The third-generation steward of the small plates, whose deepest gift to the record is his restraint — the prophet-editor who refused to add what did not need to be added, and whose seven sentences of doctrinal content are the most-Christological seven sentences of the entire pre-Mosian Nephite era.
What He Gave Us
Jarom's book is fifteen verses. It is the shortest of the named small-plates books — shorter than Enos, shorter than Omni, shorter than Words of Mormon. The reader who is moving through the small plates can pass through it in two minutes. It is so easily overlooked that many faithful readers can describe it only as the short one between Enos and Omni.
Read his own statement of purpose:
And as these plates are small, and as these things are written for the intent of the benefit of our brethren the Lamanites, wherefore, it must needs be that I write a little; but I shall not write the things of my prophesying, nor of my revelations. For what could I write more than my fathers have written? For have not they revealed the plan of salvation? I say unto you, Yea; and this sufficeth me. (Jarom 1:2)
I shall not write the things of my prophesying, nor of my revelations. This is one of the most striking sentences any prophet has written about his own ministry. Jarom had prophesyings. He had revelations. The fathers' line ran through him — his grandfather Jacob and his father Enos had both received voice-revelation, and the gift had clearly continued. He could have filled a hundred pages with his own oracles. He chooses not to. His reason is breathtaking in its simplicity: what could I write more than my fathers have written? The plan of salvation has already been revealed. The doctrine is on the plates. The additional words would only crowd the doctrine that is already there.
This is the doctrine of dai. The Hebrew dai (דַּי) — enough, sufficient — is the noun behind the name El Shaddai, God-all-sufficient (Genesis 17:1). When Jarom says this sufficeth me, he is in the Hebrew Bible's own theological grammar. El Shaddai is enough; the plan-of-salvation-He-has-already-given is enough; the record-as-it-stands is enough. The disciple does not need to add. The disciple does not need to amplify. The disciple needs to receive what has been given and pass it on.
Compare what Paul wrote to Timothy: all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect (2 Timothy 3:16–17). The scripture given is sufficient to make the man of God perfect. Paul's is sufficient is Jarom's sufficeth me. The doctrine is the same. The scripture-as-given is enough for salvation. The disciple who knows this does not add to scripture; he keeps what scripture has said and lives it.
Compare what John wrote at the end of his Gospel: and there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written (John 21:25). John could have written more. He chose not to. What he had written was enough for faith (John 20:31). Jarom is four and a half centuries earlier than John, and he is making the same editorial decision. What I have written, and what my fathers have written, is enough.
Compare the warning at the end of Revelation: if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book (Revelation 22:18). The Lord guards His scripture against editorial addition. Jarom guards the small plates against the same temptation by simply refusing it. He could have added; he chose not to.
This is editorial restraint as a form of testimony. Jarom's silence is itself his witness. He is saying, by what he does not write, that the scripture-already-given is true, that what the fathers said is enough, that the prophet's faithful act in his generation is not always production of new doctrine but preservation of old doctrine. Sometimes the deepest act of reverence is to leave the holy thing alone. Jarom is the BoM's clearest portrait of this.
That is what he gave us. The doctrine of enough.
The Name He Carried
Jarom in Hebrew is Yārôm (יָרוֹם), from the verb rûm (רוּם), to be high, to be lifted up, to be exalted. The name means he shall be exalted or the Lord lifts up. The same root produces Yĕrûšālayim (Jerusalem, city of peace lifted up), Rāmâ (the high place where Samuel was buried, 1 Samuel 25:1), and the place-name Rāmâṯāyim (1 Samuel 1:1). To bear the name Jarom is to bear the name of the lifted-up one.
There is a quiet beauty in this for a man whose chief act is restraint. The Lord lifts up. The disciple does not exalt himself. The disciple receives what the Lord has given, holds it carefully, and passes it on. The lifting up is the Lord's work, not the disciple's. Jarom's name is the name of one whose exaltation does not come from his own production. He is exalted because the Lord lifts him, not because he made himself impressive on the plates. He did the opposite of making himself impressive. He did what his father commanded — kept the genealogy, kept the record, kept the witness — and trusted the Lord with the lifting.
