32 thoughts on “Lehi Quoting Joseph Quoting the Lord about All Those Josephs: 2 Nephi 3”

1. It has taken quite a while to add the HTML coding, and I’ve tweaked a couple of problems since posting. If you see lingering formatting problems, I’d appreciate a heads-up.

2. Also, if anyone would find it useful to have a digital copy of this, I’ll be glad to send it (leave a legitimate address with your comment). You’ll lose italics, etc., just lifting it off the blog, I think.

3. Ardis, this is fantastic! I really like the formatting, and I also like that you interpreted every pronoun, whereas I only did the ones at critical junctures. (And yes, I would like a digital copy to klbarney at yahoo dot com.)

   So far as I can tell we see it the same way, with one exception: I see v. 17 as referring to Moses and Aaron, with v. 18 transitioning to Joseph and Sidney or whoever as a modern analog to Moses//Aaron. But to me that is a total toss up and one can take it either way.

   I hadn’t noticed your verse 22 conundrum. Interesting point that “after this manner” is ambiguous and could refer either to that which precedes or that which follows. I think it more naturally reads as referring to what precedes, but I also would take v. 24 as referring to Joseph as descended from Joseph in Egypt, not Joseph son of Lehi, just as you have it. If that is inconsistent, so be it.

4. I have always assumed this passage to be describing Joseph Smith as a descendant of Joseph of Egypt, although genetics being what it is, it’s not entirely impossible that Joseph Smith was a descendant of Lehi. It only takes one one individual with an unusual life path to add their entire family tree to a family.

   My interpretation of verse 17 is a little different. Joseph (Egypt) says that he is sure of the promise of a Moses, and he is equally sure of the promise of a seer named Joseph. I take verse 17 to be a description of the person we call Moses, whom God has promised to Joseph, and the following verse to be a description of the seer of his own loins. The only difference this makes is that Joseph Smith is not necessarily the one who couldn’t speak much. That was Moses. But God prepared a spokesman for both of them.

   I also assume that Lehi is being prophetic in telling Joseph (Lehi) that his (Joseph-Lehi) will be preserved, because that is not a given based on the Joseph (Egypt) prophecies that Lehi has been giving.

   Anyway, that’s my reading.

   When I was at BYU, I played in an orchestra that performed an Oratorio called “And His Name Shall Be Called Joseph” so whenever I read this passage, I hear it sung in my head.

5. Thanks, Kevin and LauraN. I’m fantasizing these days about organizing my ideal study group — it would include opportunities to puzzle out and discuss different readings of the text, just as you both have done here. Thinking … thinking …

6. Here’s another interpretation that I found a couple of days ago when I read this chapter and realized for the first time in my life I had no idea what was going on here:

   http://quantumleap42.blogspot.com/2012/12/was-joseph-smith-descended-from-lehi.html?m=1

   The author thinks that perhaps the writer in verse 18 and the mighty one in verse 24 is Mormon. And the spokesman in 18 is either Joseph Smith or Moroni.

7. Apologies for the duplicate comment.

   [I fixed it. — Ardis]

8. Mormon hadn’t even occurred to me! But of course we should look for his hand almost anywhere. Back to work. Thanks!

   [added:]

   Having read it only quickly and only once, now, I know I’ll have to give a lot more thought to it. But my first instinct is to be skeptical of the teacher’s summoning Lehi’s unknown father to play any role here. That is pulling a rabbit out of a hat and isn’t something I can support at all. I’m also highly skeptical of naming Moroni as a spokesman for Joseph Smith (or any of the Josephs, really) — that doesn’t fit at all, IMO.

   And on second thought, I wonder about any involvement from Mormon, since he didn’t abridge Nephi’s plates but merely added them to the record he had already abridged. So he isn’t there as an author involved in framing this particular passage — although I’ll give some thought to whether Mormon as responsible for there even being a Book of Mormon has a bearing on this passage.

9. The Mormon thing was BRM’s interpretation, which I included as an alternative in my presentation.

10. I completely missed that, Kevin. It takes very attentive reading to follow not only the scripture passage but any dissection of it as well.

