Hugh W. Nibley Bibliography

Review of Lehi in the Desert, The World of the Jaredites, There Were Jaredites (1988); An Approach to the Book of Mormon (1988); and Since Cumorah (1988), by Hugh Nibley.

Review of An Approach to the Book of Mormon (1988), by Hugh Nibley.

Review of Lehi in the Desert, The World of the Jaredites, There Were Jaredites (1988), by Hugh Nibley.

Review of Lehi in the Desert, The World of the Jaredites, There Were Jaredites (1988), by Hugh Nibley.

Review of the Prophetic Book of Mormon (1989), by Hugh Nibley.

Review of Since Cumorah (1988), by Hugh Nibley.

Review of Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Sememster 3 (1992), by Hugh W. Nibley.

Review of The Ancient State: The Rulers and the Ruled (1991), by Hugh W. Nibley

Review of Hugh Nibley. Abraham in Egypt.

Review of Boyd Petersen. Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life.

Review of Ronald V. Huggins. “Hugh Nibley's Footnotes.” In Salt Lake City Messanger 110 (May 2008): 9-21.

Review of Hugh Nibley. Eloquent Witness: Nibley on Himself, Others, and the Temple, CWHN 17.

Review of Hugh Nibley. Approaching Zion.

Indexes Vol 1-13 of the CWHN, printed as a half page booklet. Contains alphabetical article listing at end.

Indexes Vol 1-13 of the CWHN, contains alphabetical article listing at end.

26 pages, alphabetical ignoring “the.” FARMS ID in left column where available.

Discussion of Nibley’s review of No Man Knows My History

The name of Hugh Nibley has become a byword within the Church in the past two decades, primarily as a result of his writings published in the pages of The Improvement Era for 21 years. Since 1948, only six volumes of the Era have been published without the by-line of Hugh Nibley, which is usually part of an extended series of articles. His brilliant, incisive mind, fortified on one hand by fluency in some ten languages and strengthened on the other by his strong faith in the gospel's message, has blessed countless readers. But it is his zest for knowledge, his joy in discovery, his thrill at uncovering old things for us to view anew that have endeared him to all who have read his works. In this respect, Brother Nibley represents a symbol of the person hungering and thirsting after knowledge, an ideal that most individuals could well adapt for the betterment and fulfillment of their own personal lives. In this spirit, as his current series is concluded, the Era is pleased to feature Brother Nibley as a fitting symbol of one who has truly found many adventures in learning.

Kitsch in the Visual Arts [an interview, in Lori Schlinker’s Kitsch in the Visual Arts (BYU, August 1971), 60–64; augmented by the inclusion of some miscellaneous comments made by Nibley in a panel discussion on the arts in Letters to Smoother, Etc. . . . Proceedings of the 1980 Brigham Young University Symposium on the Humanities, ed. Joy C. Ross and Steven C. Walker (Provo, UT: BYU Press, 1982), 102–4; 111–12]

Includes comments about Nibley’s work

Contains 95 listings from 1926-1977.

Typed list of 108 Nibley writings from 1926-1979

Johnston, a staff reporter for the Deseret News, conducted a series of interviews concerning the reading habits of prominent Utahns. This was the eighth in the series. Nibley listed, as his favorite books, the following: (1) Shakespeare, Complete Works; (2) Book of Mormon; (3) Homer, Odyssey; (4) Goethe, Faust; (5) Gaius Petronius, Satyricon; (6) Jean Froissart, Chronicles. Nibley also said that by age thirteen he knew Macbeth by heart and tried to learn Hamlet, but found it too long.

Short, selected bibliography at end of book

An account of Hugh Nibley’s favorite discoveries and monumental contribution to Book of Mormon scholarship.

In the Book of Moses, part of the Latter-day Saint scriptural canon known as the Pearl of Great Price, are what the Prophet Joseph Smith entitled “extracts from the prophecy of Enoch.” These scriptures, says the eminent LDS scholar Hugh Nibley, “supply us with the most valuable control yet on the bona fides of the Prophet. . . . We are to test. . . . ”˜How does it compare with records known to be authentic?’ The excerpts offer the nearest thing to a perfectly foolproof test””neat, clear-cut, and decisive””of Joseph Smith’s claim to inspiration.”

In Enoch the Prophet, Dr. Nibley examines and defends that claim by examining Joseph Smith’s translations in the context of recently discovered apocryphal sources.

