BOM 1 Nephi 20

Today’s reading, 1 Nephi 20 (compare Isaiah 48), is the first of the infamous “Isaiah chapters” in the Book of Mormon.  “Infamous,” because readers who’ve been sailing along, thus far, with the fairly straightforward narrative of the book of 1 Nephi now run into prophetic texts that are, to most, as inscrutable as T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.  Many either skip these chapters or altogether surrender their plan of reading the Book of Mormon.

At least one reader of my blog has predicted that these chapters would be the acid test of my project to comment my way through the Book of Mormon.

I don’t think, though, that Isaiah needs to be as difficult as we tend to make him.  (For one thing, simply reading a clearer modern translation — such as, say, this one, or this one — can be of enormous help.  Such translations are easily accessible on line, at such sites as this.)  But laying out a full explication of these chapters (most of which are actually in 2 Nephi) would require a lot of time and effort, and it’s simply a project that I cannot take on right now.  Here, my rule of picking up only one small element from each chapter saves me from an investment of labor that would, frankly, mean abandoning my intent.

So I’m going to restrict myself to the last verses of the chapter, 1 Nephi 20:18-22, in which the prophet Isaiah eloquently contrasts the peace of the righteous to the turmoil of wickedness.

 18 O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments—then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea.

 19 Thy seed also had been as the sand; the offspring of thy bowels like the gravel thereof; his name should not have been cut off nor destroyed from before me.

 20 Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans, with a voice of singing declare ye, tell this, utter to the end of the earth; say ye: The Lord hath redeemed his servant Jacob.

 21 And they thirsted not; he led them through the deserts; he caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them; he clave the rock also and the waters gushed out.

 22 And notwithstanding he hath done all this, and greater also, there is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked.

Here is the same passage, as given in the New English Translation:

18 If only you had obeyed my commandments,
prosperity would have flowed to you like a river,
deliverance would have come to you like the waves of the sea.
19 Your descendants would have been as numerous as sand,
and your children like its granules.
Their name would not have been cut off
and eliminated from my presence.
20 Leave Babylon!
Flee from the Babylonians!
Announce it with a shout of joy!
Make this known!
Proclaim it throughout the earth!
Say, ‘The Lord protects his servant Jacob.
21 They do not thirst as he leads them through dry regions;
he makes water flow out of a rock for them;
he splits open a rock and water flows out.’
22 There will be no prosperity for the wicked,” says the Lord.

With his allusion to God’s provision for the Children of Israel, through Moses, of water from the rock (see Exodus 17:6 and Numbers 11:2-13), Isaiah compares the escape of the Hebrews from their Babylonian captivity to the much earlier exodus from Egypt.  It’s very much in this spirit, in the spirit of his own principle of “likening the scriptures unto us,” that Nephi, in turn, sees parallels to both events in the larger history of Israel in his family’s divinely-led escape from the wickedness of doomed Jerusalem.

It’s not at all difficult to see how these patterns of repentance and God-blessed withdrawal from wickedness can apply in our own families, and in our own personal lives.  The wicked will, in the end, have no peace.  But our peace can be, if we will choose it, like a river.