The Book of Mormon chronicles the classic rise and fall of two major civilizations. Their history demonstrates how easy it is for a majority of the people to forget God, reject warnings of the Lord’s prophets, and seek power, popularity, and pleasures of the flesh.

—President Russell M. Nelson[1]

For some reason there has been chosen for our attention a story of how and why two previous civilizations on this continent were utterly destroyed.

—Hugh Nibley[2]

What is the Book of Mormon about? That is obviously an important question—certainly for Latter-day Saints, who consider the book to be divinely inspired scripture, but also for all other readers of the book. Latter-day Saints have become accustomed in recent years to say that the Book of Mormon is “all about Christ.”[3] Yet while there is no doubt that the doctrine of Christ and his atonement permeates the work, this view doesn’t quite capture the full significance of the book.

The Book of Mormon can be fruitfully examined in light of various broad categories or genres. In the first place it can be viewed as a book of theology and doctrine, and this seems to be how it is generally treated by most of its readers, particularly in a devotional context. In their study of this marvelous work, Latter-day Saints typically approach it as a source to discover and understand the commandments of God—the standards that God expects of his covenant people.[4] In addition, there have been numerous articles, books and even university classes focused on the Book of Mormon as literature, focusing on literary analysis of the text. As long ago as 1947, Sidney Sperry wrote an article entitled “The Book of Mormon as Literature,” maintaining that while the book often fell short in the beauty of its expression, its power and thematic grandeur qualified it as great literature.[5] Richard Dilworth Rust’s Feasting on the Word: The Literary Testimony of the Book of Mormon discusses many literary topics such as “narrators and narratives,” “poetry,” “imagery,” and “typology.” He points to the “literary richness” of the book, declaring that “to take a literary approach enhanced by spiritual sensitivity” is to “delight in how something is said in a way that reveals its essence.”[6]

These studies all have their value. And yet it should be obvious that the book is not, on its face, a book of doctrine, nor simply a work of literature, but a history. To be sure, it is filled with profound doctrinal and theological discussions that can greatly benefit readers in their spiritual lives. Stylistic and literary matters, too, have their place in enhancing our appreciation of the work. Yet as important as these things may be in enriching our understanding the Book of Mormon, I am convinced that we will never fully appreciate Mormon’s work and its message until we take it seriously as a work of history—the only historical account we have of what was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable civilizations in all of world history.

By this I am not saying simply that we need to take seriously the historicity of the Book of Mormon as an authentic account of a real people that existed in the past.[7] That is an argument that has been made many times (and is one I agree with).[8] Instead, my contention is that we must take Mormon’s work seriously as a work of historiography, as an attempt by a prophet-historian to say something important about some aspect of history—in this case, the history of the Nephite nation. Yet despite its obviously historical nature, there are comparatively few studies that analyze the Book of Mormon as history. Why is this? I believe there are several likely reasons.

One reason is that readers are unconsciously influenced by the nature of the first few books of our current Book of Mormon—that is, by the writings that are typically referred to as the “small plates.” Nephi specifically distinguishes those plates from the “large plates”—that is, the primary “plates of Nephi”:

These plates [i.e., the small plates] . . . are not the plates upon which I make a full account of the history of my people. . . . Upon the other plates should be engraven an account of the reign of the kings, and the wars and contentions of my people; wherefore these plates are for the more part of the ministry; and the other plates are for the more part of the reign of the kings and the wars and contentions of my people. (1 Nephi 9:2, 4)

The two books of Nephi and the book of Jacob, while they contain some historical narrative, are mostly filled with prophecy and accounts of visions, preaching, and miracles. Mormon, by contrast, based his account primarily on what he found on the large plates of Nephi, which were intended to be historically oriented, as Nephi clearly states.[9] Nevertheless, it is easy for the reader, without consciously realizing it, to allow the writings of Nephi to set the tone of the book as a whole.[10] I am certain that our attitude toward the Book of Mormon would be quite different if we had the missing 116 pages—in other words, if we had the complete Book of Mormon exactly as Mormon originally wrote it.

Another reason we resist thinking of the Book of Mormon primarily as a history is that the book itself bears little resemblance to most people’s idea of a history book. History, in the minds of most modern people, should be written in an objective, factual, even scientific style. It should lay out what happened in the past in plain terms, focusing on the human realities of past events. The Book of Mormon, in contrast, reads almost like a work of theology. Apart from the long doctrinal sermons scattered throughout, the narrator himself persistently theologizes and moralizes, drawing “lessons” from the events he relates, clearly signaling these with such phrases as “and thus we see that . . .” Thus some commentators insist that it was never intended to be a history because its message is spiritual—even though the Old Testament (and the New Testament, particularly the book of the Acts) is similarly filled with historical narratives that have spiritual content.[11]

Yet another likely reason there has been so little historical discussion of the book is that when most people conceive of historical analysis, they think of names, dates, and other facts and imagine of the work of a historian as trying to get the facts about the past correct. Accordingly, they suppose that a historical analysis of the Book of Mormon should engage in the use of written and unwritten (i.e., archaeological) sources to discover what really happened in Nephite history and perhaps consider critically the text of the Book of Mormon and the extent to which Mormon got his facts right or wrong. In other words, historical analysis is conceived of as an attempt to reconstruct the past, to determine what actually happened.[12]

