Review
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Title: The Annotated Book of Mormon
Editor: Grant HardyPublisher: Oxford University PressGenre: Scripture Study Edition Year Published: 2023Number of Pages: 892Format: HardcoverISBN: 9780190082208
Price: $39.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters|
The Annotated Book of Mormon is the latest in Grant Hardy’s now-decades-long work on The Book of Mormon. This volume, from Oxford University Press, builds on Hardy’s study edition of The Book of Mormon published with the Maxwell Institute, and his earlier Reader’s Edition with the University of Illinois Press. The Annotated Book of Mormon contains all the features of these previous editions and some additional supplementary material to aid in the close reading and study of The Book of Mormon.
Like these previous books, The Annotated Book of Mormon restructures the text of The Book of Mormon itself, using paragraphs and poetic stanzas, as opposed to the versification common to the version produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hardy continues to highlight the four main structural sections of the book—the Small Plates of Nephi, Mormon’s Explanatory Comments, Mormon’s Abridgment of the Large Plates of Nephi, and Moroni’s Additions to His Father’s Record.
New to this volume are brief overviews of each of these sections and introductions to each book of The Book of Mormon, which discuss some of the narrative highlights along with thematic and symbolic motifs worthy of attention. These work in concert with the extensive annotations throughout the text, visually placed as footnotes. The annotations often offer some gloss on narrative-level events, clarifying characters and actions, as well as linking passages to other moments in the book. The annotations also help connect the Book of Mormon to the Bible (along with an extensive index in the back of every Biblical reference and allusion in the Book of Mormon).
Hardy also includes twelve essays that each offer different ways of thinking about and approaching the Book of Mormon—as literature, as an ancient record, as fiction, as world scripture, etc. These brief essays concluded with a bibliography for further reading, guiding the interested reader to some portion of the wealth of resources available for thoughtfully engaging with the Book of Mormon.
One of the best things that Hardy’s various editions of the Book of Mormon do is defamiliarize the scriptures. Here, the presentation is so different on the page and filled with so many additional frameworks and ways of accessing the text, that it would be close to impossible to engage with it the same way that you have in its traditional format. What a gift! The Annotated Book of Mormon can help us read the Book of Mormon with fresh eyes again. This strikes me as one of the keys to new insight and seeking revelation for ourselves.
The Annotated Book of Mormon is a rich study resource that I hope will help transform the way we engage with the Book of Mormon as a people. I am excited to use it for my own study of the Book of Mormon over the next year and hope to share some of the insights that I gain with my fellow co-religionists. And I hope to see a robust response to The Annotated Book of Mormon, building on Hardy’s insights—perhaps wrestling with and arguing with his claims—and generally engaging more deeply with this wild, weird, and wonderful book of scripture.