Mosiah 12 & 13: The Ten Commandments

In Mosiah 12 & 13, Abinadi quotes the Ten Commandments.

In nineteenth-century America, the Decalogue was a link to the Lost Tribes of Israel, a popular topic of the time. Many scholars and religious leaders and archaeologists in the nineteenth century maintained that some or all tribes had made their way to America, bringing with them important wisdom, most specifically the Ten Commandments.

In the aftermath of the Civil War as the United States became home to immigrants from places other than Northern Europe (and Canada), the Ten Commandments were presented as unifying standards, products of "natural law," which presupposes that humans across many cultures will identify similar behaviors as right or wrong. (See section on Natural Law below.) 

The hope was that this natural law--along with archetypes and legends, such as the Founding of Our Country--could bring various religions and sects (and states) together. Hence, the erection of numerous monuments before and after DeMille/Heston's The Ten Commandments. 

Transplanted Israelites alongside their ethical legacy were common currency in the nineteenth century. Despite sharing an interest in those ideas, the first readers of The Book of Mormon were more interested in the associated doctrines. As I will address later, Millenarianism flourished within Mormonism but never went entirely in the same direction as it did in other societies. To borrow from my popular culture background, Joseph Smith had a more Spike attitude towards life and human endeavors than an Angelus attitude, more "let's invest in human activity" than "let's watch the world burn."

Like Joseph Smith, many early Book of Mormon readers were coming out of the Calvinist tradition. An ongoing doctrinal controversy within that tradition was the relationship between grace and works or, rather, the exact nature of grace. Passages within The Book of Mormon return to this issue again and again.

In the Book of Mosiah, Abinadi is brought before the wicked King Noah and King Noah's priests. He uses the opportunity to pull a Martin Luther, to accuse the priests of claiming adherence to a set of behaviors they don’t actually practice: “I perceive that [the Ten Commandments] are not written in your hearts” (Mosiah 13:11). The argument bears resemblance to a current-day interpretation of ancient texts, Jesus’s words, and King Benjamin’s speech, the latter also from The Book of Mormon:

• Michael Coogan argues that the Ten Commandments are likely extremely old. Documentary evidence indicates that they preceded the various versions that appear in the first five Books of Moses. The classically numbered third commandment—commonly presented as “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain”—is more accurately rendered as “You should not use the name of Yahweh, your god, for nothing.” 

Both books are worth checking out. Joselit

discusses monuments--see above.

Coogan goes on to discuss how ancient religions customarily paired magic with theology. Speaking the name of one’s god was often part of a spell. Coupled with the classically numbered second commandment about idols, the third commandment of the Decalogue tosses out the idea of propitiation through such appeals: “The Israelites’ new god with the mysterious name was not a god who could be controlled by invoking his name in incantations or magic, any more than he could be localized in a statue” (Coogan). Paul, who knew his scriptures, built on this idea.

• Jesus uses the Ten Commandments to make a series of rather sarcastic points. (There is far more sarcasm in the Gospels than may make some religious commentators comfortable—it is a touching indicator that Jesus had a singular personality, though one can’t help but wonder if Heavenly Father turned to Jesus upon the Ascension and said, “You do realize many humans have absolutely no sense of humor. They are going to take a bunch of that stuff you said very, very literally.”)

Don’t commit adultery becomes If your right eye offend thee (with lustful gazes), pluck it out.

Although some scholars perceive Jesus as increasing the rules, I agree with those scholars who argue that Jesus is actually driving home a point that comes up with the Rich Young Man: If you truly think you are already completely righteous for keeping all the commandments, fine—now, try this on. Are you as good as you say? Are you honestly dedicated to what you claim to follow? If you keep pushing the envelope here, you might find that the essence of the law is better than a checklist. Because cutting out your eye is a dumb idea. Instead, try to use thoughtfulness and commonsense to be a decent human being. It’ll be easier.

As David Mitchell states about the eye of the needle directive, “Jesus was being sarky and going, ‘It’s about as easy for a rich man to get into heaven as it is to get a planet into a shoe.’” 

Trying to bargain will get a believer absolutely nowhere.

• King Benjamin’s speech early in Mosiah presents a series of if…then statements. The “then” statements are often treated as commandments by readers. They are not. They are “fruits” of adhering to the first commandment:

Believe in God; believe that he is, and that he created all things, both in heaven and in earth; believe that he has all wisdom, and all power, both in heaven and in earth; believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend.

Believe that ye must repent of your sins and forsake them, and humble yourselves before God…(Mosiah 4:9, 10)

If you believe—

You will not have a mind to injure others.

You will treat your children well.

You will help others and have a magnanimous attitude. (Mosiah 4)

In sum, the Ten Commandments are used in The Book of Mormon as a way to resolve the connection between grace and works. Abinadi chastises the learned because they fail to practice what they claim to know/embrace, which chastisement could be taken as an argument in favor of works. However, as detailed above, the overall argument more resembles the points made by Coogan, Jesus, and King Benjamin: the Commandments only have merit as works if they reflect faith-based beliefs as part of character. 

