To understand Jacob, you have to understand that he was born in a tent, that his older brothers menaced him from infancy, that his father blessed him by saying he had already seen God in his youth — and that out of all of that came the gentlest defender of women in the Book of Mormon.
Born in the Wilderness
He never saw Jerusalem. The city his father had loved and his older brothers remembered with longing was, to Jacob, a story. He was born somewhere along the south-Arabian coast, or in the deep wadi country before Bountiful, or under one of the tents Nephi and Sam pitched on the long way down to the sea. His first sky was a desert sky. His first water was what a camel-skin held. His first companions were the same brothers who would later try to murder his brother Nephi.
The text is delicate about it. "Thou art my first-born in the days of my tribulation in the wilderness" — that is Lehi speaking, on his deathbed (2 Nephi 2:1) — "And behold, in thy childhood thou hast suffered afflictions and much sorrow, because of the rudeness of thy brethren." Read those two phrases carefully. The word rudeness is doing a great deal of work. Lehi is not naming a slap on the wrist. He is naming the kind of treatment that puts a softness into a small boy and never quite leaves him. Laman and Lemuel had been rough with this little brother — the boy who had never seen the country they had lost, who carried the prophecy they hated, who was being raised at the knee of the father whose visions they refused. Jacob grew up under their menace.
And then, while still young, he saw the Lord.
Thou hast beheld in thy youth his glory; wherefore, thou art blessed even as they unto whom he shall minister in the flesh; for the Spirit is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. (2 Nephi 2:3–4)
A child in a wilderness tent, bruised by his older brothers, granted a vision of the same Christ who would one day walk through Galilee. The text does not tell us when. The text does not tell us how. The text only tells us, in his father's voice, that it had happened. Whatever else Jacob would become — and he would become much — he was first a child who had seen God.
The Patriarch's Name
His name is itself a sermon.
Yaʿaqov — Jacob — is the Hebrew word for "he grasps the heel," and the patriarch who first wore it was the supplanter who wrestled at the Jabbok and came up out of the river limping, with a new name: Israel, one who has prevailed with God. The patriarchal Jacob is the prototype of the man who wrestles with God and with his brothers and is given a covenant on the far side of both. The Lehite Jacob lives that same pattern. He wrestles with the rudeness of his brothers as a child. He wrestles with the men of his own people as a priest. He wrestles with Sherem as the first apologist of the new world. And he carries Israel forward — literally, in the allegory of Zenos he preserved for us, the tame olive tree that is Israel.
To name a son Jacob is to plant in him the expectation of a long wrestle, and the assurance, at the end, of a new name. That is what Jacob's life turns out to be.
The First to Speak the Name
This is the line most readers miss, and it is one of the great quiet marvels of the small plates.
Wherefore, as I said unto you, it must needs be expedient that Christ — for in the last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his name — should come among the Jews. (2 Nephi 10:3)
Read it once and you might pass over it. Read it twice and you realize what it is saying. An angel of God came to Jacob, in the night, and gave him the proper name of the Messiah — Christ — almost six centuries before the Galilean would be addressed by it on earth. The Hebrew word Mashiach was already old by Jacob's day; the Greek Christos would not come into the tradition until the Septuagint translators rendered the title four hundred years later; the personal name Jesus Christ would not be heard on earth until Gabriel said it to Mary. And here is Jacob, in the new world, on the very night before his temple sermon, being told by an angel: this is what his name will be.
The whole book is full of prophets who saw the Christ. Jacob is the one who was given the name to call him by.
The Atonement Sermon
In 2 Nephi 6 through 10, Nephi hands the pulpit to his younger brother, and Jacob delivers what is — by any honest measure — the most theologically dense single sermon in the Book of Mormon.
He preaches the gathering of Israel. He preaches the suffering of the Lord — "they shall scourge him … they shall spit upon him; and he suffereth it" (2 Nephi 9:5–6, paraphrasing). He preaches the necessity of an infinite atonement — that phrase, "infinite atonement," is his. Nobody else in scripture uses it; Jacob gives it to us (2 Nephi 9:7). And then he preaches the conquest of "that awful monster, death and hell" by the resurrection of the Christ, in language so vivid it ought to be terrifying and is in fact a comfort:
O the wisdom of God, his mercy and grace! For behold, if the flesh should rise no more our spirits must become subject to that angel who fell from before the presence of the Eternal God, and became the devil, to rise no more. … O how great the goodness of our God, who prepareth a way for our escape from the grasp of this awful monster. (2 Nephi 9:8, 10, 19)
It is also Jacob — not Nephi, not Mormon, not Alma — who diagnoses the deepest disease of the educated classes in any age:
O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish. But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God. (2 Nephi 9:28–29)
Two verses that ought to be inscribed over every university door in the Restoration. The diagnosis is gentle but exact: the learned are not wrong to be learned; they are wrong to think they know. Knowledge becomes ruin the moment it stops listening.
The Defender of Women
And here is the section that most ought to undo us.
Jacob 2 and 3 are the most morally serious passages about the abuse of women in any prophetic record we have. Jacob is consecrated as priest and teacher. He goes up to the temple in the Land of Nephi, and what he has to say to the men of his congregation is not what they wanted to hear.
Behold, ye have done greater iniquities than the Lamanites, our brethren. Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives, and lost the confidence of your children, because of your bad examples before them; and the sobbings of their hearts ascend up to God against you. (Jacob 2:35)
Pause on that. The sobbings of their hearts ascend up to God against you. This is a prophet who was rough-handled as a child, who knew exactly what menace at the hand of a man feels like, who had grown up watching his older brothers' anger become his mother's grief, his father's burden, his own bruises. When he stands up at the temple to indict the men of his own people for what they have been doing to their wives — for taking concubines, for justifying sin by misreading David and Solomon, for breaking the tender hearts of the women who trusted them — he is speaking from a place no other prophet in the Book of Mormon stands.
