LDS Discussions — A Faithful Response

What If “Skin” Doesn’t Mean Skin? A Scholarly Defense

Responding to LDS Discussions’ critique of the metaphorical and non-literal interpretations of 2 Nephi 5:21–23

The Claim Under Review

LDS Discussions devotes two blog posts—Come Follow Me: What Is the Curse of Dark Skin in 2 Nephi? and Come Follow Me: What If ‘Skin’ Doesn’t Mean Human Skin?—to arguing that the apologetic interpretation of “skin of blackness” as metaphorical, spiritual, or non-dermal is “silly,” “insulting to our intelligence,” and motivated purely by the need to escape an embarrassing problem. The site treats the literal, racial reading as the only intellectually honest position, dismisses alternative interpretations as special pleading, and concludes that the non-literal reading proves Joseph Smith fabricated the Book of Mormon using nineteenth-century racial ideology.

This response engages each of those claims on their scholarly merits. We argue that the non-literal reading is not an apologetic afterthought invented to avoid embarrassment, but the hermeneutically defensible position grounded in ancient Near Eastern (ANE) linguistics, comparative religion, internal textual evidence, and the structure of the Book of Mormon narrative itself. LDS Discussions’ rebuttal, examined carefully, relies on a series of anachronistic assumptions, selective textual citations, and a repeated logical error: treating nineteenth-century prophetic commentary as interpretively equivalent to the original text.

The question is not whether LDS prophets interpreted the passages literally. Many did. The question is whether the ancient text of the Book of Mormon, read on its own terms, requires that interpretation—and the answer is no.

Claim 1: The Text Obviously Means Literal Skin

LDS Discussions argues that 2 Nephi 5:21–23 read “at face value” describes a miraculous darkening of human skin pigment as divine punishment, and that any departure from this reading is dishonest motivated reasoning. This framing has a fundamental problem: it assumes that the “face value” of an English rendering of a claimed Hebrew-language ancient text corresponds directly to nineteenth-century American racial categories.

That assumption is not self-evidently true. It must be demonstrated, not assumed.

Consider the ANE background. Color terminology in ancient Semitic literature routinely functioned as moral and spiritual metaphor. The Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon (c. 672 BC) invokes a curse stating, “May they make your skin as black as pitch and crude oil”—describing divine judgment and spiritual ruin, not a literal dermatological change. The Hebrew prophets employ the same idiom: Lamentations 4:7–8 describes Nazirites whose “faces are blacker than soot” as a poetic description of devastation and shame during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. Joel 2:6 and Nahum 2:10 describe faces that “gather blackness” in the face of invading armies—a metaphor for horror and anguish, not a claim that soldiers’ skin literally changed color.

Job 30:26–30 reads: “My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.” No interpreter has ever suggested Job’s skin literally turned black; the language describes severe affliction. Across the ancient world—in Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Islamic texts—the black/white color binary served as a ubiquitous metaphor for spiritual states: condemnation and blessing, rejection and favor, wickedness and purity.

The Quran uses “faces blackening” as an idiom for shame and divine disfavor (Surah 3:106; 39:60), while “faces whitening” denotes joy and salvation—a direct parallel to the Book of Mormon’s structural opposition. Egyptian texts similarly contrast being “white of countenance” (blessed, favored) with “black of countenance” (cursed, condemned). Early Church Father Jerome wrote of sin: “our sins had blackened us,” and of baptism: “transformed from blackness into whiteness”—a usage that requires no racial interpretation whatsoever.

Scholar Brant Gardner (writing as a Mesoamerican specialist, not primarily as an apologist) observes that the conceptual vocabulary Nephi employs fits precisely within this ancient Near Eastern metaphorical tradition. When the Book of Mormon speaks of “skin of blackness,” the most historically informed reading of that phrase—one attentive to its likely Semitic origin—is a metaphor for covenant rupture and spiritual separation, not a genetic or phenotypical description.

Claim 2: The Alma 55 Argument Doesn’t Work

LDS Discussions attempts to dismiss the Alma 55 argument—the account in which Captain Moroni must search for “a man who was a descendant of Laman” to deceive Lamanite guards—by claiming it is “just one of many things in the Book of Mormon that don’t make sense.” This concession is actually quite significant: LDS Discussions abandons the very text it claimed to be reading at face value in order to avoid what the text plainly shows.

