The Book of Moses constitutes a part of canonized scripture in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It contains revelations, teachings, and prophecies pertaining to Adam and Eve and spans topics and time up through the ministries of Enoch and Noah, paying special attention to the significant place Enoch holds in eschatological (end-of-days) scenes. Revelations in the Book of Moses teach us about the Creation, including details of the premortal existence and the purposes of creation. For example, they reveal the nature of Satan and how he became who he is. Importantly, we find sobering confirmation that Satan is not an invention of later biblical authors or a literary foil—rather, he existed from the beginning, like all of God’s spirit children, but later chose to rebel against God and Christ and to wreak havoc on the human family on earth in his relentless attempts to bring souls down into the misery he himself is experiencing. The Book of Moses gives us a window into this conflict and struggle from the time that Adam and Eve first established their family down through the days of Noah.

In God’s efforts to teach his children his divine purposes for them, the Book of Moses offers spectacular insights into the Creation, the lives of Adam and Eve, their experiences in the Garden of Eden, and the presentation of the everlasting gospel of Jesus Christ to them.[1] We learn the nature of sacrifice and see it as a symbol and type of the Lamb of God’s sacrifice.[2] We learn that Adam and Eve were instructed in their mode of worship in honoring and remembering the Father and his Son, who would perform that infinite sacrifice as the Lamb of God, the Savior and Redeemer of God’s children.[3] Further, we learn significant details about Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, beyond what the biblical text presents, details that help us better understand a story that is otherwise confusing. This story reveals that worship and the law of sacrifice have always played a crucial role in the spiritual development of God’s children and their redemption through the Son of God.

The Book of Moses also contains magnificent insights into the ministry of Enoch, a prophetic figure whom we only briefly encounter in the Bible, but about whom voluminous apocryphal and pseudepigraphic writings have much to say. We witness Enoch’s teachings, prophecies, and ministry resulting in a people who were changed by the gospel and atonement of Jesus Christ and who were eventually prepared for and taken into heaven.[4] The conditions prevalent during Enoch’s time worsened in the years leading up to Noah and the Flood, and the Book of Moses subsequently reveals the nature of this flood and how God and Noah labored to prevent it. In contrast to other flood stories extant in ancient Near Eastern literature, Genesis and the Book of Moses portray a flood rooted in the love of a God who never stops working for the salvation of his children. Importantly, this “Primeval History” (a technical term relating to the earliest times of human history), from Adam and Eve to Noah and the Flood, concentrates on God’s work of salvation, including the revelation of doctrine, covenants, and sacrificial worship in similitude of the salvific work of the Lord’s atonement. The content of these chapters within that Primeval History foreshadows and underlies the Covenant Code and the Priestly Code, as well as the tabernacle that will be revealed to and constructed by Moses as recorded in the Old Testament.[5] The events and principles outlined in these Primeval History narratives appear to have greatly influenced Moses in his time, as well as Joseph Smith and the Saints when they received these revelations, principles, and covenants along with their eventual instructions for temple construction and worship. The influence of these truths establishes one of the truly marvelous aspects of the content of the Book of Moses: it constituted a template for both ancient and modern peoples. As part of the Lord’s means of instructing the Church in the nineteenth century, its content, including the model for Zion established in the days of Enoch, had a profound effect on the way Joseph Smith and the Saints would set about to achieve Zion.

This volume attempts to juxtapose the ancient and the modern contexts of the Book of Moses. Viewing the revelations through both lenses offers a spectacular view of the timeless nature of this book of scripture. As we will see, it was such an approach that illuminated God’s work for his prophet Joseph Smith throughout the early period of the Restoration. Thus, a primary approach of this volume is to examine the Book of Moses within its context of antiquity.[6] It was this type of convergence that helped early Church members better understand how ancient scripture bound them to the past and oriented them toward a prophetic future yet to be fulfilled. They thus viewed the purposes of God as consistent throughout time yet suited to their present needs, rather than as static, archaic, or having little relevance in the present.

