Item Detail
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27877
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1
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14
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English
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Joseph Smith, Polygamy, and the Levirate Widow
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Fall 2016
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49
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3
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Cambridge, MA
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Dialogue Foundation
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41-60
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Most accounts of Mormon polygamy have either emphasized sexual experimentation and marital reform on the one hand or biblical primitivism on the other. While these accounts are at least partly true--Joseph Smith did believe that he was replacing a failed system of marriage, and he and his colleagues frequently invoked Bible patriarchs to explain their behaviors and doctrines--polygamy was also a solution to a specific set of contemporary cultural problems--remarriage after bereavement--refracted through biblical interpretation. Here, Brown talks about polygamy through the lens of Smith's persistent, distinctive exegesis of Luke 20, the story of a hypothetical levirate widow which elucidates the conceptual matrix from which Mormon polygamy arose and points out the complexity of early Mormon belief about human relationships in the afterlife. Smith's complex and idiosyncratic exegesis of Luke 20 exemplifies his "marvelously literal" approach to biblical interpretation.
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