Description
Brant A. Gardner, Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007, 7.25×10.25″ hardbound, 570 pages.
Commentaries on scriptural texts attempt to deepen the experience of the reader with the text they are reading. Different commentaries take very different approaches to the same text. There is so much that may be said about the Book of Mormon that no single commentary can hope to be exhaustive. In this commentary, the attempt is to bring to bear the insights of multiple disciplines and multiple scholars into a single location where the concentration of information at the point of the text may assist us in understanding a particular passage, and from the individual passages, the greater message of this most marvelous book.
The commentary is laid out with the comments interwoven with the text of the Book of Mormon. In all cases, the intermixing of scripture and commentary is intended to focus attention on the text itself. Even with such a focus on specific texts, there is an overall view of the real people and their times that develop through the text. This cultural background becomes more and more important as the scriptural text moves from the somewhat familiar Old World and into the more exotic New World.
