u/Infamous_Treacle_653

There was recently a post on here about Nephi killing Laban. I thought I would elaborate on this topic. Since this is the year for the Old Testament, I thought I would read through it again, but I'm not following the Come Follow Me schedule (which only asks you to read half of the text). While I was reading Kings and Chronicles, I couldn't help but notice some interesting things about the ancient background where Lehi supposedly finds himself. There is additional evidence to use in the book of Jeremiah, but I am not as strong with that book and it's been a second since I have read it (I will get to it in good time).

Problem One: The Multiple Recent Sacks of Jerusalem

As everyone knows with the Book of Mormon, the story begins in the first year of the last king of Judah, king Zedekiah. Let us, then, go through some of what 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles state happen right before Zedekiah came to the throne. First, the kingdom of Judah was first subjugated to Jerusalem during the reign of Manasseh (who died around 642 BC). Josiah comes to power, reigns independently, and then is tragically killed at the Battle of Megiddo in 609 by the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco (2 Kins 23:30). Three months later, the Egyptians come back, dethrone the replacement to Josiah, install a new king, and impose a tribute on the land (2 Kings 23:33). Judah at this point is no longer and independent kingdom. This vassal king stays in power for eleven years until Nebuchadnezzar shows up with his own armies. Jerusalem surrenders to Babylon, who installs his own king. Three months later, Nebuchadnezzar shows up again, captures the king, sacks the city, loots the temple of its valuables, and deports a large number of people (2 Kings 24:11-16). Nebuchadnezzar then installs Zedekiah. According to a Bible commentary I have, all of these events as related in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles can be supported using discovered Bablyonian annals. Furthermore, it's possible to use these annals to date this sack of Jerusalem and Zedekiah's installation as king to middle of March in 597 BC.

The Book of Mormon seems to be unaware of these events. 1 Nephi opens with Nephi relating that a bunch of prophets show up in the first year of Zedekiah's reign and prophecy the destruction of Jerusalem. Lehi goes and prays and God appears to him, telling him that the Babylonians are coming and that they will kill a bunch of people and deport the whole population. Essentially, then, God tells Lehi exactly what had just happened--literally only months prior the Babylonians had shown up, killed a bunch of people, and deported a large number of other people to Babylon. Lehi goes out to the people of Jerusalem, tells them that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, and is mocked and rejected. Later, when Lehi is leaving Jerusalem, Laman and Lemuel state their agreement with the wicked people of Jerusalem, expressing skepticism that a great city such as Jerusalem could be destroyed (1 Nephi 2:13). I think most readers of the Book of Mormon picture the depiction of the people of Jerusalem here are easy and well off, insulated by prosperity, blissfully unaware of the problems brewing in the horizon. It's a far cry from what the actual state of these people would have been like at this time: humiliated, starved, impoverished, and missing relatives and neighbors who were either dead or deported. There are even more problems with this portrait that appear when it comes to Laban.

Problem Two: Laban and His Household

Something I realized when reading through 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles again is that there is a major problem with the story of Laban and his plates. Now, let us look carefully at what kind of person Laban is depicted as. Laman and Lemuel famously describe him as 'a mighty man, and he can command fifty, yea, even he can slay fifty' (1 Nephi 3:31). Laban furthermore has a very nice sword, one that is so nice that Nephi's descendants hold onto it for a thousand years and it finds its way into the cache where the gold plates are stored. Here is an excellent question, then: how did a man of that caliber escape Nebucadnezzar's deportation? Included in his deportation were ten thousand of the leading people of the city. He even took away the craftsmen and smiths, leaving only the poor (2 Kings 24:14). Someone like Laban would certainly have been included. Another weird irregularity also appears in the narrative after Laman, Lemuel, and Nephi find out that walking into someone's house and asking for their family heirlooms does not simply work. The three resolve to walk over to their house, where they had left 'gold and silver, and all manner of riches' (1 Nephi 3:16). Nephi further explains that it was just sitting there because of the command of God, which makes it sound like it was just there out in the open and not carefully hidden away with the expectation that the family would ever come back for it. Two questions emerge: how did Lehi manage to hold onto this money during Nebuchadnezzar's sack? Second question: if this stuff is just sitting there, why has nobody broken into Lehi's house and stolen everything? Apparently post-sack Jerusalem was better than Detroit from a few years ago where people reportedly were breaking into houses to steal the copper wiring regularly.

