The King's Conference

As Dr. Burton mentioned in the instructor post Monday, we're kind of developing our own subject for our posts this week. I had an idea come to mind earlier today while listening to the class's performance of King Benjamin's speech regarding how the text is the way it is because of its oral nature despite the fact that we have a textual record of it. I am going to focus mainly on the verses that I had to recite/perform because these are the ones I am most familiar with and I think these will be sufficient enough to get my point across.

Specifically, I noticed these things which signified the oral nature of the speech:

• Frequent conjunction use
• Repetition of specific words
• Addresses to the listener
• Pronoun usage
  

Conjunctions
My first verse (2:13) had a LOT of conjunctions, which made it fairly tedious to memorize. This verse contains six broken up ideas. The first starts with "neither," the next three start with "nor," the next with "and," and the last with a preposition. In the next verse, each starts with "and." This was most likely done to help the listener mentally break up ideas during the speech so that they didn't all flow together. Another use of conjunctions that King Benjamin used that is similar to what is frequently done in General Conference (did you know that if you type "general" into google, "general conference" is the first result, beating out "general hospital" and "general mills"? Of course, the time of the year and the fact that google knows my location is Provo may have influenced this...) is the creation of lists. In the same verse, King Benjamin lists the things that they must not do: he says "nor... should [ye] murder, or plunder, or steal, or commit adultery." This polysyndeton helps the listener break up the different ideas he is expressing to keep them organized. If this speech was originally written instead of spoken, this would not be necessary because the reader could reread previous statements to ensure that they had the correct understanding. Another possible idea is that the people listening to King Benjamin's speech were taking written notes and that lists would make this easier.

Repetition
In order to keep these separated ideas cohesive, however, King Benjamin repeats certain words almost like a catchphrase to connect the ideas. For example, he uses the word "commit" to connect sins when he mentions them at different points. He also uses the word "suffered" to connect the things (sins) that he has forbidden his people from doing. Both these instances allow the hearer to keep things straight in their mind while listening so that they can understand King Benjamin's message correctly without being able to look back at what he said. Alex's verses did the same thing with the word "boast" as did Brianne's with "service" and "king." While King Benjamin may have substituted "charity" for "service" if he had been writing this for some variety with his vocabulary, he chose to instead stick with "service" throughout to give the speech some uniformity and connectivity.

Addresses to the listener
While we sometimes speak directly to the reader when writing, this is much more common in an oral delivery, especially when you are telling them to "wake up" and try to "command [their] attention" so that they stay focused. The use of the word "behold" also signified this to me because we don't usually use commands to look when we're writing. The fact that King Benjamin's speech uses these addresses shows that he was talking directly to people, not originally writing his speech to be read.

Pronouns
Ok, so this one doesn't really tie very well into the idea already established. However, while reading the speech, I realized something grammatical that had also been a bit of a mystery to me. Throughout scriptures, we see various forms of the word "you" or "your" Examples include "ye," "thou," "thine," etc. I never knew what the differences between these words were. While focusing on the speech, however, I realized something: "ye" usually functioned as a subject while "you" worked as a direct object. For example, in verse 14 King Benjamin says he has worked so that he "might serve you, and that ye should not..." which shows the differences between the words. In some instances, this also works with the kind of chiasmus in the speech where the person being addressed is at the center of the chiasmus. This could also help the people being addressed keep track of what it is that they need to pay special attention to as they are addressed twice in a short period.

This idea of King Benjamin doing these things to help his listeners remember the things he spoke (in addition to writing them down) reminded me of a quote by Thomas Jefferson:

"Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead of persuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour."

This quote further relates to the speech in the fact that King Benjamin did not give his entire speech at once but rather broke it up. (It seems familiar that he split it between two days, BUT on checking in the text, I did not find this stated, so that statement will go with a "maybe" on it.) This is another way in how King Benjamin's speech was similar to our general conferences today.


As a last note, I'd like to congratulate everyone on their performance today. I think we did very well as a whole and set the stage for the other groups. (I just love ending things with puns! It's so much fun!)