But the Alma 55 account is not an isolated puzzle. It is internally coherent given the non-literal reading:

Textual Evidence

  • Alma 55:4 — Moroni searches for a man of “Lamanite heritage” because language and cultural markers—not skin color—were needed for the deception to succeed
  • Alma 55:8–16 — Laman and his Nephite companions approach the guards together; if stark visible racial difference existed, the Nephite soldiers would have been immediately conspicuous
  • Alma 3:10–13 — Nephites who joined the Lamanites “received the mark” upon themselves—showing the mark was something that could be volitionally adopted, not a fixed genetic trait

FAIR LDS summarizes the implication precisely: if skin color were the literal distinguishing feature, Moroni would not need to search for a person of Lamanite heritage—he would simply need dark-colored animal skins or body paint. The fact that genealogical identity (and presumably linguistic and cultural fluency) was necessary implies the distinction was cultural, not dermal.

LDS Discussions’ counter—that if the curse were just clothing “I would just get a new shirt”—is a rhetorical quip, not an engagement with the argument. No serious scholar is claiming the curse was merely dark clothing that could be exchanged at will. The argument is that the mark functioned as a covenant boundary marker—visible, social, and meaningful in the ancient group-identity sense—rather than as a biological racial classification. The Amlicites’ self-marking in Alma 3 demonstrates exactly this: they voluntarily adopted the mark of the Lamanites as an act of covenant defection, not as a skin-color change.

Claim 3: Prophetic Commentary Is Decisive Evidence

LDS Discussions devotes substantial space to quoting LDS leaders from Joseph Smith through Spencer W. Kimball who interpreted the “skin of blackness” passages literally and applied them to living Native Americans and Black people. These quotations are real and their historical impact was genuinely harmful. We do not minimize that.

However, there are two critical logical errors in using prophetic commentary to settle what the original text means.

First, prophetic interpretation of a text is not equivalent to the text itself. LDS theology has always distinguished between scriptural canon and its subsequent interpretation by leaders. The fact that Orson Pratt in 1840 interpreted 2 Nephi 5 through the lens of his antebellum racial environment no more determines what Nephi intended than medieval commentators’ interpretations of Mosaic texts determine what the Hebrew authors intended. Textual meaning precedes and constrains its interpretive reception history; it is not determined by it.

Second, LDS Discussions presents this as a binary dilemma: either the prophets were right (literal skin change) or the Book of Mormon is a nineteenth-century fraud. But this ignores a third possibility that the evidence actually supports—that the text is an ancient document using ancient Near Eastern metaphorical idiom, which was then misread through the lens of antebellum American racial ideology by men who were products of their time. This is not a special apologetic maneuver; it is the standard mode of responsible historical interpretation applied to every ancient text.

In fact, LDS Discussions itself implicitly concedes this point. The site argues repeatedly that the Book of Mormon “reflects the ideas of Joseph Smith’s environment.” But if that is true, it also means that the later prophets’ literal interpretations reflect their environments—which were even more saturated with racial pseudoscience and the Curse of Ham theology that dominated American evangelical and popular thought throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those prophets were not accessing the ancient text directly; they were reading it through a thick layer of inherited American racial theology. That is precisely what scholars Armand Mauss and John Welch have argued: the modern racial reading is itself the imposition of an anachronistic interpretive framework onto a text that did not originally carry that meaning.

Claim 4: The Amlicite Parallel Is Decisive Against the Literal Reading

LDS Discussions quotes Alma 3:6 as confirmation that dark skin is identified directly as the curse. But a careful reading of the surrounding verses in Alma 3 complicates this dramatically in ways LDS Discussions does not address.

Alma 3:10–13

“And it came to pass that whosoever did mingle his seed with that of the Lamanites did bring the same curse upon his seed. Therefore, whosoever suffered himself to be led away by the Lamanites was called under that head, and there was a mark set upon him… Now the Amlicites knew not that they were fulfilling the words of God when they began to mark themselves… and thus the word of God is fulfilled, for these are the words which he said to Nephi: Behold, the Lamanites have I cursed, and I will set a mark on them.”

