In 1827, a young man named Joseph Smith began reporting to family and friends that an angel had visited him and revealed gold plates buried in a hill not far from his family's farm in Palmyra, New York.
Since even before its publication, the text of the Book of Mormon has been a prisoner to the miraculous and outlandish story of its own origin. For Latter-day Saints, the Book of Mormon is primarily a sign. Until recently, they have been less concerned with the narrative or even theological content of the Book of Mormon than with its role in the founding myth of their religion.
For example, in January, 1831, less than a year after the publication of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, wrote a letter trying to convert her brother to the new faith:
By searching the prophecies contained in the old testament we find it there prophesied that God will set his hand the second time to recover his people in the house of Israel. he has now commenced this work. he hath sent forth a revelation in these last days, & this revelation is called the book of Mormon, it contains the fullness of the Gospel to the Gentiles, and is sent forth to show unto the remnant of the house of Israel what great things God hath done for their fathers; that they may know of the covenants of the Lord & that they are not cast off forever, and also of the convincing of both Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ the Eternal God and manifests himself unto all nations. Lucy Smith to Solomon Mack, Jr., 6 Jan. 1831 I wouldn’t vote for someone who truly believed in the founding whoppers of Mormonism. The LDS church holds that Joseph Smith, directed by the angel Moroni, unearthed a book of golden plates buried in a hillside in Western New York in 1827. … Smith was able to dictate his “translations” of the Book of Mormon first by looking through diamond-encrusted decoder glasses and then by burying his face in a hat with a brown rock at the bottom of it. He was an obvious con man.
Jacob Weisberg,
Mirroring Latter-day Saint readings, such dismissive treatments also take the Book of Mormon primarily as a sign rather than a text. The content of the book is less important than the conclusions that one draws from the story of its origin.
The gravitational force of the book's origin story has also infected the discussion of the content of the text. Latter-day Saints have tended to treat the Book of Mormon as a trove of theological proof texts. The authority of the text as scripture has vouchsafed the value of these textual snippets for believers. Indeed, because Latter-day Saints ground the value of the text in the miraculous story of its production, they have generally not felt called upon to understand or evaluate the text on its own terms. For non-Mormons, a similar, if inverted, dynamic arises. Mark Twain, who seems to have actually read large chunks of the Book of Mormon, insisted that it was “chloroform in print.”
Literary critic Harold Bloom, despite his admiration for Joseph Smith's religion-making imagination, writes, “What is a contemporary non-Mormon, interested in American religion, to do with the Book of Mormon? I cannot recommend that the book be read either fully or closely, because it scarcely sustains such reading.” H
More recently, however, there has been a scholarly re-evaluation of the Book of Mormon. In the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States, Daniel Walker Howe claims:
The Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature, but it has never been accorded the status it deserves, since Mormons deny Joseph Smith's authorship, and non-Mormons, dismissing the work as a fraud, have been more likely to ridicule it than to read it.
D
A number of treatments of the text's literary structure and content have appeared in scholarly presses for an academic audience.
This article contributes to this latest generation of scholarship by offering a close reading of some of the earliest narratives in the book from a legal perspective and bringing them into dialogue with contemporary legal theory.
The earliest appearance of the Book of Mormon in legal scholarship appears to have been in 1898.
This divide between law as formal rules and law as narrative mirrors the discussion within contemporary legal theory between traditional positivist accounts of law and the jurisgenerative theory of Robert Cover.
This article proceeds as follows. Part II provides an account of the debate over the nature of following the law in the Book of Mormon, showing through a close reading of the story of Nephi's confrontation with his brothers their contrasting approaches to legal authority. Part III shows how Laman and Lemuel's approach to rule following fits within one of the main streams of analytic jurisprudence but how within that framework Nephi's response to their claims is largely incomprehensible. Part IV shows how Nephi's approach does make sense within Robert Cover's approach to law even as his story challenges Cover's central claim about how interpretation becomes law. Part V concludes.
