Click here for the reading schedule for 2024 to see today’s reading, with links to the text. To see my past posts on today’s reading or anything else, see the right-hand margin or click here.
Recently, I had an interaction in which a Mormon declared that Ishmael in the BOM was a descendant of Ephraim, which meant that when his daughters married Nephi and the other good sons whose descendants came to be called “Nephites”, that those descendants were of mixed heritage, being descended from Manasseh on their father’s side, but Ephraim on their mother’s side. He even asserted that with Ishmael having more children than Lehi, one might even say that the majority of the Nephites (or at least, of the BOM people) were descended from Ephraim!
It’s interesting to note that “Ephraim” appears in the BOM only 12 times, and none of those times say anything about it in association with the BOM people’s genealogy. It appears 11x when the BOM quotes from Isaiah (with no part of the narrative being said to be in reference to the BOM peoples being from the tribe of Ephraim), which is not helpful to the claim that any of the BOM peoples were descended from Ephraim. The last reference is actually harmful to the BOM, since it’s in the book of Ether, which tells the story of the Jaredites who left the Middle East at the time of the Tower of Babel, and made their way over to the Americas. The Jaredites’ speech and writing system were both different from that of the BOM peoples (who are said to speak and write Hebrew, and also to write in Reformed Egyptian), so what is this Israelite name of Ephraim doing in the context of a non-Israelite people hundreds of years before the first Israelite set foot on the American continents, according to the BOM?
So, since the BOM says nothing about Ishmael or anyone else in the BOM being a descendant of Ephraim, where do Mormons get that idea? It’s even in the BOM genealogy I’ve shared before and still reference (though I never noticed it claim that Ishmael was from Ephraim, until this conversation). Apparently, JS said it at some point, and that has made Mormons accept it unquestioningly. I haven’t seen the quote itself in which this is asserted (and very likely it’s more like, “Brigham Young said in 1864 that he remembered that JS had said….”), but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it came from JS or someone else wanting to make the parable in Ezekiel 37 about the “two sticks” to be about the BOM and the Bible.
[For a quick refresher on that, God told Ezekiel to take two sticks, and to write the names of Judah and Ephraim on them — these being the two largest tribes of their respective countries after the ten tribes rebelled against David’s house after Solomon’s death — and to join the two sticks together in his hand to make them appear to be one stick. Unfortunately for Mormons, God Himself gives the actual meaning of the parable in the very chapter, starting with v21, saying that it’s referring to the Israelites — both from Judah and Ephraim (i.e., from all the tribes) — being gathered back to the land after the Babylonian Captivity is over.]
Mormons have long claimed that these “sticks” are actually some sort of writing medium (since Ezekiel wrote or carved names on them) and this really refers to the Bible (having been written mostly by Jews) and the BOM (which then would necessitate the BOM to have been written mostly or entirely by a descendant of Ephraim). Okay, let’s run with that then (though I have to point out that Mormons are basically telling God that He doesn’t know what He’s talking about, since they contradict His own explanation of His own parable!). Let’s say that the BOM was written by a descendant of Ephraim. How? If it was Joseph Smith, that would require him to be of Jewish descent, but there is zero evidence of that. And if it’s talking about the original claimed authors of the BOM (Nephi, Moroni, etc.), all of them are specifically said to be descended from Nephi or Jacob, aside from the original claimed author of Ether (but even then, the interpretation was said to be by King Mosiah, a descendant of Nephi). The “Small Plates of Nephi” comprising 1 Nephi through Omni, was written mostly by Nephi (1 & 2 Nephi), who then gave the plates to his brother Jacob (who wrote Jacob), who then passed them on to his son, and they remained in his descendants’ possession (Enos through Omni) until they handed them over to good King Benjamin (a descendant of Nephi, since Nephi was set up as king, and Nephi’s posterity remained kings over the BOM peoples). Then we have Mosiah (Benjamin’s son) and Alma (specifically said to be a descendant of Nephi); after that, the descendants of Alma maintain possession of the records and continue to write them, until Mormon (also specifically said to be a descendant of Nephi).
Thus, even within the BOM itself, there are no Ephraimites available, to allow the BOM to be considered “the stick of Ephraim”! I think it is this (whether directly from JS or indirectly), along with the necessity of finding some way for the BOM to have been written by descendants of Ephraim, that led to the claim that Ishmael was a descendant of Ephraim, and thus his grandchildren through his daughters would also be considered Ephraimites or at least half-Ephraimites.
The problem with this, though, is that it contradicts the Bible — and remember, the BOM repeatedly asserts that the people followed the Law of Moses! The book of Numbers tells about Zelophehad, an Israelite who had no sons but had 5 daughters. The daughters claimed that they should be able to inherit his portion, and God agreed with this, and it was written into the Law of Moses (Num 27:8-11). But the problem then arose (in Num. 36), if they married outside their father’s tribe, the land would pass into the possession of their husband and would then be considered part of the husband’s tribal land, which would decrease the size of the land owned by the actual tribe. Note that this is one of many places in the Bible that indicates that when a woman marries, she joins the tribe of her husband, and is considered to have left the tribe of her family of origin. Even if the land wasn’t considered to have passed from the woman’s father’s tribe to her husband’s tribe directly, when her sons inherited the land, it would go into the husband’s tribe because her children would be descendants of her husband’s tribe only. This means that even if Ishmael was of the tribe of Ephraim and had had a dozen daughters so that all of the sons of Lehi and Zoram married daughters of Ishmael, their children would not be considered Ephraimites, but would only be of the tribe of their father — which for all the sons of Lehi would be Manasseh.
The BOM never hints that children would be considered half of one tribe and half of another, and the Bible strictly forbids such an idea as well. Thus, there is no reason to believe that the BOM people were at all descended from Ephraim so that the BOM could be considered “the stick of Ephraim”.
TOYBOM: The One Year Book of Mormon 