What Language Was the Book of Mormon Written In?

The Book of Mormon was engraved on metal plates in a script the record calls reformed Egyptian, while the learning and heritage behind it were those of the Jews — that is, Hebrew. The text is unusually direct about this, telling us plainly what language its authors wrote in and why. Understanding that answer is also the key to why the record now returns so naturally to Hebrew.

Two passages in the record speak directly to the question.

At the very beginning, Nephi explains that he writes “in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2). Right away, then, the text describes itself as a blend: Jewish learning expressed through an Egyptian script.

Near the end, Moroni is more specific still. He writes that the record was kept in “reformed Egyptian,” a script handed down and altered among his people, and adds that had the plates been larger, they would have written in Hebrew instead — but that Hebrew, too, had been altered by their people over the centuries (Mormon 9:32–33). Egyptian, in other words, was chosen partly because it was more compact to engrave on limited metal plates.

So the plates were not written in Hebrew. But that is not the whole story.

The script was Egyptian; the mind behind it was Hebrew. The authors were Israelites who had left Jerusalem carrying Hebrew scripture — the brass plates containing the Torah and the prophets. Their prophets quoted Isaiah at length, and their covenant vocabulary, their idioms, all of it traced back to Hebrew.

This is why the Book of Mormon, even in English translation, is filled with Hebraisms — Hebrew sentence structures, the recurring “and it came to pass” (the Hebrew wayehi), and patterns like chiasmus that belong to Hebrew poetry. The Egyptian was a writing system chosen for practicality. The living language underneath was Hebrew.

Moroni’s own remark makes the point: given the space, they would have preferred to write in Hebrew. The record was Egyptian on the surface and Hebrew at heart.

“Reformed Egyptian” is the record’s own term for its script — an adapted, altered form of Egyptian writing, changed over generations of use by a people separated from Egypt by an ocean and centuries of time. It is one of the more debated details of the Book of Mormon — and the debate is worth walking through on its own terms.

Here is the irony the text almost invites: a record kept in Egyptian only because Hebrew took too much room on the plates, by authors who'd have used Hebrew if they could, testifying all along of a Hebrew Messiah to a Hebrew people — now, finally, rendered into the very language its own authors preferred.

The complete Book of Mormon can be read in Biblical Hebrew today, free, verse by verse alongside the English.