Having completed his superfluous fetch quest and murdered a man in cold blood at god's explicit command, Nephi returns with his brothers, much to the joy of his parents. His mother is particularly pleased, to the point that she utters the awkward early Modern English phrase "know of a surety" twice in the same sentence. From a quick Google search, I've found the phrase turns out to be a very common one in the Book of Mormon, even though it was already so rare in the 1660's that the KJV contains the phrase only twice.
This is one of the things that perplexes me about the origins of the Book of Mormon. Both the KJV and the Book of Mormon available today were, allegedly, translated into English from their original languages. The KJV, it's true, contains many archaic words and phrases...but it does so because it is nearly four hundred years old and the Modern English language has changed extensively in that time. When it was written in 1660, the KJV's language was thoroughly modern. But with the Book of Mormon, it is not so. The Book of Mormon contains even more archaic language (and just plain poor language), even though it was written--excuse me, translated--in 1830, nearly two hundred years after the KJV's smoother language was penned. Why is it that when Smith translated the Book of Mormon he didn't render it in contemporary Modern English, but instead threw in words and phrases that had fallen out of use long before he was born? Compare the overuse of archaic language in the Book of Mormon to it's near-contemporary, the 1860 Young's Literal Translation of the Bible, which does not use (for instance) the phrase "know of a surety" even once. I can see no reason why God would divinely inspire someone to make His word harder to read by translating it using (and overusing) outdated words and terms. However, I can see a very clear reason why Smith would write the Book of Mormon on his own with such language. By inserting and abusing familiar archaic phrases from the KJV (the most popular translation then as now), he tried to make it "sound like the Bible." It's the same tactic KJV-only proponents use to shoot down later translations with easier wording--and it's a fallacious argument: the only reason the KJV sounds archaic to us today is because the passage of time and the development of the English language have made it so...there is nothing inherently archaic about the Bible.
Of course, if you're wondering what Nephi's fetch quest was all about, it was meant to retrieve a Bible from Jerusalem. It was not the complete Bible, of course, or even the complete Old Testament, but that being said it contained a remarkably large portion of the Bible. According to 1 Nephi 5:11-13, "they did contain the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents; and also a record of the Jews from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah; and also the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah; and also many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah." In addition, there was a genealogy proving Lehi was a descendant of Joseph. All of this was written on a set of "brass plates" in Laban's possession.
This raises several questions for me, not the least of which is the medium of the writing. As I said in my introduction, no literate society ever used metal as its main medium of writing, and with good reason. Certainly, the Jews never used it as their mainstay--they used scrolls and books of paper for that, as numerous Bible verses prove (Jeremiah 36:18 and 23 for contemporary examples). In the rare cases where they did choose to use metal, they used it to ornamentalize very brief pieces of text (as with the Silver Scrolls, also contemporary--and note that they wrote plain, regular Hebrew on these, not "reformed Egyptian"). But the brass plates are said to contain a ponderous amount of text, more than the Book of Mormon itself. It would have been, without a doubt, the longest section of text ever written on metal by any society--and it would demonstrate one of the key reasons no one had ever written more than eight pages on metal before: it would be enormously heavy and difficult to move. All of this, of course, makes me wonder why god sent Nephi to fetch the rarest and most cumbersome copy of these writings ever made rather than the more common and easy-to-transport copies written on scrolls.
Of course, in all fairness, there may not have been any other copy, considering the contents. The plates are said to contain a history of the Jews clear down to the time of Zedekiah's reign. Did such a concise history even exist? It's no good to simply say that the plates contained most of 1 and 2 Kings or Chronicles--both are abridgments of earlier, more extensive records made after the fact. Chronicles even goes to the trouble of pointing this out and telling readers where they can find more complete details. To say that the plates contained these earlier, more complete records defies belief, since these records would come from a number of different sources and would increase the volume (and mass) of the plates to the point where a forklift would be necessary to move them safely. The writings of the prophets, particularly Jeremiah, present similar problems. The book of Jeremiah is a compilation of numerous short pieces, arranged in topical rather than chronological order. It could not have been completed until the end of Jeremiah's ministry, and it's likely that, until that time, most of its pieces would not have been available at all. Other prophetic books present similar problems. Finally, there's the matter of having all of this material bound together in one volume. Even as late as the 1st Century (the time of Christ), the Old Testament was still being referred to as "the Law and the Prophets." It would probably have been very rare, even at that time, to find both of them written together, rather than as individual books or--better yet--as two separate volumes of scripture. But the plates are alleged to have the law and the prophets both printed together as if they were one and the same, more than 500 years before Christ.
Taking in the above, I'd say the existence of the plates defies belief, but that's nothing, of course, next to who they used to belong to. Laban, their rightful owner, was--judging from the Book of Mormon's treatment of him--a thoroughly rotten character, one of Jerusalem's corrupt elite. So, why does he have the most elaborate and weighty version of Jewish scripture ever to be written? In particular, why has he added the prophesies of Jeremiah to it? Laban (if he were real) would have been one of the people Jeremiah was publicly decrying as an enemy of God shortly to be killed by the Babylonians. Laban wouldn't have even listened to Jeremiah, let alone believed him. Why would he take the care to add the words of a prophet he didn't believe or like to his improbable collection of engraved scriptures?
