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I look forward to reading the essays again in print form. Though personally, I am more interested in understanding the Book of Mormon from the point of view of the original authors, than to experience what the first readers did. Jesus took pains to point out that the same seeds (words) can produce a vastly different harvest, depending on soil, nurture, and time. I get a lot more from the text after another 46 years of preparation and exploration than I did from my first solo read through. All I have learned to see comes with an accompanying clamor that there is more to see yet. So I pay attention both to close readers (such as Hardy, Spencer, Goff, Austin, and so on) and to careful contextualizers (Nibley, Peterson, Welch, Tvedtnes, Gardner, Poulson, and so on). It was a comment in a Feb 2016 discussion of one of Micheal’s essay’s here that prodded me to read Ethan Sproat’s “Skins as Garments in the Book of Mormon” in JBMS in 2015. Rather than consider the content, one thread reader dismissed even the idea that there was anything to learn:
“I’ve seen arguments by those who try to explain that “skin” in the Book of Mormon really means a “spiritual skin,” something metaphorical. But that is what we might call wresting the scriptures. It’s an attempt to take the inherent racist attitudes that are plain in the book and twist them to something more politically correct. It’s very obvious that “skin” in the Book of Mormon means “skin.” Just as “north” means “north,” not some other direction.”Share
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