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By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion

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By the Hand of Mormon makes a fine contribution to Book of Mormon studies; Terryl Givens deftly surveys the twists and turns of the debate over the truth of the book. Givens, a Latter-day Saint scholar, has now made two extraordinary contributions to Mormon studies. If one wishes to understand the complex of interests and motivations-pecuniary, personal, and ideological-that fuel both sectarian and secular anti-Mormonism, Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, published in 1997, is the book to consult. In By the Hand of Mormon, Givens examines the roles the Book of Mormon has played for both believers and detractors. He describes its coming forth, and the debate over its historical authenticity. This book is an extraordinary accomplishment.

With subtle understatement and exceptional skill in analysis and argumentation, Givens examines how the Book of Mormon has served for some as a kind of barometer of gullibility and for others as solid evidence of blasphemy, while for the faithful it has served primarily as a sacred sign that the heavens are once again open, that Joseph Smith is God's prophet, that the end time is approaching, and that the world is again pulsing with divine powers. The most original chapter describes "dialogic revelation"-the special divine revelations in the Book of Mormon that result from a kind of dialogue with God and that are radically different from traditional concepts of revelation. This revelatory process was exemplified by the way in which the Book of Mormon was recovered, and the Joseph Smith story. And the Book of Mormon its readers to experience it for themselves.

Givens shows why it has been impossible to understand Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon by finding some "new middle ground" between or beyond the polarities of authentic ancient history or fraudulent composition-and hence between Joseph Smith as seer or charlatan, prophet or blasphemer, kingdom builder or disturber of the peace. He shows that both the book and the story of its recovery work together to force those who receive it to choose between these different alternatives. Those who encounter the book are also invited to enter into a world not unlike that described within its pages, a world in which the heavens are open and God communicates in ways entirely unlike the vagaries and obfuscation found in mystical intuition or in subtle theological speculation. Givens explains why such controversial book has been such a successful conversion tool even though its contents have been virtually ignored for long periods.

He explains how this "most religiously influential, hotly contested, and, in the secular press at least, intellectually underinvestigated book in America" has been variously "understood, positioned, packaged, utilized, exploited, presented and represented by its detractors and by its proponents" (p. 6). This effort is necessary because, "in spite of the book's unparalleled position in American religion and its changing meaning for apologists, critics, and theologians, no full-length study has attempted to present to the wider public a study of this book and its changing role in Mormonism and in American religion generally" (p. 6).

Givens shows that the story of the Book of Mormon's recovery and the fact of the book's existence fixed for the Latter-day Saints the prophetic authority of Joseph Smith and his successors. It is the book's role as a sacred sign-more than its teachings-that fuels the hostility of its critics as it continues to shape the identity of the Latter-day Saints and distinguish them from their sectarian neighbors. He shows why and how the Book of Mormon has been read as a factual account of some pre-Columbian peoples, and why its detractors see it as a product of the 19th-century and not as an authentic ancient text and divine revelation.

Givens draws attention to the "artifactual reality" surrounding the Book of Mormon-to the gold plates and the relics found with them. LDS belief on this point diverges from the interiority and subjectivity of much religious discourse and hence away from the nebulous stuff of myth, magic, and mysticism. But having faith grounded on a historical record is a double-edged sword because it subjects the founding text to the scrutiny of scholarship, which has both advantages and disadvantages. These Givens examines in detail.

Givens shows that competent Saints are not trying to discover some dramatic archaeological evidence, as sectarian critics demand, that would "prove" the Book of Mormon. Instead, the increasingly sophisticated efforts of the book's defenders to draw upon literary, historical, and anthropological support for the ancient origin of the Book of Mormon has forced its more honest, better-informed detractors to abandon earlier explanations and to search for explanations of its authorship.

The driving force behind much sectarian theological discourse has been to emphasize the otherness of God and to stress the inability of language to describe divine things with any concreteness or in any detail. Those steeped in traditional theological perspectives are offended because the text Joseph Smith gave us, the story of its recovery, and the relics are difficult to explain away as allegorical, mythical, or merely highly symbolic ways of talking about what is ultimately ineffable and entirely mysterious. Among such hostile professors of religion, either sectarian or secular, is the dogma that angels simply do not bring books of new scripture.

