Steinberg - The lost Book of Mormon : a journey through the mythic lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, and Kansas City, Missouri

Running the Books:

The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

This is a work of nonfiction. Nonetheless, some of the names of the individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

Copyright 2014 by Avi Steinberg

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.nanatalese.com

DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint the bar graph from Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification by Matthew L. Jockers, Daniela M. Witten, and Craig S. Criddle (Literary and Linguistic Computing, December 2008, Vol. 23:4, page 478). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, administered by Copyright Clearance Center.

Map illustration by Emily Wong
Jacket design by Emily Mahon
Jacket illustration by Jason Ford/Heart Agency

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Steinberg, Avi, author.
The lost Book of Mormon : a journey through the mythic lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, and Kansas City, Missouri / Avi Steinberg.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-53569-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-385-53570-0 (eBook)
1. Book of MormonGeography. 2. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day SaintsHistory. 3. Mormon ChurchHistory. 4. Travelers writings, American. I. Title.
BX8627.S779 2014
289.322dc23
2014009464

v3.1

To my father, for teaching me maddah

To my mother, for teaching me midrash

CONTENTS

LOOMINGS

Happy people dont think about angels. And they certainly dont see them. As for holding extended conversations with angels, thats only for the truly, irretrievably miserable. Despite our best painters best efforts to ennoble this kind of behavior, we are, in the presence of our angels, just like that depressed donkey in the Bible who sees the heavenly messenger standing on the highway, where others see nothing. What choice did he have but to give up and crouch down in the middle of the road? What good is being a prophet when youre a donkey?

That the vast majority of Americans believe in the existence of angels80 percent, according to most countsis usually cited as proof of our foolishness or our piety. But thats all beside the point. What it really says, simply put, is that we are one of the unhappiest peoples ever to walk the face of the earth.

And theyre everywhere, these angels. There are, to paraphrase an old mystical tradition, as many angels as human worries. Which means the number is staggeringly large and ever multiplying. It has been calculated, for starters, that 133,306,668 angels were cast out of heaven. Thats about the size of the population of Germany, Spain, and Portugal. It should be noted that this number was but a fraction of the original quantity of angels, and that when you factor for population growthand the precipitous rise of human worriessince the Great War in Heaven, the sum total jumps a few orders of magnitude, each angel representing a discrete unit of discontent, and each tailor-made to fit the unique dimensions of that discontent. One angel, known as Sandalphon, stands five hundred years tall. Sometimes unhappiness is exactly like that.

Young Joseph Smith swore that late one night in the fall of 1823, a spirit, barefoot and luminous, visited the cramped bedroom he shared with his brothers and told him the hidden history of America, a history that was engraved on gold platesthat is, gold pages, bound by three large ringsburied in a hill down the road from the family farm. When Joseph dug up the gold book, which he did only with great difficulty, he translated it from its ancient language, also with great difficulty, and published it in 1830 under the title The Book of Mormon.

It tells the saga of the descendants of Nephi, a sixth-century BCE Israelite man, from the beginning, when Nephi and his extended family take a boat from the Middle East to the New World, to the end, in the fourth century CE, when the Nephite people are destroyed in a giant apocalyptic battle. The stories told in the Bible and in The Book of Mormon basically roll along simultaneously for about a thousand years along two parallel tracks, one in the Middle East and the other in America. Like the Bible, The Book of Mormon is organized as a collection of books, each named for its first-person narrator, starting with Nephi himself, who was born in Jerusalem, and concluding with Moroni, who was born somewhere in the Americas. The complete book is named for Moronis father, Mormon, the scribe who edited and engraved the final version of the gold plates.

Two years before The Book of Mormon was published, author Israel Worsley wrote a book in which he documented the popular belief that American Indians were among the Bibles ten lost tribes. The Indians, he wrote, once had a holy book [but] they lost it and in consequence of the loss fell under the displeasure of the Great Spirit; but they believe they shall one day regain itthey are looking for and expecting someone to come. As Joseph walked along the glacial hills of northern New York, he came to believe that he was that man, that he would deliver the lost book.