“Some Notes on Jacob 4:14, Revelation, Canon, Covenant, and Law”

It’s Friday and, accordingly, a new article has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.  This one is by Dr. Matthew L. Bowen, of Brigham Young University – Hawaii:

““God Hath Taken Away His Plainness”: Some Notes on Jacob 4:14, Revelation, Canon, Covenant, and Law”

Abstract: This article examines Jacob’s statement “God hath taken away his plainness from [the Jews]” (Jacob 4:14) as one of several scriptural texts employing language that revolves around the Deuteronomic canon formulae (Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32 [13:1]; cf. Revelation 22:18‒19). It further examines the textual dependency of Jacob 4:13‒14 on Nephi’s earlier writings, 1 Nephi 13 and 2 Nephi 25 in particular. The three texts in the Hebrew Bible that use the verb bʾr (Deuteronomy 1:5; 27:8; Habakkuk 2:2) — each having covenant and “law” implications — all shed light on what Nephi and Jacob may have meant when they described “plain” writing, “plain and precious things [words],” “words of plainness,” etc. Jacob’s use of Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree as a means of describing the Lord’s restoring or re-“adding” what had been “taken away,” including his use of Isaiah 11:11 (Jacob 6:2) as a hermeneutical lens for the entire allegory, further connects everything from Jacob 4:14 (“God hath taken away”) to Jacob 6:2 with the name “Joseph.” Genesis etiologizes the name Joseph in terms of divine “taking away” (ʾāsap) and “adding” (yōsēp; Genesis 30:23‒24; cf. Numbers 36:1‒5). God’s “tak[ing] away his plainness” involved both divine and human agency, but the restoration of his plainness required divine agency. For Latter-day Saints, it is significant the Lord accomplished this through a “Joseph.”

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“New Book Highlights Hebrew-Like Features in the Book of Mormon”

“The Chiastic Report of the 64th Year of the Reign of the Judges in Helaman 6:7-13”

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Some of you will be interested, I think, in this interview with my Latter-day Saint friend Tarik LaCour, who is currently an M.A. student in psychology and a doctoral student in philosophy at Texas A&M University.  It was conducted by Hanna Seariac:

“FAIR Voice Podcast #12: Interview with Tarik D. LaCour”

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And here is a potentially interesting item from Stephen Smoot:

“B. H. Roberts and the Book of Mormon: An Addendum”

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In the meanwhile, I can’t recall whether I called attention to this item from the Neville-Neville Land blog:

“Jonathan Neville won’t like the September 2020 issue of the New Era”

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Owing to my wife’s surgery earlier this week, we are currently benefitting from the extraordinary kindness of friends and members of our ward.  My mean-spirited viciousness and my ever-seething perpetual rage have, of course, driven them all away.  But they like my wife enough that they overcome their understandable fear and loathing to bring food and to visit.  If you wish, you can add this to your Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File.  It seems to fit.