11. I saw this post and thought, “Hey I wrote about this a few years ago. Maybe I’ll share my link.”

    Then I check the comments and John has already shared a link to my post. Great, now I don’t have to shamelessly promote myself.

    I originally heard about this in a BoM class at BYU, and a few years ago I went through my own scriptures and put in quotation marks. The way it breaks down I think verses 18-21 being a quote from Lehi makes more sense.

12. It’s nice to have your work remembered longer than a week, isn’t it, quantum? 😀

13. By the time I got to the last of this post I felt that I was going around in circles. I’m really impressed to Ardis and also to Kevin and others who have plotted out this set of scriptures. I can see that I need to print this out, then sit down with some highlighters to see what is going on without getting off on the wrong Joseph.

14. I think the spokesman referred to in verses 17 and 18 is Oliver Cowdery rather than Sidney Rigdon.

    Here’s my take on verse 18:

    I [the Lord] will raise up unto the fruit of thy [Joseph of Egypt’s] loins [the Lehites]; and I [the Lord] will make for him [Joseph Smith] a spokesman [Oliver Cowdery]. And I [the Lord], behold, I [the Lord] will give unto him [Joseph Smith, or “him,” might refer to the spokesman, that is Oliver Cowdery] that he [Joseph Smith, or maybe Oliver Cowdery] shall write the writing of the fruit of thy [Joseph of Egypt’s] loins [the Book of Mormon], unto the fruit of thy [Joseph of Egypt’s] loins [the Lamanites]; and the spokesman [Olivre Cowdery] of thy [Joseph of Egypt’s] loins shall declare it.

    I think the revelation rebuking Oliver Cowdery for his having been influenced by Hiram Page and his unauthorized seerstone activities (section 28 of the D&C) reads this prophecy as referring to Joseph Smith as the second Moses, and Oliver Cowdery as the spokesman. It says that Joseph Smith receives revelations “even as Moses” (verse 2), then directs Oliver Cowdery to be obedient to those revelations, “even as Aaron, to declare faithfully the commandments and revelations, with power and authority unto the church” (verse 3). The revelation then calls Oliver Cowdery to “go unto the Lamanites and preach my gospel unto them” (verse 8). Section 30 and section 32 called additional missionaries to serve under Oliver Cowdery as the head of the Lamanite mission.

    According to this revelation, Joseph is as Moses, and Oliver is as Aaron. And the call to Oliver to head the Lamanite mission then reads naturally as a fulfillment of Joseph of Egypt’s prophecy that the spokesman would declare the Book of Mormon to the descendants of Lehi.

    I confess that the BRM interpretation makes no sense to me even in the context of the chapter alone, but more so because it seems to ignore the connection between this chapter and section 28.

15. Good ideas, JKC. My suggestion of Sidney Rigdon is based only on the references of speaking and the tongue: Joseph became a fluent and perhaps a mighty speaker, but in the early days of the Church Sidney was by far a more powerful and experienced orator — we tend not to give Sidney much respect because of his unhappy break with the Church, but he contributed quite a bit. Of course there’s nothing in this passage of scripture that points to any particular period of Joseph’s mission for the assistance of this “Aaron,” and your candidate has the edge over Sidney because of Oliver’s direct association with the Lamanite mission.

16. Good thoughts, JKC. In my mind I think of the latter-day spokesman as “Oliver/Sidney,” since the specific identificationseems uncertain to me, but you’ve raised some interesting points that may well give Oliver the edge. (Grant Hardy in his Reader’s Edition footnotes this as Sidney, maybe with a question mark, I don[‘t quite recall).

17. please send me a digital copy with many thanks.

18. “we tend not to give Sidney much respect because of his unhappy break with the Church, but he contributed quite a bit.” Amen. This is so true. Along those same lines, I think we also sometimes discount Oliver’s influence as well, also due to his unhappy, though temporary, as is turned out, break with the church. He was basically the co-founder of the church.