Moses as Author: The Book of Moses and Genesis as Ancient Sources

Just as we consider the Book of Moses to be an ancient source (written anciently or reflecting revelations that were received anciently and revealed anew in modern times), we regard Moses as an actual prophet and author. We approach his writings and recorded revelations as recovered in the Book of Moses, and as transmitted in the Bible (however imperfectly and distantly), as genuine. We view Moses as an entry point to those revelations while recognizing that the Bible in its current form does not constitute its original form and, in fact, has a long redaction history. In relation to this editorial history, the evidence of redaction in the biblical texts in their current form has led to voluminous studies and works that have, in turn, resulted in a multifarious range of approaches applying the methodologies of higher criticism to the study of these texts. Emerging early from source criticism, which became a popular tool of biblical scholars, was the Documentary Hypothesis, which informed many subsequent studies.[7] The results of these studies have achieved no lasting consensus except that the Bible in its current form appears to reflect a multiplicity of voices, despite the inability to locate whence those voices originate or when. Nevertheless, as Cory Crawford observes regarding the putative documentary sources of the Pentateuchal narratives, “Given the fact that these narratives are complete, coherent stories when separated and can be reconstituted virtually seamlessly (i.e., they are complete in their narration even though they do not always narrate the same events), it seems that they had achieved some kind of authority by the time they were compiled.”[8]

This all has implications for the Book of Moses. When it comes to authoritative stances on the Bible, or even Joseph Smith’s use of language in his translations of the Bible, no scholar, believer, or critic disagrees that Joseph Smith employed the language of the King James Version of Genesis in his efforts to recover some semblance of the words, visions, and divine instructions that God originally gave to Moses, and as they are currently recorded in the English translation of the KJV Bible. Disagreement enters the picture regarding the degree to which this prophetic foray succeeded. The degree of success and truth one sees in Joseph Smith’s engagement with antiquity will be largely commensurate with the degree to which one believes that antiquity can be accurately recovered through divine revelation. In other words, a priori assumptions about the nature of revelation and the nature of the biblical text itself largely determine how one views the sacred texts that Joseph translated and recorded. A naturalistic preconception of ancient scripture generally, and revelation in particular, tends to yield a dim view of revealed texts like the Book of Moses.

In such discussions the issue of biblical source criticism comes to the forefront. From the time of the Enlightenment up to the present day, the authorship and authority of the texts attributed to Moses have been increasingly questioned as their minutiae have been scrutinized and their potential interrelationships investigated. Arguably, the most influential source-critical studies on the Pentateuch and its origins in the past two hundred years have been those of Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen, whose source-critical examinations of the biblical texts resulted in the Graf-Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis (DH).[9] The DH model proposes four originally separate source strands later combined, interwoven, and redacted to produce the texts that we recognize today as the five books of Moses. Throughout the twentieth century, biblical scholars by and large adhered to, but then began to question or attempt to revise, the DH.[10] In more recent years, scholarly repudiations and refutations of the DH have become much more common.[11]

Bearing on—and ultimately inseparable from—the still-burgeoning source-critical and redaction controversies are the interrelated issues of canon and community. Before achieving their final canonical forms, the biblical texts were shaped by the religious communities that used them. To the canonical critic falls the burden of selecting primacy or authority amid all the variety of competing voices extant within the texts. As Crawford states, “Scriptural texts were produced, compiled, combined, and recombined by and for members of particular faith traditions . . . because the canon itself exerts force on the literary expectations of its audience.”[12] The result has been that various critical approaches have “turned away from the privileging of authorial intent (“what the text meant”) and toward the text itself (“what the text means”).”[13] In its own way, the restoration of ancient truths and translations of ancient scripture through the Prophet Joseph Smith sought to do both. In other words, “what the text meant” and “what the text means” were not treated as mutually exclusive concepts but as historically and perpetually relevant since the word of God transcended temporal bounds. The divine restoration of ancient scripture and revelations effectively lifts the Bible out of the morass it has long been in, offering insights into the elusive past and all the efforts to reconstruct it through scholarly means.

Regarding the ongoing source-critical debate and the absence of scholarly consensus, including the ever-elusive “assured results of critical scholarship,”[14] Kenneth Kitchen stated that “a large amount of inconclusive discussion by biblical scholars in almost two hundred years has established next to nothing with any surety, and has vacillated all the way between extreme conservatism (“Moses wrote all the Pentateuch”) and total nihilism (“There was no Moses, and he left nothing”).”[15] In recognizing the limitations of source criticism and its methods, one need not dismiss it as an important scholarly tool, but it is also important to acknowledge that its use can never fully or irrefutably reconstruct putative sources without corroborating documents, nor should the results of its use ever be considered a final word on any matter or as an end in and of itself, especially when trying to define or challenge the historicity of Moses and his role as a prophetic author and lawgiver.