If that were the only possible type of historical analysis, it would indeed be impossible to discuss the Book of Mormon historically, since there are no other sources of Nephite history, no identifiable written sources that a historian could make use of to either correct or build on the accounts given to us in the Book of Mormon itself. Attempts have been made to try to correlate Book of Mormon history with Mesoamerican history, but such connections can only be made in the most tentative fashion and with the most strenuous qualifications.[13] The significance of any such reconstruction obviously rests on one’s judgment about the relationship, if any, between such Mesoamerican civilizations as the Maya and Book of Mormon peoples.[14]

However, the attempt to reconstruct past events is only one type of history. One alternative approach is to view the text in terms of cultural history. The work done by such scholars as Hugh Nibley and John Sorenson should be regarded as a type of cultural history. Nibley in the 1940s and 50s revolutionized Book of Mormon studies by recognizing that since Lehi and his family were Israelites living in the decades before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, it should be possible to contextualize the cultural details of Nephi’s first-person account from what we know about the world of Israel in the late seventh and early sixth centuries. Sorenson has attempted to do something similar (but with much fewer extant sources) with the world of Mesoamerica.[15]

An equally important part of historical studies, however, is known as historiography. Historiographical analysis is, at bottom, simply an attempt to more fully understand a work (or group of works) of history—what ideas the author was trying to communicate about his or her subject (i.e., the author’s purpose in writing), how the author arrived at his or her conclusions (the nature of the sources used and the method used of interpreting those sources), and what might have influenced the author’s viewpoints (e.g., personal background, philosophical outlook, and culture).[16]

To understand the purpose of historiography it is important to recognize that history at its best is not merely an attempt to be accurate in our knowledge of the past (i.e., to collect the facts); it is also and most importantly about trying to understand the past. Historians deal with change over time and look for causes of change. A work of history is not a mere compilation of facts; it is rather an interpretation of facts, an attempt to marshal a mass of information into a detailed explanation of some aspect of past time. Each work of history provides a unique approach toward understanding a segment of the past. Getting the facts right is, of course, of basic importance, but the point of writing history is to organize those facts into a meaningful whole. Each historian brings his or her unique interests and background to bear on the subject at hand, and each work of history has a unique approach. To take an obvious example, the question of antebellum slavery in the United States is a controversial subject, and no two historians will address the topic in exactly the same way, even if their repository of source materials and “facts” is identical.[17] They will often view the same facts through very different lenses and, not uncommonly, reach disparate—even, at times, contradictory—conclusions. Notably, one generation of historians will typically have very different points of view and interpretations from those of an earlier generation. Hence the saying that each generation rewrites history. As the British historian Christopher Hill has remarked, “History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change[,] the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.”[18]

Historiographical study is of particular importance in the case of the most influential works of history. Such foundational works as those of the first Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides; the historical writings found in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament); the powerful portrait of the early Roman emperors as found in the Annals of Tacitus; early medieval histories by such authors as Orosius or Gregory of Tours; and the great classic by Edward Gibbon first published in 1776, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (to name only a tiny handful of examples), have had outsize influence on how later historians have seen the periods they wrote about.[19] Historiographical study of such writings helps modern historians recognize, for example, how subtle biases of such authors might have shaped our own views of the past. The view of the Roman Empire that we find depicted in Gibbon’s opus, for example, was shaped by his own interests and biases, many of which were common biases of his own time and environment (late eighteenth-century England). Most notoriously, he shared the anti-Christian prejudices of many of the learned men of the Enlightenment era and declared that the church bore much of the responsibility for the fall of the empire.[20]

The Terrain Ahead

This book argues that the Book of Mormon (specifically that portion written by Mormon) should be considered a legitimate work of history. Of course, it is not the kind of history book that would pass muster with a modern-day academic publisher; it is a very different kind of history from what we are used to in the twenty-first century. But that should come as no surprise whatsoever. To anyone who believes in the historicity and antiquity of the Book of Mormon, it should be expected that the book would bear greater similarities to ancient rather than modern works of history. Like many other ancient historiographical works, it does not shrink from overt references to deity and accepted concepts of morality. It could be described as moralistic and didactic in nature. It is best described as a sacred, or sacral, history.[21]

Historical texts written from an overtly sacral perspective, like the Book of Mormon and the historical books of the Old Testament, are often referred to disparagingly as theology rather than legitimate history, as didactic and moralizing, or even as religious and political propaganda. The roots of this dismissive attitude lie in the massive gap between the ancient and modern worldviews. It is all too easy for us in the modern world to take for granted the superiority of our way of thinking and unconsciously evaluate the ancient sources according to our own internal paradigms without stopping to realize that ancient peoples viewed the world in vastly different terms. This radical difference of perspective can make it challenging to properly understand the mentality of ancient writings—including Mormon’s record.[22] Peoples of the premodern world (i.e., before the Scientific Revolution in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe) took for granted not only the existence of deity, or deities, and the primordial creation of the world through divine initiative, but also the idea that the gods frequently intervened in human society, particularly by means of sacral kings who served in a kind of mediating role between humankind and the gods. They conceived of the world in all its diversity of operations as being permeated by the presence and the active involvement of conscious, supernatural beings. In contrast, the modern concept of nature as a purely physical system controlled by a variety of objective, impersonal, and immutable laws was completely foreign to their way of thinking.

To prepare the reader to more fully appreciate Mormon’s record as a sacral history and to better grasp his intent in assembling and writing it, I will lay a broad foundation in two general areas. First, we will begin our quest with an excursion into the worldview of ancient peoples. Second, since most readers will have little or no knowledge of historiography, or how the writing of history has changed through the ages, I will provide a broad survey of the field. Indeed, to properly understand the notion of sacral history, it is essential to see it in the context of the sacral nature of ancient civilization in general. This avoids the trap of seeing ancient historiography superficially as a kind of religious or theological propaganda.