This book contains a collection of various comparisons of the Enoch materials in the Book of Moses with the Slavonic and Ethiopic Enoch texts and other related materials and lore from antiquity, showing the possibility that Joseph Smith’s book of Enoch could be authentic ancient text.

In 1954, Hugh Nibley delivered a series of weekly lectures on KSL Radio. The series called ""Time Vindicates the Prophets,"" was given in answer to those who were challenging the right of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to call themselves Christians.

A republication of a corrected version of what were originally a series of talks given over KSL under the title “Time Vindicates the Prophets” and then published under that title in pamphlet form, as well as in book form, as The World and the Prophets, both in 1954. A second expanded edition of the book was published in 1962. This edition includes a new foreword by R. Douglas Phillips.

From the outset of his career, Dr. Hugh Nibley has been centrally concerned with primitive Christianity, especially the shadowy era between the New Testament proper and the emergence and the triumph of the Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire. That is the era treated in the nine essays collected in this volume. The essays cover such subjects as early accounts of Jesus’ childhood, the Savior’s forty-day ministry after his resurrection, baptism for the dead in ancient times, the passing of the primitive church, and the early Christian prayer circle. Each essay examines the close connection between the practices and the doctrines of the early Church and the Church of the latter days. Each essay has been reedited, and all the original sources have been rechecked.

Keith E. Norman has reviewed this volume (see The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 9 [1989]: 108–12). His remarks are generally favorable. He pictures Nibley as “the preeminent Mormon scholar of ancient studies and unofficial apologist for the LDS Church” (108). He notes that Nibley’s “biases are never in doubt.” This offends Norman, and he complains of “Nibley’s apparent lack of a sense of fair play or balance—dare we say Christian charity?” (109). And he also refers to what he calls Nibley’s “operative methodology: he is proof-texting—compiling isolated passages to support predetermined conclusions—with little regard for the context of those citations” (109–10). Norman claims that Nibley’s faults are thus in ample evidence in the essays found in this volume. “The most obvious [fault] is his tendentiousness, which is perhaps inevitable when one sets out to be a defender of the faith” (111). Norman feels that “the conclusion of each of these essays has been predetermined according to Nibley’s Mormonism” (111). But Norman neglects to explain why tendentiousness is a weakness, or why it should be overcome, or how it can be overcome. What is implied in Norman’s view is that for one to be tendentious, that is, marked by a tendency to favor a particular point of view—especially Mormonism—is wrong. But why is that necessarily so? Though Norman does not explicitly take up this issue, he provides some clues indicating why he feels that tendentiousness is wrong: he apparently believes that it is a mistake to manifest bias because one ought, instead, to strive for objectivity, balance, or detachment. From the point of view of the commonly held methodological mythology Nibley must be faulted because he lacks the necessary objectivity. But Peter Novick has shown that the American history profession has been made to rest upon an incoherent and vacuous objectivist mythology, which he identifies as the myth of presumably objective historians giving us an objective history (That Noble Dream [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]). According to the objectivist mythology, biases, inclinations, or propensities favoring a point of view (including especially faith) are corrupting and prevent the historian from discovering what really happened. Obviously such an objectivist ideology works against believers, since they obviously have a point of view. But ironically, Norman is tendentious about the need for detachment, balance, or objectivity, which he clearly endorses. His understanding of historical method is not defended with arguments and is recommended for unexplained and unexamined reasons. Ironically, Norman is biased against the defense of the faith and would presumably feel more comfortable if Nibley had hidden his premises and made an effort to dissemble by making it appear to his readers that he had merely happened to discover some things while wandering around in the literature of antiquity as a dispassionate, disinterested, detached observer interested only in having the facts speak their truth through him. The demand for objectivity turns out to be more a matter of scholarly pretence, style, or tone and therefore has little to do with the substance of reasoning and argumentation and nothing to do with the historical understanding or the business of working out historical explanations. Nibley clearly rejects the affectation of scholarly neutrality, and rightly so. One wonders whether Norman follows what Nibley labels “the Baconian gospel, that one has simply to collect the facts and let them speak for themselves” (375). If so, he has appropriated an outmoded, incoherent view of science which he has unwittingly applied to historical scholarship.

