[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to present the fourth installment from a book entitled Labor Diligently to Write: The Ancient Making of a Modern Scripture. It is being presented in serialized form as an aid to help readers prepare for the 2020 Come Follow Me course of study. This is a new approach for Interpreter, and we hope you find it helpful.]

 

 
Chapter 9: Nephi Writing
Applying His Training
Noel B. Reynolds noted: “Of course [The Book of Mormon] is a witness for Christ and his teachings. But in addition, it provides reasons why we should believe that the tradition of the Nephites was just and correct. The two messages of the book are tied together in such a way that whoever accepts the teachings of Christ accepts that Nephi was a legitimate ruler, and vice versa.”237 Politics, science, and religion were interrelated belief systems that were difficult to separate in antiquity.238 The Book of Mormon — the product of an author reared, trained, and immersed in such a society — is no exception. It is for this reason that when Nephi declares that “these [small] plates are for the more part of the ministry” (1 Nephi 9:4), the text he provides tells both a religious and political [Page 168]history. For Nephi, politics and religion merged into “the more part of the ministry.”
One of the important aspects of the national origin story is the presentation of the legitimacy of their rulers.239 Nephi was faced with that very task. He had a new people in a new city. As he began to write on the small plates thirty years after he had left Jerusalem, he turned his attention to telling the story of the legitimate right of his people to be a separate people and for Nephi to be their king. Even with this treatise supporting his legitimacy, Reynolds points out that: “[t]hrough a thousand years of Nephite history, both Nephite dissidents and Lamanite invaders would accuse Nephite rulers of usurping the right to rule that belonged to Laman and Lemuel”.240
The ways in which Nephi built his case drew upon his scribal training. One of the underlying structural elements with which he would have been familiar from his study of ancient Near Eastern texts was the cultural formula by which a new nation was justified. Establishing a new people is termed ethnogenesis. The texts Nephi would have studied would have modeled the typical origin story of a new people. Ann E. Killebrew lays out the basic form:
Following Hedwig Wolfram’s definition, the process of ethnogenesis that forms the core ideology of a group often comprises three characteristic features: (1) a story or stories of a primordial deep, which can include the crossing of a sea or river, an impressive victory against all odds over an enemy, or combinations of similar “miraculous” stories (e.g., the exodus); (2) a group that undergoes a religious experience or change in cult as a result of the primordial deed (e.g. reception of the Ten Commandments and worship of Yahweh); and (3) the existence of an ancestral enemy or enemies t...