For they shall not lead away captive the daughters of my people because of their tenderness. … Have ye not read the word of the Lord, that this people, the Lamanites — ye hate them because of their filthiness and the cursings which hath come upon their skins — are more righteous than you? For they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our father, that they should have, save it were one wife; and concubines they should have none. (Jacob 2:33; 3:5)
A prophet telling his own people that the people they despised — the people they had cursed, the people they had warred against — were more righteous than they were, in the specific area of marital fidelity. It would be hard to find a more uncomfortable sermon in any pulpit, and Jacob preached it.
The defender of women in the Book of Mormon is the boy who grew up listening to his sisters and his mother and the women of Ishmael cry into the night while the men argued at the fire.
The Keeper of Zenos
Then there is Jacob 5 — the longest chapter in the Book of Mormon, the allegory of the tame olive tree, and one of the most theologically dense pieces of scripture in any canon.
The allegory itself is older than Jacob. It came from the prophet Zenos, whose writings were on the brass plates and which are otherwise lost to history — quoted by Paul (Romans 11), echoed in 1 Enoch's Animal Apocalypse, hinted at in the rabbinic tradition of Israel as an olive tree, but preserved in the form we have only by Jacob. He did not write it. He saved it. Without Jacob there would be no Zenos in our scripture at all.
The allegory traces the whole history of Israel as a single olive tree under a single Lord of the vineyard who labors — patiently, painfully, repeatedly — to bring forth fruit. The branches are grafted in and broken off and grafted in again. The roots are old and good. The Lord of the vineyard weeps over the corruption of the natural fruit and weeps again over the wild fruit and works with his servants — plural, mark that detail — to bring the tree to the harvest. The whole story of the gathering of Israel, the apostasy, the Restoration, and the last days is in those seventy-seven verses.
Jacob preserved it. The wilderness-born boy who was bruised by his brothers preserved for the entire dispensation the longest, deepest text in the Book of Mormon about the long-suffering patience of God with his people. It is hard not to feel that Jacob had become, by the time he received those plates, the kind of man who could understand the Lord of the vineyard from the inside.
The Sherem Confrontation
In Jacob 7 the first anti-Christ in the book walks onto the page.
Sherem is described with the language of seduction: "a man came among the people of Nephi, whose name was Sherem. And it came to pass that he began to preach among the people, and to declare unto them that there should be no Christ. And he preached many things which were flattering unto the people." (Jacob 7:1–2.) He had "a perfect knowledge of the language of the people; wherefore, he could use much flattery, and much power of speech." A polished, articulate, persuasive man, denying the Christ and gathering a following.
He sought out Jacob.
And what Jacob said, when the polished man with the smooth voice and the perfect language came to dismantle him, is one of the quietest sentences a prophet has ever spoken:
And it came to pass that he came unto me, and on this wise did he speak unto me, saying: Brother Jacob, I have sought much opportunity that I might speak unto you … and I am learned that I might know the perfect language of our fathers. … And he said: I know that there is no such thing as a Christ. But Jacob answered him … I cannot be shaken. (Jacob 7:5, paraphrasing the surrounding verses.)
I cannot be shaken. From the boy who had been roughed by his brothers in the wilderness. From the priest who had been confided in by angels. From the man who had handled the doctrines of the Atonement and the Resurrection and the Allegory and now stood face to face with the eloquence that wanted to undo them all. He did not raise his voice. He did not get clever. He told Sherem, in plain language, that he had seen angels, that they had ministered unto him, that he had heard the voice of the Lord from time to time, and that it was impossible that he should be shaken. The contest was over before the smooth man understood that it had ended.
Sherem asked for a sign. The Lord smote him. He confessed before he died. The people, "when they had seen this, they fell to the earth" (Jacob 7:21), and the church was preserved.
Brethren, Adieu
He closes the book with a French farewell.
And I, Jacob, saw that I must soon go down to my grave; wherefore, I said unto my son Enos: Take these plates. … And to the reader I bid farewell, hoping that many of my brethren may read my words. Brethren, adieu. (Jacob 7:27)
Critics of the Book of Mormon have made much of adieu — a French word in a record of antiquity. They have made too much of it. Adieu is just à Dieu — "to God." It is what the Hebrew speaker would have meant by the parallel construction. It is the Spanish adiós. It is the same gesture, in another language, that the patriarchs used when they committed their people to God at the end of their days. Joseph Smith, translating into the English his contemporaries spoke, reached for the word in English that carries that meaning — adieu, "to God." It is the most ancient kind of farewell, dressed in the most polite language of 1830 New York.
Jacob commits his readers to God and goes.
What He Was
He was the wilderness-born brother who never saw Jerusalem, and he became the prophet who saw the Lamb. He was the boy who suffered rough hands and grew into the man who would not let a single woman in his congregation be broken in silence. He was the keeper of Zenos's olive tree and the first man to whom an angel said the name Jesus Christ. He was the answerer of Sherem who would not be shaken, and the priest at the temple in the Land of Nephi who delivered the densest atonement sermon in the book.
He was — to use his own father's word for him — a beloved son. He grew up to be the kind of priest the Lord builds when he raises a soul up under affliction and then teaches it how to be tender.
The boy whose own brothers had bruised him stood at the temple and told the men of his people that the sobbings of their wives' hearts ascended up to God against them. Only the bruised boy could have said it. Only the man who had seen the Lord in his youth could have said it without flinching.