The Hebrew Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon is now available to read in Hebrew — the full text, free, verse by verse, with the Hebrew and the English side by side. This is the record of a family of Israelites who left Jerusalem around 600 b.c. and carried their scriptures across the ocean — the seed of a people whose prophets would go on writing of a coming Messiah for centuries before his birth. Restoring their record to Hebrew returns it to the language of its own origins.

You can begin reading immediately, or read on to learn what this edition is and why the Book of Mormon belongs in Hebrew.

The complete text is open to every reader at no cost. Every book, every chapter, in Hebrew and English together.

The Hebrew Book of Mormon is a complete translation of the Book of Mormon into Hebrew, presented alongside the 1830 English text so the two can be read together. Each chapter pairs the Hebrew and the English verse by verse, letting readers move between the languages line by line.

For most of its history, the Book of Mormon has been read in English or in one of the many modern languages it has been translated into. Yet the record itself is a Hebrew record at its root: written by descendants of Israel and shaped by Hebrew thought, its pages full of the names, idioms, and covenant language of the Hebrew Bible. Reading it in Hebrew is a homecoming.

This edition exists so that Hebrew readers — whether encountering the text for the first time, studying Biblical Hebrew, or seeking a deeper connection to the record — can read the Book of Mormon in the language its first authors would have recognized.

The opening pages of the record introduce Lehi, a man living in Jerusalem in the final years before the Babylonian conquest. He and his family were Israelites — Lehi himself a descendant of Joseph through the tribe of Manasseh. When they departed into the wilderness, they did not leave empty-handed. They returned for a set of engraved brass plates that contained the five books of Moses, the writings of the prophets, and a record of their lineage — Hebrew scripture, carried into a new world.

Hebrew, then, was the language of this family’s scripture and heritage. Their prophets quoted Isaiah at length, and their writings echo the structures of Hebrew poetry throughout. The record itself, though later engraved in another script, stayed rooted in the learning of the Jews. To read the Book of Mormon in Hebrew is to hear it closer to the way its own writers thought and spoke.

The English text preserves this Hebrew character in translation — in its names, its phrasing, and its repeated cadences. A faithful Hebrew edition lets that character speak directly rather than through approximation.

Before this edition, the fullest prior efforts to render the Book of Mormon in Hebrew were in Modern Hebrew, and none remained in print: a translation commissioned privately in the 1970s, and a Church-published edition in the early 1980s that was withdrawn from circulation as part of a diplomatic agreement tied to the construction of the BYU Jerusalem Center. Modern Hebrew, while the living language of Israel today, is not the language of scripture. To a reader familiar with the Hebrew Bible, a modern rendering can read like a newspaper rather than sacred text — the difference a modern English speaker feels between everyday prose and the older, scriptural cadence of the King James Bible.

This edition is rendered in Biblical Hebrew — the Hebrew of the Torah and the prophets. Biblical Hebrew is not spoken conversationally today, which makes translation into it a careful, deliberate work. The reward is a text that reads as scripture to a Hebrew reader — its forms familiar, its vocabulary resonant with the covenant language that runs through the record start to finish.

Terms that English can only approximate carry their full weight in Hebrew — brit (covenant), teshuvah (repentance), mashiach (messiah). In Hebrew, these words arrive already freighted with centuries of scriptural meaning.

• Verse by verse — every verse appears in Hebrew and in English, so you can follow the text in either language or compare the two directly.
• Read in Hebrew, or side by side — toggle the English on or off to read the Hebrew on its own, or keep both visible for comparison.
• Chapter by chapter — move through each book in order, with the full record navigable from any page.

The text is free to read online in its entirety. Nothing is gated, and no account is required.

• Is There a Hebrew Translation of the Book of Mormon? — the history of Hebrew editions and how this one differs.
• The Book of Mormon Is a Hebrew Book — the Israelite origins, Hebrew names, and Hebraisms woven through the text.
• What Language Was the Book of Mormon Written In? — what the record itself says about the language of the plates.
• Learn Hebrew Words from the Book of Mormon — a beginner’s glossary of Hebrew terms, with pronunciation and meaning.