Religious Studies Center

Kent P. Jackson and Charles Swift "The Ages of the Patriarchs in the Joseph Smith Translation," in Kent P. Jackson and Andrew C. Skinner, ed., A Witness for the Restoration: Essays in Honor of Robert J. Matthews (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2007), 1-11. 

The Ages of the Patriarchs in the Joseph Smith Translation

Kent P. Jackson and Charles Swift

Kent P. Jackson is a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. Charles Swift is an assistant professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University.

Two documents comprise the original manuscripts of Joseph Smith's New Translation of Genesis, named, in order of their composition, Old Testament Manuscript 1 (OT1) and Old Testament Manuscript 2 (OT2).¹

Old Testament Manuscript 1 is the original dictated text of the first half of Genesis. Between June 1830 and March 1831, the Prophet translated with the assistance of scribes Oliver Cowdery, John Whitmer, Emma Smith, and Sidney Rigdon.² In accordance with a revelation received on March 7, 1831, he stopped translating the Old Testament midway through Genesis 24 to work on the New Testament (see D&C 45:60-61). Old Testament Manuscript 2 (OT2) began as a duplicate of OT1, probably with the intent of being a "backup" copy to safeguard the translation. It was copied from OT1 by John Whitmer in March and April 1831.³ 
 

Detail of Old Testament Manuscript 1, page 11, lines 33-44. The dictated text is in the handwriting of John Whitmer. The subsequent corrections are in the handwriting of Oliver Cowdery. Image courtesy of Library-Archives, Community of Christ, Independence, Missouri.

Joseph Smith's translation of the Bible was not complete with the initial dictation. There is much evidence on the manuscripts that the Prophet did additional work on the pages after they were originally written. Some of the changes and additions he made are editorial in nature and clarify and smooth out the words of the dictated text. But others are corrections that provide new insights or even change the meaning of what had been written before. Many of those later revisions make important contributions to the Joseph Smith Translation (JST).

Oliver Cowdery's tenure as Joseph Smith's first scribe on the Bible translation ended in October 1830 when he was sent on the "Lamanite Mission" that established the Church in Ohio and Missouri. Sometime after Cowdery's return from that mission, the Prophet dictated to him fourteen revisions to the translation of Genesis 5 in which he changed the ages of the early Patriarchs from Adam to Methuselah. Cowdery recorded those changes on OT1.⁴ But OT2 had already been written by that time (copied from OT1), and thus the new changes on OT1 never were copied onto OT2. When Joseph Smith finished the New Testament in July 1832 and returned to the Old Testament, it was on OT2 that his scribes recorded the translation to the end of Malachi and the further refinements, additions, and corrections to the Genesis text translated earlier. Thus some of his Genesis refinements were written on OT1 and some (most) on OT2.

Whatever the reason may have been for using OT2 for the recording of the continuing translation, the evidence gives us every reason to believe that the Prophet intended the corrections in the Patriarchs' ages on OT1 to be part of his Bible translation and assumed that they would ultimately appear in print.

We present the fourteen changes here. In the following transcriptions, strikeouts represent text that was lined out (for example, after), and angle brackets show text that was inserted, usually directly above the text it replaces (for example, <870>). References to both Genesis and the Book of Moses are included for convenience.

Genesis 5:4; Moses 6:11: the days after of Adam after he had begotten Seth were 800 <870> years⁵

Genesis 5:5; Moses 6:12: & all the days that Adam lived were 930 <1000> years⁶

Genesis 5:7; Moses 6:14: & all the days of Seth were a lived after he begat Enos & 807 <876> <years>⁷

Genesis 5:8; Moses 6:16: & all the days of seth were 912

<981> years⁸

Genesis 5:9; Moses 6:17: called after his own Son whom he had named Cainan <whom he begat when he was 90 years old.>⁹

Genesis 5:10; Moses 6:18: & Enos lived after he begat his son Cainan 815 <850> years¹⁰

Genesis 5:11; Moses 6:18: & all the days of Enos were 905 <940> years¹¹

Genesis 5:12; Moses 6:19: And Cainan lived 70 <117> years and begat Mahalaleel¹²

Genesis 5:14; Moses 6:19: And Ca<al>l the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten <fifty seven> <957> years¹³

Genesis 5:15; Moses 6:20: and Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years <115> and begat Jared¹⁴

Genesis 5:17; Moses 6:20: and all the days of Mahalaleel were 895 <945>¹⁵

Genesis 5:23; Moses 8:1: <And <all> the days of Enoch were 4 430 years.>¹⁶

Genesis 5:25; Moses 8:5: Mathusalah lived an hundred eighty and seven years <218 years> and begat Lamach¹⁷

Genesis 5:27; Moses 8:7: and all the days of Mathusalah were nine Hundred Sixty and nine years <1000>¹⁸

In 1867 the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints published an edited version of Joseph Smith's Bible translation in book form, complete with corrected spelling and punctuation and chapters and verses in Bible format. It is commonly called the Inspired Version.¹⁹ In its preparation, the RLDS Church's publication committee, chaired by Joseph Smith III, created a transcript from the original JST manuscripts for the purpose of editing and correcting.

Detail of Old Testament Manuscript 1, page 19, lines 40-50. The dictated text is in the handwriting of Sidney Rigdon. The subsequent corrections are in the handwriting of Oliver Cowdery. Image courtesy of Library-Archives, Community of Christ, Independence, Missouri. 

The writing on it shows the following process. First, the staff member who made the transcript copied the Genesis translation from OT1. Joseph Smith III, realizing that the translation was not complete with only the text of OT1, edited the transcript against OT2, adding the OT2 revisions his father had made after the original dictation. Then, checking the text against some early, incomplete printings of the Genesis material, Joseph Smith III went through the text again and selectively removed many of his father's corrections. Among those that were removed were all of the corrections to the ages of the Patriarchs except one. The correction now at Moses 8:1, "And all the days of Enoch were 430 years," was retained, but all the others were removed.²⁰

In preparation for the 1878 edition of the Latter-day Saint Pearl of Great Price, Elder Orson Pratt of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles took the text of what we now call the Book of Moses directly out of the 1867 RLDS Inspired Version. Because all of the later editions of the Book of Moses derive from that text (with some changes that were made in later years), our Book of Moses today still lacks important corrections made by the Prophet Joseph Smith, including the changes in the ages of the Patriarchs. Robert J. Matthews first made note of the lost changes in his research in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was not until the publication of the Joseph Smith Translation manuscripts in 2004 that they became known more broadly.²¹

As we study the changes in the ages of the Patriarchs, we find there is always internal consistency for each man. There is never an instance in which the age has been changed for how long a Patriarch lived after the birth of his son without the same number of years being added to the Patriarch's life.