This is the disciple's pattern in its quietest form. The Hebrew rûm gives Mary her magnificat — my soul doth magnify the Lord… for he that is mighty hath done to me great things (Luke 1:46, 49). The magnification is the Lord's work in her. Mary does not exalt herself; she is exalted by the Lord. Jarom is, in a smaller way, the same kind of soul. He does the small faithful act in his generation. The Lord yārôm-s him for it.
The Hermeneutic of the Law
The center of Jarom's brief record is verse 11.
Wherefore, the prophets, and the priests, and the teachers, did labor diligently, exhorting with all long-suffering the people to diligence; teaching the law of Moses, and the intent for which it was given; persuading them to look forward unto the Messiah, and believe in him to come as though he already was. And after this manner did they teach them. (Jarom 1:11)
This is the BoM's most compressed statement of how the law of Moses should be read. The Nephite prophets did not teach the law as an end in itself. They taught the law and the intent for which it was given. The Hebrew word behind intent would be kawwānâ (כַּוָּנָה) — aim, direction, purpose. The law has a kawwānâ. It is not a set of arbitrary commandments. It is given with a direction. The direction is Christ.
The doctrine here is one of the most important in all of scripture. Paul will articulate it in Galatians 3:24 — wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ. Paul will articulate it in Romans 10:4 — Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. The writer of Hebrews will articulate it in Hebrews 10:1 — the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things. The Christological hermeneutic of the law — the reading of the Mosaic ordinances as pointers toward Christ — is one of the foundational principles of New Testament theology.
Jarom articulates it four centuries before Paul. And he articulates it not as theological reflection but as prophetic-pastoral practice. The Nephite prophets were already doing what Paul would later argue for. The Mosaic law in Nephite hands was always Christological. They never read it as an end in itself. They always read it as the shadow of which Christ would be the substance. The doctrine Paul will have to fight for among Jewish-Christian readers in Galatia is the doctrine the Nephite prophets, by the small-plates witness, have always held.
This is one of the strongest internal evidences of the Book of Mormon. The Christological reading of the law of Moses was not, in the first century BC, the dominant Jewish reading. It was a minority view — held by some sectarian groups (the Qumran community's Teacher of Righteousness materials carry something like it), but generally not the rabbinic position. The dominant reading of the law, both at Jerusalem and at the Diaspora synagogues, was that the law itself was the goal, not a pointer to a coming Messiah. The Christian reading of the law as Christological is a New Testament development that required Paul and the writer of Hebrews to argue for it strenuously against Jewish opposition.
But the Nephite branch of Israel, by Jarom 1:11, already had the Christological reading. They taught the law with the intent for which it was given. They taught it as pointing to the Messiah. They taught the kawwānâ. Joseph Smith, in 1829, did not know that the Christological reading of the law was a minority view in second-temple Judaism. He could not have constructed Jarom 1:11 to fit the theological history of the law. But the verse fits — perfectly. The Nephite branch, having left Jerusalem in 600 BC, having been taught by Lehi and Nephi, having had Christ revealed to them by name as early as 2 Nephi 25:19, would naturally have kept the Christological reading their founders had been given. The Jerusalem branch lost it. The Nephite branch kept it. The two branches of Israel diverged at exactly the point of how the law should be read.
This is one of the most theologically significant facts in the entire small plates. Jarom's seventh sentence is a window into how the Nephite priesthood had been reading the law of Moses for four hundred years.
As Though He Already Was
The phrase that follows is even more striking. And believe in him to come as though he already was.
As though he already was. The temporal collapse of faith. The Hebrew rabbinic-style conjunction kĕʾillû (כְּאִלּוּ) — as if, as though — is the formal device by which the not-yet-real is treated as already-real for the purposes of the soul's posture. The Passover Haggadah uses kĕʾillû in its central liturgical claim: in every generation a person is required to view himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt. The exile that ended a thousand years ago is to be lived as if it is happening to me, this year, at this seder. The not-now is collapsed into the now by the kĕʾillû of faith.
