A review by russellarbenfox
Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide by Grant Hardy

5.0

I've had this book on my shelf for something like 10 years, and I've only finally gotten around to reading it. For a faithful member of the Mormon community, or at least anyone who chooses to give the primary distinctive scripture used within the Mormon church, I can't recommend this book more highly. I've known all my life, as someone who was raised with readings of the Book of Mormon, that the book on its own terms is to be understood as the product of a set of ancient American prophet-editors who were compiling records for a latter-day audience. Hardy uses the tools of literary analysis to discover, assuming what the book itself presents on its own terms, what we can really know about those prophet-editors (Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni), and what their choices in regards to embedding other documents, making use of allusion and parallels, and much more can tell us about the world they were describing. The result, particularly the first two-thirds of the book (for a variety of reasons, trying to pull any kind of internally consistent understanding of Moroni's portion of the overall book strikes me as much harder sell), is incredibly eye-opening, or at least it was to me. In fact, I found parts of it downright faith-promoting, which is not something I expected from the book at all. Anyway, an important book for Mormons; hopefully, somehow or another, its critical take on the Book of Mormon will filter down to the ordinary faithful, one way or another.