Norman, though respectful of Nibley’s learning and command of languages, feels that the documentation in some of the essays in this volume goes too far and was intended to “dazzle” the reader with an “esoteric level of erudition. One essay contains twelve pages of text followed by twenty-two of footnotes, set in smaller type. So much paper and ink are squandered when the editing is sloppy or overly lenient” (111). Without argumentation, Norman hints that the editing for the essay to which he alludes was either shoddy or permissive. But apparently the editors of Vigiliae Christianae, a distinguished European journal, who originally published Nibley’s essay on the forty-day ministry of Christ, did not feel that they were wasting either paper or ink by publishing the citations appended to that essay. If one were to look for a squnadering of ink and paper, would it not be easier to make a case by pointing to advertising copy, newspapers, pornography or a host of other such publications, rather than the endnotes for a serious piece of scholarship?

Hugh Nibley is probably still best known for his groundbreaking investigations into the ancient Near Eastern backgrounds of Lehi and of the Jaredites. Those classic studies are contained in this volume ”” the first of several books to appear in the volumes of The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley that deal with the Book of Mormon.

Originally published in 1957 as a Melchizedek Priesthood manual , An Approach to the Book of Mormon is Dr. Hugh Nibley’s classic work on the Book of Mormon. A gifted scholar with expertise in ancient languages, literature, and history, Nibley shows numerous details in the Book of Mormon narrative to be in accord with cultural traits of the Middle East.

A revised edition of the book published under the same title by the Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the lesson manual for the Melchizedek Priesthood quorums in 1957; and in a second edition by Deseret Book in 1964; reprinted in 1976 in the Classics of Mormon Literature series.

A hundred years ago, the Book of Mormon was regarded by the scholarly world as an odd text that simply did not fit their understanding of the ancient world. Since that time, however, numerous ancient records have come to light, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts. These discoveries have forced scholars to change their views of history, and they place the Book of Mormon in a new light as well. That is why respected Latter-day Saint scholar Hugh Nibley wrote Since Cumorah, a brilliant literary, theological, and historical evaluation of the Book of Mormon as an ancient book.

This is a revised and corrected edition of the book published under the same title by Deseret Book in 1967, with many changes, taken from a series in the Improvement Era that appeared in 1964–66.

65 pages, Contains description of Nibley collected works project, followqed by chronological listings with annotations.

The Book of Mormon is a prophetic book. It was written by prophets and about prophets. It was foreseen by prophets and foresees our day. It was brought forth by prophetic gifts for prophetic purposes. It speaks in a clarion voice of warning to those who would survive the last days.

The articles in this volume, brought together under one cover for the first time, approach the Book of Mormon through a variety of prophetic themes. They speak out incisively on such topics as the prophecy of Ezekiel 37, internal and external evidences of the divine origin of the Book of Mormon, literary style in the Book of Mormon, ancient temples and the Book of Mormon, and the Book of Mormon’s teachings for the last days.

Approaching Zion is LDS scholar and social critic Hugh Nibley’s most popular book. More accessible than many of his scholarly works, it is replete with Nibley’s trademark humor and startling insights into history, religion and life.

Well known and beloved in its text form, most of the essays in this book were originally delivered as speeches. In Approaching Zion, Hugh Nibley gives thinkers reason to believe, and believers something to think about.

Review of Since Cumorah (1988), by Hugh Nibley.

The Ancient State, by Hugh Nibley, is a thought-provoking examination of aspects of ancient culture, from the use of marked arrows to the surprisingly universal conception of kinship, from argument from various schools of philosophy to the rise of rhetoric. Author Hugh Nibley brings his usual meticulous research and scholarship to bear in this enlightening collection of essays and lectures.

The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, &ldquoThough I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (I Corinthians 13:1). Since then, the terms “tinkling cymbals” and “sounding brass” have often been used to signify words of emptiness and confusion ”” describing perfectly most writings critical of the Latter-day Saints.

Trained in history and interested in classical rhetoric, Hugh Nibley brings a broad perspective to his study of anti-Mormon writings. Included in this volume are:

* No Ma’am, that’s Not History

* Censoring the Joseph Smith Story

* The Myth Makers

* Sounding Brass

In Temple and Cosmos, Brother Nibley explains the relationship of the House of the Lord to the cosmos. In Temple, the first part of the volume, he focuses on the nature, meaning, and history of the temple, discussing such topics as sacred vestments, the circle and the square, and the symbolism of the temple and its ordinances.