Givens describes in some detail the Cold War taking place along the Wasatch Front over the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon. He argues that the claims made by the Book of Mormon are, as others have already shown, open to critical inspection by scholars using whatever means they have at their disposal. The Book of Mormon does not ask to be shielded from such inspection. Of course, the faith of the Saints does not depend on the apparent results of such debate. This frustrates those who want a final proof one way or another right now.

In spite of the absurd things said in some of the reviews here, e.g. that the Bible boasts characters of Proustian complexity while the Book of Mormon is content with stock figures, that Givens somehow cleverly duped his Oxford editors, that Joseph Smith's claims are disproved by the oh-so-simple measuring rod of "common sense" (as if famous biblical stories, such as Moses turning a river to blood or Jesus rising from the dead, can be authenticated by everyday experience), that Givens's status as a believer disqualifies him somehow from writing a scholarly book (F.F. Bruce, anyone? C.S. Lewis?), etc. etc. etc., Prof. Givens's work is a model of precise, enjoyable, well-organized writing and thinking and is an ideal introduction to one of the seminal holy texts of the modern age.

For a long time, people who desire careful analysis of the Book of Mormon have had nowhere to turn. They were required to choose between three types of sources: 1) abrasively anti-mormon polemics; 2) "objective" accounts; and 3) official church accounts.

There is no shortage of studies that fall into categorey 1. You can buy many or most of them here on Amazon. They are worse than useless, though, because they are designed to use as much evidence as possible to put Mormonism in a bad light. They are not very choosy about their sources, they ignore positive evidence and stories, and they follow what might be called Ed Decker's razor-- of competing interpretations of disputed historical fact, the one that make Mormons and Mormonism seem most outlandish must be true.

Category 2 studies are more helpful. These studies are more (sometimes) selective in their choice of sources. The problem with them is their "interpretative" element. They apply a version of Occam's razor to interpreting facts. However, while this sounds good and scientific, it leads inevitably to one conclusion-- Joseph Smith was not a prophet, the Book of Mormon is not true, etc. To see why this is so, consider that Occam's razor provides no real guidance as to how one goes about deciding which of the competing explanations of a phenomenon is "simpler." These books use a "secular" version of Occam's razor, where non-religious explanations are always more likely to be true, because they are "simpler" in some sense. This is fine as far as it goes, but it perpetuates a lie, in some sense-- the lie is that the secular interpretation is the only plausible one, or worse yet, that the facts as seen through this secular mindset are simply "the facts," with no real interpretation being done at all.

Category 3 books are not all that useful for analysis because analysis is not their point-- they are designed to present the SPIRITUALLY RELEVANT portions of a story that is already assumed to be true. That is, they are answering different questions-- not questions about WHAT happened, or WHETHER something happened, but questions about what we should DO in light of what happened.

Givens gives us a category 4-- this book is like the books in category two, but its Occam's razor does not discount the possibility of religious explanations in advance. Instead, it priviledges the possibility of religious explanations-- where a plausible one is available, it is assumed to be true. This is no better or worse than category 2. It is only the "other side" of the category 2 story. And it needs to be told, because otherwise the assumption among many in the world will be that believers simply don't know their own history, rather than the truth, which is that they don't see the evidence in the same light as their critics.

It is well-told here. Most of the complaints against the book are that it doesn't fit into one of the other three categories mentioned. But it doesn't pretend to. And that shouldn't bother you unless you happen to have already made up your mind that one of the other three categories is the best one. That will be the case if (numbers correspond to the categories): 1) You believe that Mormonism is an evil that must be fought at all costs (usually because it is not in agreement with your own faith); 2) You believe that secular explanations of phenomena are usually or always more reliable than religious/revelatory explanations of those same phenomena; 3) You believe that Mormonism is true and the only remaining question is what to do now. If you are interested in how a believer makes sense of the historical/textual, and other evidence regarding the Book of Mormon, this book is for you. If you really want to get crazy, actually get a copy of the BofM and read it for yourself, trying to evaluate whether this thing is or is not for real, based not just on the history, but on the actual text. Forming an intelligent opinion without reading it all the way through carefully is hard to do, because all of the stuff out there "about" it, has either agenda 1,2, or 3 in mind.

The Book of Mormon is a curious work. Jos. Smith, Jr., founder of the Mormon movement (whose largest branch is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah), claimed to receive it by divine revelation. It professes to be the history of ancient inhabitants of the Americas, who came to the New World centuries before Christ.