Abinadi then makes an assertion about knowledge/works that would have signaled a battle-cry to nineteenth-century readers, namely a lack of knowledge does not preclude salvation, when he declares without qualification, “Little children also have eternal life” (Mosiah 15:25).

Such a statement may seem a given to readers now—but a gauntlet is being thrown down.

Natural Law

Coogan argues quite reasonably that the Decalogue specifically references ancient Israelite culture. I think he has a point, but I also think there is something rather impressive here about what C.S. Lewis referred to as the Tao; throughout history, people have considered certain things good and bad despite what society considers acceptable and non-acceptable. Slavery has sometimes been acceptable but nobody has ever advocated it as a lifestyle; violence was often far more acceptable but few cultures have ever supported violence/betrayal against a friend (other than those societies that substitute individual virtues with service to the State)...and so on.

Ether: Millenarianism & The Book of Mormon

Background

The best way to understand Millenarianism is to accept that human nature doesn't change, not fundamentally. 

Millenarianism thrived in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries in England and America. Once Protestantism opened the door to ordinary citizens determining their own theologies, they did (much to the consternation of Protestant leaders like Luther and Calvin) and what they determined is that all that cut-and-dried God-is-this stuff pushed on them by religious leaders was just not their cup of tea. (See the history of every pushback against a dogmatic ideology ever.)

In sum (from a religious angle), they wanted their saints and angels back. They wanted the culture and rituals and pageantry of Catholicism without Catholicism plus a whole lot of other stuff, like astrology and fortune-telling. That is, it is no mistake that Millenarianism took off around the same time as Gothicism. As the modern world made greater in-roads into people's lives, people began to hanker for what they imagined the past to be. For some, that imagined past was Gothic. For some, it went back even further. 

Millenarianism's hey day was the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century but it has lingered. When I was growing up, Millenarianism was somewhat more popular than it is now. Many people at church honestly believed (or spoke as if they honestly believed) that the Second Coming was right around the corner. Food storage was important not as a debt-saving maneuver but as a prelude to building storm shelters from when the Soviet Union invaded.

I found the idea increasingly bizarre--and not one that I encountered at home. Reading about the plague in Europe pretty much cured me of being scared into apocalyptic visions by earnest, middleclass, employed, comfortably-situated people who spent most of their time--when not preaching doom--going to work and paying their taxes and sending their kids to college. 

J.F.C. Harrison's The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 focuses on trying to understand the supposed cognitive dissonance here rather than mocking it. Harrison points out that the adherents and preachers of Millenarianism were not uneducated or slothful or deceitful. They were intelligent, contributing members of society. 

Likewise, many self-styled prophets--such as Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers--were supported by establishment clergymen, some of whom lost their parishes due to providing that support. Others, however, did not get booted out by their regular members. Those attendees agreed with their leaders enough to sanction supporting Milleniarian outliers. In addition, many Millenarian beliefs were shared by reformers and artists. It was a wide-ranging ideological system. 

Harrison sums up the attraction best: "[I]t provided an explanation of the mysteries of life to [those] who were dissatisfied with both the orthodoxies of evangelical religion and the claims of Enlightenment reason" (229).

Some of the beliefs shared by Milleniarians:

1. Prophets and visionaries

God's words were not confined to the labeled prophets of the past and designated scholar-interpreters of the present. God did deliver visions. God cared about current problems--such as the French Revolution.

William Blake was one of these visionaries. It wasn't an artistic pose (well, not entirely). He truly believed in his visions, as did many people--about Blake and about themselves. 

As Harrison states, 

Given certain common premises, the claims of millenarian prophets were not easy to refute on logical grounds...Few were prepared to deny absolutely that God might still speak to men through prophecy, so prophets and prophetesses could not be dismissed a priori. [V]isions and voices were validated by a great weight of Christian testimony, and could not be simply put down to hallucination. The strength of the inward witness of the Spirit (inconvenient as it always was for orthodox or majority denominations) means that millenarian claims were assured at least of a hearing in certain quarters. If millenarian visions and visitations were to be discredited they had to be shown to be from the devil...rather than flatly denied as having any existence at all. (227)

2. The Gathering of Israel

For Americans, this gathering meant providing a history/story about and to the Native Americans. As David G. Hackett describes one Millenarian leader--

In seeking to restore the ancient government of the judges, [Noah Ararat] looked to a primordial past for guidance. This impulse resembled that of contemporary Masonic ritualists, Christian primitivists, African American race historians, and Native American members of the Keetoowah Society, who all sought an anchoring in ancient wisdom amid the readily changing present. Moreover, like Joseph Smith's restorationist vision for the Latter-Day Saint, Noah's plan called for the gathering of religiously minded settlers from throughout the world in a theocratic refuge governed by Scripture and the contemporary embodiments of biblical leaders. Both men also called for people of Israelite descent, including tributes of American Indians, to populate the new colonies. (202-203).

3. Last Days

Harrison (kindly) points out that Milleniarians seemed far more fascinated by the drama of the possible destruction of everything than its actual occurrence and fall-out. 

