Does the Book of Mormon Read Like an Ancient Record or a Nineteenth-Century Book?

Draft status.  Every section of this article is written from sources that were opened.  The first draft, of August 2026, covered the summary, chiasmus, King James dependence with its n-gram and italics measurements, the Isaiah chapters, the nineteenth-century controversies, the source-book tests and Early Modern English.  The sections on Hebraisms, names, narrative complexity and stylometry were written on October 1, 2026 from the books and papers themselves, together with the citation for the dating of Isaiah 40–66 and the treatments of B. H. Roberts and of the Johnsons' study of The Late War.  Three new measurements were made for them:  counts of the claimed Hebraisms across six books, a base rate for the Hebrew name matches, and a count of therefore and wherefore in the order of dictation.  No quotation in this article is reproduced from memory.  Each was copied from a document that was open at the time and is recorded with its locator in the companion quotations ledger.  The October sections were then checked the same day by a second agent that had not written them.  It re-read every new quotation against its source, re-ran the three tools, corrected five page numbers or counts and several sentences that claimed more than the measurements show, and added a set of checks on the name test, which are reported in the names section.  What is still unread is small and is named where it matters:  Stanford Carmack's three papers on Early Modern English syntax are cited from their abstracts and from Skousen's summary of them;  Skousen's grammar volumes are quoted only as William Davis quotes them;  the endnotes of Hardy's and Finley's books and the tables of Holmes's paper could not be reached by the route used.  Each footnote says how its source was read.  What each source argues, and why it was or was not used, is in the literature review.

Summary

The Book of Mormon does not read like one thing. It reads like two things at once, and any honest account has to say so.

It contains genuine literary structure. John W. Welch's 1969 discovery of extended chiasmus in the text was real, and the strongest example, Alma 36, is very unlikely to be an accident of repetition. Two physicists who tested it statistically concluded that its inverted structure was put there on purpose.¹ That is a real finding and it should not be waved away.

But the same statistical test that vindicates Alma 36 does not reach the conclusion Latter-day Saint readers usually take from it. Boyd F. and W. Farrell Edwards wrote plainly that their results "do not prove that the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient document."¹ Deliberate composition is not the same as ancient composition. Chiasmus establishes an author who was working carefully. It does not establish which century that author lived in.

Meanwhile the nineteenth-century evidence is not a matter of interpretation. It is measurable, and this article measures it. Using the Book of Mormon and the King James Bible in plain text, a script written for this article found 2,017 separate runs of seven or more consecutive words that the Book of Mormon shares word for word with the King James Bible. Those runs contain 26,179 words — 9.76 percent of the entire book. The longest single unbroken shared run is 172 words.² That number is close to the "about 25,000 words" figure that circulates in the literature, and it was produced here from scratch with the method stated and the script published.

More decisive than the volume is the kind of dependence. The 1611 translators printed in italics the English words they had supplied for sense, words that stand for nothing in the Hebrew or Greek. They are the translators' own words. A second script written for this article aligned every Book of Mormon verse in a declared biblical quotation with its King James counterpart and counted those supplied words. Of 472 King James italicized words in the quoted passages, the Book of Mormon keeps 292 — 61.9 percent. In Mosiah 14, which reproduces Isaiah 53, it keeps all fifteen.³ An independent ancient text has no reason to contain the specific English words that Jacobean scholars inserted to make Hebrew read smoothly.

The proposed nineteenth-century source books fare far worse than their advocates claim, and this article says so against the critical side. A claim that Gilbert Hunt's The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain (1816) supplied rare phrasing to the Book of Mormon, built on an analysis run in 2013, needs a control from the same genre, and it fails one.⁴ The Book of Mormon shares zero runs of ten or more words with The Late War. It also shares zero with The First Book of Napoleon. Its longest shared run with The Late War is nine words, and after removing every run whose wording also appears in the King James Bible, only 55 short runs survive in 268,344 words² — over half of them variations of "and it came to pass," and the rest stock formulas of the genre. Per ten thousand words of source text, the Book of Mormon actually matches The First Book of Napoleon — a London pamphlet of 1809 — more densely than it matches The Late War. The overlap is the shared vocabulary of King James imitation, not borrowing.

Alexander Campbell saw the real nineteenth-century signal in February 1831, ten months after publication, and named it better than most modern critics do. Writing in the Millennial Harbinger, he charged that Joseph Smith "decides all the great controversies — infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man."⁵ That list was compiled by a hostile contemporary who knew the disputes of western New York firsthand, and it remains the sharpest single piece of evidence in the case.

Four more lines of evidence were worked through from their sources, and three of them were measured.

• Hebraisms. The constructions usually listed are King James English. The King James Bible has more cognate verb-and-noun pairs per 10,000 words than the Book of Mormon does, 1.39 against 0.89, and "dreamed a dream" stands in an 1809 London pamphlet about Napoleon.⁶ One construction, a conditional with an extra "and," is real and is not in the King James Bible. The scholar who found it says it "is strictly speaking not a Hebraism."⁷
• Names. Of 163 Book of Mormon names that the King James Bible lacks, 85 match the consonants of a Hebrew Bible name under the rule the proponents use. Random names of the same length would match 84 times.⁸ Against the names on excavated Israelite artifacts, the only Book of Mormon names that match beyond chance are those built on the consonants of a King James name.⁸
• Narrative complexity. Grant Hardy's account of three distinct narrators is accurate, and Hardy says his observations "could just as readily be made about" a novel.⁹ The word wherefore replaces therefore partway through the dictation and stays, whoever the narrator is.¹⁰
• Stylometry. Seven studies reach five incompatible conclusions. The only result that survives is negative: the method behind the 2008 attribution to Sidney Rigdon also named Rigdon as the author of 28 of 51 essays by Alexander Hamilton.¹¹

The overall verdict of this article: the ancient-origin evidence establishes a deliberate and skilled author, and one striking Old World detail, the place-name Nahom; the nineteenth-century evidence establishes an English text built on the King James Bible and engaged with the religious arguments of Joseph Smith's own decade. Those two findings are not symmetrical. Careful composition is compatible with any date. King James italics are not. On the specific question the title asks, the text's English dress is nineteenth-century beyond reasonable dispute, and the LDS claim therefore has to rest on a translation model loose enough to allow it — which is exactly where serious faithful scholarship has moved.

Stylometry, which readers on both sides expect to settle the matter, settles nothing. That is treated as a finding, not as a gap.

The claim being tested

Several distinct propositions get blurred into one, and separating them is most of the work.

1. The text is an ancient record. Its narrative content originated with writers living between roughly 600 BC and AD 421 in the ancient Near East and the Americas.
2. The English is a translation of that record. The words on the 1830 page correspond, tightly or loosely, to words on metal plates.
3. Joseph Smith could not have produced it. No plausible nineteenth-century process accounts for the book.
4. A specific nineteenth-century source produced it. Some identifiable book or collaborator supplied the content.

These are independent. Evidence against proposition 4 is not evidence for proposition 1. Evidence that the English is nineteenth-century bears on proposition 2 without automatically touching proposition 1, because a loose translation could carry ancient content in modern dress. This article keeps them apart.

The Church's own current description of the process, in the 2016 Gospel Topics essay Book of Mormon Translation, matters for what follows. The essay says that "almost all of the present Book of Mormon text was translated during a three-month period between April and June" of 1829, that "about 28 percent" of the original dictation manuscript survives, and that Emma Smith denied there was any written source in the room: "He had neither manuscript nor book to read from."¹² The essay also makes a textual claim relevant to this article: "some grammatical constructions that are more characteristic of Near Eastern languages than English appear in the original manuscript, suggesting that the base language of the translation was not English."¹²

A companion article treats the production process itself; see How was the Book of Mormon produced?. The distinct question of whether Solomon Spaulding and Sidney Rigdon supplied the text is treated separately in Did Spaulding and Rigdon produce the Book of Mormon?, which concludes that the recognition testimony establishes a genuine Spaulding story about ancient America but does not establish that Rigdon received a manuscript, collaborated with Joseph Smith, or authored the Book of Mormon. That evidence is not repeated here.

The strongest case for the Latter-day Saint claim

Stated at full strength, without hedging.

A twenty-three-year-old farmhand with almost no formal schooling dictated a 268,000-word book in about three months, in a single pass, without notes. The Church's own essay reports the timeframe, and the surviving quarter of the dictation manuscript shows a text produced by ear rather than copied.¹² Whatever else is true, the compositional feat is real and it is not explained by calling the author uneducated.

The book has structure that its author would have had to plan. Welch found extended inverted parallelism — chiasmus — running through it, including passages where the pattern spans an entire chapter and turns on its own thematic center. In 1969 he argued that this could not have been learned: "No one in America, let alone in western New York, fully understood chiasmus in 1829."¹³ Two physicists later tested his best example and found the odds against accident overwhelming.¹

The book contains Old World names that turned out to be real. Alma, which sounds to an English ear like a woman's name or a scrap of Latin, appears as a man's name in a Jewish document of the early second century AD.¹⁴ Sariah appears as a woman's name in a papyrus from the Jewish community at Elephantine in Egypt.¹⁴ The place-name Nahom, on Lehi's route, has been linked to inscribed altars from Yemen bearing the tribal name NHM in roughly the right place and period. Mulek has been connected to Malchiah, "the son of Hammelech" or "son of the king," in Jeremiah 38:6.¹⁴

The book distinguishes its narrators. Grant Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2010) argues⁹ that Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni are consistently different writers with different anxieties, different habits of self-presentation, and different editorial methods sustained over hundreds of pages. This is the best literary argument the text has, because it does not depend on any single striking detail; it depends on a pattern that would be very hard to fake and very hard to fake accidentally.

The earliest text may contain English older than 1611. Royal Skousen's critical text project and Stanford Carmack's syntactic studies argue that the original dictation contains grammatical patterns characteristic of Early Modern English — sixteenth-century constructions unavailable to a New York farm boy and not derivable from the King James Bible.⁷

The book is internally consistent across a complicated structure. It tracks multiple record-keeping traditions, a chronology counted from three different starting points, and a plot that hands sacred objects from one custodian to another across a thousand years, without collapsing.

A reader who takes only the critical evidence seriously and never confronts this list has not understood the problem.

Chiasmus

The discovery

Chiasmus is inverted parallelism: a sequence of elements stated in one order and then restated in reverse. Welch, then a missionary in Germany, recognized it in the Book of Mormon in 1967 and published "Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon" in BYU Studies in 1969.¹³

His argument had two halves. The first was that chiasmus is a genuinely ancient Hebrew form: "although some chiasms appear in Greek, Latin, and English, the form was originally Hebrew and dates at least to the eighth and tenth centuries B.C. in Isaiah and in the Psalms."¹³ The second half was the inference to authorship, and Welch stated it strongly:

If chiasmus can be convincingly identified in the Book of Mormon, then specific Hebraisms will testify of its origin, because there exists no chance that Joseph Smith could have learned of this style through academic channels. No one in America, let alone in western New York, fully understood chiasmus in 1829.¹³

He added an argument that is often overlooked and is genuinely good: the King James translators frequently normalized inverted Hebrew word order into ordinary English, so an English reader could not easily reverse-engineer the form from the King James page. "The possibility of Joseph Smith's noticing the form accidentally is even more remote, since most biblical passages containing inverted word orders have been rearranged into natural word orders in the King James translation."¹³ He closed the section with a rhetorical question: "If the Book of Mormon then is found to contain true chiasmal forms, should it not be asserted without further qualification that the book is a product of ancient Hebrew culture?"¹³

That last sentence is the claim to test.

The statistical test

In 2004 Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards published "Does Chiasmus Appear in the Book of Mormon by Chance?" in BYU Studies.¹ Their method is worth explaining because it is honest.

They took the four of Welch's fifteen criteria that can be counted — length, density, mavericks, and reduplication — and compressed them into a single number L, the chance that a given arrangement of elements would fall into chiastic order at random. Then they did the step that most parallel-hunting skips: they counted opportunities. As they put it, "the longer a monkey sits at a typewriter, the greater the likelihood that a sonnet will emerge."¹ A long book gives many chances for an accidental chiasm, so the meaningful quantity is P, the chance that structure this strong would appear somewhere in the whole work.

They then ran the same test on candidates from several books, chosen as the strongest known in each. Their published results:¹

Their conclusion on Alma 36: "These results rule out, with 99.98 percent certainty, the claim that Alma 36:1–30 is simply an arrangement of words that happen to fall into chiastic order by chance."¹

This result cuts in an unexpected direction, and both sides tend to misreport it.