The Amlicites were Nephites by lineage who defected to join the Lamanites. They then “marked themselves” with a red mark on their foreheads (Alma 3:13)—a voluntary act that the text tells us “fulfilled the word of God.” This is remarkable: if the curse were literal biological skin darkening, it would not be “fulfilled” by Nephites voluntarily applying a red facial mark. The text explicitly places the Amlicite self-marking and the Lamanite “skin of blackness” in direct parallel as equivalent expressions of the same covenant boundary—the mark of being outside the covenant community.

This parallel structure is the strongest single piece of internal textual evidence against the literal reading: it shows that “the mark” in the Book of Mormon is a covenant marker that can be self-applied, that extends to those who voluntarily join the out-group, and that serves as a social and religious boundary identifier. These are not the properties of genetic skin pigmentation.

Brant Gardner concludes from this passage: “Since the mark/curse can be removed by simply traversing that boundary, I conclude that it is unlikely that the mark or curse had anything to do with pigmentation.” This is a philological and narrative observation, not a faith-motivated apologetic. LDS Discussions has no answer for the Amlicite passage.

Claim 5: Jacob 3 Cuts Against, Not For, Literalism

LDS Discussions quotes Jacob 3:5—“the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate because of their filthiness and the cursing which hath come upon their skins”—as “crystal clear” evidence that the dark skin is the curse. But the passage actually undermines the literal reading when read in its immediate context.

Jacob 3:8–9

“O my brethren, I fear that unless ye shall repent of your sins that their skins will be whiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God. Wherefore, a commandment I give unto you, which is the word of God, that ye revile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins; neither shall ye revile against them because of their filthiness.”

Jacob tells the Nephites that the Lamanites’ skins will be “whiter than yours” if the Nephites do not repent of their own wickedness. Under the literal reading, this is incoherent: Jacob would be claiming that Lamanites with hereditary dark skin will literally become paler than Nephites at the Final Judgment unless the Nephites repent of sexual immorality. That is not how biological pigmentation works, and it is not what Jacob is teaching.

Under the metaphorical reading, the passage is entirely coherent: Jacob is using the language of spiritual darkness and purity to tell the Nephites that their covenant faithlessness—particularly sexual immorality, which is Jacob’s central concern in this chapter—makes them morally darker than the Lamanites, regardless of external markers. The darkness language is doing spiritual and ethical work, not racial taxonomic work.

Additionally, Jacob 3:3 describes the Lamanites explicitly as “not filthy like unto you”—directly contradicting the notion that the “filthiness” and “cursing” language refers to the Lamanites’ condition. The labels were moral, not fixed racial categories.

The Scholarly Landscape: What Experts Actually Say

LDS Discussions presents the metaphorical/non-literal reading as a fringe apologetic position invented after DNA evidence discredited the Lamanite-Native American identification. This is historically inaccurate. Non-literal and metaphorical readings of the “skin” passages have been advanced by scholars from a range of methodological and faith commitments for decades, many well before DNA studies entered the conversation.

Scholarly Voices on the Non-Literal Reading

  • Brant Gardner (Mesoamerican specialist) — The mark functioned as a social boundary marker; its removability through group-crossing proves it was not biological pigmentation
  • John L. Sorenson (anthropologist) — Color terms in the Book of Mormon are relative descriptors reflecting in-group prejudice, not objective racial taxonomy
  • Armand Mauss (sociologist) — White/black attributions could be “read in a similarly figurative manner”; Joseph Smith himself may not have intended the modern racial reading
  • Douglas Campbell (linguist) — 28 uses of “white/whiteness” in the Book of Mormon are overwhelmingly metaphorical for purity; black/darkness is the consistent paired opposite
  • Gerrit Steenblik (Interpreter Foundation, Vol. 49, 2021) — “Skin” in Semitic usage can refer to external surface coatings; Mesoamerican body paint traditions documented in Maya codices, murals, and polychrome vessels are consistent with episodic marking that could be applied and removed
  • Ethan Sprout (UVU, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 2015) — Contextual analysis of Alma 3:5–6 supports garment/covering interpretation as one viable reading
  • Hugh Nibley — Metaphorical meaning with possible environmental/cultural factors; ancient use of color language does not map onto modern racial categories

None of these scholars needed DNA evidence to reach non-literal conclusions. Their arguments are grounded in philology, narrative analysis, ANE comparative literature, and Mesoamerican archaeology—the standard tools of textual scholarship. Scripture Central’s KnoWhy series synthesizes this scholarship and concludes that the text supports multiple non-literal readings, each of which is more internally consistent than the biological skin-color interpretation.

