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Perhaps one of the strangest descriptive words in the entire Book of Mormon is “slippery,” which is used in a few places to describe a most perplexing condition in which otherwise secure possessions become mysteriously elusive. According to ancient Nephite prophets, the Lord sometimes used curses and enchantments against the wicked. While the rational reader may struggle with this idea, those entrenched in the money digging sub-culture in backwoods New York would have had no problem relating. Compare selected verses from the Book of Mormon with accounts from contemporaries of Joseph Smith: 1. “And behold, the time cometh that he curseth your riches, that they become slippery, that ye cannot hold them… Yea, in that day ye shall say: O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them… for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them.” (Helaman 13:31,33,36)
2. “AND now there began to be a great curse upon all the land because of the iniquity of the people, in which, if a man should lay his tool or his sword upon his shelf, or upon the place whither he would keep it, behold, upon the morrow, he could not find it, so great was the curse upon the land.” (Ether 14:1)
3. “And these Gadianton robbers, who were among the Lamanites, did infest the land, insomuch that the inhabitants thereof began to hide up their treasures in the earth; and they became slippery, because the Lord had cursed the land, that they could not hold them, nor retain them again." (Mormon 1:18)
1 An interview with Martin Harris, published in Tiffany's Monthly, 1859, p.165. 2 Excerpt from the record of Joseph’s 1826 Bainbridge, New York trial published in Fraser's Magazine, February, 1873, vol. VII, p. 229-230, quoted in Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Changing World of Mormonism, p. 70. 3 Sermon by Brigham Young, recorded in Journal of Discourses, vol. 19, pp.36-39. |
"There
was a company… who were digging for money supposed to have been
hidden by the ancients. Of this company were old Mr. Stowel--I think
his name was Josiah--also old Mr. Beman, also Samuel Lawrence, George
Proper, Joseph Smith, jr., and his father, and his brother Hiram [Hyrum]
Smith… and they took Joseph to look in the stone for them, and he
did so for a while, and then he told them the enchantment
was so strong that
he could not see…
Mr. Stowel was at this time at old Mr. Smith’s, digging
for money. It was reported by these money-diggers, that they had found
boxes, but before they could secure them, they would sink into the
earth. A candid old
Presbyterian told me, that on the Susquehannah flats he
dug down to an iron chest, that he scraped the dirt off with his shovel, but
had nothing with him to open the chest; that he went away to get help, and
when they came to it, it moved away two or three rods into the
earth, and they could not
get it. There were a great many strange sights…”1
“Jonathan
Thompson says that prisoner (Joseph Smith, Jr,) was requested to
look for chest of money… Smith looked in hat while there, and when very
dark, and told how the chest was situated. After digging several feet, struck
upon something sounding like a board or plank. Prisoner would not look
again… the last time he looked he discovered distinctly the two Indians
who buried the trunk, that a quarrel ensued between them, and that one
of said Indians was killed by the other, and thrown into the hole beside
the trunk, to guard it, as he supposed. Thompson says that he believes
in the prisoner's professed skill; that the board which he struck his spade
upon was probably the chest, but on
account of an enchantment the trunk
kept settling away kept
about the same distance from them.”2
“These
treasures that are in the earth are carefully watched, they can be
removed from place to place
according to the good pleasure of Him who made
them and owns them.... There were a great many treasures hid up by the
Nephites… there is a seal upon the treasures of earth; men are allowed
to go so far and no farther. I
have known places where there were treasures
in abundance; but could men get them? No…”3