The Book of Mormon opens with the story of Lehi and his family. Lehi is living in Jerusalem in the decade just before the Babylonians destroy the city in 587 B.C.E. He has a vision of a pillar of fire in which he learns that unless the city repents it will be destroyed.
This opening portion of the Book of Mormon, which following the biblical convention is divided into “books” named 1 Nephi and 2 Nephi, is written in the first person. The narrator is Nephi, and we learn that he is composing his record many decades after the fact with a full knowledge of how conflict with his brothers will mature into permanent enmity and warfare.
Even the most casual reader of the Book of Mormon will notice its heavy dependence on the Bible. It is written in self-consciously archaic language that deliberately apes the Jacobean idiom of the King James Version. The characters within the narrative are aware of the biblical texts, and at various points they quote large portions of the King James Version nearly verbatim.
As one early 19th-century critic of the Latter-day Saints put it, “this book is bespangled from beginning to end not only with thoughts of sacred writers, but with copious verbal extracts from King James’ translation.” Grant Hardy,
Readers of the Bible face a similar interpretive choice. Certain narratives in the book clearly copy the basic structure of earlier narratives. Source critics provide us with an appreciation of the complex textual history of the Bible.
A similar approach can be taken to the intertextuality of the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Rather than seeing the latter's reliance on the former as evidence of plagiarism, it is more fruitful to examine quotations and the borrowing of biblical themes and narrative structures as a part of a strategy of allusion by Book of Mormon narrators that serves often complex purposes.
Readers of the Book of Mormon often miss this point. Devout Latter-day Saints regard the book as an ancient text rather than a production of Joseph Smith. They are thus often uncomfortable directly addressing the text's obvious reliance on the 17th-century King James Version. Non-Mormon readers immediately note the text's reliance on the KJV but tend to see that reliance as crude rather than subtle. Therefore let us go up; let us be strong like unto Moses; for he truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither, and our fathers came through out of captivity, on dry ground, and the armies of Pharaoh did follow and were drowned in the waters of the Red Sea.
At this explicit level, Nephi comes across as a cocksure little brother confident that he is going to re-enact the exodus story at its dramatic climax, with himself cast as Moses miraculously defeating the armies of Pharaoh.
The narrative structure, however, also contains a darker allusion to Moses, one at odds with the cocksure Nephi's invocation of triumph on the shores of the Red Sea. Nephi returns to Jerusalem and there comes upon the drunken Laban.
1 Nephi 4:10. Others have argued that the murder of Laban is narratively structured in such a way as to highlight Nephi's reconsideration of his original understanding of God's commands in at the opening of the Laban narrative.
Nephi's killing of Laban is also a reference to Moses. The narrative marks Nephi's first action in the story. Thus Nephi is introduced, as is Moses in the Bible, with a morally ambiguous homicide. The second chapter of Exodus recounts how Moses killed an Egyptian overseer he saw beating an Israelite slave. He hid the body in the sand, but when Pharaoh discovered the killing, Moses was forced to flee into the desert.
1 Nephi 4:11.
The narrative provides an ironic commentary on Nephi's glib call to his brothers to be like Moses. Nephi-as-narrator is in dialogue with the character of Nephi in the narrative. He is like Moses, yes, but not in the way that the character thinks. The irony of Nephi's glib identification with Moses emphasizes the real difficulty and moral anguish involved in actually following the Mosaic example. Far from being a mindless pastiche of biblical elements, the killing of Laban reveals how the Book of Mormon's allusions to the Bible are deliberately structured in ways that deepen the meaning of the book's narrative, adding layers of implicit commentary on the actions recounted by the narrator.
Careful attention to the use of explicit and implicit biblical allusion reveals the structure of the legal argument between Nephi and his older brothers. The key conflict comes in what is 1 Nephi chapter 17 in the modern edition of the Book of Mormon. The current structure of chapters and verses, however, is not native to the Book of Mormon text. Rather, it was adopted in an 1879 printing for ease of reference.
