“He Taught Them in the Synagogue Which They Had Built for the Place of Worship”

Brant Gardner

Textual: Without any transition except this announcement, Moroni has left the over explanation of liturgy and has changed subjects. What we have in chapter 7 is an inserted sermon. The text is presented in the first person, and it is given as the words of Mormon, just as earlier discourses that Mormon inserted in his text are assumed to be the text given by the author.

A possible connection between the liturgical information in the previous chapters and this inserted sermon comes from the final verse of the previous chapter:

Moroni 6:9

9 And their meetings were conducted by the church after the manner of the workings of the Spirit, and by the power of the Holy Ghost; for as the power of the Holy Ghost led them whether to preach, or to exhort, or to pray, or to supplicate, or to sing, even so it was done.

The overt liturgical discussion ended with a generalized statement of the types of events in the church meetings, but not a specific. What we have following immediately appears to be a specific instance of the preaching and exhorting. This would be given as a sample, for the nature of such preaching and exhorting is that it would change with every instance. In modern LDS worship, we understand that there will be speakers in sacrament meetings, but we expect that the texts of their talks will differ from other weeks (even though we are also accustomed to the repetition of certain phrases within those talks).

Another piece of information se have in verse one is that there is a continuation of at least the terminology attached to a place of worship. Mormon gives this discourse in a synagogue “which they had built for the place of worship.” This follows the descriptions of synagogues from earlier in the Book of Mormon (Alma 16:13; Alma 26:29, and others). The particular label of synagogue may be a convenient description used in Joseph’s translation, or it may indicate that there was a conceptual continuation of the previous practice. In the Old World, a rift developed between the non-Christianized Jews and the Christians. The wider the rift, the greater the divorce in practice and descriptive language. Modern Christians meet in churches, not synagogues, a result of that rift and the change in vocabulary that resulted to define differences, not to emphasize continuity. In the New World, there was no such rift, as there is no indication of any remnant of non-Christianized Nephites. Their theology had already been pre-Christian, and the great destructive event prior to the appearance of the Christ is described as having destroyed “the wicked,” or those who did not accept the Christ. The appearance of the Savior created a rather dramatic new beginning, but not one that was required to make a differentiation between the new and the old such as occurred in early Old World Christianity.

Multidimensional Commentary on the Book of Mormon

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