For readers who may be tempted to jump ahead to the chapters that deal more directly with Mormon and his history, let me emphasize that in trying to understand the past, we must remember that historical context is of utmost importance. More specifically, seeking to perceive the intentions of ancient writers, that is, an accurate understanding of their mindset or mentality, is essential. The famous opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between states, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Similarly, past societies thought very differently, and we can fully appreciate the writings they left to us only by striving to understand their mental world and how dramatically it differed from our own.[23]

Ideally, of course, we would focus nearly all our attention on Mormon himself and the worldview of the Nephites in the fourth century. But that is simply impossible, due to limited evidence. Because we are so limited in our knowledge of Mormon’s own world or the civilization of the Nephites more generally, we must cast our net more broadly. The key here is to focus on some of the most basic aspects of the ancient mindset that are attested so widely that we can be reasonably confident that they were part of Mormon’s own worldview. For example, one extremely common element of ancient sacral culture was the sacral kingship. As we will discuss in chapter 3, kings in the ancient world were almost always viewed as having an especially intimate relationship with deity as well as a corresponding duty to care for their people. Every nation had its own variations on this theme, but this view of kingship, which contrasts dramatically from modern notions of kings or governments in general, was nearly universal in antiquity.[24] Indeed, it was central in many ways to the whole ancient mentality regarding the nature of the cosmos. In the case of the Book of Mormon, we cannot know the extent to which specific Nephite practices might have resembled or differed from those of the ancient Israelites or the Egyptians or Assyrians. But we do have more than enough information to be confident that the Nephites had some form of sacral kingship, indicating that their culture should be viewed as taking part in the archaic sacral milieu.

Part I of this book aims to bridge the vast chasm of understanding between ancient and modern mentalities by providing a broad overview of what I call the “sacral worldview.” Chapter 1 sets the stage by setting out the radical differences between the ancient and modern perspectives. Chapters 2 through 4 comprise a broad survey of some of the most characteristic features of the ancient worldview. This discussion will necessarily be broad in scope, focusing on basic attitudes and gathering examples from a wide variety of peoples over many centuries. The purpose of this overview, it must again be emphasized, is not to suggest that all ancient peoples held precisely the same views of the world, but rather to show that virtually all ancient societies shared certain general attitudes about the cosmos that contrast dramatically with those of the modern era. In addition to kingship, discussion of the sacral worldview will consider such things as the nature of deity, the relationship between deity and humankind, and notions about chaos and cosmos (i.e., disorder and order) and sacral space and temples. Another vital topic, sacral time, had a direct impact on how ancient peoples viewed history.

With a better understanding of the ancient sacral perspective under our belts, it will then be easier to understand the concept of “sacral history” and how it differed from the modern canons of historiography. Part II addresses this issue by conducting a broad survey of the development of historical writings over the last four millennia. Chapter 5 discusses in broad terms the nature of sacral history. The historiographical survey then begins in chapter 6 with a brief discussion of the early annalistic writings of Mesopotamia and Egypt, examining the general nature of these early texts but principally focusing on their sacral aspects—the ways in which they reflect the sacral worldview of their respective societies. Chapter 7 examines the development of more connected historical narratives in the writings of the Israelites, as well as the broad sacral themes relating to the idea of covenant found in the book of Deuteronomy and the later historical books commonly referred to as the Deuteronomic History. Thereafter we will take a brief look at the further development of historiographical writings in the Western world, first of all by the Greeks and Romans (chapter 8), then in the ages of medieval and early modern Europe. From there we will turn to the development of modern conceptions of historiography in the nineteenth century and the outright rejection of many of the assumptions of sacral historiography that, until then, had been taken for granted for several thousand years (chapter 9).

My overview of Greco-Roman, medieval, and early modern European historiography might well seem irrelevant to a discussion of Mormon’s record, because those works were written many centuries later in different civilizations with which the Nephites had no contact whatsoever. But the point of this discussion will be to provide insight into how Mormon’s approach to history fits within the ancient milieu and to show how it was typical of premodern historical writing. Mormon’s history is clearly a didactic work—it was written with the goal of enlightening its readers regarding numerous moral and religious principles and furnishing moral exemplars, both positive and negative. However, that should not disqualify it as legitimate historiography. All ancient historiographical works, even those of the Greeks and Romans, were filled with moralistic content. In particular, the work of the early Greek historian Herodotus, who is commonly referred to as “the Father of History,” should be seen as a hybrid sacred-secular mix. The main purpose of this broad historiographical overview is to demonstrate that the sacral and didactic tendency we find in Mormon’s record is by no means unique nor even limited, as one might suppose, to the writings of the ancient Near East or even the ancient world as a whole. Instead, in many ways it was a common, almost universal tendency that survived until roughly the nineteenth century. In other words, what we typically think of today as proper or legitimate history writing has been in existence less than two centuries. Moreover, many of the basic historical themes furnished by the Israelite, Greek, and Roman historians bear considerable similarities with Mormon’s own themes, which will be covered in part III.

