A Deep Dive into the “Flyover Books”

On page 72 of the Maxwell Institute’s newest Brief Theological Introductions book, Sharon Harris writes a passage that will forever change the way I read the “itty-bitty books” of Enos, Jerom, and Omni. Speaking of the common charge that Jarom just wasn’t as invested in keeping the record as his ancestors were, Harris counters:

Rather than seeing them as a lag or a slowdown in the narrative of spirituality among Lehi and Sariah’s descendants, perhaps we have more in common with them than we realize. It has now been over a century since a revelation was received that was added to the Doctrine and Covenants. Would we say of our day, however, that revelation has ceased? Of course not. In many ways it feels as though revelation continues to increase within the church. But if people 2,500 years from now were to look back, with one narrow selection of records with which to draw their conclusions, would it look as though revelation was booming in the early twenty-first century? Perhaps not (72-73).

Though I have never considered it before, she is absolutely correct. Around 98% of the revelations that constitute the canonized scripture of the Restoration were generated between 1830 and 1845. The last 175 years, not so much. And this holds true across the board. Most of the Old Testament comes from the two sets of prophets–those of the 8th century and those of the 6th century–and from the post-exilic community in Babylon. And the entire New Testament was written in the last 50 or so years of the First Century AD. Scripture, like evolution, seems to follow a path of punctuated equilibrium in which most of us live in the unpunctuated parts.

This insight, I think, is crucial to understanding the three books that Harris treats in this study– Enos, Jarom, and Omni, which she calls “the flyover books” (2). Having grown up in Oklahoma, and having moved fairly recently from Kansas to Indiana, I know a bit about the things that people fly over, and I think that Harris’s approach is exactly right. Rather than working to invest these books with the earth-shaking theological significance of, say, First Nephi or Alma, she revels in their ordinariness—because ordinariness, or the conditions born of a well-ordered life and society, has a theological significance of its own.

A key insight that Harris introduces in the beginning and carries through her study is that, in all likelihood, Enos, Jerom, and Omni were the last books that Joseph Smith dictated to Oliver Cowdery during the BOM’s translation process (7-11). Assuming that this was Mormon’s sequence too, it gives the books a timelessness that should affect how we read them. In the reading order, the destruction of the Nephites that is prophesied in Enos, has already happened, and the future record that the authors of Jerom and Omni struggle to understand has already been compiled. If we already know the end, we can better understand how the small acts recorded in these small books helped to bring it about. And we can pick out themes and patterns connecting their works that may well have been invisible to the authors themselves. Understanding these themes patterns constitutes the bulk of Harris’s project in this brief study.

And she succeeds magnificently. The opening chapter on Enos sets the analysis in motion by offering multiple lenses to use in viewing the main character’s “wrestle” with the Lord. To help, she makes us familiar with the Greek term kenosis, or a complete emptying of one’s self. The term frequently appears in traditional descriptions of Christ’s absolute surrender to God’s will. But Harris investigates the concept much further, as she examines the spiritual path that Enos traveled to get from asking God to forgive his sins to securing God’s promise to spare the Lamanites if the Nephites are ever completely destroyed:

The process goes like this: being whole generates self-emptying, and self-emptying catalyzes focused, complete commitment to the life and welfare of specific people for whom we pour ourselves out. This is no theoretical idea of love, so undefined that we can hide behind its abstraction. This is loving real people with real consequences and costs, even if we do not know these real people right now. (30)

This is a marvelous understanding of how conversion changes us, and of how we become a Zion people by rejecting the inherent selfishness of natural humanity and becoming capable of loving other people the way that Christ loves them.

But Enos, as Harris deftly illustrates, still holds on to plenty of unfair stereotypes of the Lamanite people (41-44). His love for them in the future, which is absolutely sincere, does not prevent him from holding judgmental, ethnocentric views of them in the present—seeing them as creatures “led by their evil nature that they became wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people, full of idolatry and filthiness” (42). It is crucial here that Enos can love at least the descendants of these people even though he holds these views about them. But it is also crucial that he retains these bias views about them even after he spiritually commits to loving them. In the first thing, Enos is an example to us; in the second thing, he is a cautionary tale. In both, he provides us with a lesson well worth remembering.

The relationship between Nephites and Lamanites also becomes important to Jarom, who, Harris argues, is able to describe them without judgment—in a sign that the covenant between God and the Lamanites becomes increasingly important to the Book of Mormon even as the relationship between Nephites and Lamanites worsens. This is just one example of how Jarom embodies kenosis in a different sense. He is not lazy or unmotivated, she suggests, he just doesn’t see the need to keep up with the page counts of earlier writers, who have said all that needs to be said. He realizes that the book he is safeguarding is not all about him.

Like most of us, Jarom lives in a middle period between great revelations. His job is not to add to the perfectly adequate theological teachings that have already been written, but to safeguard these teachings for future generations by participating in an unbroken custodial chain. This is his role in the great covenant between God and his people. He is quite happy to observe it throughout his life and pass it on to his heirs, beginning with Omni, the first of five custodial platekeepers who live through turbulent times but never write more than a few paragraphs—and sometimes just a few sentences—on the plates.

Though they comprise only a few pages of text, the books of Enos, Jarom and Omni cover about 300 years of history—more time than the United States has been a country. If we think of how much has changed in our nation between 1720 and today, we can get a sense of how the world of Jarom different from the world of Nephi and Lehi.  The brief information that we have points to wars, migrations, the formation of a new nation, and, well, a lot more wars.

But the way that the text came down to us affirms that these are not the things that mattered, spiritually, to the people. What did matter was that God made a covenant with the nation, that that covenant included both Nephites and Lamanites, and that, for that covenant to be fulfilled, generations of record keepers had to perform their ordinary duties faithfully. That we have the Book of Mormon today is evidence that they succeeded. And we owe a great debt to Sharon Harris for showing us why, and how much, these itty-bitty books matter.