In the second part, Cosmos, he discusses the cosmic context of the temple-the expanding gospel, apocryphal writings, religion and history, the genesis of the written word, cultural diversity in the universal church, and the terrible questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? and Where are we going?

Linda Hunter Adams expressed gratitude for Nibley’s article.

Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints presents Hugh Nibley’s reflections on the thoughts of Brigham Young on politics, education, leadership, and the environment. The timeliness of Brigham’s counsel on these topics will quickly become apparent to readers, as will the unique insights that Nibley adds. This volume will amuse, provoke, and challenge ”” and, above all, educate.

Presented in honor of Hugh Nibley’s sixty-fifth birthday in the Varsity Theater, Brigham Young University, in connection with the 1975 Annual Welch Lecture Series by Klaus Baer and others.

Hugh Nibley’s correspondence reveals a lifelong fascination with the Book of Mormon. This is significant for two reasons: First

Considered by many to be a classic in LDS literature, Abraham in Egypt is coming back to print in an enlarged edition published in association with the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS). In 1968-1970, Hugh Nibley wrote a series of articles for the Improvement Era titled ""A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price."" Brother Nibley asked that some of these articles be made into chapters to be added to Abraham in Egypt. This is what constitutes the new edition; no changes were made to the original chapters. For the articles, Nibley drew from many Jewish and rabbinical sources, while his work in the first edition was based on Egyptian material.

Contains all the material from the first edition of Abraham in Egypt as well as additions from Nibley’s 1968–70 Improvement Era series, “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price.”

This review enthusiastically endorses Boyd Petersen’s biography of his father-in-law, Hugh Nibley. Petersen intersperses narrative chapters with thematic ones in Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life.

New to this edition is Gary Gillum’s “Hugh Nibley: Scholar of the Spirit, Missionary of the Mind”; the bibliography has been dropped.

The author reflects on the lasting influence of the eminent Latter-day Saint scholar Hugh Nibley, whose far-reaching scholarship, unmatched erudition, and vigorous defense of the Mormon faith established Mormon studies on a solid foundation and pointed the way for others to follow.

Much can be learned from the New Testament and other early Christian sources about the powers, duties, and desired attributes of those who originally held the offices of apostle and bishop. Catholics claim that Peter was the first bishop of Rome, and Eastern Orthodox Christians assert that he was the first bishop of Antioch. But does either position reflect the apostolic or episcopal offices completely or correctly? What, really was the role of bishops, and what was their relationship with apostles in the early Christian church? It is hard to imagine anyone better than Hugh Nibley to shed light on this challenging and intriguing topic.

This is the first ”” and still the only book-length commentary on the Joseph Smith Papyri. In this long-awaited new edition, with expanded text and numerous illustrations, Professor Nibley shows that the papyri are not the source of the Book of Abraham. Rather than focusing on what the papyri are not, as most commentators have done, Nibley masterfully explores what the papyri are and what they meant in ancient times. He demonstrates how these ancient Egyptian papyri contain a message that is of particular interest to Latter-day Saints.

In the tradition of Approaching Zion, this book represents Nibley at his best. It is loaded with stunning insights on the temple, trenchant social commentary and fascinating autobiographical details.

The volume contains diverse essays, including his three-year series of lengthy articles from the Improvement Era, “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price.” According to Nibley, “Until now, no one has done much more than play around with the bedizening treasury of the Pearl of Great Price. They would not, we could not make of the Book of Abraham an object of serious study. The time has come to change all that.”

Detailed list of works by and about Nibley with commentary.

Just as attorneys representing the church wouldn’t bear their testimonies in a courtroom, Hugh Nibley defended Joseph Smith through facts and scholarly dialogue, not testimony bearing. Although Nibley did, at times, discuss the Prophet specifically, his defense of Joseph came primarily through academic vindication of the Book of Mormon. When others made scholarly attacks against Joseph’s character, Nibley would move the debate to a discussion of the historicity of the book on its own terms. When Nibley did directly discuss the Prophet, he portrayed him as a humble, loving servant of God.

In this lecture commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of Hugh Nibley’s birth, Arnold paints a picture of him by discussing not only his scholarship but also his very unique, and often humorous, writing and speaking styles and his consistent jabs at academia. According to Arnold, who read everything Nibley had written on the Book of Mormon, Nibley was never more eloquent or serious than when he defended that book. Often, Arnold notes, his defenses and other writings are illuminated by literary devices, including the use of parable, epistle, and Platonic dialogue.

