Unlocking Isaiah
A review of Joseph Spencer's latest offering, a lucid and learned study of how key voices in the Book of Mormon interpret the writings of Isaiah.
Perusing the shelves at Deseret Book, one quickly notices that a cottage industry has sprung up around interpreting Isaiah for a lay audience. With so many options, where can wisdom be found? With this publication we have, at long last, a systematic study of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon that is worth its salt.
This is not Joseph Spencer’s first word on the subject, so this book is best seen as a refinement and culmination of decades of inquiry regarding Isaiah in the Book of Mormon on the part of the author (though he demurs this assessment, instead describing it in its closing pages as something more like a preliminary gesture rather than a magnum opus). Anyone acquainted with the author knows that 300 pages is, for him, just getting started.
By now we have all heard the old joke about a missionary getting shot but miraculously being saved by his pocket-sized Book of Mormon because the bullet could not get through the Isaiah chapters. Humorous though it is, I imagine Nephi would be quite distressed with this kind of sentiment that we, by and large, take as axiomatic. The joke is, in a less humorous vein, emblematic of our broader inability to read scripture in anything but the surface-skimming devotional or doctrine-extraction mode.
As if anticipating our complaints, Nephi states that Isaiah was not plain to his own people (2 Nephi 25:4), but that it would be plain to us in the last days (25:8)! We have not yet lived up to this hope of his, but I would suggest that this book is a major step towards that end.
Far from being a disharmonious obtrusion in an otherwise pleasant narrative, Spencer informs us, Isaiah is “the organizing force for the materials making up the Book of Mormon,” and far from being haphazard, the Book of Mormon is a “choosy interpreter of Isaiah” via a clear programmatic interaction with it.
After an introduction and preliminary matters, the book is broken up into two major sections: Mormon’s Isaiah and Nephi’s Isaiah. What strikes the reader immediately is that these sections are in reverse chronological order relative to the published Book of Mormon with which we are familiar. This is by design, as Spencer has organized the study with a view to the dictation order rather than the chronological or published order of the Book of Mormon. For those unfamiliar, the dictation order is as follows:
The lost 116 manuscript pages
The Large Plates - Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, 3 Nephi, 4 Nephi, Mormon, Ether, Moroni, Title Page
The Small Plates - 1 Nephi, 2 Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, Words of Mormon
After losing the manuscript pages, Joseph Smith did not immediately turn to the replacement record but rather picked up right where he left off and only afterwards dictated the chronological beginning of the book.
Kim Morgan, Translation of the Book of Mormon (2015)
So what? the reader might justifiably ask. The immediate answer is that the dictation order is how Joseph Smith himself encountered Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, and any serious textual scholar must, by nature of their scholarly craft, pay attention to original form and ordering.
The two main sections (Mormon’s Isaiah and Nephi’s Isaiah) are further broken down into the three main interpreters of Isaiah—Abinadi and Jesus in the first section and Nephi in the second. Within these subsections, Spencer addresses three main subjects: 1) How each figure interprets Isaiah (within the Book of Mormon), 2) How each figure’s interpretation stacks up against the others, and 3) How Book of Mormon interpretations of Isaiah compare with antebellum American interpretations.
Chapter 1 addresses preliminary matters for the study including an introduction to the Book of Mormon’s selectivity in Isaiah quotation, patterns of Isaiah’s appearance in the text, and the “ideal reader” that will accompany us throughout the study. Bringing onboard this fictive “ideal reader” allows Spencer to explicitly center the following question: “How would someone living in the United States of America in 1829–1830 react to the Book of Mormon if she were (1) familiar with the general history of Isaiah's interpretation and (2) a particularly close and generous interpreter of the Book of Mormon?” Though the possible candidates for this “ideal reader/listener” are all long dead (and probably nonexistent to begin with), Spencer steps in to fill the gap.
Chapters 2 and 3 take up the story of Abinadi, which is the dictated text’s first engagement with Isaiah. Four verses from Isaiah 52 feature in a showdown between a literalist interpretation by the priests of King Noah and an esoteric Christological interpretation by Abinadi. The showdown becomes all the more interesting when Spencer argues that King Noah’s priests were in all likelihood operating with a “Nephi-like hermeneutic of Isaiah” inherited from Zeniff, turning the showdown into a kind of debate between Abinadi and the ghost of Nephi.
Chapters 4 and 5 take up the the arrival of the ultimate arbiter of that debate in Third Nephi—the resurrected Christ. Ironically, Spencer points out, Abinadi’s interpretation of Isaiah is Christologically focused, but Christ’s own focus is non-Christological (78). Then taking up and expanding upon New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl’s discovery of the centrality of the Gospel of John to Third Nephi, Spencer carefully argues the case that “John becomes a Christological frame for making sense of the covenantal interpretation Christ offers of Isaian prophecy” (99), which is obsessively literal and therefore would have fallen on the margins of antebellum America. With a profound sense of irony not lost on the reader, he then juxtaposes the approaches of Abinadi who—for the sake of preaching Christ—is “deflationary” of Isaiah, and Christ himself who is “reflationary” of Isaiah.