This edition was prepared by Orson Pratt, a senior member of the Church's governing Quorum of Twelve Apostles and an influential Mormon intellectual. He created the system of chapters and verses that continue to be used in modern editions of the Book of Mormon. According to the convention in Book of Mormon scholarship, chapter numbers in the original text are giving using Roman numerals and are always capitalized while chapter numbers in the modern edition are given using Arabic numerals and are not capitalized. The original edition of the Book of Mormon contained no verse numbers. The original chapters of 1 Nephi and their corresponding chapter and verses in the modern edition of the Book of Mormon were: Chapter I (1 Nephi 1–5, telling the story of leaving Jerusalem and recovering the plates of brass); Chapter II (1 Nephi 6–9, telling the story of Lehi's Dream and Nephi's response); Chapter III (1 Nephi 10–14, telling the story of Nephi's Vision); Chapter IV (1 Nephi 15, telling the story of Nephi's argument with his brothers over the meaning of the visions); Chapter V (1 Nephi 16–1 Nephi 19:21, telling the story of traveling in the wilderness, building a ship, and traveling to the new promised land); Chapter VI (1 Nephi 19:22-21, containing Nephi's extensive quotations from Isaiah); Chapter VII (1 Nephi 22, containing Nephi's interpretation of the quoted Isaiah passages).
Chapter 17 in the current edition begins with the compressed account of 8 years of wandering in the wilderness, the entry into the land Bountiful, and God's command to Nephi to build a ship. The text says:
And it came to pass that after I, Nephi, had been in the land of Bountiful for the space of many days, the voice of the Lord came unto me, saying: Arise, and get thee into the mountain. And it came to pass that I arose and went up into the mountain, and cried unto the Lord. And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto me, saying: Thou shalt construct a ship, after the manner which I shall show thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters. And I said: Lord, whither shall I go that I may find ore to molten that I may make tools to construct the ship after the manner which thou hast shown unto me? And it came to pass that the Lord told me whither I should go to find ore, that I might make tools.
1 Nephi 17:7–10.
Like Moses in Exodus, God calls Nephi to the top of a mountain where he gives instructions on leading a chosen people to the promised land.
Exodus 3:11. In all quotations from the Bible, I use the King James Version. Whatever its limitations as a translation, it clearly influences the language of the Book of Mormon, whose biblical allusions must be understood against the background of the KJV's language. 1 Nephi 17:10.
After Nephi begins work on the ship, Laman and Lemuel taunt him, and when Nephi sorrows at the “hardness of their hearts,”
1 Nephi 17:19. We knew that ye could not construct a ship, for we knew that ye were lacking in judgment; wherefore, thou canst not accomplish so great a work. And thou are like our father, led away by the foolish imaginations of his heart; yea, he hath led us out of the land of Jerusalem, and we have wandered in the wilderness for these many years; and our women have toiled being big with child; and they have born children in the wilderness and suffered all things, save it were death; and it would have been better that they had died before they came out of Jerusalem than to have suffered these afflictions.
1 Nephi 17:19–20.
Tellingly, this passage seems to retell the story with which Nephi as narrator began chapter 17.
Grant Hardy has noted the paucity of references to women in the Book of Mormon, arguing that readers should be particularly attentive to situations, such as chapter 17, where the narrator makes repeated references to women. Such references, he argues, are more likely to mark deliberately structured narrative elements because of their rarity. 1 Nephi 17:2–3.
The narrator invites the reader to interpret this passage against the background of Exodus. God's chosen people are led by revelation out of a wicked country and travel to the promised land. Their way is blocked, however, by a body of water that they are called to miraculously cross. In Exodus the body of water is the Red Sea, while in Nephi 17 it is “Irreantum, which, being interpreted, is many waters.”