One Eternal Round is the culmination of Hugh Nibley’s thought on the book of Abraham and represents over fifteen years of research and writing. The volume includes penetrating insights into Egyptian pharaohs and medieval Jewish and Islamic traditions about Abraham; Greek, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian myths; the Aztec calendar stone; Hopi Indian ceremonies; and early Jewish and Christian apocrypha, as well as the relationship of myth, ritual, and history.

Hugh Nibley cared deeply about creation and was passionate about our stewardship over the earth. His arguments in defense of the environment were informed by the disciplines he knew best: history, philosophy, and theology. From his study, research, and reasoning, Nibley drew several principles that seem to have directed his thoughts and crafted his sense of environmental stewardship. Four of these principles are discussed in this paper: (1) humankind has a divine mandate to properly care for creation; (2) humankind’s spiritual health and environmental heath are linked; (3) creation obeys, reverences, and provides for humankind, as humankind righteously cares for creation; and (4) humankind should not sacrifice environmental health for temporal wealth.

References to Hugh Nibley weekly lecture series at BYU

Review of Colby Townsend, “Returning to the Sources: Integrating Textual Criticism in the Study of Early Mormon Texts and History,” Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 10, no. 1 (2019): 55–85, https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/imwjournal/vol10/iss1/6/.

Abstract: In the present article, Part 2 of 2 of a set of articles supporting Colby Townsend’s efforts to raise awareness of the importance of textual criticism, we focus on his argument that Joseph Smith created the Book of Moses names Mahijah and Mahujah after seeing a table of name variants in the Hebrew text of Genesis 4:18 in a Bible commentary written by Adam Clarke. While we are not averse in principle to the general possibility that Joseph Smith may have relied on study aids as part of his translation of the Bible, we discuss why in this case such a conjecture raises more questions than it answers. We argue that a common ancient source for Mahujah and Mahijah in the Book of Moses and similar names in the Bible and an ancient Dead Sea Scrolls Enoch text named the Book of Giants cannot be ruled out. More broadly, we reiterate and expand upon arguments we have made elsewhere that the short and fragmentary Book of Giants, a work not discovered until 1948, contains much more dense and generally more pertinent resemblances to Moses 6‒7 than the much longer 1 Enoch, the only ancient Enoch text outside the Bible that was published and translated into English in Joseph Smith’s lifetime.

Hugh W. Nibley (1910–2005) was arguably the most brilliant Latter-day Saint scholar of the 20th century, with wide-ranging interests in scripture, history, and social issues. The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley comprise nineteen weighty volumes. But he was also one of the most enigmatic observers of the Church.

In this volume readers will discover that the personal stories and perspectives behind the scholarship are sometimes even more captivating than his brilliant and witty intellectual breakthroughs. This comprehensive three-part collection of essays sheds fascinating new light on Hugh Nibley as a scholar and a man.

Part 1, entitled “Portraits,” contains the first collection of observations—a “spiritual” portrait of Hugh Nibley by his close friend and colleague John W. “Jack” Welch, a description of the physical portrait by Rebecca Everett hanging in the Hugh Nibley Ancient Studies room at Brigham Young University, and a biographical portrait by Hugh himself.

Part 2, “Nibley, the Scholar,” contains expanded and updated versions of the almost forgotten audio and video recordings of the BYU Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship lecture series celebrating the centennial of Nibley’s birth in 2010. An additional set of chapters on Nibley’s scholarship rounds out this collection.

Part 3, “Nibley, the Man,” includes tributes given by family members and others at Nibley’s funeral service. A series of entertaining personal stories, reminiscences, and folklore accounts concludes the volume.

Who was Hugh Nibley? For starters, he was arguably the most brilliant Latter-day Saint scholar of the 20th century. Though he was sometimes one of the harshest critics of Brigham Young University, he was also one of the Church’s most faithful and loyal advocates. People liked Hugh Nibley because he was not afraid to say things that we wish we could say, to espouse unpopular causes, to thumb his nose at fashion, or to buck the crowd. According to Elder Neal A. Maxwell, Nibley’s well-known eccentricity was itself “a reflection of his deepened discipleship.”

Most recent and most complete Nibley bibliography, updated from 2010 version.