“Begging Food for His Support”

Brant Gardner

Textual: Mormon had a structure in mind, and he inserted information that appears to have interrupted that structure. From a continuity standpoint, it is important to know that Korihor is traveling and begging so that we may understand what happens to him among the Zoramites in the next verse. For this reason Mormon gave us the statement that Korihor went begging in verse 56.

What Mormon did next was a logical outgrowth of his concern to tie up the loose ends of the story, and make sure that his readers understood that the harm done by Korihor had been reversed by the cursing of Korihor. While this is important information, Mormon appears to give it to us out of order. It would appear that he began his introduction to the demise of Korihor with the story of the begging, and then remembered the inserted information. This left him in need of creating a linkage back into his planned structure. Thus he finds that he is required to repeat the information about begging in this verse. This is the best solution of the very proximate repetition of this specific information.

This does continue to tell us something about Mormon’s methods while he created his final text. Mormon is following an organized script created prior to committing his text to the metal plates. That process of transferring structure and copying specific speeches was not so rigid that he felt proscribed from adding other information as he wrote on the plates. Thus Mormon’s writing on the plates is the result of a multi-layered developmental process.

Mormon’s first step in the creation of his work, once conceived, would have  been to read the multiple sources available to him. Certainly Mormon would have made notes during this process so that he could not only refer to them in the next stage, but easily return to the sources for specific cited passages.

The next step would be to construct the overall structure of his narration. In this stage Mormon establishes the stories that he would tell, and the order in which they would appear. It is unlikely that he copied the speeches, since he had them in his possession, and there would have been no need to create a copy which would then be transformed to yet a third copy in the final text. We may safely presume that he copied directly from source to metal plates when writing down the inserted discourses.

The tight structure transitions such as the begging as a necessary precedent to the story of Korihor’s demise suggests that Mormon wrote a fairly detailed draft from which he copied when he created the plate text.

The final creative piece would have come at the time of writing on the plates, where Mormon would at times insert information that did not appear on his draft. We see this process most clearly in cases such as this where we see him returning so quickly to a theme he had established.

Multidimensional Commentary on the Book of Mormon

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