    And really, Oliver and Sidney may not necessarily be mutually exclusive options for the spokesman, because Sidney really kind of stepped into Oliver’s role. Even though Oliver wasn’t officially removed as Assistant President until 1841, he sort of fell from favor by the late 1830s, around the same time that the First Presidency was organized with Sidney as counselor. So I guess I think Oliver is the primary person referred to as the spokesman, and the one who fulfilled the prophecy of declaring the Book of Mormon to the Lamanites, but I would say that Sidney was his successor in that spokesman role, so it could also refer secondarily to him.

19. (This comment crossposted from BCC):

    After sleeping on it, I have some more thoughts on this subject:

    1. When in the OP I said I had misread a claim that Joseph Smith would be descended from Joseph son of Lehi, that was actually earlier in the chapter were I had thought Lehi was still speaking but in fact Joseph of Egypt was. That was clearly a mistaken reading on my part. Where this is actually a possible reading in verse 24, I had completely missed it. Which again underscores how difficult this chapter is to parse.

    2. The BRM reading of v. 18 as talking about Mormon as the author of the BoM and Joseph Smith as his spokesman is clearly directed at avoiding the implicaiton of v. 24 that Joseph is descended from Lehi. Since Mormon explicitly was descended from Lehi, if we accept this reading the problem goes away. A nice, creative try, but I don’t accept the BRM reading; it’s just too out of left field in the context of the passage for me.

    3. If one is really concerned about the implication in v. 24 that Joseph Smith was desceended from Lehi, then the suggestion of Ardis that “after this manner” is ambiguous and could introduce a continued prophecy of Joseph of Egypt is to my eye by far the stronger possibility.

    4. Still, to my eye “after this manner” concludes the prophecy of Joseph of Egypt rather than introduceing a continuation of that prophecy. So the problem in v. 24 identifying Joseph Smith as a descendant of Lehi persists.

    5. When I wrote the OP, I had not reviewed JST Genesis 50. That passage provides an important gloss on 2 Nephi 3. In verse 25, Joseph of Egypt in talking about his descendants says that “a branch shall be broken off,” referring to the Lehites. And so metaphorically his descendants are a tree, and the Lehites are a branch broken off of that tree.

    6. Joseph of Egypt states that the choice seer will be among his descendants, but he never identifies the choice seer as among the “branch broken off” descendants, the presumption being that he is of the main tree descendants.

    7. It is Lehi, not Joseph of Egypt, who seems to say that Joseph Smith would be a descendant of his son, Joseph. I’m inclined to read this as simply a mistaken assumption on his part. The choice seer is going to write about his descendants; like Lehi, the choice seer will be a descendant of Joseph of Egypt; since Lehi and his descendants will be a branch broekn off, it seems a logical assumption that the choice seer would be among those descendants. But he wasn’t; he was from the main tree of descent.

    8. I have no problem with there being mistakes in the BoM, a possibility the book itself announces. Reflecting the humanity of mortal mistakes to me is a good thing, not a bad thing.

    9. Alternatively, this could have been a mistake on Joseph’s part in dictating the text. Such a mistake seems forgivable given how convoluted the text of 2 Nephi 3 is. Again, we’re not scriptural inerrantists.

    10. Alternatively, one could take it as a true prophecy. How is this possible? Did Joseph son of Lehi have any descendants? Weren’t the Nephites wiped out? Nominally, but many former Nephites became Lamanites when it became clear that they would otherwise be wiped out. And Joseph Smith being descended from Lehi is not the impossible proposition we would have taken it to be more than a generation ago. Our modern knowledge of population dynamics suggests that if Joseph son of Lehi had descendants that survived to Joseph Smith’s time, then Joseph Smith very well could be descended from Joseph son of Lehi. (A fairly meaningless proposition, because so could you or I, but this statement would have been consistent with the ancient understanding of tribal lineages.)

    11.On a different point, to me JST 50 makes it abundantly clear that in 2 Nephi 3 verse 17 is talking about Moses and Aaron, and verse 18 then transitions to talking about Joseph and his spokesman as a modern analog to Moses//Aaron. JST Genesis 50:29-30 and 34 make this abundantly clear to me.

