Question: Why would "camp meeting" elements appear in the story of King Benjamin's temple speech in the Book of Mormon?

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Question: Why would "camp meeting" elements appear in the story of King Benjamin's temple speech in the Book of Mormon?

The same elements that the critics consider 19th century attributes in the Book of Mormon are also evidences of ancient Israelite origin

Terryl Givens notes,

[A]lthough the content of the Alma conversion story suggests to some the influence of contemporary conditions, the account as narrated in the Book of Mormon exhibits a complex structure of inverted parallelism or chiasmus that has been persuasively connected to ancient Old World forms....The same story, in other words, is invoked as telling evidence of both nineteenth-century composition and authentically ancient origins. [Blake] Ostler sees an example of such divergent readings in King Benjamin's great temple speech (Mos 2-6), that incorporates elements common to Methodist camp meetings, but at least as convincing are more than a dozen formal elements of Israelite covenant renewal festivals contained in the speech.[1]


Notes

  1. Terryl Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion, 173.