Grant Hardy’s The Annotated Book of Mormon debuted on Oxford University Press in the Fall of 2023, just in time for the Come Follow Me course of study to focus on the purported “keystone of our religion” for the 2024 calendar year. The miserable end of 2024, then, seems as good a time as any to take a step back and evaluate how these Annotations handled on the road, so to speak.

I eagerly bought Grant Hardy’s book early in the year, both due to the rave reviews it was getting across ye oulde bloggernacle, but also just to finally have a new way to engage a book I had read at least 8 times on my mission, and innumerable times since. Like a beloved old music album that I had over-played in my youth—and have since repurchased in remastered, “expanded edition,” and vinyl formats in increasingly-desperate attempts to recapture the old magic—I have long been on the prowl for new ways to experience the Book of Mormon.

I’d already done the usual things to try and keep my Book of Mormon readings fresh, viz: dutifully read the accompanying institute manual in college; binge my way through the apologia of Nibley, FARMS, and BYU Studies while still a fresh-faced RM; read a facsimile of the 1830 first edition; re-read it in my mission Spanish; actually try to look up all the footnotes and cross-references on the bottom; read it extra-fast; read it extra-slow; study it by topic; mark up a new copy once my old mission quad began to fall apart; read it entirely on my phone when that became available; read Mark Twain’s excerpts from Roughing It; check out the Penguin Classics edition; look up the RLDS modern English version; and in grad school read book-length studies by the likes of Terryl Givens, Richard Bushman, Paul C. Gutjhar, and Grant Hardy himself.

Hardy was actually my personal favorite of that particular phase: his excellent 2010 study Understanding The Book of Mormon was like a breath of fresh air. Beyond the lucidity and clarity of the prose itself (a rarity in academia—especially in the Humanities, ironically), I appreciated how he seemed to care what the Book of Mormon actually has to say. All other studies I’d waded through were inevitably just some species of apologetics, which after awhile becomes repetitive and redundant (at a certain point, you either have a testimony by the Holy Ghost or you don’t). The only other scholar I’d encountered who focused on what the text itself actually has to say to us was late-period Hugh Nibley, of all people (he evidently grew bored with BoM apologetics as he aged, too); but Nibley’s been dead since 2005, so Hardy seemed to be the new standard-bearer in that regard. When he was announced as the author of Oxford’s Annotated edition, I naturally got my hopes up, that I would be treated to an in-depth PhD-level analysis of the Book of Mormon.

Alas, those hopes were swiftly dashed, as I quickly became confused as to who this book is even for. Initially, I was disappointed because the book just seemed intended for first time readers, not repeat ones. Seriously, so many of Hardy’s footnotes here are only brief, hand-holding recaps of what you literally just read. (Frankly, this site has done more thorough Annotated Readings before.) His lists of scriptural cross-references are actually thinner and sparser than the footnotes in the “official” edition that the LDS Church gives out for free; and the reformatting of the more poetic passages into verse form loses its novelty fast. I started to wonder if all the hoopla about this edition had less to do with the quality of the annotations itself, than the sheer fact the book got an annotated edition at all; that maybe we were all a little too excited to get outside validation and a pat on the head from a name-brand university press, regardless of its actual utility.

Seriously, if you are looking for, say, a complete list of purported anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, or of wording changes between the first and later editions, or of its various 19th-century turns-of-phrase (as though translators in general don’t constantly use functional rather than formal equivalence), it would be both faster and cheaper to just google them yourself, rather than pick your way finding them across this Annotated edition. Anyone hoping for, say, a summation of the current critical debate surrounding certain passages, or even just a refereed back-and-forth between the book’s defenders and critics, will have to comb through old FARMs articles or evangelical websites or Reddit threads or what-not, because you won’t find them here. This is not a midrash. The long-form essays in the appendix merely summarize longstanding debates about the BoM, without attempting to resolve or add to them. The vast majority of these annotations are simply a “For Dummies” beginner’s-guide to the Book of Mormon.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing! Introductory texts have their place! It is good to make esoteric books more accessible to outsiders and beginners! I just wish it had been more explicitly marketed that way; but then, frustratingly, this edition also shows glimpses of the sort of in-depth close-readings that I thought I was actually buying nearly a year ago.