1 Nephi 17:5. And they said unto Moses, because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? Wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt? Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.
Exodus 14:11–12
Both Nephi's brothers and the Children of Israel are enmeshed in a narrative irony. They both believe that they know how the story is going, but both are mistaken.
As Moses explains to the Israelites on the shores of the Red Sea:
Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will shew to you today: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen to day, ye shall see them again no more for ever. The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.
Exodus 14:13–14.
Likewise, Nephi will offer his own rebuke to his brother's accusations that he is a fool who cannot build a ship or cross the waters.
And I said unto them: If God had commanded me to do all things I could do them. If he should command me that I should say unto this water, be thou earth, it should be earth; and if I should say it, it would be done. And now if the Lord has such great power, and has wrought so many miracles among the children of men, how is it that he cannot instruct me, that I should build a ship?
1 Nephi 17:50–51.
Notice how Nephi's rebuke explicitly harks back to Moses before the Red Sea—“If he should command me that I should say unto this water, be thou earth, it should be earth”—reinforcing the sense that Laman and Lemuel don’t really understand the story that they are inhabiting, the story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt.
Laman and Lemuel offer their own gloss on Moses in verse 22 and in so doing model a particular type of scriptural and legal interpretation. They say:
And we know that the people who were in the land of Jerusalem were a righteous people; for they kept the statutes and judgments of the Lord, and all his commandments, according to the law of Moses; wherefore, we know that they are a righteous people; and our father hath judged them, and hath led us away because we would hearken unto his words; yea, and our brother is like him.
1 Nephi 17:22.
There is a great deal that is going on in this sentence. It begins with an assertion that the people in Jerusalem were righteous. If this is true, of course, the entire journey through the desert has been pointless. The claim is justified by an appeal to Moses, but unlike the narrative references made by Nephi, the appeal is an explicitly legal one. The people of Jerusalem were righteous because they “kept the statutes and judgments of the Lord . . . according to the law of Moses.”
1 Nephi 17:22.
Whereas Lehi claimed that the people of Jerusalem were unrighteous because of a revelation from a pillar of fire, Laman and Lemuel come to the opposite conclusion on the basis of legal analysis.
1 Nephi 17:22. 1 Nephi 17:22.
Where Nephi locates Moses in the experience of his family's exodus, Laman and Lemuel locate Moses in the correct application of rules. “Statutes and judgments” dominate stories of preaching and fleeing the wrath that is to come. Nephi's response to his brothers directly attacks their understanding of Moses's significance. Where they see Moses as a law-giver whose “statutes and judgments” provide a determinate and juridical criterion of righteousness, Nephi insists on the primacy of Moses as the hero of a story of exodus and desert redemption.
And it came to pass that I, Nephi, spake unto them, saying: Do ye believe that our fathers, who were children of Israel, would have been led away out of the hands of the Egyptians if they had not hearkened unto the words of the Lord?
1 Nephi 17:23.
Notice the way in which Nephi directly attacks his brother's criticism of Lehi's words as a means to illegitimate power. It was only by hearkening to the “words of the Lord” (not his “statutes and judgments”) that the Children of Israel were redeemed. He then proceeds to recapitulate the story of the original exodus in a way that parallels the journey of the Lehite group out of Jerusalem. First, he says:
Now ye know that Moses was commanded of the Lord to do that great work; and ye know that by his word the waters of the Red Sea were divided hither and thither, and they passed through on dry ground.
2 Nephi 17:26.
This miraculous crossing of a water can be seen as a reference to the situation of Nephi before Irreantum, the great waters that he will pass through the miracle of God's revealed plan to build a ship. Next, Nephi invokes the story of the Children of Israel being fed by manna from heaven and the water that sprang forth when Moses struck the rock.
Nephi ends his recounting of the story of the exodus with the story of the invasion of Canaan.