The Prophet Joseph Smith himself recognized the importance of diachronic redactional issues as they pertained to the transmission and translation of the biblical texts. Refuting the inerrancy of the Bible, he said, “I believe the bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers.”[16] From the beginning of this dispensation, Joseph’s statement has relieved the Latter-day Saints of any obligation to embrace an extremely conservative approach to the Bible (i.e., biblical inerrancy) and reflects to some degree what Bible scholars have concluded about the biblical texts. This view also may underscore the need of a Restoration in “the fact that the ground this volume [the Bible] is seeking to cover is not virgin territory.”[17]

Significantly, the appearance of Jesus and other biblical figures—including Moses himself—to the Prophet Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery on April 3, 1836, in the Kirtland Temple also means that Latter-day Saints should not embrace a nihilist or minimalist position either (the other extreme). Restoration scripture affirms Moses as a historical person and as a prophet who left some form of a written record (see especially 2 Nephi 3:17; JST Genesis 50:35; Moses 1:23, 40–42). Elsewhere in ancient scripture, the prophet Nephi referred to “the five Books of Moses” found on the plates of brass (1 Nephi 5:11), a collection that dates back to at least the reign of Zedekiah in Jerusalem (see 1 Nephi 1:4). This suggests that by the time of Nephi (the end of the seventh century BC) there was already a fivefold division of the texts ascribed to Mosaic authorship, authority, or derivation, and this is attested in other books of ancient scripture.

At the beginning of this volume, we want to inform the reader that we approach these texts as canonized scripture. We accept their historicity and ancient origins, even if we have much more to learn about these subjects. We understand that the historicity of Moses, as well as attributing authorship of the Pentateuch to him, is debated and often denied in scholarship and that perspectives on and approaches to these issues differ even among Latter-day Saint scholars.[18] This is a debate that has endured for centuries with no scholarly consensus and with no end in sight. For our part, we accept Moses as a historical figure who was responsible, on some level, for the basic content of the scriptures attributed to him, despite academic debates revolving around redaction, sources, and final forms of the Bible. We recognize that we do not have Moses’s writings in the Pentateuch as he originally penned them (see Moses 1:41), and we are aware that academic discussions on the final form of the Pentateuch signal a long redaction history. Nevertheless, we accept that Moses cannot be removed from the equation. Multiple scriptural sources inform us that Moses recorded revelations (see, e.g., Exodus 24:4; 2 Nephi 3:17; JST Genesis 50:35). We also accept as valid the idea that the language of the King James text that Joseph Smith used as a starting point for his prophetic recovery of God’s revelations to Moses gives adequate—albeit imperfect—shape to the visions, concepts, and words that God revealed to Moses. Such would be consistent with Nephi’s statement that the Lord “speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 31:3) and in line with the principle that divinely revealed texts, like divine revelation generally, are given “after the manner of [our] language, that [we] might come to understanding” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:24).[19]

Scope

The scope of this volume is not wide enough to allow debate on how much or how little the Pentateuch preserves of that process simply to acknowledge that Moses is a part of the recording and production of scripture.[20] These academic debates serve important purposes, but they cannot and do not disprove the historicity of Moses nor what he accomplished in his lifetime. They do attempt to ascertain the origin of the Bible and its current state. Thus, while the minutiae continue to be debated in academia ad infinitum, ancient scripture and modern revelation uniquely attest to the reality of Moses and his ministry. The truth that Moses was a historical figure whose ministry spanned multiple dispensations—ministering and bestowing keys of the priesthood, recording the word of God, and establishing covenants and a worship system administered in the ancient tabernacle—is nonnegotiable in our approach to the Book of Moses and something we accept. Given the postmortal appearance of Moses in multiple contexts within scripture (including as part of the Restoration), we accept these accounts as historical and beyond the reach of academic nonconsensus.[21]

This brings us to an important component of this book: for the Prophet Joseph Smith, revelation was his guiding principle. Ancient scripture always provided the foundation, but it, combined with modern revelation, established a larger framework for building up the Lord’s kingdom. Joseph saw the past as part of the present, the present as part of the future. Throughout this volume, we discuss how Joseph Smith came to receive revelation, how he came to translate ancient texts, and how he conducted a revelatory translation of the Bible under the direction of the Lord. We explore the ancient and eternal nature of the gospel Joseph Smith came to learn through visions, angelic visitations, and revelations from God. We examine what set his ministry apart from other religious figures of the day and how ancient scripture in the form of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses, and the Book of Abraham all worked in conjunction with the Old and New Testaments to form a continuum of God’s work throughout history.