It defeats a popular critical objection. Sandra Tanner and Daniel Vogel had pointed to chiasms in the Doctrine and Covenants — modern revelations, not claimed translations — as proof that Joseph Smith knew the form, an argument Tanner traced to Blake Ostler's list of chiasms in the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Abraham.¹ Edwards and Edwards tested the strongest of those, Doctrine and Covenants 88:34–39, and got P = 0.52. Half of all random rearrangements would produce structure that good. They also tested Abraham 3:26–28 (P = 0.98). And they took up a critic's own reductio — a four-element "chiasm" an anonymous writer had found in the introduction to the INFORMIX-OnLine Database Administrator's Guide, offered to show that chiasms turn up anywhere — reanalyzed it as a nine-element structure, and scored it at P = 0.66.¹ Their verdict: "Our results are consistent with the idea that chiasms in the Doctrine and Covenants and the book of Abraham are simply patterns of words that happen to fall into chiastic order by chance, patterns that are recognized only after the fact through the diligence of the analyst."¹ The Doctrine and Covenants chiasmus argument should be retired. It does not survive its own proponents' test.

It also does not establish what Latter-day Saint readers usually take from it. The authors were explicit twice over:

Our results do not prove that the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient document, but they do establish that chiastic passages in the Book of Mormon likely appeared by design, that is, by the deliberate application of the chiastic form by the author(s) of these passages.¹

And:

Our results do not rule out the possibility that Joseph Smith knew about the chiastic style when he translated the Book of Mormon but do rule out the use of chiasms in the Doctrine and Covenants and the book of Abraham as possible evidence of that knowledge.¹

Read carefully, the paper says: the Book of Mormon's best chiasm was intended, and the usual evidence that Joseph Smith knew the technique is worthless. It does not say the intending author was ancient.

The critique of Alma 36

Earl M. Wunderli's "Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm", Dialogue 38:4 (2005), attacks the input rather than the arithmetic, which is the right place to attack it.¹⁵ His thesis: "My argument is that he has imposed chiasmus on the Book of Mormon where none was intended."¹⁵

His specific complaints are concrete and checkable:

• Selection. "One has only to highlight these thirty-four elements in Alma 36 to see how much text — more than 80 per cent of it — Welch has ignored in constructing his chiasm."¹⁵ Alma 36 is written in heavily repetitive language; when a keyword occurs five times, choosing the two that fit the pattern and ignoring three is a choice, not a discovery.
• Instability. Welch's rendering "has changed each time he has written about it," across at least four publications from 1969 to 1991, including changes to what the turning point — supposedly the passage's main idea — actually is.¹⁵
• Chopped boundaries. Welch's own criteria say a chiasm should run across a whole literary unit and not cut sentences in half. Wunderli lists nine mid-sentence divisions in Welch's full-text version, and notes that one of them appears to exist to keep the phrase "born of God" out of a section where it would spoil the pattern.¹⁵
• A unit that is not a unit. Alma 36 and Alma 37 "are a single chapter (XVII) in the first edition of the Book of Mormon."¹⁵ The chapter break that defines the supposed chiasm was introduced by Orson Pratt's division of the text, whose title page credits him with the "division into chapters and verses" and which does open a chapter 36 at "My son, give ear to my words."¹⁶

His conclusion: "The existence of extended chiasmus in the Book of Mormon seems far from proved by Alma 36. While the inverted parallelism developed by Welch is impressive on first reading, on closer analysis it is Welch's creativity that is most notable."¹⁵

Against Edwards and Edwards he makes the one move that matters: a statistical test is only as good as the element list fed into it, and the element list was assembled by hand by people who expected to find a chiasm. He quotes their own concession that their quantitative judgments "are based only on the order of words and ideas and disregard the overall integrity and literary merit of chiasms."¹⁵

Verdict on chiasmus

Chiasmus is real in the Book of Mormon and the best examples are almost certainly deliberate. The 1830 text is a carefully structured composition, not an outpouring.

But the inference from deliberate to ancient does not go through, for three reasons, and the first two come from Latter-day Saint scholarship itself.

1. Edwards and Edwards, who defend the chiasm, say in print that their result does not show the book is ancient.
2. Their test also destroys the standard demonstration that Joseph Smith did not know the form, because the Doctrine and Covenants chiasms it relied on are statistically indistinguishable from chance.
3. Wunderli's boundary objection is not answered by any amount of arithmetic. The 1830 first edition has no chapter break at Alma 36, so the literary unit on which the strongest case rests is partly an artifact of an 1879 editorial decision.¹⁶

Welch's own later work moved in the same direction. He published fifteen criteria for judging whether a chiasm is intentional, precisely because chiasms can be manufactured out of repetitive prose by a determined analyst.¹⁵ That is a scholar disciplining his own method, and it deserves credit. It is also a concession that the 1969 question — should ancient origin "be asserted without further qualification"? — has to be answered no.

Verdict: chiasmus establishes deliberate literary design. It does not date the designer.

King James dependence

This is where the evidence stops being interpretive.

How much of the book is King James English

To answer this without relying on anyone's count, a script was written for this article: research/ngram_overlap.py. It normalizes both texts to bare lowercase word tokens, indexes every seven-word window of the King James Bible, walks the Book of Mormon from the beginning, and at each position finds the longest run that also occurs unbroken in the Bible. Runs are maximal and non-overlapping, so nothing is counted twice.²

Corpora: the Book of Mormon from Project Gutenberg ebook #17 (current LDS edition text, 268,344 word tokens after normalization) and the King James Bible from Project Gutenberg ebook #10 (790,028 tokens).²

Result, at a threshold of seven words:²

At a threshold of ten words, 463 runs still remain, covering 5.52 percent of the book.²

Two things about the 26,179 figure. First, it is close to the "roughly 25,000 words" that circulates in the literature, which is reassuring about both. Second, it is a lower bound on King James dependence, because it counts only exact matches. Every place where the Book of Mormon paraphrases a biblical verse, changes a pronoun, or adds a clause drops out of the count entirely.

The distribution across the book is uneven in a way that is itself informative:²

The token total in this table is 55 lower than the 268,344 counted for the book as a whole. The difference is exactly the fourteen book-title lines — "THE SECOND BOOK OF NEPHI" and the rest — which the per-book split assigns to no book. They are headings rather than text, so nothing in the analysis depends on which figure is used.

2 Nephi and 3 Nephi carry the acknowledged block quotations, and their coverage — 31 percent and 19 percent — reflects that. But look at Alma. Alma is 85,337 words of Nephite war narrative and preaching with no declared Bible quotation, and it still contains 407 separate seven-word runs that appear verbatim in the King James Bible. That is 47.7 runs per ten thousand words. For comparison, the control results below put a nineteenth-century book that deliberately imitates biblical style, The Late War, at 17.1 runs per ten thousand words, and an ordinary 1826 American novel, The Last of the Mohicans, at 0.27.² King James phrasing is not confined to the parts of the Book of Mormon that announce themselves as quotations. It is the ambient dialect of the whole book.

The italics test

Volume alone does not prove copying. An ancient prophet quoting Isaiah, translated by a man steeped in the King James Bible, might reasonably come out in King James English. The diagnostic evidence is more specific.

The 1611 translators printed in italic type every English word they had supplied for sense but which corresponds to nothing in the Hebrew or Greek. Those words belong to the translators. They are absent from the underlying text. If the Book of Mormon's Isaiah is an independent rendering of a sixth-century BC brass-plates Isaiah, there is no reason for it to contain the particular English words that a committee of Jacobean scholars inserted in 1611.

A second script, research/kjv_italics.py, tests this. It reads the eBible.org eng-kjv USFM edition, in which supplied words carry explicit \add markup, aligns each Book of Mormon verse in a declared quotation block with its biblical counterpart using standard sequence alignment, and counts how many supplied words survive.³

Nearly two-thirds of the words the King James translators invented are still there. In Mosiah 14, presented as a Nephite prophet quoting Isaiah 53 from the brass plates centuries before Christ, every one of the fifteen supplied English words survives.³

The counts carry three honest caveats, stated because they matter. First, the Book of Mormon text used is the current LDS edition, not the 1830 first edition; grammatical editing since 1837 could shift a few individual alignments, though the italicized words were not a target of that editing. Second, verse-level alignment can score a relocated word as dropped. Third — and most important — a supplied word being kept is not by itself proof of copying, because some supplied words are ordinary English connectives that any translator would insert.³ The force of the result is in the rate and in the aggregate, not in any single word.

Even granting all three caveats, 292 retained supplied words across 519 verses is not something an independent translation produces.

The strongest Latter-day Saint answers to this are not evasions and should be stated properly.

• The loose-translation model. Joseph Smith received meaning, not words, and rendered it in the biblical English he knew. Where the ancient text matched a passage he could recognize, the familiar King James wording came out, italics and all. This model is widely held among faithful scholars today and it fully accommodates the italics data.
• The catalyst model. The plates prompted revelation rather than being decoded word by word. The English is entirely Joseph Smith's, and the ancient content is carried in the substance rather than the wording.
• The familiar-language model. God deliberately gave the text in the register His nineteenth-century readers recognized as scripture, because a genuinely alien translation would have been rejected.

Each of these answers works. Each also costs something. All three concede that the English of the Book of Mormon is nineteenth-century English produced by Joseph Smith, which means the italics evidence has already done its work: the text on the page is not an ancient artifact. What remains in dispute is whether ancient content stands behind it — a question the italics cannot settle in either direction.

There is also a cost the models rarely acknowledge. The Book of Mormon does not merely reproduce King James wording; it reproduces King James renderings that later scholarship regards as inferior. The clearest example verified for this article is the Lord's Prayer. 3 Nephi 13:13 reads "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen."¹⁷ That doxology stands in the King James Matthew 6:13, which follows the Byzantine and Textus Receptus tradition. It is absent from every modern critical edition of the Greek text — Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf, Nestle, and the SBL Greek New Testament all end the verse at "deliver us from the evil one" — and is generally regarded as a liturgical addition.¹⁸ On the ancient-record reading, the resurrected Christ in the New World delivered a line that a later copyist added to Matthew in the Old World.

Verdict on King James dependence: established, measurable, and large. The book's English is built on the 1611 Bible, down to words the 1611 translators admitted they had supplied.

Isaiah and the Deutero-Isaiah problem

What the text actually quotes

Alignment for the italics test above required identifying the quotation blocks exactly, so the extent is a measured result rather than a repeated claim. The Book of Mormon reproduces, verse for verse and in order:

• Isaiah 48–49 as 1 Nephi 20–21 (48 verses)
• Isaiah 50–51 as 2 Nephi 7–8 (34 verses)
• Isaiah 2–14 as 2 Nephi 12–24 (275 verses)
• Isaiah 53 as Mosiah 14 (12 verses)
• Isaiah 54 as 3 Nephi 22 (17 verses)
• Matthew 5–7 as 3 Nephi 12–14 (109 verses)
• Malachi 3–4 as 3 Nephi 24–25 (24 verses)

That is 519 verses of aligned biblical quotation, of which 386 come from Isaiah.³

The problem

Isaiah 40–66 is dated by the large majority of critical scholarship to the Babylonian exile and after — the mid-sixth century BC — and not to the eighth-century prophet named in Isaiah 1:1. The reasons usually given are internal: those chapters address an audience already in exile, treat the fall of Jerusalem as past, and name Cyrus of Persia, who was born long after the historical Isaiah died.

Lehi's party leaves Jerusalem about 600 BC carrying brass plates. Of the 386 Isaiah verses the Book of Mormon quotes, 111 come from Isaiah 48–54 — inside the block that most scholars date after the departure. Those verses appear in 1 Nephi 20–21, 2 Nephi 7–8, Mosiah 14, and 3 Nephi 22.

The chapter-block counts here are computed from the alignment run for this article.³

The grounds for the dating were set out by the Oxford Hebraist S. R. Driver in the standard English introduction to the Old Testament of his day.  He gave three, and the first is the audience:  "In the present prophecy there is no prediction of exile:  the exile is not announced as something still future; it is presupposed, and only the release from it is predicted.  By analogy, therefore, the author will have lived in the situation which he thus presupposes, and to which he continually alludes."  The second is literary style and the third the theological ideas.¹⁹

Driver did not rest the dating on a denial of prophecy.  He wrote that the view "in no way impairs the theological value of the prophecy, or reduces it to a vaticinium ex eventu," a prediction made after the event, since "the whole tone of the prophecy shows that it is written prior to the events which it declares to be approaching," and since the prophecy "nowhere claims either to be written by Isaiah, or to have originated in his age."¹⁹

The Latter-day Saint answers

Three distinct answers exist and they are not equally strong.