And after they had crossed the river Jordan he did make them mighty unto the driving out of the children of the land, yea, unto the scattering them to destruction. And now, do ye suppose that the children of this land, who were in the land of promise, who were driven out by our fathers, do ye suppose that they were righteous? Behold, I say unto you Nay.
1 Nephi 17:32–33.
Notice that here Nephi is offering a counter criterion for judging the righteousness of a people. Where Laman and Lemuel look to the legal criteria of keeping “statutes and judgments,” Nephi appeals to a violent, historical event. We can read this appeal to the invasion of Canaan against the background of Lehi's prophecies in Jerusalem. Lehi's “words,” far from being an attempt to lead people into the desert and get power over them, actually consisted of an effort to save them from imminent military catastrophe. Nephi reads the story of Moses as ultimately judging righteousness in terms of geopolitical events.
It should go without saying that Nephi's argument here is morally problematic, suggesting as it does that human war and violence reveal God's judgements on human beings as opposed to seeing war and violence as forms of human wickedness. Nephi as narrator is unconcerned with these objections, although later Book of Mormon narrators take a critical stance toward linking military events to judgments of wickedness or righteousness.
At its heart, the story in chapter 17 is about two dueling ways of understanding how one follows authoritative texts, how one follows the law. Laman and Lemuel offer a legal reading whereby scriptures provide rules that are then used to judge righteousness. Nephi, on the other hand, constructs his entire narrative around a competing view of scripture. On this view, scripture's normative power comes from the recapitulation of its stories in the lives of those that accept its authority. It orders the lives of those subject to its authority not through a set of juridical rules but rather through a set of narratives that transform existence from a mere sequence of events into the incarnation of God's working in the world.
Some readers may be skeptical of my claim that Nephi-as-narrator and his brothers are engaged in a legal debate. The text, however, supports such a legal framing. We are told that the records recovered from Laban that played such a prominent role in the early portion of the narrative contain, “the five books of Moses,”
1 Nephi 4:11. 1 Nephi 4:15. 1 Nephi 19:23. 1 Nephi 4:15.
There is one final bit of evidence that Nephi is offering a legal hermeneutic. Much later in the Book of Mormon, after Nephi has been replaced as narrator by another character, we are given a glimpse of the law among his descendants:
Now there was no law against a man's belief; for it was strictly contrary to the commands of God that there should be a law which should bring men on to unequal grounds. For thus saith the scripture: Choose ye this day, whom ye will serve.
Alma 30:7–8.
This is the only place in the Book of Mormon where a legal rule is explicitly derived from a biblical text. The scripture in this case is Joshua 24:15.
The verse reads, “And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” This is the only passage in the Hebrew Bible where the children of Israel are given such an explicit choice to serve Yahweh or other gods. And Joshua said unto the people. Ye cannot serve the Lord: for he is an holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins. If ye forsake the Lord, and serve strange gods, then he will turn and do you hurt, and consume you, after that he hath done you good. And the people said unto Joshua, Nay; but we will serve the Lord.
Joshua 24:18–19.
It would thus be entirely natural to read the Shechem Covenant as embodying the opposite rule as that given in the Book of Mormon. Far from proclaiming that there is “no law against a man's belief,” the Shechem Covenant suggests that those who forsake God will be severely punished. One can, however, derive the Book of Mormon rule from the narrative content of Joshua 24. In effect, the Nephite rule puts the law follower in the position of Joshua and the Children of Israel, faced with the choice that they were given at Shechem, namely the choice to serve the Lord or “the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites.”
Joshua 24:15.
The nature of rules and rule following has long been at the center of the philosophy of law. John Austin launched the modern debates on the topic by offering an account of rules based on the ideas of threats and punishment.
The modern discussion of rule following has blossomed beyond the debate between Hart and Austin. Lon Fuller famously argued that governing through rules imposed certain minimal moral requirements on rulers.