Problem Three: Laban's Plates

Let's ignore the fact that it is questionable that Laban would be able to hold onto a very nice set of brass plates during a sack. Let us ask a more basic question of how plausible it is that Laban has them in the first place. The brass plates reportedly contained the entire Pentateuch, a national history that had been rigorously kept up to the present, a genealogy, and a large number of prophetic books. This was a pretty extensive collection of prophetic books, including some of Jeremiah's prophecies, the book of Isaiah (including Isaiah 48, 49, and 53), some lost works (1 Nephi 5:11-14). There are many questions to be had about this, especially with modern scholarly work that everything after Isaiah 40 is the work of a different author from the Isaiah who lived during the time of Hezekiah, with this second author working during the exile (yes, there are theories of more authors than that). Moreover, there is further work stating that the Pentateuch as we have it is the result of an edition produced after return from exile. These modern scholarly theories on the composition of the Pentateuch are not even very far afield from what the patristic writers were willing to say, as I have seen reference to Jerome referring to Ezra as the 'editor' of the Pentateuch.

But let's even put all of that aside for a moment because there is the problem of Josiah and his renovation of the temple, when a copy of 'the book of the laws of the Lord by the hand of Moses' was found forgotten in the temple (2 Chronicles 34:14). Now, modern scholars don't have a very good idea of what exactly was found--the common theory is that it was a copy of Deuteronomy, but I have seen some theories that it was part of one of the sources that was later incorporated into all five books of the Pentateuch when it was later edited. The priests and Josiah had never seen this text prior to its discovery and what they learned from it was incorporated into Josiah's religious reforms.

With that in mind, let's look at Laban's plates and its copy of the Pentateuch. It would not make sense for a copy of the 'book of the laws of the Lord' to be lost to the priest class while a copy was sitting at some obscure guy's library collection, one that was being actively curated. We would need to posit that Laban had to have solicited a copy from the priests after it discovered. Now, Nephi relays that Laban's treasurer Zoram had told him that on the night of Laban's murder, he had been out drinking with 'the elders of the Jews,' and thinks that Nephi is talking about 'the brethren of the church' at one point (1 Nephi 4:22, 26-27). This is pretty vague, especially the reference to the 'church.' The word that eventually gets translated to 'church' in Hebrew was rendered as 'ekklesia' in Greek, and in the Septuagint, it refers to the entire congregation of Israel as a nation. So Zoram apparently thinks that Nephi is referring to... basically any Israelite. But let's ignore this and say that the 'elders of the Jews' is a reference to the priest class, who are apparently well enough off after their temple has been pillaged to engage in drinking practices that result in their associate passing out alone in a random street corner--an associate who can 'command fifty' but apparently can't keep a group of bodyguards to take him back home.

The priests that would have given Laban this copy of the Pentateuch, mind you were heavily connected to Josiah and his reforms. This, combined with the fact that Laban is stated to be willing to collect the prophecies of the heavily controversial Jeremiah, makes it sound like he is a partisan of Josiah's religious reforms and a supporter of Jeremiah. This is the religious point of view that wins out for mainstream Judaism and eventually Christianity. Why is someone like that seen as wicked by the Book of Mormon? Now, let's say, that it was Laban's father who collected all of this who had recently passed and that Laban is the wicked heir who thinks his father's religious point of view was all crap. Why would Laban then want to hold onto the plates so badly and be resistant to Nephi's offer to buy the plates?

I think most observers (even the faithful when they have an unguarded moment) have noticed that the LDS church has had a very difficult past decade or decade and a half. Recently there has been major media stories about how young people are being attracted to Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Christianity in general. This trend may not actually for Roman Catholicism when you try to look at the data more sociologically, but it is curious that regardless of any of this, the curious thing is that this trend seems to be missing Mormonism. I think there are important internal factors that is hamstringing the church. One I think is overlooked is how the church constructs and promulgates its doctrines and knowledge. What follows is lengthy, but I hope my prose can make this not a trudge.

Now, let's look at this sociologically. A religion has an important need to keep everyone on the same page--to create an orthodoxy, if you will. Some of this is due to social cohesion (whether one wants to use the word 'control' or not), some because of a belief that incorrect belief/action will make God unhappy, and some of it just to keep people who are joining the religion from feeling overwhelmed. To do this, there has to be 'point-people,' which usually comes down to a person in the congregation (ie. the clergy) or a specific reading catalog. This is helpful when someone has pretty idle questions that come up in the day to day (eg. 'I was reading the Bible this morning and want to know more about this') but it becomes critical when the religion runs into problems. A good example of this comes from the Catholic response to the Reformation. Institutionally, the Council of Trent decided that they needed to train their priests better and created the entire seminary system more or less as we know it in response. Outside of the formal council, however, there was an entire generation of writers known as the 'Counter-Reformation' who enlivened Catholic theology not by throwing away the previous theological work of the Augustine and the Church Fathers or Aquinas and the Scholastics, but by creatively engaging with it. I know that some very important texts of the Church Fathers were produced during this time. All of this work not only paid dividends for Catholics, but for people outside of the faith.