1. The unity of Isaiah is a minority position that some scholars still hold. True, and it should not be dismissed as special pleading; conservative Old Testament scholars outside Mormonism defend single authorship. But it is a minority position, and adopting it means the Book of Mormon's historicity rests on a contested reading of a different book.
2. The dating is itself a critical assumption. The argument runs that predictive prophecy is ruled out in advance by naturalistic method, so the exilic dating of Isaiah 40–55 is a conclusion smuggled in as a premise. This has real force against the Cyrus argument specifically. It has less force against the audience argument, which does not depend on whether prediction is possible: those chapters are addressed to people already in Babylon. Driver, who made the audience argument, held that the author did predict the fall of Babylon before it happened.¹⁹
3. The quotations are a translator's expansion. On the loose-translation model, Joseph Smith rendered whatever Isaiah material stood on the plates using the King James Isaiah he had, and the exact chapter boundaries reflect his Bible rather than the plates. This is internally consistent, and it is the same move the italics evidence already forces. Its cost is that it makes the Isaiah blocks useless as evidence of anything ancient.

Verdict: the Deutero-Isaiah problem is real but it is not decisive on its own, because a reader who accepts predictive prophecy can hold the unity of Isaiah without absurdity. Its weight comes from combination. Once the italics evidence establishes that the Isaiah chapters were transmitted through the King James Bible, the question of which Isaiah chapters appear becomes a question about Joseph Smith's Bible rather than about brass plates, and the ancient claim loses its foothold either way.

Nineteenth-century theological controversies

The single sharpest piece of evidence in this whole subject was published ten months after the book was, by a hostile witness with expert knowledge of the terrain.

Alexander Campbell was the leading figure of the Restoration movement in the Ohio Valley, a practiced controversialist, and a man who knew exactly which religious arguments were live in western New York in the 1820s. He reviewed the Book of Mormon in the Millennial Harbinger on 7 February 1831 under the title "Delusions," reprinted in Boston the following year as Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon.⁵ His central charge:

This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies — infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man.⁵

He added the observation that gives the charge its edge: "How easy to prophecy of the past or of the present time!"⁵

Campbell also noticed the anachronism that later readers rediscovered independently — Christian doctrine and Christian institutions functioning centuries before Christ: "He represents the christian institution as practised among his Israelites before Jesus was born. And his Jews are called christians while keeping the law of Moses, the holy sabbath, and worshipping in their temple at their altars, and by their high priests."⁵ And he pointed out that Nephi, writing about 600 BC, discusses material Paul presented as newly revealed: "Paul says these things were secrets and unknown until his time, but Smith makes Nephi say the same things 600 years before Paul was converted!"⁵

Three features of this source make it unusually strong.

It is contemporary. February 1831. Not a recollection, not a later reconstruction, not shaped by decades of polemic.

It is a prediction, not a retrofit. Campbell drew up his list from the disputes he knew, then found them in the book. He was not searching a nineteenth-century almanac for matches after the fact. Anti-Masonry is the clearest case. William Morgan, a Freemason of Batavia in western New York, planned to publish the order's secrets, was seized in September 1826, and was never seen again. Within months anti-Masonry was a mass movement in the same region, with citizens in many mass meetings resolving to support no Mason for public office, and it became the organizing issue of a political party.²⁰ The Book of Mormon's recurring theme of "secret combinations" that murder to get power reads as a contribution to that argument.

It is specific and checkable. Infant baptism is not merely present in the Book of Mormon; Moroni 8 is an entire letter condemning it, in the vocabulary of the exact dispute that divided American Protestants in the 1820s. The fate of those who die without hearing the gospel, the mode and proper subjects of baptism, the debate between universal salvation and eternal punishment, the argument over whether a call to the ministry must be authorized or may be claimed — these are not incidental. They are load-bearing themes.

The strongest Latter-day Saint answer is that these are perennial religious questions, not peculiar to 1820s New York, and that a book of scripture would naturally address them. That answer has partial force: baptism and salvation are perennial. It has much less force where the question is dated. Infant baptism was not a live controversy among Israelites in 74 BC. Anti-Masonic anxiety about oath-bound secret societies is not a first-century Mesoamerican concern. A second answer — that God gave a book calibrated to the questions its first readers were asking — is coherent, and it is the honest form of the reply, but it again concedes that the book's agenda is nineteenth-century.

Verdict: established, and the strongest single line of evidence for nineteenth-century composition. It is stronger than any source-book hypothesis, because it does not require identifying a book Joseph Smith read; it only requires that he lived where he lived.

The source-book hypotheses, tested separately

Three books have been proposed as sources. They deserve separate treatment because they make different claims and fail in different ways.

The Late War, and why an n-gram match rate needs a control

In January 2014 Chris and Duane Johnson published an analysis, run the previous October, arguing that Gilbert J. Hunt's The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain (New York, 1816) — a history of the War of 1812 written in deliberate King James pastiche for schoolchildren — shares an unusual number of rare word sequences with the Book of Mormon.⁴

Their claim, in their words:  "Joseph most likely grew up reading a school book called The Late War by Gilbert J. Hunt and it heavily influenced his writing of The Book of Mormon."  Their method compared the Book of Mormon with "over 100,000 books from the pre-1830's era."  A four-word phrase counted as rare if it "showed up less than once per thousand books."  The result:  "After all biblical matches were removed from the comparison, the computer algorithm found over 100 rare 4-grams shared by both The Book of Mormon and The Late War," and The Late War "contained more rare 4-gram connections to The Book of Mormon than 99.999% of the other books published before 1830."⁴

That design is better than its critics usually allow.  It has a very large background sample, and it removes phrases the Bible supplies.  What it lacks is a comparison within the genre.  Almost none of 100,000 books of the period are written in imitation of the King James Bible.  A book that is will outscore 99.999 percent of them for that reason alone.

The methodological problem with that class of claim is simple and fatal if unaddressed: a rare-n-gram match count means nothing without a matched null corpus. Any two texts written in imitation of the King James Bible will share phrases, because they are both borrowing from the same third source. To know whether The Late War is special, its match rate has to be compared with the match rate between the Book of Mormon and other pseudo-biblical books of the same era that nobody proposes as sources.

That control was run for this article with the same script and the same settings. Corpora: The Late War (1816, Internet Archive item latewarbetweenun00hunt, 55,677 tokens); The First Book of Napoleon (London, 1809, item firstbooknapole00gruagoog, 21,645 tokens); Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews (1823, item viewofhebrews0000etha, 54,931 tokens); and, as a floor, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826, Project Gutenberg #940, 149,007 tokens), an ordinary American novel of the same decade.²

First, how strongly each book echoes the King James Bible, measured as shared runs of seven or more words per ten thousand words of the target:²

Two useful facts fall out. Ordinary novels of the period essentially never reproduce seven consecutive biblical words. And The Late War, which imitates the Bible's cadence on every page, still reproduces its actual wording at about one-quarter the Book of Mormon's rate — because imitating a style is not the same as quoting a text. View of the Hebrews scores high for a different reason: it is a book of biblical exposition that quotes scripture at length.

Now the claim itself — how much the Book of Mormon shares with each candidate source:²

And after removing every shared run whose exact wording also occurs somewhere in the King James Bible — that is, after subtracting the overlap that shared biblical imitation fully explains:²

Fifty-five short runs in 268,344 words. The longest is still nine words. Twenty-nine of the 55 are variants of the same formula — "and it came to pass that there was a," "of the king and it came to pass that," "the king and it came to pass that the" — and the rest are stock phrases of the genre: "to the right nor to the left," "the face of the land," "about the space of three hours," and date formulas such as "in the thirty and seventh year of the."²

One more normalization finishes the argument. A longer source text gives more chances to match, so the raw counts need scaling by source length. Per ten thousand words of source text, the Book of Mormon shares about 64 runs with The Late War (355 runs against 55,677 words) and about 114 with The First Book of Napoleon (247 runs against 21,645 words).² Per unit of source text, the Book of Mormon matches an 1809 London pamphlet about Napoleon almost twice as densely as it matches the book proposed as its source.

The Johnsons counted four-word phrases, so the comparison was repeated at four words, with every run that also occurs in the King James Bible removed.  The Book of Mormon then shares 1,165 runs with The Late War and 565 with The First Book of Napoleon.  Per ten thousand words of source text that is about 209 and 261.²  The pamphlet is ahead again.  This run cannot apply the Johnsons' rarity filter, which needs their 100,000 books, so it tests the genre effect and not their exact list.

Verdict on The Late War: the phrase-overlap claim does not survive its own control. There is no evidence here of textual borrowing. The honest positive finding is smaller and more interesting: The Late War proves that writing extended narrative in King James pastiche was a recognized and published genre in America before 1830, which removes the "nobody wrote like that" objection. That is a real contribution, and it is the only one the n-grams support.

The same control kills a symmetrical error on the faithful side. Zero ten-word matches between the Book of Mormon and The Late War is not evidence that the Book of Mormon is ancient. It is evidence that the Book of Mormon is not a copy of The Late War. Those are different claims.

View of the Hebrews

Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, published in Poultney, Vermont in 1823 and enlarged in 1825, argued that the American Indians were descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel. Oliver Cowdery lived in Poultney while Ethan Smith was its Congregational minister.

The n-gram result above shows there is no verbal borrowing worth discussing: 97 shared runs, dropping to 17 after the King James filter, and the longest match — a 34-word run — turns out on inspection to be a passage of Isaiah 11 that both books quote from the same Bible.² Whatever relationship exists is not a copying relationship.

The serious case has never been about wording. It is about the shape of the argument: Israelites in America, a lost civilization, buried records, a division into civilized and savage branches, and a final war. The person who assembled that case most carefully was not a critic. He was B. H. Roberts, a member of the First Council of the Seventy.  His papers on the subject were published posthumously in 1985 as Studies of the Book of Mormon.²¹

Roberts wrote three papers.  The first, "Book of Mormon Difficulties:  A Study," was read to the general authorities of the Church on January 4 and 5, 1922.  The second and longer one, "A Book of Mormon Study," takes up View of the Hebrews.  The third, "A Parallel," is a short list of the resemblances.²¹

The second paper states the case as strongly as any critic has:

did Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews furnish structural material for Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon?  It has been pointed out in these pages that there are many things in the former book that might well have suggested many major things in the other.  Not a few things merely, one or two, or a half dozen, but many; and it is this fact of many things of similarity and the cumulative force of them that makes them so serious a menace to Joseph Smith's story of the Book of Mormon's origin.²¹

He went further on the question of ability:

In the light of this evidence, there can be no doubt as to the possession of a vividly strong, creative imagination by Joseph Smith, the Prophet, an imagination, it could with reason be urged, which, given the suggestions that are to be found in the "common knowledge" of accepted American antiquities of the times, supplemented by such a work as Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, would make it possible for him to create a book such as the Book of Mormon is.²¹

Roberts did not present these as his beliefs.  The covering letter he drafted for the second paper says:  "Let me say once and for all, so as to avoid what might otherwise call for repeated explanation, that what is herein set forth does not represent any conclusions of mine."  It continues:  "I am taking the position that our faith is not only unshaken but unshakable in the Book of Mormon, and therefore we can look without fear upon all that can be said against it."²¹  The letter was never sent, and the editor of the papers, Brigham D. Madsen, is careful about what follows:  "Whether or not Roberts retained his belief in the Book of Mormon may never be determined."²¹

So both popular uses of Roberts overstate the document.  It does not show a general authority who secretly lost his faith.  It is also much more than a devil's advocate exercise:  it is a believing leader's judgment that the parallels are numerous and that Joseph Smith had the imagination to use them.

How much do the parallels prove?  Roberts's own phrase points to the weakness.  He speaks of "the 'common knowledge' of accepted American antiquities of the times."  The idea that the Indians were Israelites was in general circulation in the 1820s, and View of the Hebrews is one book among several that argued it.  A list of resemblances between two books that draw on the same common stock has the same defect as a list of shared phrases:  without a count of how many such resemblances any two books on the subject would show, it cannot establish that one was the source of the other.  No one has made that count.

Verdict on View of the Hebrews:  not a verbal source, on the measurements above.  The thematic kinship is real, and Roberts thought it a serious problem.  What it establishes is that the Book of Mormon's central premise was a familiar idea in Joseph Smith's decade.  It does not establish that this particular book was in his hands.

The First Book of Napoleon

The 1809 London pamphlet shares an opening cadence with 1 Nephi and the same pseudo-biblical register. The measurements above place it exactly where The Late War sits — as a genre exemplar rather than a source. It is included in this article mainly because it functions as a control, and because its inclusion makes the point that a critic can generate a "parallel" with any pseudo-biblical text if the base rate is never checked.

Spaulding and Rigdon

Treated separately in its own article, which finds the recognition testimony substantial but the transmission chain and the textual attribution unproved.

Hebraisms

Verdict first.  Almost every construction offered as a Hebraism is ordinary King James English.  The King James Bible uses cognate pairs more often than the Book of Mormon does and noun chains at the same rate.  The Book of Mormon uses "it came to pass," sentence-initial "And" and compound prepositions more often than the King James Bible does, which fits a literal translation and an overdone imitation equally well.  They are evidence that the book's English is modelled on the Bible's, which nobody disputes.  One construction is different.  The 1830 text contains a conditional of the form "if he says this, and it is done," which the King James Bible does not use and which two pseudo-biblical books of the period do not use either.  It is real, it is rare, and its own discoverer declines to call it a Hebraism.