Schauer's model of rules and obedience to them roughly captures Laman and Lemuel's approach to following the law. They see the righteousness of the people of Jerusalem in terms of rule following, of keeping the “statutes and judgments of the Lord.” Notice that in identifying rules with God they emphasize the self-abdication involved in their allegiance to the rules. In contrast, they claim that Lehi – rather than God – has judged the people, putting Lehi's agency in the foreground. The primary function of the “statutes and judgments of the Lord” is to allocate power vertically. The emphasis is on control. The rule controls the rule follower by prohibiting certain acts. To use Schauer's language, it also controls rule appliers through the exclusionary force of empirical entrenchment. It is tempting, to read Nephi's approach as condemning this approach as mistaken. Yet in the opening chapter of the Book of Mormon, Lehi condemns the people of Jerusalem for their “abominations”
1 Nephi 1:13. 1 Nephi 1:19. 1 Nephi 17:22.
However, Nephi's broader approach to following the law is largely incomprensible within this framework of rule and rule following. When Nephi structures his narrative so as to draw comparisons to the story of Exodus with him and his father cast as Moses, he is making a point about following the law of Moses. He is providing a response to the accusations of unfaithfulness to the law leveled by his brothers. However, this response, with its emphasis on narrative and recapitulation, cannot fit within the framework of rule following that has developed from the contemporary debates in legal positivism and analytic jurisprudence. His approach to following the law requires a broader framework to be comprehensible.
The legal theory of Robert Cover provides such a framework. Cover's approach to law places the meaning-making power of narrative at the center of our conception of law. In contrast to the dominant strains of contemporary legal philosophy, Cover relegates the process of formally applying and enforcing rules to a secondary and disfavored position in legal thought. His theory thus makes sense of the move that Nephi makes of placing the intertwining of life and narrative at the center of his response to his brothers’ legal polemic. However, where Cover sees the subjective commitment to narrative at the center of law's authority, Nephi's story suggests commitment cannot ground law, which is always experienced as something in excess of subjective commitment, something that partakes of the structure of transcendence.
In his celebrated The intelligibility of normative behavior inheres in the communal character of the narratives that provide the context of that behavior. Any person who lived an entirely idiosyncratic normative life would be quite mad. The part that you or I choose to play may be singular, but the fact that we can locate it in a common “script” renders it “sane” – a warrant that we share the same
This process creates and maintains a normative universe independent of the official machinery of the state.
The dominant model for jurisgenesis within Cover's theory is Jewish law.
Caro's commentary and the pahorisms that are its subject suggest two corresponding ideal-typical patterns for commingling corpus, discourse, and interpersonal commitment to form a Cover,
The second “ideal-typical pattern” that Cover identifies for the law is what he calls “the imperial mode.”
Judges are people of violence. Because of the violence they command, judges characteristically do not create law, but kill it. Theirs is the jurispathic office. Confronting the luxuriant growth of a hundred legal traditions, they assert that this one is law and destroy or try to destroy the rest.
For Cover adjudication is destructive in two ways. First, adjudication always involves choosing between rival legal interpretations. The judge faces litigants with a dispute. She must decide the case and in deciding the case, one or both of the litigants’ interpretations of the law will be declared wrong, in effect killed and banished from the official legal community. Second, the decisions of judges are always tied to the violence of the state. As Cover evocatively wrote, “Legal interpretation takes place on a field of pain and death.”
Robert M. Cover,
The final key concept in Cover's theory of law is commitment. There must be something that differentiates mere storytelling and interpretation from law. This is important because Cover is making the strong claim that world-creating mythmaking is an important element of the law.
To live in a legal world requires that one known not only the precepts, but also their connections to possible and plausible states of affairs. It requires that one integrate not only the “is” and the “ought,” but the “is,” the “ought,” and the “what might be.” Narrative so integrates these domains. Narratives are models through which we study and experience transformations that result when a given simplified state of affairs is made to pace through the force field of a similarly simplified set of norms.
