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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Last Nephite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds
The Last Nephite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds
Faculty Publications
This paper leverages the insights of modern scholars on the scribal schools of the ancient near east to identify and track the Nephite scribal school across the ten centuries of the Nephite dispensation. Mormon tells us his abridgment only includes a hundredth part of the Nephite history available to him on the Large Plates of Nephi. That being the case, it is especially impressive that his abridgment tracks the responsibility for maintaining and preserving the Nephite record and other sacred objects—the responsibility of the scribes—across that millennium without gaps. Mormon and his son Moroni were themselves trained scribes who could …
Lehi And Nephi As Trained Manassite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds
Lehi And Nephi As Trained Manassite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds
Faculty Publications
This paper brings contemporary ANE scholarship in several fields together to construct an updated starting point for interpretation of the teachings of the Book of Mormon. It assembles findings from studies of ancient scribal culture, historical linguistics and epigraphy, Hebrew rhetoric, and the history and archaeology of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, together with the traditions of ancient Israel to construct a contextualized perspective for understanding Lehi, Nephi, and their scribal training as they would have been understood by their contemporaries. Lehi and Nephi are shown to be the beneficiaries of the most advanced scribal training available in 7th century …
Nephi's Small Plates: A Rhetorical Analysis, Noel B. Reynolds
Nephi's Small Plates: A Rhetorical Analysis, Noel B. Reynolds
Faculty Publications
Readers of the Book of Mormon commonly assume the adequacy of a simple and straight-forward explanation for the existence of Nephi’s Small Plates. As explained at various points in the text, Nephi had undertaken a shorter version of his Large Plates record by selecting out the spiritual teachings, prophecies and revelations for a more focused presentation. But the adequacy of that explanation has come under considerable strain from two very different directions. In 1986 Fred Axelgard advanced the idea that the description provided for the Large Plates of Nephi as being more historical also applied to all of First Nephi …
Nephite Kingship Reconsidered, Noel B. Reynolds
Nephite Kingship Reconsidered, Noel B. Reynolds
Faculty Publications
This paper extends and updates previous efforts to understand the political dynamic of the Book of Mormon by looking at four themes or issues that can be developed from the text itself. The first is an expansion of earlier treatments of the contradictory political ideologies of the Nephites and Lamanites, which informed relations between these two groups across their thousand-year history. The second is an exploration of the historical possibility that Nephi may never, in fact, have been anointed as king of the Nephite people, which raises in turn a possible need to reassess the character of Nephite kingship. The …