“The Power of the Resurrection of the Holy One of Israel”

Brant Gardner

Text: Verses 11 and 12 were part of a continuous paragraph in the 1830 edition. Their separation in post-1879 editions makes it more difficult to see the literary continuity and continuity of the argument.

Translation/Literature: Jacob uses parallelism to emphasize his point: “This death, of which I have spoken, which is the temporal, shall deliver up its dead” (v. 11) // “This death of which I have spoken, which is the spiritual death, shall deliver up its dead” (v. 12). In both cases, the atonement reverses one of these aspects of death.

Each sentence mirrors the other except for the single change in the central phrase. This similarity is intentional. The process of translation might lose information that relied upon puns or other similarities in sound but literary devices such as parallelism do appear in the English text. The translation is not divorced from the underlying text from the plates even if it does not preserve any recognizable flavor of that language.

The final clauses in both sentences are also parallel: temporal death is the grave (v. 11) // spiritual death is hell (v. 12). These phrases are part of the overall complementary parallel. Spiritual death is hell because hell is the location of Satan, and the opposite of both heaven and Yahweh. Death/hell/Satan stand opposed to life/heaven/Yahweh.

Second Witness: Analytical & Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Vol. 2

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