The claim in its proponents' words

John A. Tvedtnes opened the modern discussion in BYU Studies in 1970.  His thesis was that the English text is "in many respects a nearly literal translation," so that "many of the expressions found therein do not properly belong to the English language, but rather to the language from which the book was translated."  He drew the inference in a parenthesis:  "In view of the fact that Joseph Smith did not know Hebrew in those early years, this is good evidence for the authenticity of the translation."²²

His main exhibits are four.

• The construct state. Hebrew puts two nouns side by side where English would use an adjective or a possessive. His examples from the Book of Mormon are "altar of stones," "state of probation," "words of plainness," "land of promise," and "plates of brass."²²
• The cognate accusative. This is a verb followed by a noun from the same root. His examples are "they are cursed with a sore cursing" (Jacob 3:3), "and he did judge righteous judgments" (Mosiah 29:43), and Lehi's "Behold I have dreamed a dream," which he says is perhaps "the most well-known cognate accusative in the Book of Mormon."²²
• The heavy use of "and." "Hebrew uses the conjunction 'and' (w) much more frequently than English."²²
• "It came to pass." He derives it from the Hebrew wayehi, "and it was."²²

The Church makes a mild version of the claim in its Gospel Topics essay:  "some grammatical constructions that are more characteristic of Near Eastern languages than English appear in the original manuscript, suggesting that the base language of the translation was not English."¹²

Royal Skousen, who edited the critical text, added the strongest item in 1994.  Hebrew can begin the second half of a conditional with "and."  English cannot.  Skousen reported that the earliest text has this construction:  "In the original text of the Book of Mormon, there were at least fourteen occurrences of this non-English expression."  One was lost when Oliver Cowdery copied the printer's manuscript.  "The remaining thirteen occurrences were all removed by Joseph Smith in his editing for the second edition" of 1837.  Seven of them stand together in Helaman 12:13–21.²³

What the 1830 first edition prints

Skousen's readings were checked against the 1830 edition for this article.  Page 440 prints the Helaman passage this way:

yea, and if he saith unto the earth, Move, and it is moved; yea, if he saith unto the earth, Thou shalt go back, that it lengthen out the day for many hours, and it is done²⁴

The same page carries all seven conditionals Skousen lists, at what are now verses 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20 and 21.  The current edition has smoothed each one.  Verse 13 now reads "Yea, and if he say unto the earth—Move—it is moved."  Page 586 of the 1830 edition prints the best-known case, Moroni 10:4:  "and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, and he will manifest the truth of it unto you."²⁴

So eight of Skousen's thirteen surviving cases were read on the 1830 page and are exactly as he reports them.  The other five were not checked one by one.  His count is taken as given.

Tvedtnes's examples were checked the same way.  "Behold I have dreamed a dream," "cursed with a sore cursing" and "he did judge righteous judgments" all stand in the 1830 text, as do "plates of brass," "altar of stones" and "land of promise."²⁴  None of these was changed in later editions.  They are in the book now as they were in 1830.

The reply: these are King James constructions

The King James translators rendered Hebrew closely.  Their English is full of the same four features, and anyone imitating that Bible will reproduce them without knowing a word of Hebrew.  That is a claim about frequencies, so it was measured.  A script written for this article counted each construction in the Book of Mormon, the King James Bible, the two pseudo-biblical books already used as controls above, and an ordinary novel of 1826.⁶

The counting rules are crude string patterns and each one both overcounts and undercounts.  They are applied the same way to every book, which is what makes the columns comparable.⁶

Three things follow.

The cognate accusative is more common in the King James Bible than in the Book of Mormon.  The phrase "dreamed a dream," Tvedtnes's flagship example, stands eight times in the King James Bible.  "Judge righteous judgment" is John 7:24.  "Ye are cursed with a curse" is Malachi 3:9.  The phrase also turns up in the 1809 London pamphlet, which nobody thinks was translated from Hebrew:  "And in his sleep he dreamed a dream, and behold the dream was, that the monkey had put out one of his eyes."²⁵  Tvedtnes's own later chapter shows where the construction comes from.  To illustrate the Hebrew idiom he quotes "wrote upon it a writing" (Exodus 39:30) and "she vowed a vow" (1 Samuel 1:11), both in King James wording.²⁶  A reader of that Bible had the pattern in front of him.

Noun chains occur at the same rate in the Book of Mormon, the King James Bible and the Napoleon pamphlet.  The rates are 35.0, 35.8 and 34.1 per 10,000 words.  The American imitation uses them more than any of the three.  The ordinary novel uses them less than half as often.  The feature marks the biblical register, not a Hebrew original.

"It came to pass" and sentence-initial "And" run far above the King James rate.  The Book of Mormon uses "it came to pass" nearly nine times as often as the King James Bible.  The Late War uses it two and a half times as often.  This cuts both ways.  Tvedtnes can say a literal translator would keep every wayehi that the King James translators varied or dropped.  A critic can say that overusing the most recognizable marker of a style is what imitators do, and that the one American imitation in the sample does exactly that.  The measurement cannot choose between them.

Compound prepositions belong in the same group and lean the same way.  The Book of Mormon uses them 5.6 times per 10,000 words, the King James Bible 4.4 times, and the two imitations 1.6 and 1.8 times.  On this one feature the Book of Mormon stands closer to the King James Bible than either imitation does, and a little past it.  The count rests on nine fixed phrases, so it is a narrow measure.

The sharpest objection to the Hebraism list comes from inside the faithful literature.  Stanford Carmack, whose Early Modern English argument is treated below, takes several of the same odd constructions and assigns them to sixteenth-century English instead.  Of plural subjects with singular verbs he writes that they "are not grammatical flaws (or even syntactic calques of a base Hebrew text), but EModE syntax."  His footnote warns that "researchers need to be cautious and resist the temptation to analyze BofM syntax as non-English Hebrew-like language or instances of nonstandard use before analyzing past English usage."²⁷  The two leading faithful explanations of the book's strange grammar compete for the same sentences.  A construction cannot be evidence of a Hebrew original and of an Early Modern English translator at once.

The one that is left: "if … and"

The conditional is the item the King James reply does not cover, and that should be said plainly.

It is in the 1830 text.  It is not a King James construction.  A pattern search of the King James Bible for this article turned up 100 candidate sentences.  Forty-two of them contain "then," and a reading of the other 58 found a main clause in each and no clear case.  The same search found four candidates in The Late War and one in The First Book of Napoleon, and none of the five is a true case.⁶  Two pseudo-biblical books totalling about 79,000 words do not produce the construction.  That is a small sample and a string search, but it is a result in the Book of Mormon's favour and it is reported as one.

Five things limit what it proves.

First, Skousen no longer calls it a Hebraism.  In 2018 he described it as "the extra conjunctive and after a complex subordinate clause" and wrote:  "As far as I know, this syntactic structure (which is Hebrew-like, but is strictly speaking not a Hebraism) has never occurred in English."⁷  William Davis quotes the reason from Skousen's grammar volume.  The construction is "not exactly a normal Hebraism since the equivalent cases involving simple subordinate clauses (such as 'if you come and I will come') are not found in the Book of Mormon text."²⁸  Hebrew uses the form in short, plain conditionals.  The Book of Mormon uses it only after long, interrupted ones.

Second, the conditional is one member of a wider habit, and the wider habit looks like speech.  Skousen's own description is that the original text "frequently separates an initial subordinate clause from its following main clause by means of an unexpected use of the connector and," usually where an "intervening clause" or "some kind of interruption or extended subordination" comes between the two.  It happens after as, when, because and after as well as if.  His example is 1 Nephi 8:13 in the original manuscript, which with the aside removed reads "as I cast my eyes around about . . . And I beheld a river of water."²⁸  A speaker who starts a long subordinate clause, adds an aside, and then restarts the sentence with "and" produces exactly this.  The whole book was dictated aloud.

Third, as a conditional it is rare.  The word "if" occurs about 650 times in the 1830 text.⁶  Fourteen of those clauses take the extra "and," and seven of the fourteen sit in a single paragraph.  A translator rendering Hebrew conditionals literally would be expected to do it more widely than that.

Fourth, most of the cases share one shape, and that shape has a King James model.  Eight of the fourteen put a quoted command or decree inside the conditional:  all seven in Helaman 12, and 1 Nephi 17:50.  Davis sets them beside Matthew 17:20, "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove," and beside Luke 17:6.  He grants that the two are "not grammatically identical."  His conclusion is that the Book of Mormon forms nonetheless "openly display their direct derivation and dependence upon the English renditions of the KJV New Testament models."²⁸  The Book of Mormon's own version of the saying, Helaman 10:9, keeps six of Matthew's words in a row:  "ye shall say unto this mountain."²⁸

Fifth, Skousen's own statement of what the evidence shows is modest.  The potential Hebraisms of the original text "are consistent with the belief, but do not prove, that the source text is related to the language of the Hebrew Bible."²³

Verdict on Hebraisms

The standard list carries no weight.  Cognate accusatives, noun chains, compound prepositions and strings of "and" are all King James English.  The first two are measured here at King James rates or below, and one of them appears in an 1809 pamphlet about Napoleon.  The others, with "it came to pass," run above the King James rate, which a literal translation and an overdone imitation both predict.

The "if … and" conditional is a genuine oddity that neither the King James Bible nor the two imitations supply.  It counts for the Latter-day Saint side, but lightly:  fourteen cases, half of them in one paragraph, most of them shaped like a saying in the King James New Testament, all of them part of a wider habit of restarting a long sentence with "and," and described by the scholar who found them as Hebrew-like and not Hebrew.  What would raise its weight is a wider search.  If a large body of extemporaneous or dictated English from the 1820s shows no such resumptive "and," the construction becomes harder to explain as a habit of speech.  That search has not been done by anyone.

Names

Verdict first.  The personal-name evidence does not survive a base-rate test.  The rule its proponents use to call a Book of Mormon name "attested" in ancient Hebrew fires just as often on names produced at random.  Of 163 Book of Mormon names that the King James Bible lacks, 85 match the consonants of a Hebrew Bible name under that rule.  Chance predicts 84.  Real Hebrew names put through the same test match about 100 times.  Against names on excavated Israelite artifacts there is a modest excess over chance, and all of it sits among names that share their consonants with a Bible name.  The Book of Mormon names that are not vowel-variants of Bible names match once in 77, which is the chance rate.  Nahom is a different kind of evidence, a place in the right region, and it is treated in the archaeology article.

The claim in its proponents' words

Paul Y. Hoskisson's entry in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism gives the inventory:  "Of these 337 proper names, 188 are unique to the Book of Mormon, while 149 are common to the Book of Mormon and the Bible."²⁹

The fullest statement of the argument is John A. Tvedtnes, John Gee and Matthew Roper, "Book of Mormon Names Attested in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions," in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies in 2000.  They list sixteen names:  "Sariah, Alma, Abish, Aha, Ammonihah, Chemish, Hagoth, Himni, Isabel, Jarom, Josh, Luram, Mathoni, Mathonihah, Muloki, and Sam—none of which appear in English Bibles."  They state what follows from it:  "The discovery of these Hebrew names in ancient inscriptions provides remarkable evidence for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and provides clear refutation of those critics who would place its origin in nineteenth-century America."¹⁴

The best-known cases are these.

• Alma. The name "appears on a Jewish document of the early second century a.d.," found at Nahal Hever in 1961 and read as Alma by its discoverer, Yigael Yadin. The authors add that it is "attested on clay tablets" from Ebla in Syria "dating to the second half of the third millennium b.c."¹⁴
• Sariah. The name "appears on one of the papyri written by members of a Jewish community in Elephantine, Egypt, in the fifth century b.c.," where it is a woman's name.¹⁴
• Mulek. The authors take it as a short form of Malchiah and point to "Malchiah the son of Hammelech" in Jeremiah 38:6, which can be read "son of the king."¹⁴
• Paanchi and Pahoran. Hugh Nibley argued in 1952 that these are Egyptian: "Paanchi is simply the well-known Egyptian Paiankh (also rendered Pianchi, Paankh, etc.)."³⁰
• Nahom. Altars from Marib in Yemen carry the tribal name NHM in roughly the right place and period. The archaeology article gives the inscriptions and the dates.

Alma is a fair point for the proponents and should be granted as far as it goes.  The Book of Mormon uses it as a man's name, and a man named Alma does turn up in a Hebrew document.

The matching rule

What counts as a match?  The authors say so themselves.  Hebrew "was originally written without vowels," so a name is compared by its consonants alone.¹⁴  Of the seal that supports Himni they write:  "Because the seal inscriptions do not have vowels, we cannot know precisely how the name is to be read."¹⁴

Read through the sixteen entries and the rule has these parts.

