Digital Commons Network^™

“A Prophet Like Moses” (Deuteronomy 18:15–18) In The Book Of Mormon, The Bible, And The Dead Sea Scrolls, David R. Seely

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

David Seely provides a wide-ranging survey of interpretations of the prophecy in Deuteronomy 18:15–18 concerning “a prophet like unto Moses.” He examines relevant passages in the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and the Dead Sea Scrolls and shows how the prophecy has been fulfilled by Jesus Christ and others, continuing with Joseph Smith’s role in the Restoration and onward to the present day.

Missing Words: King James Bible Italics, The Translation Of The Book Of Mormon, And Joseph Smith As An Unlearned Reader And Editor Of A Visioned Text, Stan Spencer

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Chapters from Isaiah quoted in the Book of Mormon use the King James Bible as a base text yet frequently vary from it in minor ways, particularly in the earliest text of the Book of Mormon. A disproportionate number of these variants are due to the omission or replacement of words italicized in the KJV. Many of the minor variants were eliminated by the printer for the 1830 edition or by Joseph Smith himself for the 1837 edition, but others remain. Some of the minor variants are easily explained as errors of dictation, transcription, or copying, but others are not …

Temporal Mercies And Eternal Being: Using The Science Of Time To Understand God’S Nature And Our Own, Jared R. Stenson

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

How does God relate to time? How do we? Modern science and revelation offer distinctive and fascinating perspectives to these questions. Specifically, the physical mechanisms underlying time have doctrinal parallels, they appear to be operative at the Fall, and they correlate with several phenomena that make God’s mercy possible.

“God Hath Taken Away His Plainness”: Some Notes On Jacob 4:14, Revelation, Canon, Covenant, And Law, Matthew L. Bowen

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

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” …

Faith, Hope, And Charity: The “Three Principal Rounds” Of The Ladder Of Heavenly Ascent1, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

This chapter argues that “the scriptural triad of faith, hope, and charity should be understood as something more than a general set of personal attributes that must be developed in order for disciples to become like Christ. Instead, as part of the ‘guarded tradition of the Apostle’ [Paul] that is transmitted to readers in 1 Corinthians and elsewhere in scripture, these terms have been used to describe a distinct progression of ‘stages in a Christian’s earthly experience.’ The three stages that correlate to faith, hope, and charity were described by Joseph Smith as the ‘three principal rounds’ of a ladder …

The Visions Of Moses And Joseph Smith’S Bible Translation, Kent P. Jackson

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

This contribution focuses on the earliest and one of the most significant chapters of the Book of Moses: Moses 1, sometimes called the “Visions of Moses.” Kent Jackson summarizes the sources available relating to the production of this chapter, illuminating obscure corners of its often misunderstood background with his extensive knowledge of the history, manuscripts, and significance of the Joseph Smith Translation.

The Theology Of C. S. Lewis: A Latter-Day Saint Perspective, Robert L. Millet

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

In this essay, Robert Millet describes the work and impact of C. S. Lewis as it pertains to the Latter-day Saints. He explores possible reasons why Church leaders have felt comfortable quoting Lewis in General Conference more than any other non-Latter-day Saint writer and provides a substantial list of the subjects for which his writings have had special appeal to the Saints. While acknowledging Lewis’ personal faults and the obvious points of difference between his faith and our own, Millet concludes with an expression of gratitude for his “lasting lessons and his noble legacy.”

“We Are A Remnant Of The Seed Of Joseph”: Moroni’S Interpretive Use Of Joseph’S Coat And The Martial Nēs-Imagery Of Isaiah 11:11–12, Matthew L. Bowen

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Genesis 30:23–24 offers a double etiology for Joseph in terms of “taking away”/“gathering” (ʾāsap) and “adding” (yāsap). In addition to its later narratological use of the foregoing, the Joseph cycle (Genesis 37–50) evidences a third dimension of onomastic wordplay involving Joseph’s kĕtōnet passîm, an uncertain phrase traditionally translated “coat of many colours” (from LXX), but perhaps better translated, “coat of manifold pieces.” Moroni1, quoting from a longer version of the Joseph story from the brass plates, refers to “Joseph, whose coat was rent by his brethren into many pieces” (Alma 46:23). As a military and spiritual leader, Moroni1 twice uses …

Itty Bitty Books With Big Lessons: Enos, Jarom, Omni, Jasmin Gimenez Rappleye

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Sharon Harris, a professor of English at Brigham Young University, offers an analysis of the theology of the “small books” of Enos, Jarom, and Omni in this next installment of The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Harris argues that the theology of these small books focuses on the covenant with the Nephites and Lamanites, the importance of genealogy, and the role kenosis plays in several of these Book of Mormon prophets. Harris presents both new and familiar readings of these compact books, providing a fair contribution to their study.