Jarom's prophets do the same with Christ. The Messiah has not yet come — He will not come for four more centuries — but the Nephite disciple is to believe in Him as though he already was. The Christ-who-is-not-yet is to be lived as the Christ-who-is-now. Faith collapses the time-distance.
Paul will later teach this in Romans 4:17 — God… calleth those things which be not as though they were. He will teach it in Hebrews 11:1 — faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The patriarchs in Hebrews 11 are praised for having seen the promises afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them (Hebrews 11:13). To embrace a promise afar off is to live as though the promise is already kept. The Hebrew Bible's deepest doctrine of faith — Abraham's faith, of which Genesis 15:6 says it was counted unto him for righteousness — is exactly this as-though faith. Abraham was counted righteous because he believed God's promise as if it were already true, when the promise had not yet been fulfilled.
Jarom's prophets pass this doctrine to a generation that was four hundred years away from the historical Christ. They told the people to live as if Christ were already among them. The Nephite believer in c. 380 BC was to walk through the streets of the land of Nephi as if Christ were beside him, as if the atonement were already accomplished, as if the resurrection were already a known fact. The historical not-yet was collapsed into the spiritual already. Faith made the future present.
This is the deepest pre-Christian Christology in scripture. Enos had said because of thy faith in Christ, whom thou hast never before heard nor seen (Enos 1:8). Nephi had said we keep the law of Moses, and look forward with steadfastness unto Christ (2 Nephi 25:24). Jarom's prophets push the doctrine to its sharpest point: as though he already was. Not merely look forward to him, but believe in him as if he is already here. The pre-incarnational faith is not weaker than the post-incarnational faith. It is faith in the same Christ, doing the same work in the same hearts, four centuries before the historical event.
The Restoration teaches the inverse of this in D&C 138:36 (President Joseph F. Smith's vision) — the faithful elders of this dispensation, when they depart from mortal life, continue their labors in the preaching of the gospel of repentance and redemption… among those who are in darkness and under the bondage of sin in the great world of the spirits of the dead. The same Christ, working backward into pre-mortal time, redeemed the souls who waited. The pre-incarnational faith of Jarom's people in c. 380 BC was redemptive because Christ would in fact come. Faith collapses time in both directions. The not-yet-now is operative-now. The Lord stands at the center of the dispensations, and the soul's faith reaches Him across the centuries in either direction.
This is Jarom's gift. Three sentences in a fifteen-verse book contain one of the BoM's deepest doctrines of faith.
The Prophets Who Stand In The Gap
The next verse is Jarom 1:12.
And it came to pass that by so doing they kept them from being destroyed upon the face of the land; for they did prick their hearts with the word, continually stirring them up unto repentance. (Jarom 1:12)
They kept them from being destroyed. The prophets, by their preaching, kept the Nephite people alive on the land. Read the verse alongside Ezekiel 22:30:
And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.
Ezekiel's complaint is that no prophet stood in the gap, and so the destruction came. Jarom's testimony is the inverse: in the Nephite land in his generation, there were prophets who stood in the gap, and so the destruction did not come. The prophet-as-watchman doctrine — son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel (Ezekiel 33:7) — is the load-bearing doctrine of Jarom 1:12. The prophet's office is not ornamental. The prophet's preaching is what keeps the covenant people on the land. Without the prophet, the people die. With the prophet, the people live.
The phrase pricked their hearts with the word is one of the most physical phrases in scripture. The Hebrew of the underlying concept is dāqar (דָּקַר) or nāqar (נָקַר) — to pierce, to bore through. The prophet's word is not a soft suggestion. It is a sharp instrument that pierces the listener's heart and lets out the corruption. The same exact pierced-heart phrase appears in Acts 2:37 at Pentecost — when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart. Peter's preaching, on the day of Pentecost, did to its hearers what the Nephite prophets had been doing for centuries: pierced their hearts with the word so that conviction-of-sin and repentance would flow.
