Text: From this point, we may assume that these are Zenos’s words and that Jacob is copying them faithfully.
Literature: As we saw with Isaiah (Isa. 5:7), Zenos makes the connection between Israel and the olive tree explicit from the beginning and also presents the allegory’s essential elements. First, Yahweh introduces the allegory, not only establishing the description’s ultimate authority but clearly establishing the Lord as one of the characters of the allegory. Yahweh is the “man” who nourished the tree.
Israel is the tree. Because Israel is the tree, then clearly its caretaker is Yahweh. All Israel understood their special covenant with the Lord. The caretaker could be no other. This covenantal connection is an essential element of the allegory. Without it, the caretaker’s efforts to save the tree lose their symbolic power.
Paul Hoskisson, an associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, in his detailed analysis of Jacob’s allegory, proposes two possibilities for the lord and the servant sent to effect the changes. The first is that Christ is the Lord and the servant is a collective image of prophets. The second, which Hoskisson favors, is that the lord is the Father and the servant is the Son. I generally agree with this second interpretation, but for a different reason. Hoskisson reasons on the basis of theology:
I think there is reason to propose that the Lord of the vineyard represents our Heavenly Father and that the servant is Christ. For example, like the Lord of the vineyard, the servant throughout the allegory seems to be a single person and therefore cannot easily be made over into multiple prophets. Moreover, the servant in Jacob 5 can be associated with the “righteous servant” of Isaiah 53, whom Abinadi explicitly identifies as Christ (Mosiah 15:5–7). In addition, the working relationship between the Lord of the vineyard and the servant in the allegory accurately reflects the relationship between the Father and the Son, in that Christ does not act alone, but in all things follows the instructions and example of the Father.
This argument is theologically compelling, but one needn’t look so far. As an Old World prophet, Zenos’s sensibilities would have been in accord with the known understandings of Yahweh and Messiah. Most likely Zenos preceded the Josian reforms and, therefore, roughly parallels Isaiah. Consequently, he, like Isaiah, preserved the understanding of Father and Son that related to El and Yahweh. As we have seen, the Book of Mormon is part of a stream of theological development that places Yahweh as the more important actor over El; the Atoning Messiah is Yahweh, but on earth. (See1 Nephi, Part 1: Context, Chapter 1, “The Historical Setting of 1 Nephi.”) The Book of Mormon sees that shift from heaven to earth as a definitional shift from Father and Son (Mosiah 15:1–4). It would be in keeping with the pre-reform tradition to see the caretaker and the servant as Yahweh and Messiah in their different roles, even though they are the same being.
The question of the servant’s identity raises an important question about the nature of allegorical interpretation. How much of the allegory can be translated precisely into identifiable people or events? Hoskisson assigns rather specific time periods to various events in the allegory. While clearly applicable to the real world (or the allegory holds no meaning whatsoever) the absolute applicability of allegory is not required for instructional value. Indeed, virtually any allegory distorts “history” into “story.” Pushed to precision, virtually all allegories fail to match precisely the events they symbolize. It is essential to understand that allegory provides some literary license to its creator. Events and times may be generalized rather than clearly delineated. Indeed, even in Hoskisson’s reading, single events in the allegory are assigned to several historical events, a process demonstrating the futility of attempting a one-to-one reading of the story.
This inherent imprecision in assigning “values” to allegorical elements is the reason that there is no clear identification of the servant. The servant is a literary device for providing the action of the story, reflecting the cultural fact that the master of the vineyard would not be the one who actually did the labor. Both the actions and, at times, the pleadings of the servant are better seen as literary devices than as symbols of any relationship between God the Father and either Jesus Christ as Messiah or a symbolic representation of prophets.
The last element we see is that the tree “waxed old.” This is not only a literary description of the long time that the Lord had watched over Israel, but it explains the next phrase—that it “began to decay.” Decay is a known result of age. If the tree/Israel is decaying, then the Lord both declares that its beginning had been righteous (a given, since the Lord planted it) but that it is now in a state of apostasy. The allegory spends little time on the causes of the apostasy (discussed briefly at the end of the allegory), and much more on the master’s efforts to save the tree.
This allegory is therefore not a specific call to repentance. Rather, it assumes that apostasy is a natural development, just as the decay of an aged tree is natural. The apostasy has already occurred; it cannot be forestalled through repentance. The allegory’s function is to reveal how Yahweh enables recovery from apostasy.
The inevitability of this apostasy suggests that the Zenos allegory dates to a time near the Assyrian invasion. Similar to the prophecies of Isaiah, Zenos does not call Israel to repentance but foretells a redemptive future.
Culture: One of the questions about the olive tree is what it might be doing in a “vineyard.” John Tvedtnes argues that “vineyard” not only was used in association with grapevines but also for the entire planted area, which might also include trees. For instance, he comments: “The Encyclopedia Miqra’it notes that ‘The Egyptian k3mu could be used for both a vineyard of vines and a plantation of mixed fruit trees.… The scribe Any counted twelve vines that he planted in his garden, and alongside them 100 fig trees, 170 date palms, and the like.’”