Labor

Labor is the exertion of body or mind directed toward a particular end. The Hebrew ‘avodah spans an unusually wide range of meaning, naming the toil of a field hand, the bondage of Israel in Egypt, and the priestly service rendered in the tabernacle, while the Greek kopos emphasizes the weariness that follows sustained effort. In contemporary economic parlance, labor has been reduced to a commodity measured in wages and hours and increasingly assigned to machines. The scriptural record situates its origin much earlier, in the garden before the Fall, and its culmination much later, in the work God Himself declares to be His glory.

The Eternal Nature of Work

Before any thorn sprang from the ground, the Lord placed the man in Eden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Commentators have observed that the two Hebrew verbs, ‘avad and shamar, appear together elsewhere in the Pentateuch to describe the Levites’ service and guard over the sanctuary, so that Adam’s gardening already carries the cadence of temple ministry. In this light, the first labor in scripture is a form of worship, offered within a sacred precinct and entrusted to a steward who neither owns the garden nor exhausts its potential. The Fall would alter the conditions of that service while leaving its commission fully intact, and the earth would remain a sanctuary requiring cultivation.

The narrative of the Fall then binds two kinds of labor with a single word. To the woman the Lord said, “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” and to the man, “in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (Genesis 3:16-17). The Hebrew noun in both sentences is ‘itstsavon, “pain” or “toil,” a parallel that would hardly have escaped an attentive Hebrew hearer. The bearing of children and the tilling of soil thus share a common grammar of travail, each costly and each generative of life. The Apostle Paul extends the figure to the cosmos, writing that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,” awaiting deliverance “from the bondage of corruption” (Romans 8:21-22).

The Lord of the Vineyard

Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree, preserved in the Book of Jacob, closes with a detail that sets it apart from the vineyard parables of the Gospels. As the final pruning begins, the servants “did go and labor with their mights; and the Lord of the vineyard labored also with them” (Jacob 5:72). The master of the vineyard takes up the pruning hook beside those he has called, and the restoration of the tree becomes a joint undertaking between God and His laborers. Restoration scripture develops this picture into a doctrine of divine work, for the Lord declares to Moses, “this is my work and my glory⁠—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39).

King Benjamin applied the same principle to political authority. Addressing his people from the tower beside the temple in Zarahemla, the aged king reminded them that he had “labored with mine own hands that I might serve you, and that ye should not be laden with taxes” (Mosiah 2:14). Labor here functions as a safeguard against the corruption of rule, since a king who works cannot easily live upon the toil of those he governs. Hugh Nibley, who returned often to Benjamin’s sermon, contended that God supplies the necessities of life as a free gift and that the labor He requires belongs to the economy of consecration, directed toward the welfare of others and the building of Zion.

Labor and the Thinking Machine

Industrial machinery relieved the muscle, and artificial intelligence now encroaches upon drafting, programming, translation, and diagnosis, forms of labor long assumed to be secure. Mormon transhumanists have generally welcomed such developments as partial fulfillments of the Savior’s invitation, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28), insofar as they lift the drudgery that consumes human lives. The gains of new technology have historically reached workers only where institutions and countervailing power compelled their distribution. Absent such arrangements, the same tools that relieve toil can concentrate its rewards among those who own the machines.

The scriptural account of labor sharpens that caution in two directions. If labor in Eden was a form of temple service, then a society that automates work without providing other avenues of meaningful contribution deprives its members of a sacred office as well as a wage. And if the Lord of the vineyard labors alongside His servants, then the proper model for advanced technology is the co-laborer that extends human capacity in the work of tending the earth, healing the sick, and lengthening life. Mormon transhumanists who anticipate an era of radical abundance are therefore obliged to design and govern their machines so that every person retains a place in the vineyard and a share in its harvest, as Benjamin’s people retained theirs.