The Testimony of Two Nations: How the Book of Mormon Reads, and Rereads, the BibleA Word in Season: Isaiah's Reception in the Book of Mormon

Over the last few years, the University of Illinois Press has greatly expanded their publications in Mormon studies to include volumes dealing with Mormon theology and scripture. Two significant books in the last category are Michael Austin's Testimony of Two Nations and Joseph M. Spencer's A Word in Season. Scholarly treatments of scripture are difficult because authors have to find a way to balance the concerns and sensibilities of believers who view such texts as sacred and thus different from other books, against the needs and interests of outsiders who regard them as products of their time and place, quite comparable to writings from other religious traditions. The difficulties are heightened when a scripture makes strong historical claims, as the Book of Mormon does, and believers and outsiders have very different ideas about the origins of the text. What is required, obviously, is some sort of common ground, some basis for ongoing conversations that can lead to greater understanding.One approach is for an insider-scholar to introduce their sacred text to an academic audience and explain what it has meant in the lives of fellow believers. Terryl Givens's By the Hand of Mormon comes to mind.1 Another tactic is for a more religiously neutral scholar to provide a broader cultural context that can help readers both within and without the faith community see the scripture in new ways, as William Davis did in his Visions in a Seer Stone.2 While these are both important monographs, the authors tend to focus their attention on matters outside of the Book of Mormon itself, with Givens primarily recounting the book's reception history (aside from his discussion of dialogic revelation), and Davis expounding on Joseph Smith's life and early American sermon techniques (aside from his brief analysis of five Nephite sermons, along with the prefaces and headings that appear sporadically in the book).Michael Austin and Joseph Spencer are attempting something even more challenging: to explore the contents of the Book of Mormon—its message and meaning—in a detailed, systematic manner that can enlighten Latter-day Saints and non–Latter-day Saint readers alike, without alienating either. Both scholars adopt a similar strategy of comparing the Book of Mormon with the Bible, though Austin's treatment is the more successful of the two.All readers, regardless of religious commitments, can see that the Book of Mormon was intended as a companion to the Bible, particularly the King James Version. That text was pervasive in Joseph Smith's era, and not surprisingly, he and his associates knew it fairly well. They were familiar with its oft-cited stories and concepts, and they were able to draw on its distinctive phrasing in conversations, sermons, and letters. On the other hand, from the perspective of the Book of Mormon narrative, the Nephites had access to a proto-Bible in the form of brass plates from the sixth century BCE, and their perception of biblical truths was regularly augmented by revelations through the span of their thousand-year history. The King James phrasing, especially anachronistic expressions from the New Testament, can be interpreted as a function of extraordinary revelation, or an inspired translation, or some combination of both.Austin sets out to document how the Book of Mormon draws on the Bible while also revising or expanding its meaning. This is a promising avenue toward common ground, and Austin adopts a literary approach that examines the Mormon scripture through the lens of typology and type-scenes. He identifies sets of stories with shared elements, such as narratives about the tree of life, divine curses, migrations to a promised land, divided kingdoms, prophets, and apocalypses. His methodology is very flexible, to the extent that it can be hard to distinguish his typologies and type-scenes from parallel narratives, fulfilled prophecies, or thematic connections. He also dabbles in biblical canonical criticism, and the way he rearranges motifs in his chapter “Stories of the Fall” is reminiscent of structuralist literary criticism. Essentially, Austin is practicing a somewhat free form of “compare and contrast” between the Book of Mormon and the Bible, yet his observations are enjoyable to read and often astute. It seems significant that curses in the Book of Mormon, unlike those in the Bible, are reversible (66); Nephite dissenters in Mosiah and Alma were indeed likely to be Mulekites (85); and Nephite prophets generally had a different social status than Hebrew prophets (119, 123–24).While Austin is an intelligent, knowledgeable reader, he does not always write like someone who has a deep familiarity with the Book of Mormon. Every so often, his paraphrases or his details are a bit off. For example, there are actually four Nephis in the Book of Mormon, not three (contra 15); the “branch over the wall” imagery from Genesis 49 does not appear in 2 Nephi 3 (contra 34); and pride, not cynicism, is the sin associated with the great and spacious building (contra 43). Furthermore, despite his claim that all quotations come from Royal Skousen's Earliest Text (15), the standard Latter-day Saint text is regularly his source (e.g., Alma 37:45 on 26; 1 Nephi 8:27 on 44).3 These sorts of lapses are not entirely Austin's fault; the Latter-day Saint community does not model precise readings of scripture, and the formatting of most Book of Mormon editions obscures details of its narrative and structure.Austin's biblical comparisons, taken together, provide a reasonable overview of the Book of Mormon narrative, and most chapters begin with far-flung analogies that offer provocative contexts (e.g., Augustine's theology of the fall for chapter 2; Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers for chapter 3; colonialism for chapter 4; Max Weber's theory of charisma for chapter 6). His approach allows him to get beyond superficial readings, and his interpretations take into consideration a generous sweep of Latter-day Saint scholarship. The Testimony of Two Nations is a book one might recommend to a non-Mormon colleague or friend with academic literary or religious interests.I found myself wanting to argue with Austin throughout. For instance, despite some shared elements, the differences between the tree of life in Genesis 3 and the tree in Lehi's dream in Nephi 8 outweigh the similarities (chapter 2), and his constant assumption that the Book of Mormon does to the Bible what the New Testament does to the Hebrew Bible is not quite accurate (the relationship may actually be closer to the Aeneid and the Homeric epics, as Austin suggests in a marvelous analogy on 17–18). But these are useful arguments, which can refine perceptions on both sides. Austin's book offers something to readers both within and without the Mormon tradition.Perhaps Austin's most serious misstep is his treatment of the lengthy Isaiah quotations in the Book of Mormon (156–62), especially the replication of Isaiah 2–14 at 2 Nephi 12–24. He ignores Nephi's explicit interpretations in 2 Nephi 25–30 (where Nephi does not highlight the New Testament quotations of Isaiah that Austin lists on 159), and in the end throws up his hands, suggesting that Nephi may have included the Isaiah chapters “for their value as a negative example—how not to write prophecy if you really want people to understand it” (161).Into this breach steps Joseph Spencer, with an entire monograph on Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. Whereas Austin positions himself as a common reader, albeit one informed by literary criticism, Spencer claims deep expertise in the Book of Mormon and Isaiah. He has published three previous books on the topic, though A Word in Season is his first with a university press. As the culmination of many years of previous work, it is much more ambitious than Austin's book, and ultimately more disappointing.The Book of Mormon includes twenty-one chapters of Isaiah quoted mostly in full, and often nearly verbatim from the King James Bible: Isaiah 2–14 (2 Nephi 12–24); 29 (2 Nephi 26–27); 48–49 (1 Nephi 20–21); 50–51 (2 Nephi 7–8); 53 (Mosiah 14); and 52 and 54 (3 Nephi 20–22). Spencer wants to argue that these Isaiah passages, out of 239 total chapters in the Mormon scripture, are “a key, perhaps the key, to the Book of Mormon's meaning” (xiv). This approach requires him to ignore most of the intricate, lengthy narrative of the Book of Mormon, though perhaps he has in mind its theological innovations. Still, a focus on the Isaiah chapters could potentially offer common ground for non-Mormon scholars interested in the reception history of Isaiah. To that end, Spencer structures his book around three blocks of text: Abinadi's quotation and interpretation of Isaiah 53, Jesus's quotation and interpretation of Isaiah 52 and 54, and Nephi's more extensive Isaiah quotations, paying particular attention to three key passages: Isaiah 11:11–12, 29:11–14, and 49:22–23. For each section, Spencer provides a detailed analysis, including comparisons to other nineteenth-century interpretations of the Isaiah passages under consideration.Problems arise almost immediately. To begin with, Spencer has organized his three discussions not by canonical order but by dictation order (Smith dictated Mosiah–Moroni before 1 Nephi–Words of Mormon), apparently so he could find interpretive development in the only three Isaiah chapters that occur in the last four hundred pages of the Book of Mormon, and then conclude with Nephi's “climactic reading” of Isaiah, his “crescendo” and “finale” (198). This, then, is an aesthetic choice (see 19–20) that repudiates the narrative's own chronology, along with any sense of internal historical causation. Throughout the volume, Spencer relies heavily on the literary conceit of a nineteenth-century ideal listener/reader (introduced on 22–23) who was present at Smith's original dictation, was familiar with contemporary interpretations of Isaiah, and who later had the opportunity to carefully peruse and reflect on the scripture in its final, published form. The main function of this fictional character, however, seems to be to provide Spencer with a way to express his own opinions unencumbered by the last two centuries of historical-critical scholarship. And to be sure, he does not want to deal forthrightly with modern scholarship on Isaiah. (It does not appear that he is a proficient reader of Hebrew.)While Spencer occasionally draws on biblical studies and mentions the consensus about multiple authorship