Upon first blush, the Book of Mormon seems to be little more than a pale imitation of the Bible written in exaggerated King James English (by the time your done with it, you won't want to hear the phrase "and it came to pass" again). Nonetheless, the book is quite complicated and appears unlikely to be the work of the generally unlettered Jos. Smith. What is most interesting about the Book is its complex nature. Opponents of the Book have had a hard time finding internal inconsistencies in it, although it has a fair number of anachronisms.

Although the LDS Church has produced competent apologists (such as the brilliant B.H. Roberts), the age of modern Mormons apologetics began with Hugh Nibley and has continued to the present with scholars associated with FARMS, now part of BYU. For example, while Jos. Smith believed that the events narrated in the Book of Mormon concerned the territory covered by North and South America, contemporary Mormon scholarship asserts that its events took place in a relatively small area of Central America. There is no archaeological evidence to support the authenticity of the Book, but it does appear to have numerous parallels to ancient Middle Eastern works.

Prof. Givens, who is professor of English at the University of Richmond, has written a comprehensive book about the Book of Mormon. It isn't a commentary on the Book of Mormon, but a background work on the role of the Book of Mormon in the Latter-day Saints Church, its authorship, and the controversy about it "revelatory significance" (i.e., whether or not it's inspired). It's fairly dense, but it I'm not aware of a work that provides such useful background information to anyone who wants to study the Book of Mormon or who has some familiarity with it.

Professor Givens has provided a truly scholarly analysis that focuses on what the Book of Mormon has meant, both historically and in the present, to those who believe that the book is what it represents itself to be. This is NOT primarily an effort to address the question that usually is the aim of books--both pro and con--about the Book of Mormon, namely whether the book is a 19th Century fiction or a 4th Century abridgement of the record of the farthest flung branch of the Israelite diaspora. Instead, Professor Givens asks us to consider how the Book of Mormon FUNCTIONED in the establishment and growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from the earliest times to the present. Whether the reader accepts the Book of Mormon at face value or not, this is an important question for anyone interested in the expanding religious and social phenomenon that is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

One of the paradoxes inherent in most anti-Mormon critiques of the Book of Mormon is that the book is criticized as clearly contemporary (to 1829), transparently fraudulent, boring, and without a message worth considering. Generally, these critics seldom stoop to actually quoting more than a single sentence from the book itself, implicitly asking their readers to take their word for it that the book is (per Mark Twain) "chloroform in print". Starting from the critics' characterization, it becomes a mystery why millions of people have read the book and then made great sacrifices to join the church that holds the book to be a sacred record on a par with the New Testament.

Professor Givens provides insight into what it was in the Book of Mormon that persuaded people to change their lives. One of his insights is that it was not so much the teachings and doctrines of the book, but rather the simple fact of its existence, as testimony to the restoration to the earth of prophetic leadership and divine authority, which most influenced the Latter-day Saints of the mid-19th Century.

He shows how detailed scholarly attention to the specific teachings of the book, of its qualities as literature (including characteristics it shares with ancient Hebrew writings), and its worthiness to stand alongside the Bible as a witness to the resurrected Christ, has only come to fruition in the last three decades of the 20th Century, as LDS academics with unquestionable credentials in ancient languages, ancient history, and literary analysis have brought those scholarly tools to bear on the Book of Mormon.

Professor Givens shows how the Book of Mormon has become more authoritative in the teachings and doctrine of the LDS Church as more emphasis has been placed on the general membership studying the book in detail, and LDS scholars have supplemented that study with their insights, so that meanings open up in the same way that scholarly commentary can unpack the meaning of Bible passages.

Any serious scholar, of whatever discipline, who really wants to understand Mormonism, needs to start with the Book of Mormon, and Professor Givens' study can serve as an introduction to the ways that the book participated in the complex and fascinating history of the Latter-day Saints and their hegira from Palmyra, New York, to Salt Lake City, in the territory newly won from Mexico in 1847 with Mormon help, and then outward to other parts of the western US and to other nations.

The Book of Mormon has never been given the even-handed scholarly attention it deserves and the publication of this book is hopefully a chink of light on a subject that is to say the least esoteric. Prof. Givens courageous attempt to do so deserves a proper airing, and all credit is due to the non-LDS publishers who have taken the risk of collaborating with him. This book is welcome but I am looking forward to the time when non-Mormon scholars, who are not tainted by religious bias, recognise the Book of Mormon to be the work of genius it really is. Most of the objections against the Book of Mormon, i.e. visions and angels, can very easily be levelled at the New Testament, particularly the anti-Semitic Pauline corpus.

