Monday, August 14, 2023

Richard Bushman on the Complexity of the Narrative Concerning, and Contained within, the Small Plates

  

The coincidence of Mormon discovering the small plates at the very moment Smith lost the abridgment cannot help but arouse suspicion. Were the Words of Mormon anything more than Smith’s transparent attempt to escape his plight after the loss of the 116 pages? It looks like a device, but if Smith was retrofitting the text to get out of a tight spot, he worked hard at making the small plates convincing. Inside the Book of Mormon, the small plates are more than a contrivance to replace the lost 116 pages. they were a potent political document in Nephi’s long-standing feud with his brothers. Nephi forged the small plates just after his father died and when he had split with his brothers Laman and Lemuel. The book of First Nephi and his first five chapters of Second Nephi were an extended apologia for his part in the breakdown of brotherly relations and the division of Lehi’s family into feuding nations. The moral of story after story was that Nephi acted with the blessing of God and his father Lehi, while Laman and Lemuel had resisted both. The small plates were not just the physical carrier of the story but a strategic document in the internal dynamics of the Nephite drama.

 

Political aims drove the writing so long as the brothers lived together. After the separation, the story’s underlying purpose shifted, and Nephi’s record became a different kind of book. As the Lamanites became a more distant threat rather than an ever-present reality, the need for justification of Nephi’s rule faded, and the small account changed. Instead of an indictment of Laman and Lemuel, it provided instruction o the coming of the Messiah, the last days, and the end of Nephite civilization. The small plates could indeed have been an invention to rescue the floundering translator, but the plates were no make-do patch job. The text conformed itself to the changes in Nephite history. At first the small plates intensified the basic Mormon plot of Nephite versus Lamanite and when that issue faded turned to the Nephites’ evolving needs. (Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023], 172)