Saturday, April 22, 2017

King Benjamin's Speech: "That Ye May Learn Wisdom"

As part of my daily Scripture reading, I have started re-reading King Benjamin's speech. One of the best books on the Book of Mormon is that of King Benjamin's Speech: "That Ye May Learn Wisdom" eds. John W. Welch and Stephen D. Ricks (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1998) which goes into great detail into various issues, such as the Ancient Near Eastern background of the speech, literary forms (e.g., chiasmus) contained therein, and other exegetical issues. Fortunately, the book is available for free online

Another important article on King Benjamin's Speech is that of


The ever-growing evidence of the textual complexity and ancient background of the Book of Mormon is a great difficulty posed to the theory that the Book of Mormon was the production of Joseph Smith’s imagination in the 1820s; instead, the growing body of evidence for its antiquity and historicity makes more sense if we approach the text as Joseph Smith’s translation of an ancient document.