If you read New Moon Notes #8, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, Jacob Black is named for the biblical Patriarch.” I think that’s about right, but it’s not the whole picture. There is another Jacob in Mrs. Meyer’s religious firmament. We know she’s read Genesis closely because she takes Twilight’s epigraph from that book, but has said The Book of Mormon is the biggest influence on her life, not the Bible, and, sure enough, Jacob plays a feature role in that book, too.
The big hero of The Book of Mormon [BoMor] is Nephi, son of Lehi, who becomes the Prophet and leader of the lost tribe of Israel in America, even though he was not Lehi’s oldest son. Nephi has two loyal brothers, Jacob and Sam, who lead the ‘Nephites’ at his death. Two other brothers, Laman and Lemuel, rebel and their followers become ‘Lamanites,’ whose skin turns dark because of their sins and who eventually destroy their fair-skin cousins, the Nephites.
This good Jacob and many of his heirs become the keepers of the Bronze and Golden Plates that are eventually revealed to Joseph Smith, Jr., in the early nineteenth century which he claims to have translated with his seeing-stones. New Moon’s Jacob is related to his namesake Mormon Prophet in having a “brother” who is almost his equal in authority named “Sam,” in having a mother named “Sarah” (BoMor “Sariah”), and in being a Native American with a heart of gold. (Mormons historically have believed that all Native Americans descend from the sons of Lehi, which belief genetic studies and anthropological research have found implausible, at best.)
Jacob Black, then, has a name with remarkable punch: the “Jacob” points to the biblical Patriarch as well as to a Nephite leader and the “Black” is an alchemical marker for Bella’s nigredo. Which brings us to our next talking point…
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correction:
“the lost tribe of Israel in America”
This is one of the biggest mistakes of those not familiar with the Book of Mormon. There is no “Lost Tribe of Israel” in America according to the book. The Nephites (and Lamanites) are descendent’s of the very much known tribe of Ephraim, with Joseph of Egypt the principle ancestor. It would be more accurate to call them a lost break off from the tribe of Ephraim. -
While technically correct, Jettboy, that the Nephites themselves are not the Lost Tribes, the Book of Mormon is born in large part from the belief among Christians of Smith’s age that the Lost Tribes had come to America.
As Zvi Ben-Dor Benite writes in ‘The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History’ (Oxford University Press, 2009), “What the Book of Mormon takes from the debates about the ten lost tribes is the singular possibility acknowledged since the early sixteenth century that a biblical people had arrived in America. This new biblical past was implied in the sacred Mormon texts. Crucial in this regard is the idea that knowledge — or more aptly, revelation — accompanied the Israelites who came to America. If the exile of the tribes were the miraculous work of God he surely knows where they now are: “But now I go unto the Father, and also to show myself unto the Lost Tribes of Israel; for they are not lost unto the Father, for he knoweth whither he hath taken them,” declared the Mormon Prophet Nephi (3 Nephi 17:4) If God carried the tribes away, he also revealed himself to them; and this revelation is to be united with the Old World revelation. This unification is carried out in the Book of Mormon. “And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews” (2 Nephi 29:13).
So, while technically you are correct on this point, a point that that is not part of my argument about Jacob — and, yes, I think it obvious that you raise this faux issue just to raise question about my qualifications to speak on anything related to Mormonism rather than to address the subject of this post — you mislead readers by your suggestion that the Nephites have nothing to do with the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Mormonism, as Brooke, Vogel, and Ben-Dor Benite have argued cogently, is born in the remainders of sixteenth century Radical Reformation religious beliefs that were still vital in Smith’s America and in his imagination. The Book of Mormon itself references the Lost Tribes as essential for understanding why it survives. Suggesting that a reference to these Tribes is “one of the biggest mistakes of those not familiar with the Book of Mormon” without noting the critical place of the Tribes for understanding why Smith’s Semites travel to the New World as many believed the Lost Tribes to have done, not to mention how these Semites understood themselves according to BoMor, is a greater injury to the truth.
But thank you for the correction. I’ll try to be more careful in my references to the Tribes in future posts and how historical beliefs about the Ten Tribes inform the narrative of the Book of Mormon.
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