of Isaiah in an obligatory, somewhat evasive way (6–9), he does not directly acknowledge the anachronism of Second Isaiah appearing in a text purporting to be from the late seventh century BCE (the Brass Plates) until the very end of the book (199, 219–21), insisting from the start that historical questions should be put off until later (21). In his conclusion, he proposes a “deliberately and self-consciously unlearned approach to scripture” (218), whereby issues such as anachronisms can be endlessly postponed in favor of literary, philosophical, and theological discussions (220–21).Unfortunately, even given Spencer's self-imposed constraints, A Word in Season is not as persuasive or as satisfying as it could be. The arguments are slow, paraphrastic, repetitive, and dense; indeed, they can be hard to follow without constant recourse to the scriptural text itself. Spencer perceives deep significance in minor differences, and he tends to ignore counterevidence as he attempts to fit his data into an orderly schema. For instance, he argues that Abinadi's Christological reading of Isaiah offers a fundamental contrast to the eschatological interpretations of Isaiah put forward by both Nephi and Jesus, but a simpler explanation would be that the three figures were speaking in different contexts to different audiences for different purposes. Spencer skips over substantive biblical quotations that do not fit his agenda: he pays little attention to Abinadi's quotation of the Ten Commandments, Jesus's quotation of the Sermon on the Mount, or Jacob's quotation of Isaiah 50–51 (ironically, the source for the title of his book). And he sidesteps the explicitly Christological aspects of Nephi's treatment of Isaiah.It is difficult to imagine the audience for whom Spencer is writing. For religious outsiders, the Book of Mormon's take on Isaiah in the King James Bible might be interesting as a minor part of a larger reception history of Isaiah, since Smith's ideas are rather idiosyncratic, even if there is some overlap with contemporary biblical commentators. A monograph primarily devoted to the Book of Mormon would seem less useful or engaging. Latter-day Saints, on the other hand, have seldom shown much interest in the Isaiah chapters, as Spencer regularly notes. Without a clear sense of his readers, Spencer does not pare his material down to what might be most helpful or insightful; instead, he seems to include everything that comes to mind.Spencer is at his best when he is discussing how Isaiah and the Book of Mormon intersect with Joseph Smith's world, and when he can respond to earlier scholars on those topics. For example, his analysis of Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews is quite good. (Even though the two Smiths had similar theological projects, it is significant that Ethan Smith does not talk about the Gentiles; see 143–49.) Spencer's summaries of early nineteenth-century Isaiah commentaries are valuable. Similarly, his treatment of Joseph Smith's revision of the Bible (200–201) and his reconsideration of Nephi's creative reinterpretation of the sealed book in Isaiah 29 regarding Martin Harris's visit to Charles Anthon (205–14) are clear and incisive.But when Spencer is left to his own devices, with just the scriptural text, his readings are often strained. How exactly is Zeniff's record “a parody” of Nephi's account? (73). Jesus's listeners are not “unprepared” for Isaiah (82); they are simply tired. Spencer's frequent references to “Mormon's Christ” are strange and unnecessary. (Why not just “Christ,” given the religious claims of the scripture?) Nephi regularly “likens” his literal readings of Isaiah's prophecies concerning the Jews to his own people, but those applications are not figurative or metaphorical, as Spencer asserts (150, 193–94); Nephi foresees their literal fulfillment among the descendants of Lehi. The beginning of 1 Nephi 10 is not the sharp narrative break that Spencer assumes (155–60). The three-stage structure Spencer perceives in 2 Nephi 6–30, in which Jacob, Isaiah, and Nephi act sequentially as witnesses, overlooks the fact that two of Jacob's five chapters are direct quotations of Isaiah (157). And one hesitates to respond when he asks, “What does Nephi do with Isaiah 29 when the training wheels of his hermeneutic are off and he can ride freely?” (198).Spencer's approach to Isaiah in the Book of Mormon is not historical-critical; nor is it literary, since he pays no attention to poetry and there is little discussion of the contents of Isaiah 2–14, which he assumes are “largely self-interpreting” for modern readers (194); nor is it a reception history centered on Latter-day Saint interpretations. In the end, A Word in Season tells us more about the mind of Joseph Spencer than the mind of Isaiah, or his ancient successors and editors, or Joseph Smith, or even Nephi and Mormon, whether they are understood as literary constructs or as historical figures.It is exciting, at least for Latter-day Saints, that the University of Illinois Press is taking on monographs devoted to Mormon scripture, but readers who are expecting the sort of precision and rigor commonly found in biblical studies published by university presses will likely be frustrated. As a people, we are not there yet, even if some volumes are stronger than others.