Cover,
However, for these narratives to have the dignity of law they must do more than speculate about some possible utopian future. “[L]egal interpretation cannot be valid if no one is prepared to live by it.”
Nephi's approach to legal interpretation bears a striking resemblance to Cover's theory of jurisgenesis. Given what is ultimately their common origin in the reading of the Bible, this is unsurprising. Laman and Lemuel ostensibly seek to follow the law, the “statutes and judgments of God.” They see those judgments only in terms of control and as ultimately, to use Cover's term, jurispathic. In effect, they wish to invoke legal rules in order to negate the new systems of meaning promulgated by Lehi and Nephi, systems of meaning that have upended the family's life. Nephi's approach to legal interpretation, in contrast, gives rise to a new nomos. By recapitulating the story of Exodus, Lehi and his family are following “the law of Moses” but in doing so they literally create a new nation in a new promised land. The Book of Mormon is thus faithful to Cover's injunction that “We ought to stop circumscribing the
In Cover's theory, Nephi's narrative would rise to the level of law because he “accepts the demands of interpretation” through “the personal act of commitment.” Indeed, Nephi literally inscribes his new interpretation of the law on his life and the life of his family. He is not spinning merely discursive narratives and interpretations. Rather, the story of his family is written, to use the words of the colophon with which he introduces his narrative, in “their sufferings and afflictions in the wilderness.”
What seems to be missing from Cover's account of nomos is any role for the transcendent, for something beyond ourselves that presses in and makes demands. On his account of jurisgenesis, it is the process of narrative coupled with commitment that transforms interpretation into legal meaning. This is ultimately a highly subjective notion of how a nomos is founded. On his account the only outside force that interrupts the process of narrative and commitment is the imperial force of adjudication and violence. Cover's invocation of commitment – with its echoes of a self-creating existentialist morality, albeit one embedded within a communal discourse – is striking precisely because the examples of jurisgenesis on which he draws involve mainly insular religious communities.
See id.
Consider the famous Talmudic story of the Oven of Akhnai, a narrative that would seem to provide the quintessential example of Cover's ideal of jurisgenesis. The story begins with a dispute between Rabbi Eliezer and the other rabbis over the ritual status of a certain kind of stove.
The story is contained in Babylonian Talmud in the Second Tractate Bava Metzi’a 59a.
Whatever the attractions of such a vision, however, it is doubtful that the Oven of Akhnai story points toward such a process. The story responds to the condition of Jewish law in the generations after the destruction of the Second Temple.
T The Babylonian Talmud says upon hearing of the ban:
Thereupon Eliezer himself rent his garments, removed his shoes, slipped from his seat and sat upon the ground. His eyes filled with tears, and as they did so the world suffered; olives, wheat and barley all lost a third, and some say that even the dough that women were kneading spoiled.
In a sensitive essay on Cover's jurisprudence, Suzanne Last Stone argues that ultimately Jewish law cannot provide the counter narrative to modern jurisprudence for which Cover was searching.
[Cover and his disciples] should be cautious not to derive too many lessons from the counter-text of Jewish law. For, in the final analysis, Jewish law is not only a legal system; it is the life work of a religious community. The Constitution, on the other hand, is a political document. It may even be a nomos, in the Maimonidean sense of the term. But it will not be Torah.
There are similar limits on the model of jurisgenesis in the Book of Mormon. Nephi offers up a way of following the Law of Moses that is far more open to new worlds than that proposed by Laman and Lemuel. Where they reduce the law to the narrow question of whether Lehi has correctly judged the people of Jerusalem according to “the statutes and judgments of the Lord,” Nephi's narrative recapitulation of the story of the law creates a new chosen people, a new exodus, and a new promised land. This seems to be precisely the kind of nomos-creating interpretive fecundity that Cover celebrates. However, Nephi's confrontation with his brothers ultimately presents the Oven of Akhnai in reverse. He does not seek to refute Laman and Lemuel's claim regarding “the statutes and judgments of the Lord” with arguments about the facts of the case, the scope of the rules, or even the spirit that animates them. Rather, the disagreement with his brothers turns violent. Nephi recounts how “they were angry with me, and were desirous to throw me into the depths of the sea.”
