Jacob 7

A man named Sherem once moved into town. He preached against the very idea of the Anointed One. He worked hard to sway people who believed otherwise. Let’s just say I wasn’t going to be an easy sell on that one, even though he was a professor-type, with some traces of public relations training, i.e., kissing up to his targets.

He knew about me, my visions, my angelic visits, my God-audiation. I was no blow-over on these matters. Rock solid Jacob, they called me.

Still I made an appointment with him to let him take his best shot. He started with the kissing up, but then accused me of knocking down Moses’ law in favor of hope in the Lamb.

So suddenly I’m a blasphemer and a fraud, since he didn’t believe in any kind of cultural-evolutionary forecasting. (See, I can do that professor talk, too.)

I felt a passion rise up in me—I was going to say “like I’d never felt before,” but that wouldn’t be true. It’s just that he was such a jerk I remember this instance better than any others.

“So you’re saying the Anointed One won’t come,” I said.

“I might if there were an Anointed One. But there isn’t. So the question is moot.”

“You believe in the brass plates?”

“Sure.”

“Then you should read them a little more closely. Because there isn’t a single author in them that doesn’t talk about the Anointed One. But that isn’t the point for me. God’s spirit has told me about him directly. He’s the center of the Great Reconciliation—which you probably also don’t believe in.”

“God’s spirit? Way too conjectural. Evidence?”

“This is a tough one for me, because I’d have to ask God to waste his time on someone who’s basically worthless. You’re of the devil, man. So I’ll just say, let God smack you in whatever way he wants.”

And Sherem fell over as though he’d been hit by a thousand arrows. Now we have good people here—despite my tough sermons—and they fed and warmed Sherem as he lie prostrate for what must have been more than a week. It was clear he was near death.

He asked to make a public statement before he died. You guessed it: he recanted. He was now professing, though in a faint, kind of pathetic voice, that what I taught was right—the Anointed One would come—and went on to affirm angelic visits, heaven and hell (which were still controversial concepts among Jews), and the devil, who he confessed had actually been his master. Whoa.

He said he feared he’d lied too profusely to ever be saved. And maybe he had. But we’ll never know on this earth. He died as quickly as he’d barged in on our core beliefs.

Some people that saw his recantation actually swooned.

I hate to rub salt in wounds, but I got pretty tickled when I heard him crying about his lies and even when I saw him die. Because he had seriously harmed the pretty unified and hopeful community we’d made. Peace and love—that’s almost a cliché. But we had it and he tried to rob it from us.

That didn’t mean we could make any headway making peace with the Lamanites, though. They had this fetish for brutality that, mixed with pure contempt for our ways, made them impossible to have a truce with.

So we had a bit of an arms race, though our main defensive weapons were God and faith. We felt pretty secure in those, Lamanites or no.

I’ve reached the age where I’ve got to pass these plates on to the next generation, like handing a torch off in a relay. This is the end of my book. I’ve written as best I could. I’m no trained author. But I’m plain as a man can be.

To sum up: our lives as Nephites seemed dreamlike. I know that’s hard for you to understand and impossible for me to explain. We lived in cities but always felt like nomads. We always talked about rejoicing but were mostly overserious and even glum. We had this promised land, this New Canaan, but felt sad and put down and unfulfilled all the time. I hate to end this way. But it’s true. Honest. Plain.

I’m handing these plates over to my son Enos. He knows what to do with them and promised me he would. So I’m done. Sorry for the cramped engravings. I was just trying to squeeze in as much as I could. If you’re reading this, thank you. Adieu.