Saturday, December 7, 2019

Don Bradley on the Similarities and Differences between Aminadi and Daniel



Now these are the words which Amulek preached unto the people who were in the land of Ammonihah, saying: I am Amulek; I am the son of Giddonah, who was the son of Ishmael, who was a descendant of Aminadi; and it was the same Aminadi who interpreted the writing which was upon the wall of the temple, which was written by the finger of God. And Aminadi was a descendant of Nephi, who was the son of Lehi, who came out of the land of Jerusalem, who was a descendant of Manasseh, who was the son of Joseph who was sold into Egypt by the hands of his brethren. (Alma 10:1-3)

Al Case, a former Latter-day Saint, offered the following criticism of the Book of Mormon:

Why do so many stories seem like exaggerated borrowings from the Bible?
Examples . . . Aminadi deciphered writing on the wall (Alma 10:2-3) like Daniel (Daniel 5)

While it is true that there are parallels between Aminadi and Daniel, there is (1) a shared Old Testament background to both these prophetic figures and (2) there are significant differences that demonstrate Aminadi is not a sloppy reworking of Daniel by Joseph Smith.

Commenting on the similarities and differences between Aminadi and Daniel, Don Bradley wrote:

Although Aminadi’s reported New World experience as a wisdom figure strongly parallels Daniel’s experience in the Old World, both hark back to a much earlier precedent established by Abimadi’s patriarchal ancestor, Joseph of Egypt. Joseph, who interpreted Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cattle and seven lean cattle to predict seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, provided the earliest model of the prophet-interpreter (Gen. 41). Aminadi’s story, even in the broad strokes with which it is sketched in our Book of Mormon, follows Joseph’s blueprint. In each, a prophet is interpreting for others a divine manifestation they could not interpret for themselves. This parallel may account for Amulek’s decision to emphasize Joseph among Aminadi’s ancestors, rather than the patriarchs such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Joseph’s experience also established a model for Daniel’s. Anticipating Daniel by well over a millennium, Joseph too was an exile from Palestine and a captive who was called upon to interpret a revelatory experience for the king that his wise men could not, who interpreted that experience as a harbinger of calamity, and whose reputation as a prophet and position as the king’s advisor was established by this incident (Gen. 41:35-37) . . . we must also examine how Aminadi’s experience diverges from the other instances of prophetic interpretation. These differences are an instructive as the similarities and reveal in broad strokes the divine message Aminadi read from the wall of the temple.

The fundamental differences between Aminadi’s incident of reading the writing on the wall and Daniel’s are in where the writing appears and to whom it is attributed. In Daniel’s case, the writing appears on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace, while in Aminadi’s it appears on the wall of the temple of Nephi. In the Daniel event, the profaning of temple sacredness (through the sanctuary relics) had been the impetus and implicit subject for the writing on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. There, temple sacredness was (again) profaned as a result of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, from which these relics had been plundered. In the Aminadi event, one natural subject for writing appearing on the temple would be the temple itself. God’s writing would affirm the temple’s sacredness and might warn of the consequences that were to follow for profaning it—judgments on the wicked and the withdrawal of his presence—leading to the temple’s destruction (Hel. 4:24-25; cf. 1 Cor. 3:16-17), and the ultimate destruction of the people of the land of Nephi with their temple. Rather than condemning the people for past actions, in Aminadi’s case the writing on the wall could forewarn that such destruction was coming of the people, who have ignored God’s commandments and begun to pollute his temple, continued to do so.

A message about the temple in the writing by Aminadi would account for the place of its appearance (the temple wall) but not for its reported source (the finger of God). This is the other significant difference between Daniel’s interpreted text and Aminadi’s: what is said of the supernatural scribe. In the Daniel incident, the writer’s identity is indefinite: the writing was done by the miraculously appearing “fingers of a man’s hand,” with of indication whether the hand belonged to God, an angel, another supernatural being, or perhaps something more illusory. For the author of Daniel, it did not matter to whom the hand belonged, only what it wrote. In the Aminadi incident, however, the owner of the hand was unequivocally identified. The writing on the wall was not made merely by “the fingers of a man’s hand” but “by the finger of God.”

Why was the message interpreted by Aminadi given in such a distinctive way, written on the wall of the temple, and specifically by God’s finger? . . . . The writing of this covenant on the temple wall by the finger of God would have demonstrated that it was as divine in origin and immutable as the God-inscribed commandments themselves. The temple of Nephi, which lacked the actual stone tablets inscribed by God’s finger and held in the temple of Solomon, would not possess an equivalent reminder of the commandments’ divine authorship and of God’s presence in the temple—a presence granted conditionally, so long as his people did not pollute the temple and themselves to the point that He would have to withdraw his Spirit and thus leave them to destruction. Removing all room for doubt these and other consequences of breaking the commandments would have been literally spelled out and written in stone—God’s word assuring that the Nephites could not prosper if they did not keep his commandments would have been mercifully verified by this miraculous message of warning before it was verified in their destruction.

Aminadi, like Abinadi, delivered his message in a way that evoked (as strongly as any could) the inscribing of the commandments on the stone tablets of Sinai, because the purpose of Aminadi’s prophetic mission was the same as Abinadi’s—to demonstrate to the king, priests, and people of the land of Nephi the literal divine origin of the commandments and the necessity to salvation and survival of keeping them. The people comprising the original Nephite nation in the land of Nephi, however, did not heed this message, and they were eventually destroyed for continued disobedience to the commandments, except for those led away by Mosiah1. (Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019], 226-27, 229-30, 231; for a fuller discussion of Aminadi, see chapter 13: “God and Aminadi in the Temple,” pp. 221-40)