BOM 2 Nephi 1

With today’s reading, 2 Nephi 1, we enter into an entirely different book within the Book of Mormon — its second.

That fact in itself is interesting.

No great lapse of time separates the end of 1 Nephi from the beginning of 2 Nephi.  No significant event marks the division.  Indeed, the happenings with which 2 Nephi 1 begins seem to occur on the very same day as those narrated in 1 Nephi 22.  They are, perhaps, only minutes apart.  Many chapters within 1 Nephi are more clearly distinct from each other than are the end of 1 Nephi and the beginning of 2 Nephi.

Is this not peculiar?  Odd?

How to explain it?

One possibility, drawing on some of the research and writing of Noel Reynolds, a retired professor of political philosophy at Brigham Young University and a former leader of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), as well as an early contributor to Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, who recently presided over the Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple, is that 1 Nephi is constructed as a massive chiasm, and that, at 1 Nephi 22, that chiasm was, simply, complete.  His view of 1 Nephi as a chiasm is neatly summarized (by someone else) here:

http://www.cometozarahemla.org/nephi/first-nephi.html

Something else is striking about the division between 1 Nephi and 2 Nephi:  Joseph Smith didn’t know it was coming,

I discuss this interesting fact, and what I see as its significance for the question of Book of Mormon authorship, here:

http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1124&index=8

(See especially the portion of the article following footnote 15.)