I think this fascination is part of the human condition. With most of us, a desire for upheaval wars with a desire for stability--hence books that dwell with loving detail on the Rapture but fail to mention Jesus Christ. Other examples include people who supported both government regulations and riots during COVID lock downs; paranoid trolls on social media trying to destroy rather than create; the exceedingly bourgeois (not a dirty word) church members I knew growing up who liked to trade stories about possible nuclear winter and missionaries being killed in Jerusalem while paying their taxes, etc. And so on. (My mother, who has a vivid imagination, never enjoyed discussions of the Last Days: to her, the fall-out was real or could be real.) 

Consequently, there are amusing yet entirely believable (in terms of human nature) stories of Milleniarians like Ezekiel Hale, who gave up his business to his oldest son when he thought the end was nigh (he didn't simply burn it down); he then wanted to take it back when the final days didn't arrive. Lawsuits ensued.

Harrison suggests the focus on Last Days is about a larger idea or problem:  

[The sub-culture of millenianism] prominent in Millerism...presents a peculiar psychological problem: how to prepare for the Last Day? Familiar as one might become with scenes from romantic painting and with the imagery of the Book of Revelation, it is difficult to take in such a stupendous idea as the sudden appearance of the Divine Being and the complete ending of the world in its present form. Just how to act and speak in the presence of the Lord, whom one is expecting shortly to meet face to face, presents thoughts which could (or should) have enormous implications for each believer. From accounts of the Millerites one is left with the impression that they struggled hard to comprehend their situation and made the appropriate responses in words, but that they were so bogged down the literalness of their interpretation as to be incapable of grasping the full meanings of the End of Time. (196-197)

Millenarianism & The Book of Mormon

One idea common among Millenarian groups is a chosen land/group. 

Both Britishers and Americans expanded Bible applications beyond the Mediterranean world. The scattering and gathering of Israel was the means for promoting and defending that expansion. It also dovetailed with other ideas, such as the existence of scriptures--including the ten commandments--on American soil (and Joseph of Arimathea's visit to English shores).

The Book of Ether addresses the idea of a chosen, promised land more than other books in The Book of Mormon. (See specifically Ether 2:9-10.) 

However, in truth, The Book of Mormon is extremely diffident about Millenarian ideas. The Millennium is never mentioned. 2 Nephi refers to Satan being bound for a period. 3 Nephi refers to Christ's day of judgment. No reference is made to the number of years involved or the order of events. 

This diffidence is less apparent in Joseph Smith's day-to-day speech and revelations--and could be the product of common cultural discourse (what is accepted as a given doesn't need to be explained). Still, The Book of Mormon makes little effort to prophesy the exact end of times with definite dates or astrology-based explanations. It is remarkably rational in comparison to a great deal of Millenarian discourse (though, again, that discourse is wide-ranging). 

Joseph Brickey

In addition, a deep antipathy for destruction runs through The Book of Mormon, despite the tragic ending. Moroni's sheer despair is enough to lift the book out of Millenarianism's rather unlikable pleasure in catastrophe to something closer to poetry: 

And my father also was killed by them, and I even remain alone to write the sad tale of the destruction of my people. But behold, they are gone, and I fulfill the commandment of my father...I am alone. My father hath been slain in battle, and all my kinsfolk, and I have not friends nor whither to go; and how long the Lord will suffer that I may live I know not. (Mormon 8:3,5)

Moroni's final words in his own book are generous in the extreme, reflecting the transcendent magnanimity of which Joseph Smith was capable.

Harrison sums up the inherent tension here (end of times, sure, but no, no, not yet!) very well:

If, however, the Book of Mormon had been no more than another speculative account of American Israelism, it would not have made the impact that it did. Its themes were essentially the age-old problems that have perplexed men in all generations: the nature of God's revelations, good and evil, personal salvation. These were the problems which agitated many people in western New York (the Burned-over District) in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and the Book of Mormon can be seen as a projection of the beliefs and attitudes of post-revival sectarian religion...

One of the problems of popular millenarian religion is that it has to handle complex theological and philosophical issues at a level which can be generally understood; but the level must not be too simple or it will not satisfy those seekers after salvation whose rejections of their earlier beliefs is the motive for their turning to the next prophet. 

Joseph Smith's solution to this problem was extremely well-tuned to the needs of labouring people in American and England in the 1830s and 1840s. He did not offer an allegorical or abstract interpretation of the Bible in place of earlier and now unacceptable formulations, but added his own scripture which was to be taken literally. He rejected the harshness of Calvinism and the emotionalism of revivalism, while retaining the Puritan work ethic and direction by the inner light of the Spirit. He was as Arminian as Wesley (salvation was offered freely to all who respond to Christ's call): but he spoke with the authority of God's prophet. (Harrison 183-184)

An unapologetic extrovert, Joseph Smith seemed to want to gather people for the sake of gathering people. Gathering people/binding them together = fun and exciting and expansive. Leading them out on a hill to get consumed or gathered up or saved or, in any case, taken away = not so much.  

Bibliography:

Hackett, David G. That Religion In Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture. University of California Press, 2015.

Harrison, J.F.C. The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780-1850. Rutgers, 1979.