1 Nephi 1, edited

Back on Easter Sunday, I travelled to Charlotte to meet up with a couple other liberal Mormon types from this neck of the woods. We spent part of the day together, and at one point the conversation turned to the literary quality of the Book of Mormon. One person—an English professor and writer—complained that the book overexplains things, hitting you over the head with who's good and who's bad and what the moral is.

That got me thinking. Part of what makes the Bible interesting, from a literary point of view, is that its narratives are often compact, sometimes to the point of cryptic, and characters may act in ways that at least to a contemporary reader seem ignoble or otherwise dubious, which can give the narratives an air of moral ambiguity. With perhaps the occasional exception, none of that can be said about the Book of Mormon. But what if the Book of Mormon were written that way? What would it look like? And more to the point for the purposes of spirituality—what would it be like to engage devotionally with a Book of Mormon written that way? What kind of theologizing would it invite you to do if the authorial voice weren't doing so much theologizing for you?

What was particularly intriguing to me about this conversation was that at the Easter vigil the night before, I had originally been scheduled (before Hugo and I were tapped to read our remix of St. John Chrysostom) to read the creation story from Genesis. And in preparation of that reading, hoping to shorten the tedium of the Easter Vigil (where people read scripture at you for about an hour) I had created what I hoped would prove a subtly edited version of Genesis 1—trimming out words and phrases to streamline the narrative but making no other alterations to the text.

So I thought—what if I tried to do the same thing to a Book of Mormon narrative? The result is what you see below. It's a "trimmed back" version of 1 Nephi 1, the opening narrative of Lehi's first visions. Unlike in other postings where you may have seen me freely re-render scriptural texts, this edited text has been created simply by omitting material but not otherwise altering the original, except for just a few minor instances where for stylistic reasons I replaced a word in the original text with a synonym or transferred a phrase from one place to another. My goal was to winnow down to the gist of the narrative, without overexplaining things (i.e., letting the text have a certain air of mystery) and avoiding, as much as I thought I could, overt theologizing or moralizing around the narrative. Of course, with a project like this, you run the risk of omitting a detail that another reader finds particularly meaningful. But the edited text represents, for me, at this moment, the heart of what speaks to me from this particular narrative.

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In the first year of the reign of Zedekiah,
there came many prophets,
declaring that the people must repent,
or Jerusalem must be destroyed.

My father, having dwelt at Jerusalem all his days,
as he went forth prayed with all his heart
on behalf of his people.
As he prayed, a pillar of fire
came and dwelt on a rock before him;
and because of the things he saw and heard,
he trembled.

He returned to his house
and cast himself on his bed;
and being overcome by the Spirit,
he was carried away in a vision.

He thought he saw God sitting on his throne,
surrounded with numberless concourses of angels.
He saw one descending from heaven,
whose luster was above that of the sun,
and twelve others following him.
They came down and went forth upon the face of the earth,
and the first came and gave my father a book.

As my father read, he was filled with the Spirit.
He read: "Wo, wo, to Jerusalem,
for I have seen your abominations!"
Many things did my father read concerning Jerusalem—
that it should be destroyed,
and many of its inhabitants perish by the sword,
and many be carried away captive to Babylon.

So my father went forth among the people
and began to prophesy—
to declare to them the things he had seen and heard.
And they were angry with him, and sought his life.