Then, there's the matter of the genealogy. It's easy to see from the Bible that genealogies were important to Jews. The books of Matthew and 1 Chronicles both begin with genealogies. There are lots, and lots of genealogies in the Bible. Sometimes just naming someone can result in a sort of mini-genealogy ("A the son of B, the son of C, of the town of Z"). But the Book of Mormon explicitly skips the genealogy of Lehi, even after it's been properly introduced. Nephi says it's left out to conserve space, but honestly, if a society has enough gold to consider writing something the length of the Book of Mormon on it a good idea, then they can splurge a little for an extra plate to write the genealogy on. Nephi offers the excuse that he's just abridging, and thus doesn't want to waste space on the plates with a full account that would include the genealogies--but this just raises the question of why he's wasting gold abridging his father's work at all. Nephi then goes and makes it worse by explaining that genealogies are not spiritual enough for his records. They are "the things which are pleasing unto the world" and are not "pleasing to God" (1 Nephi 6:5); far from being simply distinct from "the things of God" (1 Nephi 6:3) they are "not of worth to the children of men" and Nephi says he will explicitly instruct his descendants never to include them in scripture (1 Nephi 6:6). That's an outright contradiction of the treatment of genealogies in the Bible. Not only does the Bible include many genealogies as worthy material, it goes further, saying they--together with "all scripture"--are inspired (or breathed-out) by God and good for mankind (2 Timothy 3:16). In the Bible, genealogies serve to show how God works to bring things about, generation by generation, even through unexpected events (example: the fact that two of the three named women in Matthew's genealogy of the Jewish Messiah are foreigners--Rahab and Ruth) or human sins (two of the links in the same genealogy of Christ are children from adultery--Perez and Solomon). Genealogies also help to give the Jews a sense of who they are and where they come from as a people. Finally, genealogies serve to authenticate the Bible's accounts by adding additional levels of detail.
This last reason, I fear, is the real reason why the genealogy of Lehi was left out: Smith wrote it on the Lost 116 Pages and simply could not remember it accurately. Afraid to rewrite it and contradict the earlier genealogy, he simply left it out. He does not improve his situation, however, by having Nephi take a chapter to explain why the genealogy wasn't included. Not only does this make Nephi contradict the Bible (a serious error), but it also shows his character as simply said-to-be Jewish rather than actually Jewish. It also, again, raises the question of why it was so important to go back and get the genealogy from Jerusalem in the first place.
But the Book of Mormon goes on, throwing us right into the middle of another fetch quest. Apparently, "the wisdom of God" is to be so unprepared that you have to send your sons back twice to the city you and your family were strictly ordered to evacuate. The first time, it was for the improbable brass book of Laban. In chapter seven, having just gotten back, the boys are sent back to find wives. Apparently it did not occur to god that they might need wives in order to "be fruitful and multiply" in the land he was taking them to. Apparently, god forgot to mention it not only when they left Jerusalem the first time, but also when they were sent back for Laban's book. The wives are apparently very much an afterthought. This, again, contrasts with the hyper-prepared nature of God shown in the Bible. For instance, when God set out to restart humanity in the days of Noah, he did not have to ask Noah's sons to hop out of the ark and rescue some women to serve as their wives--they already had wives aboard. It further raises the question of why going back for wives was necessary: the Americas were already well peopled, with several Mesoamerican civilizations existing in their prime. Why couldn't Nephi and his brothers taken wives from among those people? One might propose the Jewish insistence on pure-bloodedness, but I'm afraid the rest of the book will offer a far simpler (and far less historically accurate) explanation: that there were no women or people of any sort in the Americas at the time.
Blessedly, the story of fetching the wives for Lehi's sons is a short one. Lehi sends them to the family of Ishmael (not Abraham's son), which is conveniently very receptive to their words and promptly heads out to join them. Conveniently, Ishmael has exactly five daughters (four for the sons of Lehi, and one for the servant they dragged out into the desert lest he report the murder of his master). He also has two sons and a wife that go with him into the wilderness, but it remains to be seen whether or not Smith can remember them long enough to bring them up later in the narrative...and apparently it isn't important that the sons of Ishmael be able to have kids, only the sons of Lehi. Sorry, guys: life sucks when you're part of a plot device.
There is one notable thing in the passage, though, a verse that the former owner of the copy I read from highlighted and noted in the margin as "a promise." Verse 12 of chapter 7 says, "the Lord is able to do all things according to his will, for the children of men, if it so be that they exercise faith in him". Nephi reminds his brothers and Ishmael's daughters of this to encourage them to place faith in God. Why? Because god can do anything if you place your faith in him. The contrast with the Bible is telling. The God of the Bible does not need you to put your faith in Him in order for Him to do whatever He likes. There is no caveat to Psalm 115:3's declaration that "Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases" nor to the angel's announcement to Mary that "nothing will be impossible with God." The only places where any such caveats about faith appear are where it regards getting particular answers to prayer. But according to Nephi, the god of the Book of Mormon is only omnipotent if we have faith in him--without our faith, he is a lesser being. Clearly, He is not the self-sufficiently all-powerful God of the Bible, and his book does not compare.
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