The Lord’s Prayer(s) in Jacob 7

Kimberly M. Berkey

The plot of Jacob 7 is fairly well-known among Latter-day Saints, at least in its broad contours: a meddlesome anti-

Christ confronts the Nephite prophet and is fatally struck down by a sign from heaven, delivering with his dying

breath a confession so stirring that it overwhelms the attendant crowds, who devote themselves once more to

peace and righteous living. The vividness of this narrative, combined with its straightforwardly moralistic

assessment of its primary characters, render Jacob 7 a particularly attractive resource for didactic purposes—a

use evident in devotional treatments of this chapter but also witnessed in the way the Book of Mormon redeploys

of this double supplication it also seems that Jacob learns something vital about prayer, since his two prayers are

marked by a certain tension in how each treats the role of the will. Crucially, the chapter illustrates this tension by

the way it incorporates,recontextualizes, and reorders two of Jesus’s prayers from the New Testament. What

follows in this paper, then, is an extended comparison of Jacob 7:14 with Jacob 7:22 in order to illustrate the way

in which Sherem’s collapse calls Jacob to repentance and fundamentally alters his approach to prayer.

Jacob’s two prayers are found at the core of the chapter, framing Sherem’s confession and death, and each is tied

to the unfolding drama as a kind of causal force. In the rst instance, the heaven-sent sign that ultimately sends

Sherem to his death occurs pointedly not after Sherem’s snide demand (“Show me a sign by this power of the Holy

Ghost, in the which ye know so much” [Jacob 7:13]), but after Jacob’s petitioning response in the following verse:

What am I that I should tempt God to show unto thee a sign in the thing which thou knowest to be true?

nal words that they, too, “fell to the earth” (Jacob 7:21).

Although Jacob had been oddly absent from the confession narrative to this point, the resulting collective

experience of the people is not something he can let pass without comment, and so Jacob reemerges as a named

and active character precisely in order to take credit for the people’s response:

“Now, this thing was pleasing unto me, Jacob, for I had requested it of my Father who was in heaven; for he had

heard my cry and answered my prayer” (Jacob 7:22).

The fact that Jacob narrates this prayer only retroactively is signicant because it demonstrates the careful

construction of the confession scene. Mentions of prayer both begin and end this pericope, a frame which would

have been interrupted had Jacob narrated his second prayer in its proper chronological order. Viewed in this light,

B’ – The people fall to the earth (Jacob 7:21) A’ – Jacob’s second prayer (Jacob 7:22)

This parallel structural position is not the only commonality between the two prayers, however. These verses are

also linked verbally in the way they echo phrases from Jesus’ most famous prayers recorded in the New

Testament.

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Jacob’s rst prayer reiterates Jesus’s words in Gethsemane immediately prior to his betrayal and

arrest when he pled with God to “remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke

22:42). In a parallel too overt to miss, Jacob likewise sacrices his preference with the words “nevertheless, not my

will be done” and then repeats this sentiment a few lines later, this time also incorporating a positive afrmation of

God’s will: “thy will, O Lord, be done, and not mine” (Jacob 7:14). Perhaps more subtly, Jacob’s second prayer

echoes another famous moment of Jesus in conversation with the Father, this time drawn from the model prayer

since at least one of the gospels seems to stage the comparison already. Matthew grants these prayers structural

signicance by using them to bookend Jesus’s ministry and also stresses their semantic resemblance. Jesus

declares “thy will be done” only twice in Matthew’s gospel—once in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:10) and once in the

Gethsemane Prayer (“Matthew 26:42)—and this point of commonality is amply noted in academic commentary on

these verses.

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By placing these two prayers in parallel, Jacob 7 is picking up on a close relationship already

signaled within the New Testament. And yet there seem to me two primary oddities about Jacob 7’s incorporation

of Jesus’s prayers.

First is the way the chapter seems to deliberately mute their most obvious parallel. The structure of the confession

scene encourages us to compare verse 14 and verse 22 side by side, yet when verse 22 quotes the Lord’s Prayer,

prayer uttered in Gethsemane. If, as many readers have assumed, the New Testament thus implicitly privileges the

Gethsemane Prayer, what signicance might we nd in the fact that Jacob 7 seems to trace the opposite arc,

beginning instead with the Gethsemane Prayer in verse 14 and moving toward the Lord’s Prayer in verse 22 as the

climactic instance of supplication? If we want to posit an implicit theology of prayer in Jacob 7, these seem to be

the primary questions to keep in mind.

There are thus three main parallels between the prayers in Jacob 7:14 and Jacob 7:22: both frame the central

drama of Sherem’s confession, both echo Jesus’s most famous prayers from the New Testament, and, as already

noted above, both incite an identical result (the respective collapses of Sherem and the people). But if the several

commonalities between these two verses justify examining them side by side, close comparison also reveals a

series of tensions that are just as signicant as their earlier points of convergence.

22, and this shift—from a sovereign “God” to a listening “Father,” from worries about tempting God to

straightforwardly entreating him—accompanies a second shift in how Jacob treats the topic of the will.

