Question: Why would "camp meeting" elements appear in the story of King Benjamin's temple speech in the Book of Mormon?

FAIR Answers—back to home page

Question: Why would "camp meeting" elements appear in the story of King Benjamin's temple speech in the Book of Mormon?}}

The same elements that the critics consider 19th century attributes in the Book of Mormon are also evidences of ancient Israelite origin

Terryl Givens notes,

[A]lthough the content of the Alma conversion story suggests to some the influence of contemporary conditions, the account as narrated in the Book of Mormon exhibits a complex structure of inverted parallelism or chiasmus that has been persuasively connected to ancient Old World forms....The same story, in other words, is invoked as telling evidence of both nineteenth-century composition and authentically ancient origins. [Blake] Ostler sees an example of such divergent readings in King Benjamin's great temple speech (Mos 2-6), that incorporates elements common to Methodist camp meetings, but at least as convincing are more than a dozen formal elements of Israelite covenant renewal festivals contained in the speech.

Notes