Do not be taken in by the vitriolic backlash from the Bible belt, Given's book is worth reading even if you are not familiar with the Book of Mormon or the church that publishes it. The Mormon phenomenon is one of sheer determination to survive a hostile Christendom and is truly part of the spirit of America. Givens explains clearly why the Book of Mormon is such a threat to the complacency of the `Born Again' movement. Givens also demolishes the argument that Joseph Smith was simply an adventurer living by his wits.

The Book of Mormon is by any stretch of the imagination uniquely individual, and in spite of what you would think, the movement it fosters is resilient and growing into a new World religion.

Words cannot describe how much I loved Givens' book. Notwithstanding the fact he is a Latter-day Saint, Givens provides what has to be the most unbiased book pertaining to the history of the Book of Mormon, its evidences and criticisms, translation, and so forth.

Even if one were a critic of The LDS Church and the Book of Mormon, s/he should pruchase this book, regardless, as should any Latter-day Saint.

As an added bonus, Givens provides photographs of the "NHM" altar from Yemen, corresponding with the placename "Nahom" in 1 Nephi 16:34 and the manuscript that confirmed that "Alma" was a genuine Hebraic male name.

Highly Recommended!

Givens, in this well thought-out book, attempts to explain why "the Book of Mormon is perhaps the most religously influential, hotly contested, and in the secular press at least, intellectually underinvestigated book in America." This book reads like, and compliments, many of the essays and articles published by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS). He quotes BH Roberts and some of the classical Mormon historians of the Book of Mormon extensively throughout the book. He has meticulously cross-referenced this book with several authors, some of which are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and some that are not (in practice several quoted references are from antagonists).

Givens objectively presents different bases in how to view the Book of Mormon. He starts first by presenting the religous and sociological context present during the bringing forth of the Book of Mormon. He focuses next on the archaeological evidence (or lack of evidence or contradictory evidence). Givens then focuses on the intellectual integrity and credibility of the text by comparing it with sentence structure of other ancient holy writ. He then focuses on whether the Book of Mormon is a cultural product or sacred fiction. Towards the end of the book, Givens focuses on the interface of the Book of Mormon and the Bible, and the cultural identity that the Book of Mormon has created.

My only criticism of this enlightening book is that Givens uses to many references and quotes, making the flow of the book sometimes difficult.

I bought this book at the recommendation of a LDS apologist saying that this was, "A wonderful introduction for any who wants to know where the controversy and evidence for the Book of Mormon lie." After reading this book, I would have to agree. I never knew that the University of California, Berkley, conducted a word print analysis on the Book of Mormon to confirm multiple authorship of the text and none of whom were the writings of Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdrey, and Solomon Spaulding. Also, I was amazed by how the grammar of the text fits with Hebrew grammar and writing styles. Terryl Givens also was willing to talk openly about problems that face the text as well as the critical arguments against the Book of Mormon. Overall, I thought the book was balanced with both pros and cons and anyone interested in LDS apologetics will find this is a good introduction into Mormonisms "keystone" cannon of scripture.

In the Kindle edition of this book there are numerous formatting flaws. Some are as simple as misaligned words, odd changes in margins and the like, but as I am reading, I'm also finding whole bodies of text to be out of order. So, I'm leaving this 'review' not so much as a review of the material (which I find to be excellently well-informed and engaging) as I am leaving it as a guide to others who may have purchased it and wish to find their way through it. (For clairty, I am only using the first number of the "location" (kindle page number) rather than the full range as they are given at the bottom of the screen).

If you wish to read chapter one in order:
Read from the beginning through location 529, the full 'page'
Skip to location 546's 2nd paragraph, and read on through location 564's 1st 2 paragraphs.
Then cut back to location 534 and read on through 546's 1st paragraph.
Finally skip to location 564's 3rd paragraph, and then read on to the end of the chapter.

Yes, it's that tedious, but I am finding the read worth the effort, as inconvenient as it is. I do plan to give feedback to both amazon and the publisher, and if you are interested enough in this to be reading this review, I heartily suggest (and request!) that you do the same.

I will edit this review to add more of these if I come across them and am able to figure them out. I should mention that were it not for the inconvenience caused by the formatting, I would have given this a rating of 5 stars.