference book for your library.

As the title states, the book is divided into two sections—the life of Emer Harris and the witness of his youthful son Dennison. The first section is a biographical sketch that gives readers more details about Emer’s life than any other book on the market. Bradshaw has brought Emer Harris out of obscurity in an accessible and scholarly manner. He has pulled together a readable story by carefully combing source materials.

Bradshaw’s gift to masterfully create a chronological biography of Emer Harris is commendable. Without diluting the problems Emer faced, readers will learn of his hardships such as divorce, death of [Page 152]a spouse, remarriages, and poverty. More importantly, readers will discover a man who had a dogged determination to stay with his faith when it appeared there was little outward advantage to do so. The author describes Emer’s family as impoverished, in peril for their religious stance, and physically worn down. Yet none of these tribulations or others stopped Emer from following a prophet of God. He lived what Latter-day Saints call a consecrated life of devotion to the Lord. To this reviewer, this is best illustrated by his acceptance of a call to serve in the Cotton Mission in Southern Utah at age 81. Five years later, he was released at age 86. His statement, “determined to be for God & none else & with his assistance to do his will” captures the essence and purpose of his life.1

Readers will discover in his biography that Emer received the first bound copy of the Book of Mormon. It was said that his brother Martin Harris, one of the Three Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, picked up the book and presented it to him. After his conversion, Emer served an adventurous yet successful mission with Martin. Readers learn that following the mission, Emer’s woodworking skill was needed to make window sashes for the Kirtland Temple, to build the circular staircase in the Nauvoo Temple, and so much more.

What is essential information in the biography is that when his brothers Martin and Preserved Harris backed away from their religious commitments, Emer clung to his faith. Recognizing his unwavering stance, he was told in a patriarchal blessing, “[B]ecause of the integrity of thy heart, thou hast not fainted in times of dissension & persecution, when every evil thing [h]as spoken against the church of the living God, thou has endured in faith, & the Lord is well [p]leased with thee . . . because thou art alone as it were in thy father’s house; thy posterity shall be greatly blessed.”a id="footnote2anc" href="#footnote2sym" title="2. Wording and punctuation of Emer’s patriarchal blessing taken from a copy of the blessing in Bradshaw’s p...

Abstract: Moroni1’s letter in Alma 60 is not simply an angry and intemperate screed against the government; it also responds to arguments about just tactics (what modern readers would call ethics) taking place among Nephite leaders at this time. Moroni1’s letter argues for his preferred strategies of active defense and ambush, while interpreting defeat as a failure of leaders. His rhetorical strategy is particularly noteworthy for associating his Nephite opponents’ hopeful trust in the Lord with the passive resistance of the king-men, and shifting blame for defeat away from his strategies and onto his political opponents. Overall, Moroni1’s arguments exemplify sophistication and debate within Nephite thought.





[Editor’s Note: This paper is adapted from chapters 4–6 of Morgan Deane, To Stop a Slaughter: The Book of Mormon and the Just War Tradition (self-published, Venice Press, forthcoming, 2024).]





Many scholars view Moroni1’s behavior, particularly his letter to Pahoran in Alma 60, as angry and counterproductive. Grant Hardy said he was “hot blooded,” exemplifying an “aggressive posture,” a “quick temper,” a “blunt manner,” and “hasty suspicions.”1 Book of Mormon Central described Moroni1 as “angrily” writing his letter.2 Even in defending Moroni1, Duane Boyce doesn’t suggest there are [Page 136]alternative interpretations for the aggressive tone of the letter. He offers some mitigating reasons for the anger by stating that Moroni1 was constantly surrounded by danger from “beginning to end” and was misunderstood and unfairly judged by modern readers who haven’t seen constant warfare.3

There is another way to interpret Moroni1’s letter, one that moves beyond his anger at the government for its perceived malfeasance to include the larger cultural context in which he wrote. Captain Moroni1’s letter makes two arguments that reflect issues and debates during this period of Nephite history: (1) the previous Nephite practice of waiting on the Lord to deliver the people from imminent threats was dangerously passive; and (2) it was the sins of his Nephite rivals that resulted in battlefield defeat, not the sins of his soldiers who carried out his controversial strategy. A third issue may be at play as well, though it is not explicitly raised in Moroni1’s letter: the argument that ambushes are not inherently sinful. The issue of justified ambushes, as this paper argues, is an expression of the active versus passive debate prominent within the letter.

Waiting On the Lord: A Historically Passive Approach

The Book of Mormon contains many sections where readers can examine or deduce Nephite thought and strategy:



* The Lord’s reasoning that it is better that one man should perish than an entire nation dwindle in unbelief (1 Nephi 4:13) can be viewed as an authoritative and evocative example of military necessity and utilitarianism.

* Consistent with Augustine’s reasoning when he wrote that “it is a higher glory still to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword,”a id="footnote4anc" href="#footnote4sym" title="4. Augustine, “Letter 229,” NewAdvent.org, newadvent.org/fathers/1102229.htm.