1. Vowels are free. Himni matches the letters ḥmn. So do the biblical names Haman and Heman, as the authors note.
2. A final aleph may be added. Alma is ʾlmʾ, Abish is ʾbšʾ, Aha is ʾḥʾ. The extra letter is explained as a nickname ending.
3. English s stands for any Hebrew sibilant. Sam matches a seal that others read as Shem. Isabel matches yzbl, which the authors connect with Jezebel.
4. Part of a longer name counts. Luram matches "the second element" of Adan-Luram on a seal from Hama in Syria.
5. Neighbouring languages count. Hagoth is from an Ammonite seal, Isabel from a seal "thought to be Phoenician," Luram from Syria.
6. Any period counts. Alma is attested at Ebla some 1,400 to 1,900 years before Lehi, and in the Judaean desert about 700 years after him.¹⁴

Nibley's rule for the Egyptian names is looser still, and he says so:  "It will be noted that the names compared are never exactly alike, except in the case of the monosyllables Sam and Hem.  This, strangely enough, is strong confirmation of their common origin, since names are bound to undergo some change with time and distance, whereas if the resemblance were perfect, we should be forced to attribute it … to mere coincidence."³⁰  A rule under which both a perfect match and an imperfect one confirm the hypothesis cannot return a negative result.

The list being searched is large.  The authors report that "some 510 bullae had been published" by 1997, and they also draw on seals, ostraca, inscribed arrowheads, the Elephantine papyri, the Bar Kokhba documents and the Ebla tablets.¹⁴  The paper reports the hits.  It does not report how many ancient names were searched or how many Book of Mormon names found nothing.

The test

A loose rule and a long list will produce matches for any set of names.  The question is how many.  A tool written for this article measures it.⁸

Step 1.  Count the names.  The tool pulls every proper name out of the Book of Mormon text and sets aside those the King James Bible or its Apocrypha also prints.  It finds 301 names, 138 shared with the Bible and 163 not.  That is fewer than Hoskisson's 337 and 188, for three reasons.  The tool skips names that are also English dictionary words (Josh, Lib, Shim, Moron and Shared).  It skips the lower-case words for animals and weights.  And it counts a name as biblical if the King James Bible or Apocrypha prints that word anywhere, which moves a name such as Nephi, printed once in 2 Maccabees, to the biblical side.⁸

Step 2.  Write the rule down.  Every name is reduced to its consonants.  Aleph and ayin drop out, s and sh and z are one letter, and the vowel letters w and y and a final h may be ignored.  This is the proponents' rule, made exact enough for a computer to apply.  It is stricter than theirs in one way:  it does not let a name match part of a longer name.  It is looser than theirs in two ways.  It treats s, sh and z as one letter in both directions, where the proponents only let an English s stand for any Hebrew sibilant.  And it merges a repeated consonant even across a vowel, so that Shez, Shiz and Ahah each count as a single consonant.  Both sides of the comparison get the same looseness, and a tighter rule that removes both gives the same result against the Hebrew Bible's names.⁸

Step 3.  Check the rule against known answers.  Applied to the proponents' own sixteen names and the inscribed spellings they cite, the tool recovers fifteen.  The one it misses is Luram, which needs the part-of-a-name allowance.  Applied to the King James spelling of every Hebrew Bible name, set against that name's own Hebrew spelling, it recovers 85 percent.⁸  So the rule as written is about as generous as the proponents' and a little less.

Step 4.  Find the chance rate.  The list of ancient names is the 2,672 proper-name entries in Strong's Hebrew dictionary, which reduce to 2,114 distinct consonant patterns.  Against that list the tool tested four sets of names that cannot be ancient Hebrew:  10,000 made-up names built by a letter-chain model from the Book of Mormon's own non-biblical names, 10,000 built the same way from King James names, the invented names in Solomon Spaulding's "Manuscript Story," and the European and Native American names in The Last of the Mohicans.

The Book of Mormon's non-biblical names match Hebrew Bible names 85 times.  Random names with the same number of consonants would match 84 times, give or take 5.⁸  There is no excess to explain.

A check on the test itself.  The random names are built from the Book of Mormon's own names, so they inherit whatever Hebrew shape those names have.  A test built that way could be blind to real Hebrew names.  This one is not.  Each Hebrew Bible name was treated in turn as if it were missing from the list, and its King James spelling was matched against all the other names.  Real names found a match more often than random ones:  44 percent against 23 to 32 percent at four consonants, and 29 percent against 5 to 13 percent at five.  If the 163 Book of Mormon names matched the way real Hebrew names do, about 100 would match, give or take 5.  Eighty-five do.⁸  Real names from the excavated inscriptions do better still.  Of those with four or more consonants, 73 percent or more match a Hebrew Bible name.  The Book of Mormon's longer names match 26 percent of the time at four consonants, 16 percent at five and never at six or more.  The comparison flatters the real names somewhat, because the King James translators spelled Hebrew names by a fixed convention, and nobody knows what convention lies behind a Book of Mormon spelling.  With that allowance, the Book of Mormon names behave like the random names and not like the real ones.

The reason is the number of consonants.  A name with two consonants matches something on the list 96 to 99 percent of the time, whoever made it up.  A name with three matches about 70 percent of the time.  Alma has two consonants under the rule.  Sam, Josh and Abish have two.  Aha has one.  Fourteen of the proponents' sixteen have three or fewer.

Even the names of Mohawks, Frenchmen and British officers in Cooper's novel match the Hebrew list 27 percent of the time, and Spaulding's inventions 29 percent.⁸  The Book of Mormon's names match more often than those do, at the same length.  Three-consonant names match 70 percent of the time in the Book of Mormon, 52 percent in Spaulding and 32 percent in Cooper.  That difference is real, and both sides predict it.  Names coined by someone soaked in the King James Bible will be shaped like Bible names, and so will names from ancient Israel.

Step 5.  Allow for the size of the list.  The inscriptions are a different list from the Bible's, and the proponents do not say how many names they searched.  So the tool drew random lists of different sizes from the Hebrew Bible's names and asked how many of the 163 names chance would match.⁸

Sixteen matches is what chance supplies from a list of about 100 ancient names under the proponents' latitude, or about 700 with exact consonants.  The bullae alone number more than 500.

Step 6.  Ask where the consonants came from.  Fifteen of the sixteen names share their consonants with a name that is printed in the King James Bible.⁸  Sariah has the consonants of Seraiah.  Mathonihah has those of Mattaniah, Himni of Heman and Haman, Jarom of Joram, Josh of Joash, Isabel of Jezebel, Chemish of Chemosh, Hagoth of Haggith, Muloki of Malluch and Melech, Sam of Shem.  The authors concede several of these in their own entries.¹⁴  A name made by changing the vowels of a Bible name will always be "attested," because the rule ignores vowels.

Thomas J. Finley made the same point about Sariah in 2002, from the English side:  "When the names Sara …, Sarah, Sarai, and Seraiah occur a total of 80 times in the KJV, it is not hard to imagine that the name Sariah could have been invented, with the parallel from Elephantine papyri simply an accident of history."³¹

Step 7.  Run it against the inscriptions themselves.  One catalogue of inscribed names is open:  Mitka R. Golub's Onomasticon.net, which lists every personal name on an artifact excavated in the southern Levant from the Iron Age II, the period that ends with the fall of Jerusalem.  It holds 1,081 name records, 816 of them from Judah, and 524 distinct names.³²  It leaves out seals and bullae bought on the antiquities market, which the proponents also use.

Against this list, 31 of the 163 names match on exact consonants and 53 with latitude.  Chance predicts 22 to 25 and 43 to 47, depending on which set of random names is used.⁸  That is a small excess, six to nine names on the exact rule, or between one and a little over two standard deviations.  It is the one place in this test where the Book of Mormon names beat chance, and under the tighter rule described in Step 2 the excess is larger:  24 exact matches against 14 to 16 expected.⁸

The excess has a plain source.  Of the 31 exact matches, 30 are names whose consonants are those of a name printed in the King James Bible.  The inscriptions and the Bible draw on one stock of Hebrew names, so a name made from a Bible name matches both.  That accounts for most of the excess and perhaps not all of it.  Random names that happen to share a King James name's consonants would match the catalogue 24 times among these 86, and names carrying the consonants of real King James names about 26 times.  The Book of Mormon's 30 is about one standard deviation above the second figure.⁸  Both explanations predict a result like this.  Names taken from ancient Israel would match the inscriptions, and so would names coined from the best-known names in the English Bible, because those are the names ancient Israelites most often bore.

The test that separates the two explanations is to look only at the 77 Book of Mormon names whose consonants belong to no King James name.  If those names came from ancient Israel, a fair share should turn up on Israelite seals and potsherds.  Real Israelite names of that kind are plentiful there:  259 of the catalogue's 452 consonant patterns have no King James twin.  Of the 77, one matches, Luram.  Random names with no King James twin also match about once.⁸

So the inscriptions add nothing that the English Bible does not already supply.  Where a Book of Mormon name could have been made by changing the vowels of a Bible name, it matches the inscriptions.  Where it could not, it matches no more often than a random string of letters.

One test that points the other way

Finley also proposed a test that does not depend on matching at all.  Names in Judah around 600 BC were overwhelmingly built on the divine name.  "Among the bullae (seal impressions in clay) found in Jerusalem from about 600 B.C., forty-one names or nearly half the corpus end with /-yahu/," he wrote, and he counted 29 such names in the book of Jeremiah.³¹

A family that left Jerusalem in that decade should carry the habit with it.  The tool counted.  Of the 163 non-biblical Book of Mormon names, three end in "-iah" in the ordinary way:  Amalickiah, Mosiah and Sariah.  Eight more end in "-ihah," which the proponents read as the same element.  Counting all eleven, the share is 6.7 percent.  The book of Jeremiah, counted by the same tool with its place names and foreigners included, gives 13.3 percent.⁸  The Jerusalem bullae, which are personal names only, run near 50 percent, and in Golub's catalogue 265 of the 816 name records from Judah, 32.5 percent, end in the divine name.⁸

Two adjustments make the comparison like with like, and neither changes it much.  The Book of Mormon figure counts each name once, so the catalogue should be counted the same way:  89 of Judah's 333 distinct names, or 26.7 percent, end in the divine name.  And the Book of Mormon figure leaves out the biblical names its characters bear, such as Jeremiah, Isaiah and Zedekiah.  With every proper name in the book counted, the share is 20 of 301, or 6.6 percent.  With the Jaredite names of the book of Ether left out, it is 10 of 127, or 7.9 percent.⁸  So the share is 7 or 8 percent against roughly 27.  The Book of Mormon list includes place names and the Judah list does not, which closes some of the gap and not most of it.  This is evidence against a Jerusalem origin for the name stock, and it does not depend on any matching rule.

What this test cannot do

Four limits should be stated plainly.

• The inscription list is not complete. The main test uses the Bible's names. The inscription test uses excavated artifacts only. It leaves out the seals and bullae from the antiquities market, the Elephantine papyri and the later documents, all of which the proponents draw on.
• It tests more names than the proponents claim. Tvedtnes, Gee and Roper write of "nonbiblical names used in Nephite and Lamanite society."¹⁴ They do not claim that every name is Hebrew. Thirty-six of the 163 names occur only in the book of Ether, whose people the book says left the Old World long before Israel existed, and the list also holds place names and a few words such as Liahona and Rameumptom. With the 36 left out, the result is the same: 64 of the remaining 127 match a Hebrew Bible name, against 60 to 65 expected by chance. The Ether-only names, which nobody calls Hebrew, match the excavated inscriptions 12 times in 36, which is as often as chance predicts and a higher share than the other 127.⁸
• The no-twin test assumes the names would be Judahite personal names. The 77 names with no King James twin include 13 of the Ether-only names, the names Nibley read as Egyptian, and names the story places centuries after the departure from Jerusalem. A defender can say that these were never expected on Judahite seals. The test shows only that they are not found there.
• It is blind to meaning, gender and date. It cannot credit Alma for being a man's name in the right language. The proponents' list has the same blindness in the other direction, since it accepts Ammonite, Phoenician and Syrian names and a span of more than two thousand years.
• It does not test the Egyptian names. No machine-readable list of Egyptian personal names was used, and Nibley's rule, under which near misses confirm, cannot be scored. Paanchi beside Paiankh is the closest single resemblance in the file. It stands as one unscored item.
• It does not touch Nahom. That claim is a name plus a location plus a change of direction, and it is weighed in the archaeology article.