Transitioning to Part II on Nephi’s Isaiah, Spencer points out some of the fascinating quirks that arise from paying attention to dictation order. To someone in the room with Joseph Smith, he speculates, it “would have most naturally felt as if Mormon’s project were a really long preface to the record of Nephi” (122), and later asks, “is it therefore possible to see Nephi as obediently (and anachronistically) fulfilling the command of Mormon’s Christ ‘to search . . . the words of Isaiah’ and to do so ‘diligently’ (3 Nephi 21:1) . . . Would Nephi not exemplify what it means for someone to take Christ’s commandment seriously?” Indeed, “the architecture of Nephi’s project smacks more of the doctoral dissertation than of the pastor’s sermon.”
Chapter 6 takes a close look at how Nephi interacts with Isaiah in First Nephi and compares it with antebellum American interpretations of Isaiah’s “nursing fathers and nursing mothers.”
Chapter 7 is Spencer at his best, as he lays out for us the overall structure of Nephi’s record, which is organized “from beginning to end, around the task of interpreting Isaiah” through a series of incrementally expanding textual diagrams on pages 158–165. This is the section that would most delightfully rock the boat (in the best way) in Sunday school because he argues that “Nephi’s record is not—certainly not primarily—about the concrete life of faith before God. It has something larger than individuals in view,” and later, “In Nephi’s record, then, there is ultimately Isaian prophecy and narrative props that foreground Isaian prophecy.” All our favorite stories about Nephi that we string along in Sunday School as far as we can to avoid discussing the Isaiah chapters are, alas, missing the point.
Chapter 8 tackles what Claudia Bushman once referred to as “the wasteland of 2 Nephi with its endless transcriptions of Isaiah.” Spencer helpfully explains that the Isaiah chapters are in fact made up of three distinct sequences, based on original chaptering, that tell a particular story which is both literal and liken-able. The simple act of dividing the Isaiah chapters into a discernable narrative sequence pays tremendous dividends for a seasoned but weary reader of the Book of Mormon.
Chapter 9 focuses on Nephi’s last and most virtuosic interaction with Isaiah 29 in 2 Nephi 25–27, where Nephi’s and Isaiah’s voices merge and become indistinguishable at the conclusion of the book. This chapter is the most difficult to summarize because it draws together so many strands of thought that have been developed in the preceding pages. Its first section examines Nephi’s novel hermeneutic via a close reading of Isaiah 29 compared to Nephi’s version, which has spawned latter-day theories of Isaiah ur-texts and the like (which Spencer rejects). He follows this with deeply fascinating speculations on the Isaian phrase “as one that hath a familiar spirit” (Joseph Smith and benign necromancy anyone?). The last section addresses the epistemological implications of Nephi’s use of Isaiah, and of the Book of Mormon’s existence more broadly, via the ‘sealed book’ episode that we all too readily interpret as referring to the historically specific Charles Anthon incident. Following Nephi’s cues, Spencer argues that historicity, a perpetual thorn in the side of Book of Mormon Isaiah studies, is “wholly decisive only in the last instance,” which is to say, only after we take Isaiah’s elemental role in the Book of Mormon seriously.
The foregoing summaries are not comprehensive and by no means capture the lucidity and perspicacity with which Spencer performs his exegesis, each chapter brimming with pearls of insight that I would not have discovered on my own in a thousand years. He also possesses that rare and blessed gift of someone who can think a thousand miles deep while always ensuring that the reader is along for the ride. He tells us beforehand what he is going to do and then does it, with signposts all along the way just to make sure we don’t get lost.
Overall, this book is the new high-water mark for the study of Isaiah’s reception in the Book of Mormon, and will hopefully enter the broader stream of Isaiah reception studies as well. Spencer is also to be commended for attempting to place the Book of Mormon squarely inside of Isaiah reception studies rather than treating it in confessional isolation as is often done.
As for what Spencer thinks of the true scope of the matter, here is what he has to say:
It is not enough to say just that the Book of Mormon makes a real contribution to the history of Isaiah interpretation and that the Book of Isaiah makes a real contribution to the constitution and nature of this unique volume of world scripture. The Book of Mormon's contribution on this question goes right to the heart of key theological issues surrounding what it means for scripture to remain relevant—if indeed it can— in the modern age. If Isaiah has a life to live still in and beyond the twenty-first century, the book of Mormon puts itself forward as having something to say about it.
So if you find yourself in a dark and dreary waste when reading Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, consider taking Joseph Spencer as your guide.