The Visions of Moses is in the words of a narrator. When it ends, there is a change of voice in the text, and God himself becomes the narrator for what follows. The Lord had told Moses earlier, “I will speak unto you concerning this earth upon which you stand, and you shall write the things which I shall speak.” Now he begins the divine narration by saying, “Behold I reveal unto you concerning this heaven and this earth. Write the words which I speak.”[1] From that point until the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, God is the speaker and Moses is the scribe.

Creation

Revelation gives us what we can perhaps call the “standard Creation account,” with its narrative of six creative days followed by a day of rest. This is the account that God has used to teach about the Creation in the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and latter-day dispensations, and it is found, with minor variations in detail, in the Book of Abraham, the Bible, the Joseph Smith Translation, and in the temple.[2] This account presents the billions of years of God’s work in the universe and on our planet in the symbolism of days to help our understanding. Order and sequence matter in the narrative: generally speaking, cosmology is followed by geology and then biology. Simple life forms precede more complex life forms, and humans are at the apex of God’s creative work.

The Joseph Smith Translation shows that its Creation account is a revision, or a restoration, of the Mosaic narrative. It differs from the biblical account not with the addition of blocks of new text but through the revision of existing words. The JST shifts the voice away from the third-person narrative that we are familiar with in the Bible to a first-person narrative in which God speaks. The King James text is on the left and the Prophet’s revision is on the right, with comparisons highlighted by underlining in the KJV and bold type in the JST.

Genesis 1:3–4

In addition, God is not alone in his creating:

Genesis 1:26

The narration in God’s words continues into the next part of the text, the account of the first parents in the Garden of Eden.

In the Garden

As Joseph Smith worked on his Bible translation in the fall of 1830, he prepared a new reading of the stories of the Creation and the early experiences of Adam and Eve. At the beginning of Genesis 3, God revealed to him a text of about 180 words that does not look like anything else in the Old Testament. In a remarkable way it adds context to the Garden of Eden narrative that immediately follows it. It reports that Satan, later to be represented by the serpent in the Garden, came to God and volunteered to be his son. He said he would redeem everyone. God’s Beloved Son, however, said, “Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever.” Satan rebelled and was “cast down.” The impact of those events would go far beyond Adam and Eve and would be universal, because Satan would set out “to deceive and to blind men,” and he would lead away captive at his will all who would not obey God.[3] This new text, coming directly before the account of the Fall, provides the backdrop for the Fall and gives its events greater meaning.

In depicting the events in the Garden of Eden, the Joseph Smith Translation often follows the biblical narrative fairly closely. But its added emphasis on agency and accountability is unmistakable:

Genesis 2:17

Esteemed as Naught and Had Again

We have seen that God told Moses that the day would come in which people would esteem God’s words “as naught” and “take many of them” from the book that Moses would write. At a later time, however, God would “raise up another” like unto Moses, and those words would be “had again among the children of men, among even as many as shall believe.”[4]

These statements are not as clear as some Latter-day Saints have assumed. They tell us that Moses would write God’s words, indeed a “book,” but they do not tell us what that book would be. They tell us that the lost words would be restored, but they do not tell us when or how. It appears that the Joseph Smith Translation answers those questions and others and that the Visions of Moses and the revised accounts of the Creation and Fall are the record that would be lost and restored.

Centuries-old tradition has attributed to Moses the authorship of the first five books of the Bible—Genesis to Deuteronomy. Those books themselves do not identify Moses as their author, and nothing in them makes that identification necessary. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy provide narratives of events from Moses’s time, and thus they or their underlying accounts may have come from his day. Because of that, many have identified them with Moses’s name. But nothing in Genesis suggests Mosaic authorship.

As we have seen, however, the Joseph Smith Translation of Genesis does identify some text as being God’s words recorded by Moses. The material that it attributes to Moses begins with the Visions of Moses and ends with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The JST identifies this material as a unit with a carefully phrased introduction and a carefully phrased conclusion. The text begins, “The words of God which he spake unto Moses at a time when Moses was caught up into an exceeding high mountain,” and it ends with “And those are the words which I spake unto my servant Moses.”[5] Between those bookends, the text tells the story of the Creation and the Fall. The Visions of Moses introduces the characters in the story who operate on the cosmic and earthly levels—God, Jesus, and Satan. And it reveals God’s purpose—“to bring to pass the immortality and the eternal life of man.”[6] It then presents the account of the Creation and continues through the experience of Adam and Eve in the Garden. The beginning and ending phrases set the parameters of the narrative and tie it together, showing that the Visions of Moses is the prologue not only to the story of the Creation but also to the story of the Fall.

At this point in the text, at the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, there is a break in the narrative in two important ways. First, this is where God’s narration ends. Hereafter in Genesis and through much of the Old Testament, unnamed narrators tell the Bible’s stories. Second, this break in the text brings to an end the premortal history of humankind. It is the dividing line between creation and mortality. This is the point at which humankind’s mortal experience begins.

Why would anyone esteem these words “as naught” and want to remove them from Moses’s writing? And why would God desire to restore them so early in the history of the modern Church? The content of this text provides answers. It reveals in plainness the character of Satan and his motives and desires. It includes the demeaning episode of his assault on Moses and his vain desire to be God’s Only Begotten Son. It reveals his pathological behavior when he does not get what he wants. It reveals that though he said he would “redeem all mankind that one soul shall not be lost”—something that is impossible—his real motive was to obtain God’s honor and power. This Mosaic document exposes Satan for who he is. In striking contrast, it reveals God’s true Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, God’s “beloved and chosen from the beginning,” whose desire was to do the will of the Father and give him the glory.[7]

It should not surprise us that these accounts were removed from Moses’s record, leaving the book of Genesis that was passed down through history bereft of its Christianity. Satan knew how dangerous these accounts would be to him, and he was likely just as concerned about the prospects of their restoration in the latter days. As Joseph Smith wrote, “It seems as though the adversary was aware, at a very early period of my life, that I was destined to prove a disturber and an annoyer of his kingdom.”[8] The Restoration brings to earth a true knowledge not only of Jesus Christ but also of Satan.

Notes

[1] OT2, pages 3–4 (Moses 1:40; 2:1).

[2] Abraham 4–5; Genesis 1–2; Moses 2–3. “The temple account . . . has a different division of events. It seems clear that the ‘six days’ are one continuing period and that there is no one place where the dividing lines between the successive events must of necessity be placed,” Bruce R. McConkie, “Christ and the Creation,” Ensign, June 1982, 11.

[3] OT2, pages 7–8 (Moses 4:1–4).

[4] OT2, page 3 (Moses 1:41).

[5] OT2, pages 1, 9 (Moses 1:1; 4:32).

[6] OT2, page 3 (Moses 1:39).

[7] OT2, pages 1–2, 7–8 (Moses 1:12–23; 4:1–4).

[8] Joseph Smith—History 1:20.