Verdict on names

The Hebrew name matches are what chance predicts and carry no weight for an ancient origin.  The rule that produces them matches random names equally often, the list searched is long enough to yield more than sixteen hits by accident, and fifteen of the sixteen are the consonants of names already printed in the King James Bible.  Against the names on excavated artifacts, the Book of Mormon names that are not built on a Bible name's consonants match once in 77, which is the chance rate.  The names that are built on a Bible name's consonants match the artifacts somewhat more often than random names with the same property do, by one and a half to two standard deviations on the article's rule and two to two and a half on a tighter one.  Set against real King James names of the same length the margin is about one standard deviation.⁸  That is the one result in this section that leans toward the Latter-day Saint side.  It is also what names coined from well-known Bible names would produce, so it cannot settle the matter.  The shortage of names built on the divine name counts modestly against a Jerusalem origin.  The Egyptian names are unscored.  Nahom is the one name-based claim that needs more than this test, and it gets it elsewhere.

Narrative complexity

Verdict first.  Grant Hardy's reading is the strongest literary argument the text has, and its facts hold up.  The book is intricate, it keeps a long chronology nearly straight, and its three narrators can be told apart.  Hardy himself says that every one of his observations could be made about a novel, and he leaves the question of history to others.  Two checks run for this article limit what the argument can carry.  A word habit that a reader might take for a narrator's voice follows the order of dictation and not the narrator.  Hardy does not rest his case on that habit, so the check limits the argument and does not refute it.  And the 1830 text slips at the exact seam where the longest flashback rejoins the main story.  The section shows a skilled author.  It does not show an ancient one.

Hardy's argument in his own words

Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon:  A Reader's Guide was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.  Its starting observation is about scale:

Not only are there more than a thousand years of history involving some two hundred named individuals and nearly a hundred distinct places, but the narrative itself is presented as the work of three primary editor/historians—Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni.  These figures, in turn, claim to have based their accounts on dozens of preexisting records.⁹

Four things follow in his account.

The bookkeeping is nearly clean.  "The chronology is handled virtually without glitches, despite several flashbacks and temporally overlapping narratives; there are only two potential geographical discrepancies (at Alma 51:26 and 53:6); and the narrators keep straight both the order and family connections among the twenty-six Nephite record keepers and forty-one Jaredite kings (including rival lines)."  He draws the inference a believer would draw, and names the witness against the obvious explanation:  "The complexity is such that one would assume the author worked from charts and maps, though Joseph Smith's wife—the person who had the longest and closest view of the production of the text—explicitly denied that he had written something out beforehand that he either had memorized or consulted as he translated, and indeed she claimed that Joseph began sessions of dictation without looking at the manuscript or having the last passage read back to him."⁹

The narrators differ.  Nephi "is not recording events as they happen.  Instead, he is a middle-aged man recounting incidents from his teens and early twenties, with the full knowledge that life in the Promised Land has soured."⁹  Mormon is a different writer:  he "never includes contextless sermons and has little to say about the House of Israel or the last days.  Mormon does not focus on his own life or reinterpret scriptures creatively, and most of all, he is not a visionary."  Of Mormon's own style Hardy writes:  "Stories and sermons are set within a thick historical framework and strict chronology, with years ticking by like clockwork."⁹  Moroni is a survivor:  "Sixteen years after the final battle (though there have apparently been subsequent traumas), Moroni is still in shock."⁹

Hardy gives a count that can be checked.  The word "messiah," he says, "occurs twenty-three times in Nephi's writings but only twice in Mormon's work (and never in Moroni's)."⁹  A count for this article agrees on the pattern, though its first number is higher than his.  "Messiah" appears 29 times in 1 and 2 Nephi with the speeches of Lehi and Jacob included, twice in the books Mormon abridged, and not at all in Ether or Moroni.¹⁰

Documents are set inside the narrative.  "Mormon regularly inserts primary sources into his narrative."  Hardy lists a memoir by Zeniff, an edict of King Mosiah, six letters, and speeches by King Benjamin and Alma, and notes that "the transition to embedded documents is usually marked by a clear introduction and a shift from third-person to first-person voice."⁹

The flashbacks close.  His best example is the story of Zeniff's colony.  A search party from Zarahemla finds the lost colony in Mosiah 7–8.  Then the narrative goes back eighty years:

The history of that colony—some eighty years' worth—is told in a lengthy flashback that extends from Mosiah 9:1 to 21:27 and ends with a second account of the arrival of the searchers, but this time told from the point of view of the colonists.  At that point Mormon's secondary narration returns not only to the main narrative sequence but even to the same conversation that had been interrupted thirteen chapters earlier.⁹

The feat is sharper than it looks, because of the order of dictation.  Hardy notes that "the Book of Mormon narrative was produced out of chronological order, with Words of Mormon being the last section dictated."⁹  Mosiah came first.  The books that set up its back story, 1 Nephi through Omni, came last.

A reader who has not felt the weight of this has not read the book.  A dictated text of 268,000 words with nested sources, parallel plot lines and a thousand-year calendar is hard to produce.

What Hardy does not claim

Hardy is a believing Latter-day Saint, and he is careful about what the argument proves.

He declines to argue for history at all:  "I will leave it to others to prove or disprove the historical and religious claims of the book; my goal is to help anyone interested in the Book of Mormon, for whatever reason, become a better, more perceptive reader."⁹

He says his method works on fiction:  "Although it may sometimes appear as if my analysis assumes the historicity of the text, the sorts of observations and inferences I put forward could just as readily be made about an intricately constructed, multivocal, narrated novel such as Nabokov's Pale Fire."⁹

He describes what the fictional reading requires and does not call it impossible:  "In order to conceptualize the Book of Mormon as fiction, we must picture Joseph Smith imagining a history of the Nephites and then imagining narrators who interact with that history and with each other."⁹

And he supplies the skeptic's answer to the embedded documents himself.  He first puts the puzzle:  "If Joseph Smith had intended to author a religious morality tale, either to gain converts or to make money, he could have written something much simpler."  Then he adds:  "Skeptics might point to the precedents of early modern novels … that similarly incorporated letters, memoirs, and diaries.  Or they might note that Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered a profusion of fictions framed as discovered-manuscript stories."⁹

So the strongest literary case for the book, stated by its best advocate, is a case for careful design.  Its author says it would hold if Joseph Smith designed it.

Two checks

One "voice" marker follows the order of dictation.  Brent Lee Metcalfe pointed out in 1993 that the book uses two words for "so":  therefore and wherefore.  He counted "668 usages of 'therefore' … and 420 of 'wherefore' in the 1830 Book of Mormon" and found that "sizeable blocks of narrative dominated by 'wherefore' envelop a central portion favoring 'therefore.'"³³  The count was repeated for this article on the current text, with the books set in the order they were dictated.¹⁰

The switch does not happen between narrators.  It happens inside Moroni's book of Ether.  Metcalfe gives the breakdown:  "Ether 1–5 has 'therefore' 15 times and 'wherefore' 8 times.  'Therefore' is used 8 times in Ether 6–10, 'wherefore' increasing to 23 times.  In the final third, Ether 11–15, 'therefore' diminishes to 2 occurrences while 'wherefore' appears 32 times."³³  After that point every part uses wherefore, whether the named writer is Moroni in AD 400 or Nephi in 580 BC.

The same narrator falls on both sides of the switch.  Mormon's abridgment and the first seven chapters of his own book, dictated early, use therefore 593 times and wherefore 7.  Words of Mormon, a short piece he also narrates, was dictated last.  It uses wherefore four times and therefore never.  Moroni's two chapters at the end of the book of Mormon use therefore four times and wherefore never, and then his book of Ether begins the change.¹⁰

A habit that changes once, partway through the dictation, and then holds across writers a thousand years apart belongs to the person dictating.  This does not erase Hardy's narrators.  The "Messiah" count above follows Nephi and not the calendar of dictation, since Ether and Moroni were dictated late and never use the word.  It does mean that vocabulary alone cannot separate a narrator's voice from the dictator's, and that at least one feature a reader might credit to Nephi and Moroni is Joseph Smith's.  A believer can accept that.  On any theory of translation the English words are the translator's, and a translator's habits can drift.  What the check removes is the use of small-word differences between narrators as proof that the narrators were different men, which is the method of the wordprint studies treated below.

The 1830 text slips at the seam.  The Zeniff flashback ends at Mosiah 21:27.  In the very next verse the 1830 edition reads:  "Limhi was again filled with joy, on learning from the mouth of Ammon that king Benjamin had a gift from God, whereby he could interpret such engravings."²⁴  But Benjamin is dead.  Mosiah 6:5 says "king Benjamin lived three years and he died," and Mosiah 7:1 sends Ammon out after those three years.  The current edition reads "king Mosiah."

Royal Skousen's critical text confirms the reading and the date of the fix:  "Here in Mosiah 21:28, the 1837 edition made the change from Benjamin to Mosiah to avoid the apparent contradiction.  Presumably, this emendation was made by Joseph Smith."  He offers two faithful explanations, that Ammon left before Benjamin died, or that it was "Mormon's own mistake in abridging the record."³⁴  The same wrong king appears once more, at Ether 4:1, again in connection with the Jaredite plates.²⁴

Either explanation may be right.  The plain alternative is that an author dictating without notes, thirteen chapters after he last mentioned the king, named the wrong one.  That is the kind of error the "no charts" testimony predicts for a human author.  Hardy records others:  the two geographical discrepancies, and "many battles" in Alma 25:3 and 27:1 that "do not quite correspond to the account in 16:6–9."⁹

Verdict on narrative complexity

The complexity is real and Hardy has described it accurately.  It is the strongest evidence in this article that the book was planned by a capable mind and not improvised line by line.

It does not date that mind.  Hardy says his observations would hold for a novel.  The devices were in print.  A word habit that separates the narrators on the page tracks the dictation and not the narrator, though Hardy's own markers, what each narrator cares about and how he handles his sources, are untouched by that check.  And the consistency fails at the point where a dictating author would be most likely to lose his place.  As with chiasmus, the evidence establishes skill and leaves the century open.

What remains for the Latter-day Saint side is the argument from difficulty:  that Joseph Smith could not have held all this in his head.  That is a claim about how the book was produced, and it depends on the witnesses to the dictation.  It is weighed in the translation article.

Early Modern English

This is the most interesting live argument in the field, and it is interesting because it embarrasses both sides.

The claim

Royal Skousen's Book of Mormon Critical Text Project reconstructed the earliest recoverable text from the surviving original manuscript, the printer's manuscript, and the 1830 edition. From that reconstruction Skousen and Stanford Carmack argue that the earliest text contains vocabulary and syntax characteristic of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — older than the King James Bible, and not available to Joseph Smith.

In "The Language of the Original Text of the Book of Mormon", BYU Studies Quarterly 57:3 (2018), Skousen states the vocabulary side precisely:⁷ "In The Nature of the Original Language (NOL), I list 39 words with archaic meanings and 25 archaic phrases, for a total of 64 language items, that disappeared from English before the mid-1700s and do not occur in the King James Bible."⁷

The syntactic side is Carmack's, and the evidence includes the rate of periphrastic did ("they did go" for "they went"), command syntax layered with should, the obsolete phrase "the more part of," and the personal relative pronoun which used of people where modern English requires who. Skousen summarizes the result: "Stanford Carmack has found that the Book of Mormon syntax matches best what we find in English from the second half of the 1500s, but it does not match the syntax of the 1611 King James Bible nor the pseudo-biblical texts that were popular during the late 1700s and early 1800s, such as Richard Snowden's 1793 The American Revolution and Gilbert Hunt's 1816 The Late War."⁷

That last clause deserves emphasis, because it answers in advance the objection this article would otherwise raise. Carmack did run a genre-matched control. He compared the Book of Mormon not only against sixteenth-century English but against the nineteenth-century pseudo-biblical books that a King James imitator would have been imitating. Carmack's own longer treatments are "The Implications of Past-Tense Syntax in the Book of Mormon",³⁵ "What Command Syntax Tells Us About Book of Mormon Authorship",³⁶ and "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?", which states the control design in its own words: pseudo-biblical writings "can be considered a control group in relation to the linguistic form and structure that Joseph Smith might have produced had he been attempting to mimic biblical style in 1829."³⁷

The strongest single point is a comparison Skousen makes with Joseph Smith's own prose: "Yet this syntax does not show up in Joseph Smith's own writing, including his 1832 History written only three years after he finished translating the Book of Mormon."⁷

What Skousen himself concedes

Faithful summaries of this work usually stop before the concessions. They should not, because Skousen states them plainly in the same article.

Asked directly — "(1) Is the original Book of Mormon text an Early Modern English text?" — he answers: "The answer is no."⁷

One of his reasons is a straightforward counterexample: "In the Book of Mormon, the use of the perfective auxiliary have is considerably more frequent than the archaic perfective auxiliary be for verbs of motion and change; this syntax appears to date from the late 1700s, nearer to Joseph Smith's time, than from the Early Modern English period, which definitely favored the perfective be (as in 'he is risen')."⁷

He also concedes that the text is not a straightforward ancient translation either. His own summary is that the Book of Mormon is a "creative translation" and a "cultural translation," and he offers as an example the word bar — the judgment bar of God — a medieval and Early Modern English legal image with no ancient equivalent. His inference from all of it: "All of this cultural translation linking the text to Early Modern English argues that Joseph Smith was not the author of the English translation."⁷

That is the shape of the claim. It is not "the Book of Mormon is a sixteenth-century book." It is "the English contains sixteenth-century strata that Joseph Smith did not have."