With a solid grounding in the idea of sacral history, we will move on in part III to focus more specifically on Mormon’s history. Chapter 10 considers the nature of the Mormon’s sources and the historiographical methods he employed, while chapter 11 discusses the ways in which his sacral approach to the past fits into the themes and patterns discussed previously, in particular the covenantal themes of Deuteronomy. I give particular attention to what I consider the principal historical themes of the book—above all, the theme of contention and war and the role that social and political conflicts played in the decline and fall of the Nephite nation. Like all good historiography, the Book of Mormon focuses on the question of causation—why things happened the way they did. The implicit question behind Mormon’s history is why the Nephite nation fell and was ultimately destroyed, despite having received the Lord’s choicest blessings throughout its history. Mormon’s entire work is devoted to this historiographical question, in addition to the themes more narrowly described as theological in nature, the most important of which is God’s mercy and forgiveness through the atonement of Christ.

Finally, chapter 12 consists of a narrative account of Mormon’s history, designed to place in high relief its principal historiographical themes as discussed in chapter 11. Readers of the Book of Mormon have often questioned why it contains so much about war. Latter-day Saints in particular tend to assume that the book, as scripture, was intended to inspire and uplift its readers emotionally and spiritually, to provide positive role models, and so on.[25] Yet in a very real sense Mormon’s record is a book about failures. Mormon writes very little about the happy times of the Nephites, but focuses nearly all his narrative energies on discussing times of wickedness and evil.[26] Why is this? It could be because, as Tolstoy famously said in the opening line of Anna Karenina, “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—and hence much more interesting! But surely Mormon had a deeper purpose in mind than simply to write a compelling story. His primary intent was, in effect, to provide a kind of test case designed to demonstrate to his future readers in the modern world exactly what can happen when a people (a) is greatly blessed by God and then (b) completely abandons God’s commandments.

As we will see, Mormon’s main narrative is not a story of “mostly righteous Nephites who eventually fall and are destroyed.” Although this is how the book is sometimes superficially understood, that model of Nephite history is, in fact, almost the inverse of the one that Mormon intended. Instead, his narrative is a story of repeated falls followed in each case by repentance and forgiveness, until the tragic end.[27]

Like the Old Testament, Mormon’s record is a history of a society that as often as not violated God’s commands and suffered the inevitable—ultimately disastrous—results. Mormon begins with an impending war and the collapse of one people (the city of Jerusalem and the state of Judah) and ends with the annihilation of another, the Nephites, while the book of Ether presents the utter extermination of a third people, the Jaredites.[28] Conflict, war, death, and destruction are in no way a peculiar or extraneous aspect of Mormon’s book, but rather a core element of his historiographical and theological message. War and conflict permeate the book, particularly the historical core of the book consisting (as we shall see) of the books of Alma, Helaman, and 3 Nephi 1–10. And as will become clear, most of the warfare that Mormon is interested in is not, as it might appear on the surface, war between two separate peoples, Nephites versus Lamanites. Instead, it is more accurately viewed as a series of civil conflicts among a single people, the Nephites. Inevitably, the wars that Mormon discusses in detail originate with what he typically refers to as “contention” and are led by Nephites who “dissented” over to the Lamanites. The wars, for Mormon, along with their calamitous results, are merely the most extreme manifestations of the contentions and conflicts that occurred with almost clockwork regularity among the Nephites.

Latter-day Saints often point up the theme of pride and the “pride cycle” in the Book of Mormon. The theme of contention is even more pervasive in the book than that of pride. The words contention and contend are found 145 times in the book, with 125 of those occurrences coming in Mormon’s record.[29] In contrast, the words pride and proud occur only 76 times in total, including 54 occurrences in Mormon’s record.[30] In reality, however, the two themes, contention and pride, are intimately intertwined.

A Word on Terminology and Prophetic Inspiration

Since my focus is on the historical writing of Mormon, I will be paying little attention to the section of the Book of Mormon commonly referred to as the “small plates” (i.e., the books of 1 Nephi through Omni).[31] Moreover, I will consider only briefly certain passages authored by Moroni, most importantly the title page of the Book of Mormon and the book of Ether. Grant Hardy and others have shown that Moroni should be regarded as his own author with his own style and perspective, and not merely as a surrogate of his father Mormon.[32] But although I find Hardy’s contention generally convincing, I believe nonetheless that the son was striving in large measure to fulfill his father’s wishes in completing the magnum opus that his father had been unable to finish and was not attempting to strike out in a different direction.

In view of this focus, I use “Mormon’s record” and “Mormon’s history” to refer to the book as originally written by Mormon, and I use “Book of Mormon” only when referring to the entire work as it exists today, including the writings of the “small plates.” In addition, I use “book of Mormon” (lowercase) to refer to Mormon’s own account of his own times, a “book” within the Book of Mormon. Also note that all highlighted text in bold or italics in quotations from the Book of Mormon and the Bible has been added for emphasis. Also note that, except where otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible.

President Ezra Taft Benson once described God as the “author” of the Book of Mormon.[33] Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe, as a matter of faith and Church doctrine, that God has, throughout history and into the present, revealed his will to prophets in various times and through various modalities. This, however, does not mean that prophets merely record the words dictated by God to their minds, with no thought taken on their own part.

As a believing Latter-day Saint, I embrace the idea of real prophecy, namely, that God can and does place ideas and even actual words in our minds, which can then be written down and recorded as prophecy.[34] Many passages of the scriptures, particularly in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, are specifically identified as such, typically by the phrase “Thus saith the Lord . . .” This language is also used in many sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, suggesting that those verses may have, but not necessarily, been given word for word to the Prophet Joseph Smith. In many other cases, however, it appears much more likely that Joseph formulated passages using his own language under inspiration.

