[Page 169]Abstract: Genesis 30:23–24 offers a double etiology for Joseph in terms of “taking away”/“gathering” (ʾāsap) and “adding” (yāsap). In addition to its later narratological use of the foregoing, the Joseph cycle (Genesis 37–50) evidences a third dimension of onomastic wordplay involving Joseph’s kĕtōnet passîm, an uncertain phrase traditionally translated “coat of many colours” (from LXX), but perhaps better translated, “coat of manifold pieces.” Moroni1, quoting from a longer version of the Joseph story from the brass plates, refers to “Joseph, whose coat was rent by his brethren into many pieces” (Alma 46:23). As a military and spiritual leader, Moroni1 twice uses Joseph’s torn coat and the remnant doctrine from Jacob’s prophecy regarding Joseph’s coat as a model for his covenant use of his own coat to “gather” (cf. ʾāsap) and rally faithful Nephites as “a remnant of the seed of Joseph” (Alma 46:12–28, 31; 62:4–6). In putting that coat on a “pole” or “standard” (Hebrew nēs — i.e., “ensign”) to “gather” a “remnant of the seed of Joseph” appears to make use of the Isaianic nēs-imagery of Isaiah 11:11–12 (and elsewhere), where the Joseph-connected verbs yāsap and ʾāsap serve as key terms. Moroni’s written-upon “standard” or “ensign” for “gathering” the “remnant of the seed of Joseph” constituted an important prophetic antetype for how Mormon and his son, Moroni2, perceived the function of their written record in the latter-days (see, e.g., 3 Nephi 5:23–26; Ether 13:1–13).

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The biography of Joseph the biblical patriarch surfaces in intriguing ways throughout the Book of Mormon, attesting its importance among the Nephites throughout their entire existence. For example, at the beginning of Nephite history, Nephi uses Joseph’s name and [Page 170]biography as a literary means of framing his own familial role and his brothers’ abusive treatment of him (e.g., “and they hated him yet the more [wayyôsipû ʿôd]” [Genesis 37:5, 8] ≅ “their anger did increase [yāsap] against me” [2 Nephi 5:2]).1 At the very end of Nephite civilization, in his abridged book of Ether, Moroni2 (son of Mormon) makes Joseph’s name, his bringing his father down into Egypt, and his consequent preservation of his father “a type” for the preservation of “a remnant of the seed of Joseph,” the building “again” (cf. yôsîp) of “the Jerusalem of old,” the building of a “New Jerusalem,” which would be “a holy city unto the Lord like unto the Jerusalem of old” and the promise that both “shall no more be confounded” (Ether 13:1–13).