The critique from inside Latter-day Saint scholarship

The sharpest answer is recent and comes from within the tradition: William L. Davis, "Joseph Smith's Spiritual Language: The Presence of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon", Dialogue 58:2 (2025).²⁸

Davis attacks the load-bearing assumption — that Joseph Smith could not have encountered these forms:

While Skousen and Carmack have enlisted a complex and multifaceted array of evidence in favor of their position, their conclusions nevertheless rest upon a set of foundational assumptions concerning the types of language features (vocabulary, grammar, expressions, etc.) that Joseph allegedly could—or, more specifically, could not—have known. This essay, however, argues that such conclusions should be regarded with caution.²⁸

His positive case is documentary rather than statistical. Working-class households in the Smiths' region owned and read Shakespeare, Milton, Baxter, Flavel, Bunyan, Watts, Doddridge, Wesley, Johnson, and Hervey. His central exhibit is John Bunyan's The Holy War (1682), which he shows was in over fifty British editions in the eighteenth century,²⁸ in eight American editions and reprints between 1794 and 1818,²⁸ in Wesley's Christian Library for Methodist exhorters and preachers with little or no formal education, and on sale in the bookstores near the Smith family's homes in Palmyra and Manchester.²⁸ Davis then demonstrates that Bunyan's periphrastic did covers the full range of forms Carmack treats as diagnostic.

Davis also turns the "if–and" conditional against the Hebrew reading:

Nevertheless, in spite of these technical variations, the Book of Mormon formulations openly display their direct derivation and dependence upon the English renditions of the KJV New Testament models.²⁸

And he draws the consequence:

With the Book of Mormon forms ultimately deriving from adaptations of New Testament lexico-syntactic templates, any linguistic artifacts from the translation process would necessarily come from Greek (the language underlying the New Testament), rather than Hebrew, presenting an admittedly awkward resolution for the theory of "tight control."²⁸

That is a serious blow to the single strongest Hebraism, and it comes from a Latter-day Saint scholar publishing in a Latter-day Saint journal.

Other faithful resistance is real. Roger Terry's "Archaic Pronouns and Verbs in the Book of Mormon", Dialogue 47:3 (2014), reports that the text "shifts back and forth randomly between the singular" and plural second-person pronouns "in contexts where the singular form is required," and concludes that the translation is human rather than divine — while doubting that the human was Joseph Smith.³⁸ That leaves the thesis with an unanswered question: if the English is neither Joseph Smith's nor God's, whose is it?

Verdict on Early Modern English

Unresolved, and this article reports it as unresolved rather than picking a side.

Three things can be said with confidence. First, Carmack's work is real philology with a genre-matched control, and the common dismissal that he never compared against pseudo-biblical imitators is simply false; Skousen names The Late War and Snowden's American Revolution as comparison texts,⁷ and Carmack devoted a whole article to the pseudo-biblical corpus.³⁷ Second, Skousen's own answer to "is this an Early Modern English text?" is no, and readers on both sides misreport him. Third, Davis's access argument is a direct hit on the premise the whole case rests on, and it has not yet been answered.

The claim is testable, which is more than can be said for most arguments in this field. What would settle it is a replication using Carmack's exact measures with Bunyan and the other named working-class devotional authors added to the comparison set. That test has not been run by anyone, and until it is, the Early Modern English argument should be described as open — not as proof of a revealed text, and not as refuted.

Stylometry

Verdict first.  Seven studies published between 1980 and 2013 were read for this article.  Their conclusions are:  twenty-four ancient authors;  two ancient authors and no modern one;  Joseph Smith's "prophetic voice";  Sidney Rigdon and Solomon Spalding;  none of the above.  The one result that survives is negative.  The 2008 attribution to Rigdon and Spalding was produced by a method that had to name somebody, and it fails its own test on control texts.  No study establishes who wrote the book, and none establishes that it had more than one author.

Readers expect computational authorship attribution to settle this. It does not, and the reason is worth explaining carefully, because "the studies disagree" is not the same as "the method is inconclusive," and here the second is true.

Closed-set versus open-set, in plain language

A closed-set classifier is given a list of candidate authors and told that the true author is one of them. It then reports which candidate is closest.³⁹ If the true author is not on the list, the method cannot say so. It will still name someone, the least-wrong option, and report it with apparent confidence. Asking a closed-set classifier "who wrote the Book of Mormon, Spaulding, Rigdon, Cowdery, or Longfellow?" guarantees one of those four names as the answer, whether or not any of them wrote a word of it.

An open-set classifier is allowed to answer "none of the above." It first asks whether the text is close enough to any candidate to justify an attribution at all, and only then picks among them. This is much harder, and it is the correct design for a question where the true author may be someone whose authenticated writing does not exist.

G. Bruce Schaalje, Paul J. Fields, Matthew Roper and Gregory L. Snow put the point this way in Literary and Linguistic Computing in 2011:

Many, possibly most, authorship attribution problems are 'open games' (Burrows 2002) in which it is not realistic to unquestionably assume that the author of the text in question is contained in the candidate set (Koppel et al., 2009).  One purpose of this article is to show that failure to recognize or deal with this issue produces highly misleading results.¹¹

Their technical statement is stronger:  "naïve use of closed-set NSC classification in open-set situations will always produce inflated and misleading values for the posterior probabilities."¹¹  The word is "always."  It is a property of the arithmetic.  A closed-set method divides 100 percent of the probability among the names on its list, so the least bad candidate can score 99 percent while being nothing like the text.

The seven studies

Larsen, Rencher and Layton (1980).  Three researchers at Brigham Young University cut the text into 251 blocks of about 1,000 words and assigned each block to whoever is speaking, which gave 24 "authors."  They then compared how often each author uses small words such as and, the, of and unto.⁴⁰  Their result on the ten commonest words:  "The statistical odds that a single author wrote the book are less than 1 in 100 billion."  The next sentence is a caution that is usually left out:  "However, this number should not be taken too literally.  It depends on several assumptions, one of which is that we have a random sample of each author's writings."⁴⁰  A classification test put 93.3 percent of 2,000-word blocks with the right author.⁴⁰  Their conclusions were that the results "all strongly support multiple authorship of the Book of Mormon," that it "does not seem possible that Joseph Smith or any other writer could have fabricated a work with 24 or more discernible authorship styles," and that the Book of Mormon authors "do not resemble any of the nineteenth-century authors which we considered."⁴⁰

Two limits are in the paper itself.  The authors concede that "it is unlikely that the data can be considered to have come from a multivariate normal distribution," which the test assumes.⁴⁰  And they report a pattern they did not follow up:  "There is some evidence of a wordprint time trend within the Book of Mormon; i.e., writers are more similar to their contemporaries than to writers in other time periods.  This needs further investigation."⁴⁰

That second remark matters.  The narrators of 600 BC were dictated last and the narrators of 100 BC to AD 400 were dictated first.  The table in the narrative section above shows one common word, therefore, falling from hundreds of uses to almost none partway through the dictation.  Therefore and wherefore are both on Larsen's word list, and the paper names therefore among "the most important contributors" to one of its two separating functions.⁴⁰  A single speaker whose habits shifted during three months of dictation would produce blocks that differ by "time period" in exactly this way.  The study did not test for it.

Hilton (1990).  John L. Hilton set out to verify that wordprinting works at all before applying it.  He used A. Q. Morton's word-pattern ratios on 5,000-word texts and first ran "325 diverse wordprint tests" on 26 texts by nine undisputed authors.  Pairs by the same author gave about 2 "rejections" and pairs by different authors about 7.⁴¹  Then he tested the Book of Mormon:  "Taking the comparisons of Nephi versus Alma, we found that in eight of the nine tests, 5 or more rejections resulted."⁴¹  His conclusion:  "it is statistically indefensible to propose Joseph Smith or Oliver Cowdery or Solomon Spaulding as the author of the 30,000 words from the Book of Mormon manuscript texts attributed to Nephi and Alma."⁴¹

The stated limits are narrow scope and a grey zone.  The study covers 30,000 words of a 268,000-word book.  Hilton says a pair scoring 1 to 6 rejections cannot be assigned, "because the within-author and between-author distributions overlap each other in this range."⁴¹  The unstated limit is the same as Larsen's.  Nephi was dictated at the end and Alma near the beginning, so a Nephi-against-Alma test is also a late-dictation-against-early-dictation test.  And the Smith texts are letters and a dictated history, set against narrative in King James style.

Holmes (1992).  David I. Holmes, a statistician at Bristol Polytechnic in England, published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society.  He measured richness of vocabulary, such as the share of words used only once, in 14 blocks of about 10,000 words drawn from six Book of Mormon prophets, and in samples of Joseph Smith's personal writings, his revelations, the Book of Abraham and King James Isaiah.⁴²  He criticised the 1980 paper directly, calling one of its claims "a very superficial view for which Larsen and his collaborators provide no statistical support."⁴²  His own result:  "This study has therefore not found any evidence of multiple authorship within the Book of Mormon itself.  Variation within samples from the same prophet is generally as great as any variation between the prophets."  And his conclusion:  "It is my conclusion, from the results of this research and the supporting historical evidence, that the Book of Mormon sprang from the prophetic voice of Joseph Smith himself, as did his revelations and the text of the Book of Abraham."⁴²

Two things limit it.  First, his statistics did not link the book to Smith's known prose.  Smith's personal writings formed their own cluster, apart from the Book of Mormon.  The link Holmes found was between the Book of Mormon and Smith's revelations, and the step to Smith as author leans on "the supporting historical evidence."  Second, the measure is weak.  Fields, Schaalje and Roper report a test in which vocabulary richness assigned texts of known authorship correctly only 23 percent of the time, against 96 percent for word frequencies, and they are right that a failure to find a difference "may therefore say little about the subject of the test."³⁹  A failure to detect several authors with a blunt tool is not evidence that there was one.

Jockers, Witten and Criddle (2008).  This is the study critics cite.  It applied two classifiers, delta and nearest shrunken centroid, to all 239 chapters, with seven candidates:  Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt, Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spalding, the Isaiah and Malachi of the King James Bible, and two poets, Longfellow and Barlow, as controls.  The authors describe the design themselves as "a closed set of candidate authors."⁴³  Joseph Smith was left out:  "We did not include Joseph Smith in the analysis because, as noted above, there is currently no reliable corpus of Joseph Smith text."⁴³  On texts of known authorship the method was right 91.2 percent of the time.⁴³  Its first choices for the 239 chapters were Rigdon 93, Isaiah and Malachi 63, Spalding 52, Cowdery 20, Pratt 9, Longfellow 2 and Barlow 0.⁴³  The abstract concludes:  "Our findings support the hypothesis that Rigdon was the main architect of the Book of Mormon and are consistent with historical evidence suggesting that he fabricated the book by adding theology to the unpublished writings of Spalding (then deceased)."⁴³

Schaalje, Fields, Roper and Snow (2011).  The reply did two things.  First it showed what the closed-set method does to a text whose author is not on the list.  The authors gave it 51 Federalist papers by Alexander Hamilton and the same Mormon-era candidates.  "Early or late Rigdon was falsely chosen as the author of 28 of the 51 Hamilton texts with inflated posterior probabilities ranging as high as 0.9999 (Fig. 2).  Pratt was falsely chosen as the author of 12 of the papers, and Cowdery was falsely chosen as the author of the remaining 11 papers."¹¹  Sidney Rigdon did not write the Federalist.

Then it reran the Book of Mormon with Smith added and with an "unobserved author" allowed.  With the closed method the chapters went 96 to Rigdon, 68 to Isaiah, 37 to Spalding, 29 to Smith, 5 to Pratt and 4 to Cowdery.  With the open method:  "Of the 239 Book of Mormon chapters, 175 (73.2%) were classified to one or more unobserved authors, 35 (14.6%) were classified to Isaiah, 17 (7.1%) were classified to early or late Rigdon, 8 (3.4%) were classified to Smith, 2 (0.8%) were classified to Spalding, and 2 (0.8%) were classified to Cowdery."¹¹  Their companion review reports a further run with Isaiah and the poets removed.  In it the method "assigns 0 percent of the Book of Mormon chapters to Spalding-Rigdon, 4 percent to Cowdery, 3 percent to Smith, and 93 percent to 'Someone Else,'" which the reviewers take to show that the candidates' styles "show very little resemblance to the writing styles in the Book of Mormon."³⁹

The paper states its own limits, and they are the important part.  "It is important to note that the open-set NSC procedure does not indicate how many unobserved authors there are …  There could be as many unobserved authors as the number of test texts, or as few as one."  And of work still to do:  "In future studies with the Book of Mormon, we intend to adjust for the deliberate archaic language used throughout."¹¹  That sentence concedes the central problem.  The Book of Mormon is written in imitation King James English.  None of the candidates' comparison texts is.  An "unobserved author" may simply be an unobserved style.