I also believe, however, that in many cases, if not all, each prophet processes the ideas given him (or her) by God and must write them out in his own words. In the process of writing a polished work, a prophet often includes some of his own ideas, based on his own experiences, in attempting to explain the inspired ideas.

Moroni twice expresses his concern for the weakness of his own writing: “Lord thou hast made us mighty in word by faith, but thou has not made us mighty in writing” (Ether 12:23; see v. 25). Moses and Enoch, in contrast, express their insecurity about their speaking ability (Exodus 4:10; Moses 6:31). In letter to W. W. Phelps dated November 1832, Joseph expressed a prayer to God that one day he could be delivered “from the little narrow prison, almost as it were, total darkness of paper, pen and ink; and a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language.”[35]

Although I don’t think it is generally worthwhile to try to categorize which prophetic utterances were given directly verbatim and which were not, it may be useful to briefly examine section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants. The first four verses are written as a third-person description of the Lord, while verses 5–10 are written in the Lord’s own words. Verse 11 begins, “We, Joseph Smith, Jun., and Sidney Rigdon, being in the Spirit . . . by the power of the Spirit our eyes were opened and our understandings were enlightened, so as to see . . . the things of God.” Beginning with verse 19, they continue: “And while we meditated upon these things, the Lord touched the eyes of our understandings and they were opened, and the glory of the Lord shone round about. And we beheld the glory of the Son, on the right hand of the Father, and received of his fulness.” Thereafter they describe in great detail what they saw in vision and what they understood it to mean. But these descriptions appear to be in their own words rather than in words directly given to them by God.

Similarly, Mormon states that he has made his record “according to the knowledge and the understanding which God has given me” (Words of Mormon 1:9). I take this to refer to his general understanding, which he attributes to God, but he does not claim direct inspiration for the exact content of the book. On certain occasions, he tells us, there were certain things that he was specifically instructed to include or to exclude (3 Nephi 26:11–12; 28:25). He is even more specific in Words of Mormon 1:7 regarding his decision to include Nephi’s small plates for a “wise purpose; for thus it whispereth me, according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me.” Similarly, according to the title page, the book was “written by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation.”

Thus, in this book I take Mormon to be the primary author of the Book of Mormon, although he wrote it with the spirit of inspiration and occasionally from direct revelation. Furthermore, it is only on relatively rare occasions that the Lord tell us to do something out of the blue without our having already pondered the issue because of its importance to us. I am confident that this was the case with Mormon.[36]

Notes

[1]“Hear Him,” Ensign or Liahona, April 2020.

[2]The Prophetic Book of Mormon, ed. John W. Welch, vol. 8 of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Provo, UT: FARMS; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1989), 365.

[3] See Susan Easton Black, Finding Christ Through the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1987). Black has calculated that references to Christ appear on average in the Book of Mormon every 1.7 verses. After reviewing the Book of Mormon cover page in detail, David B. Honey similarly asserts that “it is a work devoted to teaching and testifying of Christ, as exemplified by the Christ-centered themes of the nine chapters written by Nephi to conclude his account immediately following the Isaiah excerpts.” See “The Secular as Sacred: The Historiography of the Title Page,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3, no. 1 (1994), 99. Although Mormon had decided, under the influence of the Spirit, to include the small plates in his record, he tells us that he had no idea of the Lord’s purposes behind that decision, and hence it is unlikely that those writings specifically influenced the description of the book on the title page. For the importance of Christ in the Book of Mormon, see also Jeffrey R. Holland, Christ and the New Covenant: The Messianic Message of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2009); Robert L. Millet, “Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” in The Book of Mormon: First Nephi, the Doctrinal Foundation, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1988), 173; and Robert J. Matthews, “What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Jesus Christ,” in The Book of Mormon: The Keystone Scripture, ed. Paul. R. Cheesman (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1988), 32–33. I emphasize that I am in no way attempting to minimize the importance of Christ in the Book of Mormon but merely arguing that Mormon’s purpose as a historian transcended this crucial theme.

[4] There are countless studies of the Book of Mormon that take this approach, many of which are written for a general church audience and take a more devotional approach, focusing narrowly on church doctrine. In addition, the articles in the nine-volume set of books on the Book of Mormon published by the BYU Religious Studies Center from 1988 to 1995 (available at https://rsc.byu.edu/books/by-category/7) touch on a number of different subjects, but these volumes, too, bear such subtitles as “The Doctrinal Foundation,” “The Doctrinal Structure,” and “Salvation Only Through Christ,” indicating that the principal focus is doctrinal. Several more recent attempts take a more robust theological approach. See, for example, Joseph M. Spencer, The Anatomy of Book of Mormon Theology, 2 vols. (Sandy, UT: Greg Kofford, 2021), and the Brief Theological Introductions series published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute in 2020, which seeks to combine “intellectual rigor and the disciple’s yearning for holiness.”

[5] The article was originally part of Sperry’s book Our Book of Mormon (4th ed., Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1950), 77–82. It was reprinted in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 41–47, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol4/iss1/10/.

