The descent

It would be easy to make this pattern into a mood — hard times before good times, the usual thing. The texts resist that. Over and over the person is put in an actual hole in the ground, and the narrator describes the hole.

The third column is the argument. These accounts are not interested in the emotional register of the experience; they are interested in the mire, the absent water, the stone on the mouth. It is a literature written by and for people who expected the descent to be actual.

Read Genesis 37 to 41 as one movement and the structure is brutal. He is thrown in a pit — that could be the bottom. He is sold into Egypt — that could be the bottom. He rises in Potiphar's house and is falsely accused and imprisoned — that could be the bottom. He interprets the butler's dream, and the butler forgets him for two full years, which the text records in one of its most deliberate sentences.

Two full years between those verses. The narrator puts them side by side because the gap is the point: the moment that looked like the exit was not one, and nothing at all happened for two years afterwards.

And then Genesis 50:20, spoken by Joseph to the brothers who began it: 'ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.' Note what he does not say. He does not say it was not evil, and he does not say it was sent. He says it was meant — repurposed — which is a much stronger and much stranger claim.

Section 122:5–7 is a list, and the list is worth reading whole because of how far it goes: thrown into the pit, into the hands of murderers, the sentence of death passed upon thee, torn from thy wife and children, dragged to prison, the earth itself opening to swallow thee. And then verse 8 answers the entire list with one comparison.

'The Son of Man hath descended below them all.' Not: this is not so bad. Not: it will end soon — it does not, for another two months. The answer is that there is no floor Joseph can reach that is lower than one already occupied, and the question 'art thou greater than he' is asked without softening.

Alma gives two purposes and they are different in kind. Death is taken on in order to loose the bands of death — that is a transaction. Infirmities are taken on in order that He may know how to succour — that is not a transaction at all. It is the acquisition of a capacity that could not be acquired any other way.

D&C 88:6 makes the same argument in a single sentence with the logic exposed: He descended below all things, in that He comprehended all things, that He might be in all and through all things. Descent produces comprehension; comprehension produces presence. If that chain is right, then there is no place a person can get to where He has not been first, and that is not encouragement — it is a claim about the structure of the universe.

One caution to end on, because this pattern is the most easily abused in the collection. Nothing here says that suffering is good, or that God sends it, or that a person in a pit should be grateful for the pit. Joseph called what his brothers did evil. Section 121 opens with 'O God, where art thou?' and that prayer is canonised without correction. What the pattern claims is narrower and sturdier: that the descent is not the end of the story, that nobody climbs out unaided, and that the deepest place has already been occupied by someone who went there on purpose.