Fields, Schaalje and Roper (2011).  The review in Mormon Studies Review restates the 2011 results for general readers and lists the faults of the 2008 design, the first two being "Failing to include Joseph Smith as a candidate author" and "Misapplying a closed-set technique for an open-set problem."³⁹  It is a hostile review by three of the four authors of the paper it defends, and it is used here only for what can be checked against the two journal articles.

Jockers (2013).  Matthew Jockers answered the first fault by testing whether Smith's personal writings could serve as a sample.  He grouped the documents by the 24 scribes who penned them and asked a classifier to recognise Smith.  It could not do so reliably even on the documents in Smith's own hand:  "documents in Smith's hand were only correctly attributed to Smith 64% of the time."  Of the documents penned by scribes, 16 percent were assigned to Smith, 33 percent to Cowdery and 25 percent to Pratt.⁴⁴  His conclusion is modest:  "The only conclusion comfortably reached here is that the decision to exclude Smith from prior work investigating the authorship of the Book of Mormon was entirely justified."⁴⁴  The paper as read does not take up the open-set objection.

What survives

• The 2008 attribution to Rigdon and Spalding does not survive. The Hamilton test shows the method assigning Rigdon to texts he cannot have written, at probabilities up to 0.9999. The same design applied to the Book of Mormon proves nothing about Rigdon.
• The 2011 open-set result survives as a negative. None of the named candidates' ordinary prose resembles the Book of Mormon. It does not survive as evidence for ancient authors, and its authors do not claim that it is. Their own text says the archaic register has not been adjusted for.
• The 1980 and 1990 findings of internal differences survive as measurements. Parts of the book do differ in their small-word habits. They do not survive as proof of several ancient authors, because neither study separated the named narrator from the stage of dictation, and the one independent attempt to replicate the finding with a different measure found nothing.
• Holmes's null result survives as a null. His positive conclusion about Joseph Smith is a historical judgment attached to it.
• The 2013 paper survives as a description of the obstacle. Even the documents in Smith's own handwriting do not give a stable sample of his style.

Why the comparison prose is the real problem

Authorship attribution needs substantial samples of each candidate's unassisted writing in a comparable genre. For this question that is almost entirely missing.

Joseph Smith's authenticated, unassisted prose is thin, late, heavily scribed, and stylistically nothing like pseudo-biblical narrative. Fields, Schaalje, and Roper list what there is: a handful of letters, most under a thousand words each.³⁹  Jockers's 2013 test shows that even this handful is not consistent with itself.  Oliver Cowdery's is limited. Sidney Rigdon's surviving corpus is sermonic. And the Book of Mormon's own text is not one genre: it is narrative, sermon, war chronicle, letter, and long blocks of King James Bible, which alone would distort any word-frequency profile unless removed.  Removing it changes the answer.

The test that could move the question has not been run by either side.  It would compare the Book of Mormon with other long texts written in King James imitation by known nineteenth-century authors, so that register is held constant, and it would compare parts of the Book of Mormon by order of dictation as well as by narrator.  The Late War and The First Book of Napoleon are the obvious first controls.

Verdict: underdetermined, and the honest result. Stylometry cannot presently name the author of the Book of Mormon, in either direction. Faithful and critical wordprint claims both overreach. Anyone citing a stylometric study as settling this question, for or against, is citing beyond what the available comparison corpus can support.

This is stated as a conclusion rather than as a gap, because it is one. A contradictory literature built on an inadequate reference corpus does not average out into a preferred algorithm. It yields an explicit statement of uncertainty.

The strongest Latter-day Saint responses

The current serious faithful position is not the one critics usually attack.

It is not that Joseph Smith read English off the plates word by word. The Church's own 2016 essay describes dictation from a seer stone in a hat, with the plates often not even in use, and Joseph Smith's own repeated answer that the work was done "by the gift and power of God" without further particulars.¹² On that description, the English is not claimed to be a mechanical rendering of engraved characters.

Given that, the responses to this article's evidence run as follows.

On King James dependence. Conceded and explained. A revelator rendering ancient material into English will use the scriptural English he and his readers possess. Where the ancient text corresponded to a passage of Isaiah, the King James Isaiah supplied the words. The italics come along because whole verses come along. This answer works, and this article accepts that it works. Its cost is that it removes the text's English from the evidence entirely — including the Hebraisms, which cannot simultaneously be translator-artifacts of Hebrew and products of King James familiarity.

On Deutero-Isaiah. Either the unity of Isaiah is defended, or the chapter selection is attributed to the translator rather than the plates. The second is more common now and is consistent with the first response.

On nineteenth-century controversies. Two moves: that the questions are perennial, and that revelation is given to answer the questions its recipients are asking. The second is theologically respectable and historically candid. It concedes Campbell's observation and reinterprets it.

On chiasmus and narrative complexity. These are offered as positive evidence that the book exceeds what its dictator could plausibly produce. The article's answer is that both establish authorial skill and neither establishes date, and that the strongest statistical defense of chiasmus says so in its own words.

On stylometry. Faithful scholarship's strongest contribution here is methodological rather than positive: the 2011 open-set work is a real correction to a real error, and it should be credited as such even by readers who reject its authors' conclusions about the book.

On Hebraisms and names.  The careful faithful position is already more modest than the popular one.  Skousen calls the conditional "Hebrew-like" and says the potential Hebraisms "are consistent with the belief, but do not prove" a Hebrew source.²³  On names, the reply to a base-rate test is that the best cases are more than consonants:  Sariah is attested as a woman's name and Alma as a man's, both in Jewish documents.  That is true of those two, and the test in this article cannot see it.  It is not the rule the sixteen were chosen by, since the same list takes names from Ammonite, Phoenician and Syrian seals.  A method that reports its hits and not its misses cannot be scored, and the proponents have not published the misses.  When the misses are counted against an open catalogue of excavated names, the hits fall on the names that resemble Bible names and nowhere else.

The pattern across these responses is consistent. Each response works. Each works by moving the claim further from "this English text is an ancient artifact" and closer to "ancient content stands behind an English text that Joseph Smith produced." That is a defensible position. It is also a much smaller one than the argument the evidence in the ancient-origin column is usually recruited to support.

Common objections and responses

"Joseph Smith could not have written it — he was an ignorant farm boy."

This objection is weaker than it looks, and so is the reply.

The dictation was a genuine feat, and dismissing it is not honest. But "uneducated" and "unable to compose" are different. Joseph Smith was a fluent extemporaneous speaker in a culture of extemporaneous preaching, immersed in the King James Bible, living in the most religiously agitated region of the country. The Late War demonstrates that sustained King James pastiche was a published genre before 1830.² None of that explains the book. It does dissolve the claim that no nineteenth-century process could have produced anything like it.

"Chiasmus proves ancient Hebrew origin."

Not according to the strongest statistical study defending it, which states that its results "do not prove that the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient document."¹

"Chiasms in the Doctrine and Covenants prove Joseph Smith knew the technique."

Retired. Edwards and Edwards tested the best example, Doctrine and Covenants 88:34–39, and found P = 0.52 — indistinguishable from chance. Critics should stop using this argument.¹

"The Late War is the source of the Book of Mormon."

Not supported. Zero shared runs of ten or more words; the longest shared run is nine words; after filtering out wording that also appears in the King James Bible, 55 short formulaic runs remain in 268,344 words; and The First Book of Napoleon matches more densely per unit of source text.² The book's real evidential value is as proof that the genre existed.

"View of the Hebrews is the source of the Book of Mormon."

Not as a verbal source: 97 shared runs, 17 after the King James filter, and the longest match is Isaiah quoted by both.² The thematic argument is a different argument.  B. H. Roberts thought the "cumulative force" of the resemblances a serious problem,²¹ and it is answered above on its own terms:  the resemblances show a shared stock of ideas, and nobody has counted how many of them any two books on Israelite Indians would share.

"Stylometry has identified the authors."

No. The 2008 closed-set attribution to Spaulding and Rigdon cannot be used as affirmative evidence.  The same method, given 51 essays by Alexander Hamilton, named Rigdon as the author of 28 of them.¹¹  The open-set correction assigns 73 percent of the chapters to "one or more unobserved authors,"¹¹ and that does not establish ancient authorship either.  Its authors say they have not yet adjusted for the book's "deliberate archaic language."¹¹

"The italics prove Joseph Smith copied from a Bible while dictating."

More than the evidence carries, and Emma Smith denied it directly: "He had neither manuscript nor book to read from."¹² The italics prove that the King James wording is the source of the Book of Mormon's biblical passages. They do not establish by what route it got there — an open Bible, memory, or a revelatory process that returned familiar English. The distinction matters and critics routinely blur it.

"Nahom proves the Arabian journey."

It is the single best item in the ancient-origin column, and it is treated properly in the archaeology article rather than being settled here.  The base-rate test in the names section above applies to personal names matched by consonants.  It shows how easily a three-consonant name finds a match somewhere, and N-H-M is three consonants.  It does not price the rest of the Nahom claim, which is that the match lies in the right region and before a turn to the east.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

What would strengthen the Latter-day Saint claim:

• A wider search for the conditional "if … and." The count is now verified against the 1830 edition, and two pseudo-biblical books of the period do not contain it. If a large body of dictated or extemporaneous English from the 1820s also lacks any such resumptive "and," the construction becomes hard to explain as a habit of speech. This is the one Hebrew-like feature the King James Bible cannot supply.
• A controlled test of the Early Modern English syntax claim against a matched corpus of nineteenth-century pseudo-biblical writing. If the Book of Mormon's periphrastic did rate is unlike both 1611 and the imitators, that is a genuine anomaly.
• Matches above the chance rate among the Book of Mormon names that share no consonant pattern with a King James name. On the excavated inscriptions there is one such match in 77, where chance gives about one. A fuller catalogue that includes the market seals and bullae could be searched the same way, with a stated rule and the misses counted.
• Further Old World finds of the Nahom type: a name, in the right place, on the right route, at the right date, that was not available in 1829.
• Discovery that any substantial passage of the Book of Mormon's biblical material follows a better textual reading than the King James Bible — the reverse of the Lord's Prayer doxology case.

What would weaken it further:

• Verification against the 1830 first edition that the italics retention rate is as high as, or higher than, the 61.9 percent measured here on the current edition.³
• A demonstration that the "if … and" constructions of the 1830 text pattern like restarts in other dictated English of the period. The evidence so far points that way but rests on Skousen's description, not on a comparison corpus.
• The same result from a catalogue of inscribed names that includes the unprovenanced seals and bullae.
• Documentary evidence placing a specific nineteenth-century source in Joseph Smith's hands — which, on the measurements in this article, none of the three books usually named supplies.

What would not change anything:

• Another stylometric study of the usual kind. Until authenticated comparison prose exists in the relevant genre for the relevant candidates, the method cannot answer this question, and further studies will continue to disagree for that reason. A study that held the King James register constant and separated narrator from order of dictation would be a different matter, and nobody has run one.
• Another list of parallels between the Book of Mormon and some nineteenth-century book, offered without a matched control corpus. This article's own measurements show how easily such lists are generated and how quickly they evaporate under a null test.

Sources

Every source below was opened, either during the first draft and its citation pass of August 8, 2026 or during the completion of October 1, 2026.  Each footnote says how:  from a library file, from a publisher's or journal's page, or through the Internet Archive's search-inside text of a scanned book that this project does not hold.  Sources that were not read in full say so.  The verbatim wording behind each quotation, and the OCR corrections applied to page scans, are recorded in the companion quotations ledger. What each source argues, and why it was or was not used, is in the literature review.

Notes on citation

The Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Bible are cited inline by chapter and verse in the ordinary way and carry no footnote, except where a specific wording is at issue. No section of this article is a placeholder.  The sources that were not read in full are Carmack's three papers on Early Modern English (two cited by title and one from its abstract and opening), Skousen's Grammatical Variation and Nature of the Original Language volumes (quoted only through Davis), and Schaalje, Hilton and Archer's 1997 power study (reported through Fields, Schaalje and Roper).  Five books were read through the Internet Archive's search-inside text and not from a held copy:  Hardy 2010, Roberts 1985, Tvedtnes 1991, Finley 2002 and Nibley 1952, along with the journal issue that carries Holmes 1992.  That route returns the running text in whole paragraphs but not footnotes or tables.  Three of the article's numbers come from tools written for it and kept in its research/ folder:  hebraism_count.ts, name_base_rate.ts and word_drift.ts.