Throughout this book we explore the ancient setting of Genesis and the Book of Moses and how Joseph came to understand them through the revelations of the Lord. Since Joseph Smith is the best source to explain his experiences, we quote extensively from his own words and from those of people around him. We understand that historians of American history would like to see the viewpoints of Joseph’s critics included in this equation. We understand the importance of this view and have briefly touched on some of these issues, but it is beyond the scope and focus of this volume to explore that topic in depth, nor will space here permit such an engagement. We thus focus on ascertaining what ancient scripture meant—its text and context and how that context influenced, affected, and came to be understood by nineteenth-century converts to the Church. The Prophet Joseph Smith and the early members of the Church truly saw themselves living in an ancient order that was being restored in the latter days, and they wholeheartedly embraced the visions of the Restoration within this framework.

Here at the outset, we also want to confront the issue of bias. All academic research on religion or religious texts inevitably is written from the perspective of the believer, nonbeliever, adherent, or critic. The notion that one can remain neutral and present merely facts is much more an academic fancy than it is a producible reality. When interpretation is involved, the experience of the author appears, despite efforts to hide belief, nonbelief, or agendas. We do not try to hide our belief in the subject matter. That said, we emphasize that we have provided perspectives informed by a variety of scholarship as we have tried to better understand the ancient nature of the texts and characters in the book of Genesis. In our efforts to interpret the Book of Moses and Genesis, we have tried to be academically responsible in presenting data and conclusions. While we draw on a variety of scholarly resources, we also rely on the scriptural texts, revelations, and prophetic statements and commentary belonging to the faith tradition of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We embrace the canonical scriptures, revelations, prophetic statements, and commentary by various Church leaders as holding extraordinary value for the faith and understanding of Latter-day Saints. We realize that this represents a break with mainstream secular scholarship, and we simply want to be up front about our approach. Our belief in the texts we are examining, both spiritually and academically, puts us in a position to offer insights into what they mean in ways that someone who overlooks the sacred nature of these texts could not. As we approach this subject, we do so genuinely and openly.

While this volume is written primarily to those who embrace the teachings in the Book of Moses, we hope that the material herein can be taken as informed and academically sound and be of use and interest to a variety of audiences. The ancient perspectives discussed herein, coupled with the modern reception of the Book of Moses, will be useful in understanding just how consequential the content of the Book of Moses was in the development of Latter-day Saint faith and practice. To us, one of the most astounding and satisfying results of this volume has been finding that in immersing ourselves in the ancient world of the Book of Moses, we more clearly see ourselves in the present.

Notes

[1] See the general overview in Hafen and Hafen, “Adam, Eve, the Book of Moses, and the Temple.”

[2] “Lamb of God” (ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, ho amnos tou theou) is used twice in the New Testament book of John (John 1:29, 36) by John the Baptist in reference to Jesus. This descriptive reference to Jesus seems to draw on numerous Old Testament themes of which New Testament authors viewed Jesus as the fulfillment: Jesus as the Passover lamb (Exodus 12; 1 Corinthians 5:7; Luke 9:31), Jesus as the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53; Acts 8:32), Jesus in reference to lambs sacrificed in the temple (Leviticus 1:4; Exodus 29:38–46; 1 Peter 1:19), or the lamb in reference to Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22). Christ is also referred to as the conquering, sacrificial Lamb throughout the book of Revelation (see Bass, “Lamb of God ”). The “expression certainly emphasizes the redemptive character of the work of Christ” throughout the New Testament, drawing on numerous references and themes situated throughout the Old Testament (Douglas and Tenney, “Lamb of God,” 579). The Book of Moses describes the origins of this theology.

[3] For important links of the phrase “Lamb of God” within Restoration scripture and ties to a remnant theology within the framework of a larger Restoration template, see Frederick and Spencer, “Remnant or Replacement?,” 111–15.

[4] See Bradshaw, Bowen, and Book of Mormon Central, “Teachings of Enoch.”