In verse 14, Jacob is particularly anxious about the place and role of his will. He moves from denying it (“not my will

be done”) to afrming God’s will (“thy will, O Lord, be done”) before returning once again to negate his own desires

a second time (“not mine”). It is as if Jacob is caught in an iterative wrestle with his own will, anxiously trying to

delineate boundaries between the various desires that want to have sway in this situation. Jacob wants to ensure

that there is space here for God’s will to direct the possible outcomes that follow from Sherem’s demand for a sign,

but it seems that he has difculty suppressing his own potentially opposing will. He no sooner afrms God’s will

than his own desires emerge a second time and must be wrestled back again. By verse 22, however, Jacob no

longer appears conicted. Although the Lord’s Prayer, to which this verse alludes, does contain discussion of the

Jacob’s prayer in verse 14 with the relative sincerity on display in verse 22. Jacob begins his response in verse 14

by describing unilaterally what he takes to be the stakes of Sherem’s demand for a sign. He refuses to “tempt God

to show unto thee a sign” because he is convinced that Sherem’s request is insincere—a heavenly portent would

only signify “the thing which thou knowest to be true” and, in any case, “thou wilt deny it, because thou art of the

devil” (Jacob 7:14). It is only here, after having laid out what he takes to be the unambiguous reality of the

situation, that Jacob begins to echo Jesus’s words: “Nevertheless, not my will be done.” Read in context, this echo is

less a sincereattempt to nd out God’s will and rather functions as Jacob’s exit from the conversation. He is, in

effect, throwing up his hands in frustration and absolving himself of any responsibility for the outcome.

Although Jacob echoes Jesus’s words, he seems to lack the intent associated with the Gethsemane prayer, instead

replacing the sincerity of Jesus’s original pronouncement with the detachment of Pilate’s infamous hand-washing

We might then summarize the shifts between Jacob 7:14 and Jacob 7:22 as follows. Where Jacob is in the rst

prayer abject before God and anxious about his own will, he appears in the second prayer to be in a much more

intimate relationship with God as “Father” and not at all conicted regarding his own desires. Additionally, where

the rst prayer demonstrates Jacob’s frustrated wish to be uninvolved— he negates his will in order to absolve

himself of responsibility—the second prayer shows him actively concerned, attending to his will as what allows him

specic engagement with the situation at hand. In the space of less than ten verses, it seems that something

fundamental has changed Jacob’s orientation to God and to his own will. What, then, has changed Jacob, and how?

The most dramatic moment in the intervening verses between these prayers, and thus the most likely place to look

for answers, is of course the sign given to Sherem and his immediate collapse. We can speculate about what that

moment revealed to Jacob and then trace the shifts between his two prayers back to what he learned from this

Jacob is shown in dramatic fashion how he had misunderstood the stakes of his confrontation with Sherem.

I want to suggest that Jacob also came to a realization about his will in the course of this profoundly humbling

moment. At a rst, too-hasty glance, it would seem that Sherem’s collapse drives home to Jacob the problematic

status of his will, since the event demonstrates how Jacob’s desires had run counter to God’s wish to smite Sherem

with a sign. But it is just as clear from verse 14 that Jacob had already recognized this problematic tension—after

all, this is precisely the disparity he was trying to resolve by saying “not my will be done.” Jacob already knew that

his will and God’s will were likely at odds or he would never have attempted to negate his will in the rst place.

Thus, what Jacob learns at this moment is not something about the problematic status of his will (a fact already

tacitly knew) but realizes rather that he had sought to resolve that tension in the wrong way.

Jacob’s solution to the disparity between his will and God’s will was to assume a self-imposed passivity, to negate

he had imposed between earth and heaven by reguring the relationship of creature and creator as a contest of

wills.

When Jacob’s prayer focused on the problem of negating his own will, it was ultimately motivated by a self-

centered anxiety that ironically reinforced the very difculty he hoped to resolve. By taking prayer to be a

question of negating his will, prayer became an internal, affective project rather than an external, spatially oriented

task. What Jacob comes to learn and enact by verse 22 is that his desires are not the point of prayer, whether he

takes a positive or negative stance toward those desires. Jacob’s task is not to save himself by praying perfectly,

but rather to assume a certain mediating role on earth in order to help enact God’s will “in earth as it is in heaven”

(Matthew 6:10), and that mediation is only possible when he views himself more as God’s colleague than God’s

vassal. After all, mankind was formed from “the dust of the ground” and given stewardship over the world (Genesis

specic “request” (Jacob 7:22). God is no longer a distant and terrifying sovereign, but instead a “Father” and a

partner. And although the full text of the Lord’s Prayer is only echoed in verse 22 rather than quoted, we might

reect at least briey on how that prayer treats the will. In the Lord’s Prayer, the disciple afrms only “thy will be

done” without explicitly negating his own will and this afrmative, tranquil attitude toward desire seems to match

Jacob’s general disposition in verse 22.

God’s will has been removed from any relation of dialectical antagonism with Jacob’s, as was the case in verse 14.

By verse 22 “thy will be done” is now something Jacob can seek in its own right. Jacob is content to let his will be

checked in his pursuit of the larger project: prayer as a means to close the distance between heaven and earth.

Jacob thus gures a type of prayer that acts as a conduit to convey God’s will down to earth, rather than conveying

his will (positive or negative) up to heaven.

6:9). The New Testament gives us the Lord’s Prayer as the explicit model we should follow, perhaps because the

Lord’s Prayer more clearly models the stance a disciple must take toward his or her own will.