[6] Richard Dilworth Rust, Feasting on the Word: The Literary Testimony of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1997), 1; see Charles Swift, “The Literary Power of the Book of Mormon,” in Living the Book of Mormon: Abiding by Its Precepts, ed. Gaye Strathearn and Charles Swift (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2007), 72–84. See also a recent anthology of articles from BYU Studies Quarterly entitled The Book of Mormon as Literature (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 2012). Grant Hardy, in Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), argues that his approach is “not quite historical and not quite literary” (p. xvii), but to my mind it is much more the latter than the former, focusing in large measure on such literary matters as narrative style and characterization. Hardy’s descriptions of Mormon, for example, have a decided bias toward viewing him as a writer of literature rather than as a historian. He does have a brief section entitled “Mormon as Historian,” which focuses primarily on Mormon’s interest in chronology, while in the section entitled “Mormon as Literary Artist” he discusses how Mormon must craft his narrative in great part by “leaving things out,” ignoring the basic reality of historiography that every work of history (certainly every work of some breadth) must omit more than it includes. (See also p. 119 therein: Mormon “deliberately choos[es] which facts to include or omit.”) In a further section entitled “Mormon as Moral Guide,” Hardy is seemingly unaware that much ancient historiography had a high moral content. Steven C. Walker, a professor of English, in a review of Hardy’s book (BYU Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3 [2011]: 167), agrees that the book is a “purely literary reading” of the Book of Mormon. With respect to classroom studies, Walker notes that Charles Swift has taught a course at BYU entitled “Book of Mormon as Literature.” And according to Grant Shreve, Seth Perry at Princeton University has taught a course entitled “American Scriptures,” which includes the Book of Mormon and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, among other texts, and addresses “how these works use rhetoric to present themselves as Scripture” (“The Book of Mormon Gets the Literary Treatment,” Religion and Politics, May 23, 2017, https://religionandpolitics.org/2017/05/23/the-book-of-mormon-gets-the-literary-treatment/). Daniel Becerra et al., in Book of Mormon Studies: An Introduction and Guide (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2022), 40–45, discuss a variety of literary approaches to the Book of Mormon. I am fully aware that historiography can be seen as a kind of literature and that such literary techniques as narrative style, characterization, and metaphor can have a major impact on the historical picture an author is making. Nevertheless, there is an important distinction between analysis of stylistic matters for their own sake and analyzing how they are used in service of a historical explanation.

[7] In contrast to those who argue that the Book of Mormon should be viewed not as a historical account of a real civilization but rather as a kind of lengthy inspired parable designed to teach purely spiritual principles, orthodox Latter-day Saint theology holds that the book represents the history of a real people. Nevertheless, if we insist that the point of the book is really its theological and doctrinal content, it matters very little whether the story is factual or not. To fully grasp Mormon’s purpose in writing such a book, we must recognize that it is a real account of a real people who were greatly blessed and ultimately found wanting by the Lord to the extreme degree that they were utterly destroyed. The recorded events took place in a real social and political context. At the same time, I should point out that it is by no means absolutely necessary for the book’s readers to believe in the historical reality of Mormon as the author of his history in order to find value herein. A reader of any book, whether historical, literary, or something else, naturally wants to know what the author’s point is, and even if we should theorize that the true author was Joseph Smith or some other modern figure, that question still holds. But obviously this book is likely to have more resonance for a reader who views Mormon as a real man who was writing a real history of a real people. On the question of the historicity of the Book of Mormon, see Stephen O. Smoot, “The Imperative for a Historical Book of Mormon” (Interpreter Foundation, 2013), https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/content/imperative-historical-book-mormon; more broadly, see Paul Y. Hoskisson, ed., Historicity and the Latter-day Saint Scriptures (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2001).

[8] Arguments in favor of historicity have been made by Latter-day Saint apologetic writers since the time of Joseph Smith. Hugh Nibley raised the ante considerably with his book Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1952).

[9] See 1 Nephi 6:1, 3–5; 2 Nephi 4:14; 5:33. Jacob tells us that his brother specifically gave him a commandment “that I should not touch, save it were lightly, concerning the history of this people which are called the people of Nephi. For he said that the history of his people should be engraven upon his other plates” (Jacob 1:2–3; emphasis added). See the discussion in Eric C. Olson, “The ‘Perfect Pattern’: The Book of Mormon as a Model for the Writing of Sacred History,” BYU Studies Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1991), 7–8.

[10] Even a scholar of the caliber of Daniel Ludlow fell into this trap, as it were. He argued that the Book of Mormon “does not claim to be primarily a history book” and insisted that “the major writers” of the book assert that it is not a work of history. Yet the verses he quotes in support of this claim are all by Nephi from the small plates! Nowhere does he quote Mormon, the principal author of the book, as saying that it was not intended as a work of history. See Daniel H. Ludlow, “The Challenge of the Book of Mormon,” in The Book of Mormon: The Keystone Scripture, ed. Paul R. Cheesman (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1988), 5–6.

[11] John L. Sorenson, in Mormon’s Codex: An Ancient American Book (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2013), 104–7, notes several ways in which the Book of Mormon differs from modern historiographical practices. He observes that the coverage of Nephite history is extremely uneven for a work of history: “Sixty-two percent of the Book of Mormon texts deals with one 160-year period (130 BC–AD 30), while events of the next three centuries are treated tersely in only four pages.” Moreover, he states, “Book of Mormon historians were not ‘value-free’ recorders of events, as some modern historians claim to be.” Rather, he says, it is clear from the title page onward that the work was intended to “shape the opinion of its readers.” As we will see, scarcely any historiographical work can truly be described as “value-free” or as not attempting to “shape the opinion of its readers.” This is doubly true for historiography written before the mid-nineteenth century. Sorenson, in attempting to distinguish Mormon’s work from full-blown history in the modern sense, describes the Book of Mormon as “lineage history,” emphasizing the book’s tendency to focus on “events and actors that shaped the development of a particular social group—usually a kin-based one.” He further states that the book was intended to serve a narrow purpose, “to defend, justify, and glorify a line of rulers and their achievements and values.” While this may be a useful approach, I believe the more obvious focus of the book is on sacral issues, such as attitudes toward deity and moral responses thereto, and hence I describe it as “sacral history.”

