A Voice Crying from the Dust: The Book of Mormon as Sound

Abstract

The Book of Mormon opens with a provocative conundrum: how can the sensory world of revelation most effectively be rendered in language? After introducing himself and his process of making scripture, the prophet-narrator Nephi recounts his father Lehi's throne theophany and calling to be a prophet. This calling entailed two dramatic audio-visual encounters with the divine. Focusing on the acoustic registers of the Book of Mormon, McMurray opines that it highlights the book's own theory-of-self as sound, an explanation of how certain events within the book unfold and critically, the sonic ecology of the book's own production, a process of particular interest since the recent publication of images of Joseph Smith's seer stone.