[5] For the priestly concerns of Moses and the significance of the Book of Moses within its ancient setting, see Welch and Abhau, “Priestly Interests of Moses the Levite.”

[6] The Prophet Joseph Smith would receive revelations underscoring the importance of studying history, cultures, and languages (see, e.g., Doctrine and Covenants 90:15; 93:53; also 88:118; 109:7, 14), an endeavor that would help situate the gospel within an all-encompassing framework.

[7] For recent overviews of these approaches by Latter-day Saint scholars, see, for example, Crawford, “Competing Histories,” 129–46; Seely, “Latter-day Saints and Historical Biblical Criticism,” 64–88; and Welch and Abhau, “Priestly Interests of Moses the Levite.”

[8] Crawford, “Competing Histories,” 137.

[9] See Graf, Die geschichtlichen Bücher des Alten Testaments; Graf, “Die sogenannte Grundschrift des Pentateuchs,” 466–77; and Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel.

[10] See, e.g., Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist; Rentdorff, Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch; Van Seters, Prologue to History; and Van Seters, Life of Moses.

[11] See Berman, Inconsistency in the Torah; Carr, Formation of the Hebrew Bible; and Whybray, Making of the Pentateuch. The last work, though written from a perspective skeptical of the Pentateuch’s historicity, is widely regarded as one of the most devastating methodological critiques of the DH.

[12] Crawford, “Competing Histories,” 141.

[13] Crawford, “Competing Histories,” 141; emphasis in original.

[14] Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, Five Gospels, 34. They assert: “The public is poorly informed of the assured results of critical scholarship, although those results are commonly taught in colleges, universities, and seminaries. In this vacuum, drugstore books and slick magazines play on the fears and ignorance of the uninformed. Radio and TV evangelists indulge in platitudes and pieties” (p. 34). While they have a point about the need for a greater public awareness of the issues, the claim to “assured results” is a vast overstatement.

[15] Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 299. Here he also notes, “As for the role of a Moses, there is no factual evidence to exclude such a person at this period, or his having played the roles implied in Exodus and Genesis.”

[16] Joseph Smith, “History, 1838–1856, volume E-1 [1 July 1843–30 April 1844],” p. 1755, The Joseph Smith Papers.

[17] Crawford, “Competing Histories,” 142.

[18] For various approaches, see Seely, “Latter-day Saints and Historical Biblical Criticism,” 64–86; Shannon, “Mormons and Midrash,” 15–34; and Welch and Abhau, “Priestly Interests of Moses the Levite.” For source-critical approaches whose conclusions tend to oppose the historicity of ancient scripture, see, for example, Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament; Bokovoy, “Book of Moses as Prophetic Midrash,” 121–42; and Townsend, “Appropriation and Adaptation of J Material in the Book of Mormon.” For a specific response to and critique of Bokovoy’s approach, see Bradshaw, “Sorting Out the Sources in Scripture”; and Bradshaw, “Did Moses Write the Book of Genesis?”

[19] See discussion in chapter 2.

[20] See Welch and Abhau, “Priestly Interests of Moses the Levite.”

[21] The New Testament describes Moses’s postmortal appearance on the Mount of Transfiguration to bestow keys of the priesthood on Peter, James, and John (see Matthew 17:3–4; Mark 9:4–9; Luke 9:30; Doctrine and Covenants 63:21). Doctrine and Covenants 110:11 describes Moses appearing again to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery on April 3, 1836, in the temple in Kirtland, Ohio, and conferring keys of the gathering of Israel. Moses is mentioned frequently in the Book of Mormon, and from the Doctrine and Covenants we learn important details about his ministry (see 84:20–26). Restoration scripture ascribes ultimate authorship of the five books of Moses to him (see 1 Nephi 5:11; Moses 1:40–41). Jesus himself stated that he was the prophet like unto Moses that the Lord would raise up (see Deuteronomy 18:15; 3 Nephi 20:23; compare 1 Nephi 22:20–21). God speaks in the first person about how Moses was to write his visions concerning the Creation (see Moses 2:1). We learn that Nephi took from Laban records that contained the books of Moses (see 1 Nephi 5:11) and that Nephi taught from those books of Moses (1 Nephi 19:23). It is difficult to overlook this data, especially if one accepts the historicity of those texts.