1 Nephi 17:48. In the name of the Almighty God, I command you that ye touch me not, for I am filled with the power of God, even unto the consuming of my flesh; and whoso shall lay his hands upon me shall wither even as a dried reed; and he shall be as naught before the power of God, for God shall smite him.
1 Nephi 17:48.
It would be unfair to equate the morally serious Rabbi Joshua in the Oven of Akhnai narrative with the murderous Laman and Lemuel in the Book of Mormon. It is striking, however, that the Book of Mormon narrative vouchsafes Nephi's interpretation not through commitment or the jurispathic function of courts but through the literal presence of God's power. The Book of Mormon thus shares with the Oven of Akhnai a teleological concern with the preservation of community and the proliferation of interpretations. Where the aggadah in the Talmud points toward the principle of majority interpretation, however, the Book of Mormon accepts the authority of miraculously wandering trees, brooks turned upstream, bending walls, voices from heaven, and a younger brother smiting his faithless siblings with the power of God. In the end, Nephi's jurisprudence cultivates the interpretive fecundity of the law, but it also testifies to the inadequacy of mere commitment standing alone to found a community.
The climax of Nephi's story also points towards something more than simply “the imperial mode.” It is a claim to law that rests on an eruption into the world of some transcendent authority. When Rabbi Joshua says that the Torah is not in heaven, he is making a similar claim. He is saying that the authority of the rabbi's interpretive project is dependent on the divine blessing placed on their activity when God committed the Torah to their care. In this, his claim is actually quite similar to the claim put forward by Nephi to ground his authority on miraculous power. Both appeal beyond interpretation and subjective commitment.
This claim can be made more precisely. From an “internal point of view,” to borrow a phrase from H.L.A. Hart, law is founded on transcendence rather than commitment. As I have written elsewhere:
Law provides a kind of sacred space for secular societies. It guides and controls actions. It coerces. It may be justified or not justified. But it does more than this. It maintains the constant experience of something pressing in on us from beyond, a claim to authority that displaces our individual judgments. It creates an order, a Nathan B. Oman,
This is true even in our disenchanted world.
The image of the disenchanted world was first offered by Max Weber as a description of a society dominated by desacralized formal bureaucracies.
The Book of Mormon had a scandalous birth. It came into the world surrounded by stories of angels and miracles along with accusations of fraud and humbug. Too often it has been unable to escape the allure of its origin story. However, the text of the book reveals itself as far more subtle and complex than the polemics of belief and disbelief would suggest. It repays close reading. In the stories of conflict between Nephi and his brothers that open the book, we have an argument about rule following that implicates basic questions of how we think about law. Strikingly, Nephi's account of law following in terms of narrative re-enactment makes little sense within the traditional categories of analytical jurisprudence but fits well within Robert Cover's theory of jurisgenesis. The climax of Nephi's story, however, challenges Cover's account of how interpretation becomes law. Where Cover pointed toward the priority of commitment to narratives, Nephi points toward the direct intervention of the transcendent in narratives. This is a dramatic claim about the structure of legal experience. Law claims to come from beyond us. It is not something that we subjectively create through our commitment. Indeed, part of what makes it such a fruitful site for the myth-making valorized by Cover is precisely the fact that it comes at us from a higher authority rather than arising from our subjective commitment. In religious legal systems the divine provides the source of legal transcendence. This point is illustrated in different ways by both the Book of Mormon and the story of the Oven of Aknai. If Nephi's account of how interpretation and transcendence interact to create a nomos is correct, then Cover's account of legal interpretation must locate the source of legal authority outside of the process of interpretation and commitment. We must grapple with the way in which legal authority erupts into our lives from some place beyond subjective commitment.