The Emerging Metamodern Sensibility In Narrative: A Case Study Of Things Left Forgotten And The Dai Gyakuten Saiban Games, Gina Barbieri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis proposes a metamodern shift in recent narrative trends, which incorporate modernist and postmodernist techniques for narrative. This includes narrative shifts which utilize postmodern devices such as irony and satire for seemingly modern ends such as hope and progress. This thesis posits that this shift can be understood through an analysis of emergent media, and considers the intertextual nature of fanfiction narratives emerging from games through a case study of Things Left Forgotten, a fanfiction written by Archive of Our Own user LookerDeWitt and based upon the two Dai Gyakuten Saiban games, spinoffs of the Ace Attorney series …

Ayahuasca’S Religious Diaspora In The Wake Of The Doctrine Of Discovery, Roger K. Green

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

‘Ayahuasca’ is a plant mixture with a variety of recipes and localized names native to South America. Often, the woody ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) is combined with chacruna leaf (Psychotria viridis) in a tea, inducing psychedelic effects among its users. While social usage varies among Indigenous Peoples of South America, during the twentieth century new religious movements in Brazil began employing the mixture as religious sacrament. Additionally, various centers for ayahuasca “healing” have emerged both inside and outside of the Amazon Rainforest, frequently with the aim of helping people addicted to other substances. As interest grew, …

24th Annual Richard A. Harrison Symposium: A Celebration Of Student Research And Achievement In The Humanities And Social Sciences, Meralis ÁLvarez-Morales, Chloe Armstrong, Tia Colbert, Maggie Davis, Barbara Espinosa Barrera, Sam Goldbeck, Tom Goldberg, Clancy Loebl, Cynfor Lu, Sam Luedtke, Sam Miller, Hikari Mine, Katherine Mueller, Thuy Nguyen, Callie Ochs, Logan Robison, Ben Schultz, Martha Strawbridge, Tamima Tabishat, Zhiru Wang

Richard A. Harrison Symposium

The Harrison Symposium celebrates independent and collaborative student research in the Social Sciences and Humanities. The Harrison is usually held as an annual conference in May, but this year’s shift to remote teaching and the new coronavirus pandemic eliminated the opportunity for in-person presentations. Instead of cancelling the event, students nominated by faculty members were invited either to participate in next year’s Harrison, or to contribute to the volume you are now reading. Reimagining the Harrison as a written artifact was inspired by the 1997 Harrison Symposium. In the early years of the conference, the Dean of Faculty Richard A. …

"To Bloom In Empty Space": An Introduction And Commentary On The Petichta To Esther Rabbah, Ethan Nosanow Levin

Religious Studies Honors Projects

The petichta to Esther Rabbah (c. 6^th century CE) reflects a pessimistic rabbinic response to the physical and theological displacement of the Jews in an increasingly Christianized Roman Palestine. Using the covenantal curses (specifically Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26) as a frame, the rabbis situate the book of Esther and their current socio-political context into the rabbinic paradigm of the Four Kingdoms, representative of ongoing imperial oppression. According to Esther Rabbah, Jews living under Roman rule–even those in Palestine–are living in a state of “exile” characterized by the ongoing impact of the covenantal curses. For the rabbis, Israel cannot …

Seek Ye Words Of Wisdom, Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry, Gaye Strathearn, Shon D. Hopkin

Interpreter Foundation Books

Stephen David Ricks is a professor of Hebrew and cognate learning in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he has taught for almost four decades (1981–). It was at BYU, in a freshman Book of Mormon class, that he first met Shirley Smith. Four years later, after they had both served German- speaking missions (Stephen in Switzerland and Shirley in Southern Germany), they were married in the Provo Utah Temple in 1974. They are now the proud parents of six children—three girls and three boys, all of whom are married—and have twenty …

Some Notes On Joseph Smith And Adam Clarke, Kent P. Jackson

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Authors of two recent articles believe they have found evidence that Joseph Smith, in preparing his revision of the Bible, drew ideas from a contemporary Bible commentary by British scholar Adam Clarke. The evidence, however, does not bear out this claim. I believe that none of the examples they provide can be traced to Clarke’s commentary, and almost all of them can be explained easily by other means. The authors do not look at their examples within the broader context of the revisions Joseph Smith made to the Bible, and thus they misinterpret them. Some of the revisions they attribute …

Nephi’S Obsession, Or, How To Talk With Nephi About God, Ralph C. Hancock

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Joseph Spencer’s intimate familiarity with the Book of Mormon text, based upon years of close textual study and informed by a well- developed theological sensibility, is in full evidence in this lead-off volume in Neal A. Maxwell Institute’s new series of books on the various books of the Book of Mormon. Leaving to prophets and apostles the responsibility for “declaring official doctrine,” this new series approaches the book with the tools of the “scholarly practice” of theology. In Spencer’s case at least, his practice is understood to be (1) informed by an emphasis on grace that is skeptical of claims …

Dignity: An Islamic Perspective, Zeki Saritoprak

2020 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

The Carthusian Influence On Werner Rolewinck’S Approach To History, Nathaniel Harris

Fasciculus Temporum

The Carthusian Order was founded in 1084 by St. Bruno of Cologne and a small number of followers, all seeking greater solitude and a more austere, contemplative monasticism. Carthusian monks lived predominantly isolated lives, only coming together co-operatively for prescribed religious purposes.