The Steenblik Thesis: Body Paint and the Mark

Gerrit M. Steenblik’s peer-reviewed article in the Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (Vol. 49, 2021) represents the most rigorous recent scholarly treatment of the question. LDS Discussions’ 2020 blog posts predate it, but it deserves full presentation here because it answers the objection that non-literal readings are ad hoc.

Steenblik observes that the term “skin” in Semitic languages carries semantic range beyond human flesh—it can denote any thin external coating or covering applied to a surface. He further notes that the word “blackness” would have been an unusual descriptor for Indigenous Americans in Joseph Smith’s era, when the conventional American term was “red men”—suggesting Nephi’s usage was not drawn from contemporary racial vocabulary but from a distinct and ancient semiotic tradition.

Steenblik then presents extensive archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence from Mesoamerica: Maya body paint traditions are extensively documented in codices, ceramic art, and murals. Black paint was applied by warriors, hunters, and participants in religious ceremonies. The paint was applied for specific purposes and was then ceremonially removed—a pattern that fits the Book of Mormon’s description of the mark as episodic, removable upon conversion (Alma 23:18; 3 Nephi 2:14–15), and parallel to the Amlicites’ voluntary self-marking in red (Alma 3:13).

This is not special pleading. It is the application of archaeological evidence to a textual question—exactly the kind of methodology LDS Discussions values when it cites DNA evidence against Book of Mormon historicity.

The body paint thesis satisfies criteria the literal reading cannot: (1) it explains why the mark could be adopted voluntarily by Nephite defectors (Alma 3), (2) it explains why it was “removed” upon conversion (Alma 23:18; 3 Nephi 2:14–15), (3) it explains why Lamanites and Nephites could be physically indistinguishable in Nephite dress (Alma 55), and (4) it accounts for the absence of any sustained narrative attention to skin-color difference across hundreds of years of subsequent Book of Mormon history.

Joseph Smith’s Own Revision and Its Significance

LDS Discussions acknowledges that Joseph Smith changed “white and delightsome” to “pure and delightsome” in the 1840 Nauvoo edition of the Book of Mormon, but dismisses this because other instances were not changed in the same edition. This objection is insufficient.

The 1840 edition is the only one that Joseph Smith himself personally prepared and oversaw. The change from “white” to “pure” in 2 Nephi 30:6 was deliberate and meaningful. The fact that other instances were not changed in that rushed edition does not eliminate the evidentiary weight of the change that was made; it shows that Joseph was capable of distinguishing metaphorical color language from literal physical description. The 1981 restoration of this reading across additional passages completed a revision trajectory Joseph himself began before his death.

Armand Mauss argues persuasively that this trajectory suggests Joseph’s own understanding of the color language was not fully identical to the rigid racial literalism his successors would later apply to it. This does not exonerate Joseph Smith of responsibility for how others applied his text; but it significantly complicates the LDS Discussions narrative that the literal racial reading was always the intended and obvious one.

Engaging the “Pattern of Retractions” Argument

LDS Discussions argues that the metaphorical reading is just one more instance in a pattern where the Church retroactively redefines words to escape problems: “horses don’t mean horses, steel doesn’t mean steel, translation doesn’t mean translation.” This is rhetorically powerful, but it obscures a critical distinction.

Not all word studies are methodologically equivalent. There is a meaningful difference between arguing that a word means something wholly different from its standard referent solely to rescue a false historical claim—and arguing that a word carries a well-attested Semitic metaphorical register that predates the English translation by millennia. The latter is not special pleading; it is responsible philology.

The “skin doesn’t mean literal skin” argument is corroborated by: (1) the internal evidence of the text itself—the Amlicite parallel, the Alma 55 deception narrative, the Jacob 3 structure; (2) the wider ANE literary tradition of black/white color metaphor; (3) archaeological evidence from Mesoamerican body paint practices; and (4) linguistic analysis of the Book of Mormon’s color vocabulary. That is convergent evidence from multiple independent disciplines—not motivated retraction.

LDS Discussions owes its readers an account of why the Amlicite self-marking parallel does not undermine the literal reading. The site does not provide one, because none is forthcoming from the text itself.