[12] Grant Hardy thus typifies “the task of historians” as “reconstruct[ing] the past by triangulating from multiple primary sources.” Because no such sources exist for the Book of Mormon, he says, it is not possible to read the book as an “ordinary history” or engage in historical analysis. All one could do, in his opinion, would be to “look for anachronisms or parallels with ancient North American or Mesoamerican cultures in order to evaluate the historical claims of the book in general.” Understanding the Book of Mormon, xvii. But since the book itself makes no clear connection with any archaeologically known North American or Mesoamerican culture, any such analysis would be highly speculative. The only direct historical linkage with outside sources that can be made based on the text of the Book of Mormon itself is with respect to the origin of Lehi and his family from Jerusalem shortly before the Babylonian captivity in 586 BC.

[13] An example of such an attempt is Brant A. Gardner’s correlation of the origin of the Gadianton robbers with the nahualistas of the city of Teotihuacán. See his Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford, 2007), 5:10–29. While intriguing, the hypothesis rests on a highly speculative foundation.

[14] As Brant Gardner acknowledges in Second Witness, John L. Sorenson’s geographical correlation of the Book of Mormon to a New World setting in Mesoamerica is “the best working model” but is far from “the final word” (1:6). Apart from the geographical correlation, which is itself highly provisional, there is the further question of cultural and historical correlations, which are even more uncertain. See John L. Sorenson, Mormon’s Codex: An Ancient American Book (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2013), and the critical review by Brant Gardner and Mark Alan Wright, “John L. Sorenson’s Complete Legacy: Reviewing Mormon’s Codex,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 14 (2015): 209–21. See also Dan Belnap, “‘And It Came to Pass . . .’: The Sociopolitical Events in the Book of Mormon Leading to the Eighteenth Year of the Reign of the Judges,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 23 (2014): 104n5; and Brant A. Gardner, Traditions of the Fathers: The Book of Mormon as History (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford, 2015), 1–23, especially the last few paragraphs, and 401–9.

[15] See, for example, the following titles by Hugh W. Nibley: Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites; An Approach to the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1957); and Since Cumorah (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1967). Sorenson’s two major publications are An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985) and Mormon’s Codex.

[16] The term historiography is often defined as “the history of history,” that is, outlining how the study of the past has changed over various generations. This is especially applicable to the last couple of centuries, when the study of history has become professionalized and has divided itself into various schools or approaches. For example, one of the most far-reaching developments in the professional study of history occurred in the 1930s with the rise of the so-called Annales school, which sought to go beyond traditional narrative history oriented around discrete political and diplomatic events and to focus attention instead on long-term social and economic developments.

[17] See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 480–88; and Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (London: Penguin, 1961).

[18] Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972; repr., Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984). See Michael Grant, Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation (London: Routledge, 1995), 92.

[19] For examples of works of historiographical analysis, see T. J. Luce, Livy: The Composition of His History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), especially 139–84 on Livy’s sources, 185–229 on his historical methods, and 230–97 on the ideas and themes (particularly the moral decline of Rome) that underlie Livy’s history; Ronald Mellor, Tacitus (New York: Routledge, 1993); Arnaldo Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Ronald Syme, Sallust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); and Brian McGing, Polybius’ Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[20] See Duncan S. Ferguson, “Historical Understanding and the Enlightenment: Edward Gibbon on Christianity,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 52, no. 4 (December 1983), 391–403. J. G. A. Pocock has written a massive six-volume historiographical analysis of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall entitled Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015).

[21] Compare Brant Gardner’s statement: “Mormon is a kind of historian, but he is unlike a modern historian in the way he perceives his task. Mormon does not write secular but sacred history.” Second Witness, 5:12.

[22] This modernist worldview of historical scholarship, based on the concepts of objectivity and science, has made it surprisingly difficult for scholars to come to grips with the religious views of antiquity. This was particularly true in the field of Egyptology for much of the twentieth century. Adolf Erman, in his classic Handbook of Egyptian Religion (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), repeatedly referred to Egyptian religion as “confusing” and “primitive.” See, for example, pp. 3, 99, 146. Similarly, Sir Alan Gardiner, one of the premier Egyptologists of the twentieth century, once stated that some Egyptian religious texts “must appear to the modern mind as unmitigated rubbish.” Quoted in Geraldine Pinch, Egyptian Myth: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12. In his classic history, Egypt of the Pharaohs (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), Gardiner refers to “the tortuous workings of the Egyptian mind” (p. 186) and the “vast accumulations of mythological rubbish” (p. 227). Rudolf Anthes, in contrast, took issue with this rather common attitude of condescension toward Egyptian thought, suggesting that there was clearly “some incongruity” between the Egyptians’ “sober effectiveness” in “politics, architecture, and art, and what seems to be their inability for clear thinking in religious matters” and that Egyptologists should rather “acknowledge the fact that we are not yet equal to the Pyramid Texts.” Quoted in Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000), 106. Compare the remarks in Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 2–3: with respect to “doctrines that strike us as contradictory . . . it is sheer presumption to accuse the ancients of muddleheadedness on this score.” More recent scholarship on Egyptian religion has been much more open-minded toward understanding the ancient worldview on its own terms. In this regard, see the discussion in Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Abraham (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 2009), 107–14, especially 112–13, where he points out that the modern approach to “solving problems” is to isolate them “in artificially closed systems. Thus we find a tidy correlation between the consumption of cholesterol and heart disease and immediately announce that all cholesterol is deadly. We get quick answers by oversimplification. The Egyptian, on the other hand, ‘did justice to the complexity of a problem by allowing a variety of partial solutions’ and then allow ‘for the possibility that there might be missing pieces that in the end would link up the two apparent contradictions.’”