What structures are available in the LDS church? Let's look at the clergy for a moment, which Mormonism has a very interesting relationship with. As part of his anti-clerical pushes, Luther promulgated the idea of 'the priesthood of all believers,' which has been very influential among Protestants. Ever since Joseph Smith, the LDS church has doctrinally disagreed with this, holding to the idea of a special priesthood handed down that is not automatic with church membership. This, of course, was most painfully seen with the fact that the LDS church did not want to ordain black people for 150 years. Yet part of the reason why it was most painful was because in practice the priesthood is just handed to every male member only a couple of weeks after being baptized. I've seen a case of someone being confirmed in the front of the church and then going into the pews only to have to immediately stand back up for a sustaining vote for the Aaronic Priesthood. This wide promulgation of the priesthood is very democratic but creates problems. The most egregious of these is that it ultimately means that people are put into pastoral roles with zero training on how to handle difficult issues correctly. To make matters worse, by the time a bishop or stake president does have their feet under them, they are rotated out. I have heard an Eastern Orthodox priest, who had been serving his congregation for 20 years, say with perfect confidence to his parishioners that during confession he had had to deal with every kind of sin imaginable and that nothing anyone came to him about would shock him. This is someone who doesn't need what the LDS church has provided to its bishops, which is a hotline to a group of social workers in Salt Lake.

The three institutions that have actual power in promulgating doctrine in the LDS church are the First Presidency/Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the group in charge of church correlated manuals, and the professors at BYU. There are severe limitations with only relying on these three institutions. First is that in a church that wants to see itself as a global faith, all are in Utah. There is no Mexican, Brazilian, etc. voice able to discuss questions their own members need. They have no separate literature and any idiosyncracies of 'Mormon Spanish' or 'Mormon Portuguese' is just a derivative of translating Mormon ideas that were originally formulated in English. This is in contrast to the early Christian church, where 'Christian Latin' became a very important literary movement in the Latin language. What this also means is that in an effort to cover a global church, the Quorum of the Twelve and people who write the correlated material end up being nowhere. The material that gets preached over the pulpit at General Conference or found in the manuals is today so generalized that it is boring and insipid.

This problem becomes an extremely critical issue thanks a movement among Mormons over the past two decades to jettison their entire theological back-catalog, most notably the works of Bruce R. McConkie, Hugh Nibley, and Spencer W Kimball. Now, Christianity has a long history of jettisoning their own people. For example, Origen used to be widely read until people soured on his theological ideas and condemned him. Manuscripts of Origen that do survive a preface that says 'this guy is a heretic and here's why.' This is what we can call a 'hard jettison.' There is also 'soft-jettisoning,' which is more of a byproduct of a particular author becoming less popular and people gravitating towards others, which is part of normal intellectual trends. A good example in Mormonism would be Charles W Penrose, a counselor to Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant who wrote a good deal of poetry, including some hymns in the LDS hymnal (which I have never heard sung). With someone who has been soft-jettisoned, a succeeding intellectual movement often bring these figures back into the spotlight as part of their new project. A good example would be the Nouvelle Theologie movement, which sought to bring the Church Fathers back into the discourse because they thought they had important things to say.

The wane of McConkie, Nibley, and Kimball's influence is very different. All of McConkie's works and Kimball's Miracle of Forgiveness have been out of print for over a decade despite the fact that people are very aware of these works and have strong opinions on them. Usually a work goes out of print because people just stop reading it and the publisher stops receiving orders. Meanwhile, when McConkie's Mormon Doctrine and Kimball's Miracle of Forgiveness went out of print, it generated news headlines. The decision to push these books out of circulation was a very deliberate move. It was a decision to hard-jettison their entire theological influence over the church. The problem is that McConkie and Kimball were filling important roles by writing these books. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine filled the role of a systematic theology, answering questions about all kinds of things that a lay member or a leader might have. Kimball's Miracle of Forgiveness was regularly handed out by bishops to their penitents as part of the normal pastoral process as part of understanding that process. The problem isn't that those works have been taken away, it's that they haven't been eclipsed by better works.

Unfortunately, the only way out of this mess has to come from top-down. There is no mechanism in the LDS church for local leaders to push an intellectual movement that is theologically rigorous and creative while also remaining orthodox.