20. On Kevin’s point 10 in his comment #19: Moroni 9 contains the last letter we know of from Mormon to Moroni. In verses 22-23, Mormon laments that the Nephites will be utterly destroyed like the Jaredites because they are unrepentant. Verse 24 contains an interesting passage: “And if it so be that they perish, we know that many of our brethren have dissented over unto the Lamanites, and my more will also dissent over unto them. Wherefore write somewhat a few things if thou art spared…” [That “wherefore” has interesting implications, but not relevant to this discussion.]

    This seems to be a clear indication that the Lamanites of Joseph Smith’s day were to be understood to also be descended from Nephite dissenters. 1 Nephi 13:30, Alma 47:35, and Helaman 11:24 are also clear that “Lamanites” (especially latter-day Lamanites in 1 Nephi 13:30) included Nephite dissenters. So I think Kevin is right that this allows for the understanding that Joseph Smith is a descendant of Lehi’s son Joseph.

    That said, I’m not at all sure that the phrase “there shall raise up one mighty among them” (Earliest Text version) indicates genealogical descendancy. We have seen the ambiguity of “among” with regard to Junia in Romans 16:7: does this mean Junia was counted as one of the apostles or that she was well known to them? Similarly, in Mormon apologetics, there are varying viewpoints regarding Sherem, who “came … among the people of Nephi” (Jacob 7:1) — was he a Nephite or not? Mosiah 9:1 has Zeniff “sent as a spy among the Lamanites”.

    Webster’s 1828 lists these first two definitions of “among”:

    1. In a general or primitive sense, mixed or mingled with; as tares among wheat.

    2. Conjoined or associated with, or making part of the number.

    An alternate understanding of this phrase could be something like “there shall raise up one mighty in their midst”. This would clearly refer to Joseph Smith, but without the implication that he is genealogically descended from Joseph, son of Lehi. (1 Nephi 15:16 may also have some bearing on being “remembered among” by being “grafted in”, along with 2 Nephi 10:18-19. 2 Nephi 3:7 seems to make a distinction between “out of” and “among” the seed of Joseph of Egypt.)

21. So, basically, you’re going to make me have to re-examine, rethink, and revise this whole chapter, eh? (That’s a *good* thing — no complaints — and the kind of thing I hope would happen if I could be part of the kind of study group I fantasize about).

    I still feel inclined to find a way that doesn’t wrest the passage that doesn’t suggest Joseph Smith is the descendant of Joseph (son of Lehi). While the population dynamics thing makes that possible, it takes away any significance of declaring any of the Joseph’s as the descendants of any of the others — if it technically describes everybody, then t isn’t prophetic about anybody.

    I don’t get to teach this lesson, and I think my co-teacher is focusing on the Psalm of Nephi so there might not be any mention of this in our ward at all. That’s all the more reason to appreciate this kind of discussion online. Thanks.

22. Sorry for the delay in posting your comment, Christopher Bradford — I just found it in the mod queue.

    That is a very helpful, entirely believable reading that helps get us past the difficulty. The imprecision of human language is a challenge (both in the sense of “difficulty” and in the sense of “invitation to puzzle out the meaning”). Thanks so much for this added point.

23. This is so helpful, and enlightening. Thanks, Ardis and Kevin, and all the rest.

24. And yes, a digital copy, please. You have my email.

25. May I please have a digital copy? deann.spencer@gmail.com

26. Ardis, I though you might like to know I devoted my whole lesson today to this chapter and passed your presentation out as a handout. I think the class went great. (The class seems to like it when I acknowledge I didn’t understand something; it gives them hope!)

27. Great! Thanks. I’m going to take another look at this based on some comments. It might be a good challenge — maybe too much to do in a SS lesson — for everybody to take a crack at untangling it. It would reinforce the necessary lessn that it isn’t enough to just read, or to know the meanings of all the different words — we *should* have questions to discuss, and sometimes some uncertainty about our reading.

    Thanks for so generously sharing your post idea and discussion with me here, Kevin.

28. Could I have a copy please? Ben at jboc dot net

29. I would like a copy also. hartwellae@gmail.com

30. I’d like a copy also, please.

31. Man I feel silly. I got my own email wrong above. It is Ben at jbloc dot net

32. I think I’ve responded to all requests for copies — if your copy hasn’t come, let me know and I’ll try again.

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