[23] Compare Daniel J. Boorstin’s attempt to “discover the dominant spirit of the Jeffersonian view of the world” in The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) while acknowledging that it “can be only imperfectly recaptured, at best” (pp. xii–xiii). For the western medieval world, see Jacques Le Goff’s Medieval Civilization 400–1500 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), especially chap. 9, “Mentalities, Sensibilities, and Attitudes.”

[24] Christopher Dawson described the archaic culture founded on the notion of sacral kingship as the “archetypal pattern . . . which underlies all the most ancient civilizations of the world.” Religion and Culture (New York: Meridian, 1958), 116.

[25] For example, Steven Olsen raises the question why the Book of Mormon, given its “single-minded spiritual purposes,” includes so much content that at least appears to be incongruous with those purposes—military campaigns, political intrigues, social crises. This impression of incongruity is heightened by the realization that on numerous occasions Mormon “subordinated or eliminated altogether material such as the work of the Church of Christ and the gospel’s influence on its adherents in favor of giving full narrative attention to seemingly secular content.” In addition, he drastically truncated his account of the two hundred years of utopian civilization following the coming of Christ and ended his narration with the “gruesome” account of the Nephites’ annihilation, even though he (and Moroni) “could have included the stories of righteous Nephites who had initially escaped the catastrophe and continued to live the gospel as best they could.” “Prophecy and History: Structuring the Abridgment of the Nephite Records,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no. 1 (2006): 21. Similarly, Sidney Sperry described it as “vexing” that Mormon treats so sparingly what Sperry called “the great Golden Era of Nephite history” after the visit of Christ. He suggested that the reason might be that Mormon was forbidden from revealing details of their remarkable system of having all things in common. Book of Mormon Compendium (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1970), 434. Such a thesis is conceivable but highly speculative, with no textual basis whatsoever. Instead, it should be noted that Mormon’s selection of facts fits well his broader pattern of focusing our attention on negative models—examples, as it were, of how we should not behave.

[26] See Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, 107.

[27] Some critics of the Book of Mormon have derided the book as a simplistic story of good guys versus bad guys. But Latter-day Saints themselves have also tended to read the book with a similar kind of simplistic outlook by focusing on the righteous heroes in the book—men of tremendous religious devotion like Nephi, Benjamin, the two Almas, Captain Moroni, and Helaman—as though they were representative of the Nephite civilization as a whole, even though those leaders were, as often as not, calling their people to repentance.

[28] Although we do not possess the first sections of Mormon’s record, we can be confident that it began in the same fashion as our current Book of Mormon, with the exodus of Lehi and his small family from Jerusalem a decade or so before its final conquest by the Babylonian Empire. See Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford, 2019), 121–44.

[29] One could, of course, also consider other closely related terms such as dissension, dissent, dissenter, disputation, and strife, not to mention war, bloodshed, and so on.

[30] To provide additional perspective, let me add that Stephen D. Ricks has calculated that the word covenant(s) appears 131 times in the Book of Mormon. See “The Treaty/Covenant Pattern in King Benjamin’s Address (Mosiah 1–6),” BYU Studies Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1984): 151n3. Approximately thirty-five of those occurrences are in the small plates.

[31] This designation of “small plates of Nephi” is a modern usage. Nephi nowhere uses that term, but see Jacob 3:13 and Jarom 1:14.

[32] See Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, 217–67. See alsoGary Layne Hatch, “Mormon and Moroni: Father and Son,” in The Book of Mormon: Fourth Nephi through Moroni, From Zion to Destruction, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1995), 110: “Instead of the concise, objective style of the sober and observant Mormon, Moroni gives us glimpses into his own fears, sorrows, and misgivings. . . . In his writing, Moroni also lacks the confident, concise, and detached style of Mormon.”

[33] “The Book of Mormon Is the Word of God,” Ensign, April 1975.

[34] The Church’s “Guide to the Scriptures” defines prophecy as follows: “A prophecy consists of divinely inspired words or writings, which a person receives through revelation from the Holy Ghost. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy (Rev. 19:10). A prophecy may pertain to the past, present, or future. When a person prophesies, he speaks or writes that which God wants him to know, for his own good or the good of others. Individuals may receive prophecy or revelation for their own lives.” (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/gs/prophecy-prophesy). For a broader discussion of the idea of spiritual communication and spiritual knowledge, see Gregory Steven Dundas, Explaining Mormonism: A Believing Skeptic’s Guide to the Latter-day Saint Worldview (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022), 224–38.

[35] History, 1838–1856, volume A-1 [23 December 1805–30 August 1834], pp. 242–43, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/248.

[36] See Richard L. Bushman, “The Little, Narrow Prison of Language: The Rhetoric of Revelation,” The Religious Educator 1, no. 1 (2000). See also Michael R. Ash, Rethinking Revelation and the Human Element in Scripture: The Prophet’s Role as Creative Co-Author (Redding, CA: FAIR, 2021).