The Plagiary of the Daughters of the Lamanites ePub feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship
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- Christianity
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,
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,