Abstract: Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s speech (Alma 24:7–16) reveals multiple allusions to significant texts in Nephi’s small plates record. Thus, when he declares “I thank my God, my beloved people, that our great God has in goodness sent these our brethren, the Nephites, unto us to preach unto us,” he appears to allude to an inclusio that bookends the two books of Nephi’s small plates record which emphasizes the “goodness” of God as a theme. Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s description of his ancestors as “wicked fathers” appears to deliberately contrast Laman, Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael with Nephi’s “goodly parents” in 1 Nephi 1:1. The name Nephi constitutes a key element in Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s own name, a name honorifically bestowed on him as a throne-name by his father. In view of the probable etymological origin of Nephi as Egyptian nfr (“good,” “goodly,” “fair”) and its evident, persistent association with “good” among the Nephites, Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s naming and the introduction to his speech deserve closer examination. This article explores the possible significance of this naming in conjunction with the Lamanites’ reception of divine “goodness” in the contexts of Nephite/Lamanite history and the Lamanite conversion narratives.





When Ammon, Aaron, and those who served with them1 taught the Lamanites the gospel of Jesus Christ and the plan of salvation, they used writings copied from the brass plates and from Nephi’s [Page 98]small plates (see Alma 18:36; 22:12–13). Mormon makes it clear that by this means Ammon, Aaron, and others redressed a longstanding, traditional Lamanite grievance against the Nephites—namely, the loss of the brass plates (see Mosiah 10:16–17; see also 2 Nephi 5:12; 10:16; Alma 20:13)—by restoring their access to the scriptures2 and thus to a knowledge of divine covenants, especially the Abrahamic covenant.

Moreover, when Ammon, Aaron, and their fellow laborers used the writings from Nephi’s small plates to teach the doctrine of Christ3 to Lamoni, Lamoni’s wife, Lamoni’s father, Lamoni’s brother (who took the name Anti-Nephi-Lehi after his conversion and likely at this coronation), and others, the Lord fulfilled his covenant with Enos for the first time (see Enos 1:11–18). That covenant included the promise that he would “bring” the Nephites records, including the small plates, “forth” to the Lamanites, in his “own due time” (Enos 1:16). While Nephi’s writings on the small plates constituted something of a political document on his right to rule,4 they had an intended broader teaching function: “they teach all men that they should do good” (2 Nephi 33:10). The Lord instructed Nephi to make the small plates with the explicit command, “thou shalt engraven many things upon them which are good in my sight, for the profit of thy people” (2 Nephi 5:30) and Nephi avers, “for their good have I written them” (2 Nephi 25:8).

Abstract: Repetition is a feature of all ancient Hebraic narrative. Modern readers may misunderstand this quality of biblical and Book of Mormon narrative. Biblical and Book of Mormon writers believed that history repeated, with what happened to the ancestors happening again to their posterity. Fawn Brodie and her acolytes misapprehend Book of Mormon narrative when—instead of at least provisionally granting that God might exist, can intervene in history, and tenaciously reenacts events from the past while the recorders of such repeated stories firmly believed in the historical reality of the narratives they recounted—they attribute such repeated stories to Joseph Smith’s imputed plagiaristic tendencies. The story of the kidnapping of the Lamanite daughters by the priests of Noah (Mosiah 20) is a recurrence of the story of the mass kidnapping of the daughters of Shiloh (Judges 21), but to attribute such similarity to plagiarism by Joseph Smith is a grand and flagrant misreading of Hebraic narrative, its persistent allusive qualities, and its repetitive historiography. Such narratives were widespread in Levantine and classical antiquity, and neither ancient historians nor modern scholars take the relationship among such analogous stories to be one of plagiarism when their antiquity is undisputed. At least one additional construal of the Book of Mormon story’s meaning needs to be explored and considered against the backdrop of Hebraic narrative.





Readers of texts are not mere passive receptacles but are active interpreters. They bring their experience, knowledge, attitudes, assumptions about the world and humans, capabilities, and all the [Page 58]previous texts they have read with them. Technical writing (say, the instructions in a manual), a romance novel, an academic source for a research paper, an article about a celebrity, a recipe, a news aggregator site, a complex work of literature such as War and Peace, a Shakespeare play, a review of a neighborhood restaurant, historical and biographical writing, a letter to the editor of a periodical: all require active involvement by the reader. But not all such reader contributions to the resulting reading are equal or equivalent. Texts require interpretation. They require appropriate assumptions, gap filling of ambiguities, judgments about genre, and experience with similar texts. Some recovery of the world created by the writer is necessary. The more recovery, the more complete the reading. Writers of texts build into their writings clues about the apt strategies to be used by the reader to decode the transaction between reader and author. Misreading those signs leads inevitably to a breakdown in that contract. Sophisticated texts call for a higher level of interpretation and greater reading skill. When a failure to communicate the storyline occurs with a complex text, the shortcoming is more likely a readerly rather than a writerly malfunction. “In works of greater complexity, the filling-in of gaps becomes much more difficult and therefore more conscious and anything but automatic.”1 One fundamental feature of Hebraic narrative such as we encounter in the Bible or the Book of Mormon requires that the reader understand the role of repetition.

Biblical narrative certainly abounds in patterns of similarity, all based on the principle of analogy. Analogy is an essentially spatial pattern, composed of at least two elements (two characters, events, strands of action, etc.) between which there is at least one point of similarity and one of dissimilarity: the similarity affords the basis for the spatial linkage and confrontation of the analogical elements, whereas the dissimilarity makes for their mutual illumination, qualification,