The intellectual and separate life of a Carthusian monk appealed to Werner Rolewinck (1425-1502), the author/compiler of the Fasciculus temporum, one of the two texts (together with the Malleus maleficarum) included in Portland State University Library’s late fifteenth-century codex. With its structure modeled on early chronicles and biblical conventions, its inclusion of a variety of woodcut …

The Appropriation Of Lacrosse: Competitive Lacrosse And The Creator’S Game, Chloe Anderson

Race, Ethnicity, & Religion

No abstract provided.

Review: Richard Neitzel Holzapfel And David M. Whitchurch, Eds. My Dear Sister: Letters Between Joseph F. Smith And His Sister Martha Ann Smith Harris. Salt Lake City And Provo, Ut: Deseret Book And Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2019., Natalie Rose

Mormon Studies Review

decades of letters exchanged between the sixth church president and his sister from the 1850s to the 1910s. A majority of these letters are provided by Carole Call King, the great-granddaughter of Martha Ann Harris, who had the well-preserved letters in her possession. Following her father’s death in 1993, King inherited several items from her father including these letters that remained in a box left “on a closet shelf ” in her home for some time (xiv). In the box were almost one hundred letters written to her great-grandmother Martha Ann Harris by Harris’s brother Joseph F. Smith, the nephew …

Front Matter

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Confronting And Condemning “Hard Doctrine,” 1978–2013, Matthew L. Harris

Mormon Studies Review

Although Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 revelation in the Salt Lake Temple ended the 126-year-old priesthood and temple ban affecting persons of African descent, questions about racial teachings in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lingered. The revelation, canonized as “Official Declaration 2” in Latter-day Saint scripture, failed to repudiate the theology justifying the ban.1 Some members, consequently, continued to assert that black people were cursed, equating their dark skin with misdeeds they allegedly committed in a pre-earth life.2 Anguished over these microaggressions, black Latter-day Saints petitioned church officials to condemn racism within the church as well as remove …

2020 Graduate Theological Studies Journal & Newsletter

Graduate Theological Studies Journal and Newsletter

Graduate Theological Studies is published by the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA.

Inkatha, Propaganda, And Violence In Kwazulu-Natal In The 1980s And 90s, Michael Macinnes

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

The 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of the end of Apartheid in South Africa but before the first fully democratic election in 1994, the KwaZulu-Natal region was being torn apart by a low level civil war. This conflict was not the black majority fighting against white minority, but part of so-called black on black violence. One side was the African National Congress (ANC) and the United Democratic Front (UDF) and on the other was Inkatha, secretly backed by the Apartheid state. Originally a Zulu nationalist liberation movement aligned with the ANC, Inkatha separated with the ANC over issues of …

A Wesley Bibliography [Ninth Edition], Kenneth J. Collins

Academic Books

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Memory And Millennials: A Review Of First Vision: Memory And Mormon Origins, Spencer R. Marsh

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

The multiple historical accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision have been an area of intense study, debate, and discussion for several decades. The newest addition to the discussion is a specialized monograph engaging the various accounts of the First Vision through the lens of psychology and, particularly, memory studies. This book, authored by Steven C. Harper, proves to be a valuable resource in answering some pressing questions about the integrity of the First Vision accounts, even though that was not the book’s explicitly stated purpose. This review highlights these contributions as interpreted through the lens of a Millennial reviewer — …

The Brass Plates Version Of Genesis, Noel B. Reynolds

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

The Book of Mormon peoples repeatedly indicated that they were descendants of Joseph, the son of Jacob who was sold into Egypt by his brothers. The plates of brass that they took with them from Jerusalem c. 600 bce provided them with a version of many Old Testament books and others not included in our Hebrew Bible. Sometime after publishing his translation of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith undertook an inspired revision of the Bible. The opening chapters of his version of Genesis contain a lot of material not included in the Hebrew Bible. But intriguingly, distinctive phraseology in …

The Joseph Smith Papers And The Book Of Abraham: A Response To Recent Reviews, Matthew J. Grow, Matthew C. Godfrey

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

The Joseph Smith Papers welcomes engagement with its work and gratefully acknowledges the important work of various scholars on the Book of Abraham. Recent reviews in the Interpreter of Revelations and Translations, Volume 4, however, significantly misunderstand the purposes and conventions of the project. This response corrects some of those misconceptions, including the idea that the transcript is riddled with errors and the idea that personal agendas drive the analysis in the volume. The complex history of the Book of Abraham can be understood through multiple faithful perspectives, and the Joseph Smith Papers Project affirms the value of robust, respectful, …

A Passover Setting For Lehi’S Exodus, Don Bradley

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Later in his life, former Palmyra resident Fayette Lapham recounted with sharp detail an 1830 interview he conducted with Joseph Smith Sr. about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Among the details he reports that Lehi’s exodus from Jerusalem occurred during a “great feast.” This detail, not found in the published Book of Mormon, may reveal some of what Joseph Sr. knew from the lost 116 pages. By examining the small plates account of this narrative in 1 Nephi 1−5, we see not only that such a feast was possible, but that Lehi’s exodus and Nephi’s quest for …