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.

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Conclusions

Brodie and Ham specifically, and the revisionist position generally, present a tattered narrative cloth that hardly requires unweaving. I share the bias of literary critics, but one principle of comparison and judgment between two interpretations is the theory that explains the text in greater detail and reveals its complex manifestations is better. Nobody would argue that the simplistic theory treating a text in a cursory and superficial manner is superior. If I see the texture as subtle, filled with complex design and color, and another sees it as monochrome, plain fabric, then a plausible explanation is the reductive meaning is enabled by the reader’s color blindness. Brodie and Ham have not found an adequate interpretive principle for this text. This reading clique imposes a template on the abduction story in Mosiah, but it is a superficial interpretive pattern that demonstrates not the slightest attempt to acquire the skills and tools to become good readers and follow the cues built into the patterns embodied in the text.

Revisionist Book of Mormon readings require that the book be shallow. But while the book asserts its plainness, superficial the book is not. Reducing the sophistication of the scripture to these crude readings simply doesn’t do justice to the text. Comparing readings that begin from contrasting presuppositions is one way to determine better textual analysis from worse.