Culture: This sentence is an absolute farewell, most appropriate for a dying man, even though the next chapter makes it clear that Jacob lives for years after this discourse. Why is it so final? Sidney Sperry suggests: “It is very probable that Jacob meant to end his book at this point; the quotation seems to imply that fact. However, later events caused him to add the historical matter now found in the last chapter of his record.” This analysis recognizes the finality of the statement but misses the intended audience. Jacob delivers that statement to an audience who is present; but the actual final statement is addressed to the book’s readers: “And I, Jacob, saw that I must soon go down to my grave; wherefore, I said unto my son Enos: Take these plates. And I told him the things which my brother Nephi had commanded me, and he promised obedience unto the commands. And I make an end of my writing upon these plates, which writing has been small; and to the reader I bid farewell, hoping that many of my brethren may read my words. Brethren, adieu” (Jacob 7:27). The book’s preface would appear to indicate that Jacob understood that he would be writing about the Sherem incident before he began writing anything in his book. (See commentary following the preface.)
The final statement of a recorded sermon can be best read, in my opinion, as Jacob’s final discourse as chief priest. Although this conclusion is speculative, based on only a few fragments of evidence, I hypothesize that the termination of his religious position accounts for the finality of his benediction. He formally juxtaposes his positional prophecy against their actions and testifies that the ultimate judgment between his congregation and himself will be at the bar of God.
The fragments of evidence begin with his marginalization and lack of power. In this discourse, he exerts no pressure but that of his personal testimony. Second, the cultural transformation is evidenced by social divisions, polygamy, and probably wife-exchange, as noted earlier. (See commentary accompanying Jacob 2:32–34.) These outside influences have been sufficiently powerful that they comprise not only a significant fraction of the Nephite population but also the wealthiest and most influential, those who have apparently gained greater say governing the community.
In this final sermon, Jacob obviously intended to make the gulf between the community’s practices and Yahweh’s commandments as obvious and painful as possible. Such was his duty as chief priest. Since this sermon suggests little or no repentance after his first sermon, Jacob, as a prophet, is verbally attacking the leaders’ character. It does not require much imagination to see that they would not long submit to such public tongue-lashings. Removing Jacob from his official position is a logical step and, I further hypothesize, replacing him with someone more amendable to fashionable trends. This idea suggests an interesting reading for the story of Jacob and Sherem in the next chapter.
Variant: Rather than a textual variant, Royal Skousen has suggested that the phrase “pleasing bar of God” should rather read “pleading bar of God.”
Christian Gellinek (who studied law at the University of Gottingen in Germany) believes that the textually difficult reading “the pleasing bar of God” can be readily resolved if we replace the word pleasing with pleading—in other words, Jacob and Moroni will meet us before “the pleading bar of God” (personal communication, 25 September 2003). Phonetically, the words pleading and pleasing are nearly identical. What seems to have happened is that Oliver Cowdery, being completely unfamiliar with the legal term pleading bar, twice substituted the more familiar word pleasing for pleading, even though pleasing does not make much sense.
There are a number of examples in the original manuscript where Oliver made this kind of mistake—that is, if a word or a phrase was unknown to him, he substituted a more common word or phrase (but with varying degrees of success). In each of these cases, the substitution seems to have occurred in the original manuscript (O) as Oliver took down Joseph Smith’s dictation and later copied it into the printer’s manuscript (P).
John S. Welch, a retired attorney, agrees that the “pleasing bar” is a difficult reading, but does not see “pleading bar” as a plausible emendation.
Just as the “pleasing word of God” (Jacob 2:8, 9; 3:2) is naturally pleasing to the righteous yet hard for the wicked, the same can be said for the “pleasing bar of God” in Jacob 6:13. The candidates who appear before the judgment seat will include those who will receive the final invitation to enter into the celestial kingdom as kings and queens, priests and priestesses, the ultimate crowning of the faithful; or as Jacob says more briefly in Jacob 6:11 (just before referring to the judgment bar as “pleasing”), “Enter in at the strait gate, and continue in the way which is narrow, until ye shall obtain eternal life.” Is that not a pleasing prospect?
In fact, Jews anciently welcomed God’s judgment and saw it as a moment of vindication for his people, not as a terrifying and foreboding event. Thus, as C. S. Lewis astutely observed in his classic Reflections on the Psalms, it is Christians who tend to see the final judgment as a courtroom proceeding in which they position themselves as the accused in a criminal case “with [the Christian] himself in the dock; the Jew pictures it as a civil case with himself as the plaintiff. The [Christian] hopes for acquittal, or rather for pardon; the [Jew] hopes for a resounding triumph with heavy damages.” Thus the idea of Jacob’s “pleasing bar” is not problematic if one emphasizes an Israelite background for Jacob’s introduction of this phrase in Jacob 6:13. In fact, Jacob speaks like the Israelite he is when he sees the judgment bar of God as a “pleasing bar” but warns that this “bar striketh the wicked with awful dread and fear” (Jacob 6:13).
There is probably no good conclusion to the reading. Skousen has found examples of “pleading bar” in legal discourse. He declares: “In my mind, the linguistic use of pleading bar as a legal term is established. This is not the relevant issue. Rather, the issue is whether the original Book of Mormon text referred to “the pleasing bar or God” or to “the pleading bar of God.” The nature of a conjectural emendation is that it attempts to supply what something should have been, but wasn’t. It is a recognition of a difficult text and an attempt to make the difficult text more understandable. In this case, we have reasonable contexts in which we might see either the pleading bar or the pleasing bar. Because the real issue, as Skousen suggests, is what the original text meant, the issue will remain open for this verse.
Text: This is the end of a chapter in the 1830 edition.