This is the BoM's doctrine of preaching as surgery. The faithful prophet does not merely deliver information. The faithful prophet wields the word as a piercing instrument that opens the soul to repentance. Continually stirring them up unto repentance — the same Greek concept Paul uses in 2 Timothy 1:6, stir up the gift of God, which is in thee. The prophet stirs. The stirring keeps the heart from settling into the dead-bottom of complacency where destruction takes hold.
Jarom is sharing here not his own preaching but his observation of the prophets around him. He is the editor; he is not the chief preacher of his generation. The other prophets — unnamed in the small plates — are the active mouths. Jarom is the recording-witness. He sees what they are doing. He says it kept the people alive. That is the testimony of the editor: not I preached and saved them, but I watched them preach and the Lord saved them through it. The third-generation steward is honest about which work was his and which work was others'. The editorial restraint here is also humility. He does not claim the credit that belonged to the prophets and priests and teachers.
The Third Link
Jarom is the third link in the small-plates chain of custody. Nephi handed to Jacob (Jacob 1:1–4). Jacob handed to Enos (Jacob 7:27). Enos handed to Jarom (Enos 1:25). Jarom hands to Omni (Jarom 1:15). The chain has just passed through three generations after the founder. The plates that Nephi made for the special purpose of containing the more spiritual record (1 Nephi 9:3–5) have been kept faithfully through three sons-after-fathers.
This is no small thing. The most common pattern in scripture is that the third generation is the failure-generation. The first generation has the vision. The second generation has the inheritance. The third generation has lost the vision. And there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel (Judges 2:10). The third generation of Israel after the conquest forgot the Lord. The third generation of David's house after David built the kingdom — Rehoboam, Solomon's son — split the kingdom. The third generation of Jacob's house in Egypt — Joseph's grandchildren's generation — was the generation that knew not Joseph and fell into slavery (Exodus 1:8). The third generation almost always loses what the first generation built.
Jarom is the third generation. He does not lose what was built. He inherits the plates from his father; he keeps the plates with the same care his fathers kept them; he hands the plates to his son with the same charge his fathers had given him. The third generation in the Nephite priestly line holds. This is itself a witness. The Nephite stewardship, by Jarom 1, has proven that it can survive the third-generation failure-test that has broken so many other priestly lines in scripture. The small plates have a structural strength that goes beyond any one prophet's gift. The pattern of son-after-father-keeps-the-record survives even when the son is not a preacher. Jarom is not a preacher. Jarom is a keeper. The keeping is itself the gift.
What it took to keep the plates through Jarom's generation should not be underestimated. The Lamanites were active enemies — Jarom 1:6 says they came down often to battle. The Nephites had become exceedingly wealthy and were producing iron, copper, brass, and steel (Jarom 1:8), and the temptations of prosperity were already at the door. The civil law was strict (Jarom 1:5) but the heart was still hard (Jarom 1:3). A lesser man, in that environment, might have lost the plates — to war, to forgetfulness, to the simple drift of priorities away from sacred record-keeping. Jarom did not lose them. He kept them. He passed them on.
The Material Culture Detail
There is one quiet detail in Jarom 1:8 that deserves its own paragraph.
