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)