The Hermeneutical Crux: Ancient Text, Modern Category

The dispute about whether “skin of blackness” is literal or metaphorical ultimately rests on a hermeneutical question: whose interpretive framework should govern the reading of this text? Should it be read through the lens of nineteenth-century American racial biology, antebellum evangelical theology, and the Curse of Ham tradition—or through the lens of its claimed ancient context: Semitic color idiom, ANE covenant theology, and the insider/outsider group dynamics of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern literature?

LDS Discussions implicitly advocates for the first framework by treating prophetic commentary from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as decisive interpretive evidence. But this is methodologically backwards. We do not read the Psalms through the lens of how medieval commentators glossed them; we read medieval commentary against the background of the original Hebrew text. The same discipline applies here.

Modern racial categories—biological race as a hereditary, fixed, phenotypically visible index of innate worth or divine favor—did not exist in the ancient world. Scholars including John Welch and Douglas Campbell have demonstrated that ancient sources categorized human groups along lines of genealogy, covenant status, and cultural membership. The “Lamanites” as a category in the Book of Mormon functions precisely this way: people can join the Lamanites (Alma 3:10), leave the Lamanites (Alma 23:18), and be reclassified as Nephites irrespective of their ancestry (3 Nephi 2:16).

This is not modern political correctness retrofitted onto an ancient text. It is the historically appropriate interpretive framework for understanding how ancient peoples thought about group identity. The Book of Mormon’s mark/curse language is coherent under this framework. Under the modern racial framework, it is not.

Conclusion: A Defensible and Well-Grounded Reading

The non-literal reading of “skin of blackness” in the Book of Mormon is not silly, dishonest, or intellectually embarrassing. It is supported by multiple converging lines of scholarly evidence:

Convergent Lines of Evidence

  • ANE literary tradition — Black/white color binaries as spiritual and covenant metaphors are documented across Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Islamic literature from the second millennium BC onward
  • Internal textual evidence — The Amlicite self-marking, the Alma 55 deception narrative, and the Jacob 3 inversion all presuppose that the “mark” was not biological pigmentation
  • Linguistic analysis — 28 uses of “white/whiteness” in the Book of Mormon are overwhelmingly metaphorical for purity; the “black/darkness” register is the consistent paired opposite
  • Mesoamerican archaeology — Body paint traditions documented in Maya codices and murals provide a material-culture parallel for episodic, removable marking among ancient American peoples
  • Joseph Smith’s own revision — The 1840 change from “white” to “pure” signals that the translator understood at least some of the color language as metaphorical for spiritual purity, not racial description
  • Ancient group-identity frameworks — Ancient peoples organized group identity around covenant, genealogy, and cultural membership; the Lamanite category in the text functions exactly this way, with members joining and leaving the group across generation

LDS Discussions’ case rests entirely on (1) the rhetorical force of face-value literalism, and (2) the weight of prophetic commentary from men who interpreted the text through the racial ideology of their times. Neither of these constitutes philological or hermeneutical evidence about what the ancient text meant. They are evidence about what later readers believed—and in this case, those later readers were themselves operating within a deeply racialized cultural context that shaped their interpretation.

The honest, rigorous, and historically responsible reading of 2 Nephi 5:21–23 does not require concluding that God cursed a people with dark pigmentation as a racial marker. It requires reading the text as an ancient document whose color language carries the same metaphorical register that identical language carries throughout the ancient Near East—a register that was then overlaid, in the nineteenth century, with American racial ideology by readers who could not have known any better.

The question is not whether words should mean what they mean. The question is which framework—ancient Semitic covenant theology, or nineteenth-century American racial biology—is the appropriate one for reading a text that claims ancient Semitic origins. LDS Discussions has not answered that question. It has assumed an answer and worked backward from it.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Scholarly Sources

  • Gerrit M. Steenblik — “Demythicizing the Lamanites’ ‘Skin of Blackness’” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, Vol. 49 (2021)
  • Brant Gardner — Second Witness: Analytical & Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Vol. 2 (2007)
  • Armand Mauss — All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (2003)
  • Ethan Sprout — “Clothing as Identity in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 24 (2015)
  • FAIR Latter-day Saints — “What Does the Book of Mormon Mean by ‘Skin of Blackness’?” and “The Lamanite Curse” — fairlatterdaysaints.org
  • Scripture Central — “What Is the ‘Skin of Blackness’ in the Book of Mormon?” KnoWhy series — scripturecentral.org