BOM Jacob 7

The bulk of Jacob 7, today’s reading, is about Jacob’s encounter with the antichrist Sherem.  But that’s not what I’m going to focus on today.

I’ve always been struck by the note of melancholy with which the book of Jacob closes:

I conclude this record, declaring that I have written according to the best of my knowledge, by saying that the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore, we did mourn out our days.  (verse 26)

Melancholy is a vanishingly rare tone in the Book of Mormon.  Alert readers can, of course, pick up a touch of it, perhaps, in the comments of Mormon, and for good reason:  Since he was a little boy, Mormon says (see Mormon 2:18-19), he had seen little but human evil, and he lives to witness the slow, drawn-out, but, in the end, virtually total destruction of his people.  I think an element of melancholy can also be seen in the uncharacteristic and frank self-criticism of the so-called “psalm of Nephi,” in 2 Nephi 4.

Jacob was born a refugee.  In the Arabian desert.  He never knew the great city of Jerusalem where his father, mother, and siblings had been born and where they had lived in wealth and comfort.  In fact, that city had, as he knew by now, been destroyed.  There was no going back.  And his prophet-father and prophet-brother were now dead, and he was living in a dramatically foreign land, hated by his own extended family, who opposed his most sacred beliefs and would have welcomed his death.  His, I think, is the melancholy of exile, an acute sense of being a stranger and a pilgrim on this earth.  A sense that we, who are sometimes too comfortable in this fallen world, could probably stand to feel somewhat more often than we typically do.

But the overall spirit of the Book of Mormon is hopeful, faithful, positive, confident in the ultimate triumph of both God and good.  And — important note — melancholy certainly isn’t the characteristic mood of the Yankee prophet Joseph Smith who, in his own autobiographical sketch (see Joseph Smith–History 1:28), describes himself as having a “native cheery temperament” — something confirmed by scores of eyewitness accounts — and confesses to a degree of guilt over what he feared was inappropriate levity and youthful association with “jovial company.”  It’s a faint suggestion, I think, that Joseph wasn’t the author.

One other item:

The last two words of Jacob are “Brethren, adieu.”

Many anti-Mormon pamphlets, books, and speakers have made merry with that word adieu.  Was there French on the plates? they triumphantly demand.  Sometimes, they even go so far as to lay out evidence demonstrating — as if any literate person has ever argued otherwise — that French didn’t even exist, neither in the Middle East nor in the Americas, during the sixth century BC.

I’ve long been inclined to award the prize of Most Blitheringly Stupid Anti-Mormon Argument in History to this hoary old chestnut.

The English Book of Mormon claims to be a translation, not a transcript of the original ancient text.  Adieu is a translator’s representation, in a modern language, of what was on the Nephite plates.  The translation could, I suppose, just as easily have rendered it sayonara or ciao.  (The German, Arabic, and Spanish translations have, respectively, Gott befohlen, Brüder! and Wadaa‘an ayyuhaa al-ikhwatu and Adiós, Hermanos!)

If the text had read, instead, “Goodbye, brethren!” the same critics could, by the same logic, have pointed out that goodbye is English, and that English didn’t even exist, neither in the Middle East nor in the Americas, during the sixth century BC.

But such an argument would also undercut the Bible.  Take Genesis 1:1, for example, which begins with In the beginning.  But every single one of those three words is English!  Did Moses or whoever wrote Genesis speak English?

This would be a rock solid argument against the Bible . . . for idiots.  It would apply to virtually any biblical passage.

And, for that matter, to any English translation of any ancient document.  Was there English in the original dialogues of Plato?  In the first manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad?  In the Code of Hammurabi?  With one fell swoop, an enterprising but stupid polemicist could demonstrate that every ancient and/or purportedly “foreign” document that we have is a forgery!

But, a slightly more sophisticated Book of Mormon critic might counter, isn’t it significant that adieu is a French word, and not an English one?  Isn’t it a dead giveaway that Joseph Smith, or Sidney Rigdon, or Solomon Spalding, or the Illuminati, or Hydra, or whoever the proposed author or authors du jour might be, used French?

Hardly.

Both writers and translators use the words in their vocabularies to render their thoughts.  Adieu doesn’t help at all to distinguish a translated English Book of Mormon from a freely created one.

And adieu was securely situated in English by Joseph Smith’s time.  It has an entry, for example, in Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language.  In fact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it had already entered into English by the 1300s, if not earlier.  And, of course, don’t forget the nineteenth-century country and western or folk song “Red River Valley,” and, please, as the song says, “do not hasten to bid me adieu.”