And we multiplied exceedingly, and spread upon the face of the land, and became exceedingly rich in gold, and in silver, and in precious things, and in fine workmanship of wood, in buildings, and in machinery, and also in iron and copper, and brass and steel, making all manner of tools of every kind to till the ground, and weapons of war — yea, the sharp pointed arrow, and the quiver, and the dart, and the javelin, and all preparations for war. (Jarom 1:8)
Iron and copper, and brass and steel. The chapter is one of the most archaeologically pointed in the BoM. The mention of steel in a pre-Christian American context has been one of the most-attacked features of the Book of Mormon by critics for two hundred years. Yet in the last fifty years, the term steel in ancient contexts has been substantially rehabilitated — the Hebrew bĕrōšeṯ and the Greek adamas both describe metallic compounds the Bible calls steel (2 Samuel 22:35; Job 20:24; Psalm 18:34), and ancient metallurgy across the Mediterranean and the Near East produced what would now be called hardened iron or carbon-steel with techniques that go back at least to the second millennium BC. The Nephites, who had brought metallurgical knowledge from pre-exilic Jerusalem (Nephi himself made plates of ore and even fine steel swords by 1 Nephi 16:18 and 2 Nephi 5:14–15), would have continued the tradition. Jarom 1:8 is consistent with a culture that had pre-exilic Mediterranean metallurgy and had developed it for over two centuries in a new-world environment.
The detail is small and easily missed. But it is the kind of detail Joseph Smith would not have included by accident in 1829. The standard nineteenth-century critic's assumption was that steel was a much later invention than the BoM dates. The detail is the kind of detail an ancient editor — recording the actual technological status of his civilization — would naturally include. It is the kind of detail a forger would have removed if he had been thinking about plausibility. Jarom did not remove it. He recorded what his civilization actually had. The verse is the historical truth of the Nephite civilization in c. 380 BC.
The same paragraph also names the weapons of war — the sharp-pointed arrow, the quiver, the dart, the javelin. This is the same culture that would, two centuries later, produce Captain Moroni's body armor and Helaman's stripling warriors. The weapons-tradition Jarom records is the foundation of the Nephite military culture that will dominate the middle books of the Book of Mormon. Jarom is the editor who recorded its technological-historical starting point.
What He Was
He was the third-generation small-plates record-keeper at the land of Nephi. He was the son of Enos and the grandson of Jacob, the great-grandson of Lehi, born into a priestly line that had already produced two of the BoM's most beautiful prayer-records and one of the deepest enemy-intercession covenants in scripture. He was the disciple who, on receiving the plates from his father, looked at the small remaining space, looked at the magnitude of what his fathers had already written, and said what could I write more than my fathers have written?… this sufficeth me.
He was the editor whose silence is his testimony. He wrote fifteen verses. He could have written hundreds. He refused. Editorial restraint is itself a form of witness. His name in Hebrew said the Lord lifts up, and he lived into the name by refusing to lift himself up.
He was the editor who recorded that the Nephite prophets of his generation taught the law of Moses with its intent — with the Christological kawwānâ the New Testament will not articulate for four centuries. He was the editor who recorded the doctrine of as though he already was — the deepest pre-Christian Christology in scripture. He was the editor who recorded that the Nephite prophets pricked their hearts with the word and so kept them from being destroyed — the BoM's clearest pre-Acts statement of the prophet-as-watchman, prophet-stands-in-the-gap doctrine.
He was the third link in an unbroken chain of small-plates custody. He did what the third generation almost never does in scripture: he held what his fathers had built. He passed it to his son intact.
He was a quiet man in a noisy generation. He let the prophets preach; he let the priests teach; he let the kings rule. He did the small faithful act in the corner of the temple-courtyard that no one was watching, and he did it with the care of a man who knew the Lord saw him. He kept the plates. He kept the genealogy. He kept the witness.
He is the patron of every disciple whose ministry is small and faithful — the home-teacher who quietly visits one family for forty years, the Primary teacher who quietly loves three children for one year, the genealogist who quietly enters one name a week into the temple file. He is the witness for the doctrine that the small faithful act, repeated across generations, is what the Lord builds His kingdom on.
The chain held because Jarom held. The Lord lifted him up for it. The Lord lifts every Jarom up for it.
A father gave him a small set of plates and a charge to keep the genealogy; he kept the plates, kept the genealogy, kept the witness; he wrote only what needed to be written, and what he wrote contained the deepest pre-Christian Christology in scripture; he passed the plates to his son, intact. He is the witness for what editorial restraint, third-generation faithfulness, and the quiet steady work of keeping look like in the small plates of the kingdom.