For Hardy’s overriding hobby horse in this volume (and it’s a good hobby horse!) is that there is much internal textual evidence that the Mulekites never fully assimilated with the Nephites (as was insinuated back in Omni), that they in fact remained resentful of Nephite political hegemony for the rest of their shared history—especially since the Mulekites were the ones descended from the Davidic throne of Israel via King Zedekiah, so arguably had the stronger claim to the government. Such a reading can help to explain the rise of the “kingmen” in the time of Captain Moroni; their numerous dissensions to the Lamanites and Gadianton Robbers; the latter’s complaints of having been robbed of their “rights to the government;” Mormon’s odd boast in 3 Nephi 5:20 that he is a “pure descendant of Lehi” (as though that were a rare and laudable thing); and many other editorial elisions by Mormon and Moroni that seem to willfully downplay Mulekite differences, grievances, and achievements (e.g. the surely-rousing story of how King Zedekiah and his followers escaped the destruction of Jerusalem and sailed to the Americas is curiously never referenced once by Mormon, while Lehi’s is mentioned repeatedly).

It is a very rigorous, careful, and fascinating reading that Hardy performs here, one that I honestly wish he had compiled into a single journal article or book chapter—or even its own book-length study—rather than scatter it across an otherwise-basic Annotated edition. As a side-bar, Hardy’s close-reading here also makes a strong case (almost in spite of itself) that the unlettered, uneducated Joseph Smith, Jr. couldn’t possibly have produced a text as complex, layered, and subtle as the Book of Mormon on his own. It has been a hobby horse of mine for years now that the literary-genius explanation for Joseph Smith’s life simply won’t fly, because he frankly wasn’t a genius: his widow Emma Smith bluntly said he “could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter, let alone dictating a book like the Book of Mormon,” and I increasingly take her at her word. His command of Hebrew was embarrassing (never quote his reading of Genesis 1:1 to an actual Rabbi), and his Greek non-existent. Joseph Smith—who never even learned how to spell in his native English correctly—often didn’t seem to comprehend the full complexity of the Book of Mormon text he held in his own hands, no, not even when he called it the “keystone of our religion;” as Hardy himself writes in an end-of-book essay, “he was much more likely to preach from the Bible than the Book of Mormon” because “Smith treated the Book of Mormon as something external to himself, whose contents he was not particularly familiar with” (pg. 749). This is all to say, that Smith must have gotten help from somewhere else, someplace higher, for the production of a text that he himself never seemed to fully understand. Hardy’s book reinforces my suspicions.

But that all still leaves me with the frustrating question of: Just who is this annotated edition for? First-time readers would barely understand who the Mulekites even are, let alone how to deconstruct their larger textual significance; while more experienced readers are not going to be interested in skimming basic chapter recaps to get to the good stuff. So again, who is this book for? Beginners and dilettantes looking for a basic overview? Or seasoned readers and English majors seeking an in-depth analysis? Annotated tries to appeal to both crowds, while never fully satisfying either.

But then, I quickly find myself asking the same question about the Book of Mormon itself, just in general: Who is this even for? It is a text, after all, that preaches repeatedly, explicitly, almost monotonously (to the point that even our Primary children can recite it), that seeking after wealth is always the first step in the self-destructive “Pride Cycle” (D&C 38:39); that the only valid reason to pursue wealth in the first place is to help the poor (Jacob 2:18-19); that one must give to the poor freely, without judgment or precondition (Mosiah 4:16-19); that in fact the only sort of society pleasing to God is one where there are neither rich nor poor to begin with (4 Nephi 1:3); and that Mormon is telling us all this specifically for our day (Mormon 8:36-38). Yet to date, the only decent-sized Church of any consequence to completely and unambiguously claim the Book of Mormon as the divinely inspired keystone of our religion (the Community of Christ definitely punted on that) is also the one with the $100billion-and-counting hedge fund and no clear plans on how to use it; that spends less than 1% of said wealth on humanitarian aide; that is dominated by American members who regularly vote for tax breaks for the rich, tax increases on the poor, and kingmen in high places; and that fills its upper-echelons of leadership with self-satisfied millionaires who only donate token amounts of their wealth to charity, if at all.

It is a book about immigrants and refugees to the Americas that is only read seriously by a people who just majority-voted to deport immigrants and refugees from America–and that in the exact same calendar year when we were supposed to be studying this book exclusively! If we steadfastly refuse to let the Book of Mormon make us a more generous, charitable, and humane people, then why do we make such a big deal about reading it so often? If we as a church won’t take the message of the Book of Mormon seriously, then how can we honestly expect anybody else to? I do not ask these questions rhetorically.