The Pleading Bar of God - a podcast by PDF feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Abstract: Royal Skousen’s essay shed light on enigmatic references in Jacob 6:13 and Moroni 10:34 to “the pleasing bar of God.” After establishing that the term “pleading bar” is an appropriate legal term, he cites both internal evidence and the likelihood of scribal errors as explanations for why “pleasing bar,” instead of the more likely “pleading bar,” appears in current editions of the Book of Mormon.



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[Editor’s Note: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article is reprinted here as a service to the LDS community. Original pagination and page numbers have necessarily changed, otherwise the reprint has the same content as the original.

See Royal Skousen, “The Pleading Bar of God,” in “To Seek the Law of the Lord”: Essays in Honor of John W. Welch, ed. Paul Y. Hoskisson and Daniel C. Peterson (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation, 2017), 413–28. Further information at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/to-seek-the-law-of-the-lord-essays-in-honor-of-john-w-welch-2/.]

 

Near the end of his life, the prophet Nephi referred to the day of judgment and declared that we, the readers of the Book of Mormon, will stand face to face with him before the bar of Christ: “and you and I shall stand face to face before his bar and ye shall know that I have been commanded of him to write these things / notwithstanding my weakness” (2 Nephi 33:11). Similarly, the standard LDS and RLDS editions state that the prophets Jacob and Moroni will also meet us when we stand before “the pleasing bar” of God to be judged:

[Page 22]Jacob 6:13

finally I bid you farewell

until I shall meet you before the pleasing bar of God

which bar striketh the wicked with awful dread and fear



Moroni 10:34

and now I bid unto all farewell

I soon go to rest in the paradise of God

until my spirit and body shall again reunite

and I am brought forth triumphant through the air

to meet you before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah

the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead



The problem in these two passages is that the word pleasing does not really work as a descriptive adjective for “the bar of God.” For the righteous, the day of judgment at the bar of God may well be pleasing, but not for the wicked, as Jacob himself says in Jacob 6:13: “which bar striketh the wicked with awful dread and fear.”

Christian Gellinek (who studied law at the University of Göttingen in Germany) has suggested that the difficult reading “the pleasing bar of God” can be readily resolved if we replace the word pleasing with pleading – that is, Jacob and Moroni will meet us before “the pleading bar of God” (personal communication, 25 September 2003). Phonetically, the words pleading and pleasing are nearly identical. Oliver Cowdery (or perhaps Joseph Smith, when he dictated these two passages to Oliver) was completely unfamiliar with the legal expression pleading bar and twice substituted the more familiar word pleasing for pleading, despite the difficulty of referring to the bar of God as pleasing.

Part of the argument for “the pleading bar of God” relies on the evidence from the manuscripts that at least Oliver Cowdery and maybe even Joseph Smith (as he dictated the text) tended to replace unfamiliar vocabulary with words they were familiar with, even if the resulting phraseology did not always make much sense. In every case, there is considerable phonetic similarity between the words that were mixed up:

weed (O, P) instead of reed (1830 and all subsequent editions)

1 Nephi 17:48

and whoso shall lay their hands upon me shall wither

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