Reformed Egyptian and the Book of Mormon

“Reformed Egyptian” is the name the Book of Mormon gives to the script in which it was engraved. It is one of the record’s most distinctive — and most discussed — details. This page lays out what the text itself says and how the question is debated, then turns to the Hebrew learning that lay beneath the script.

The clearest statement comes from Moroni, the last writer in the record. He explains that the plates were engraved in characters called reformed Egyptian, handed down and altered among his people according to their manner of speech. He adds a striking detail: had the plates been larger, the writers would have used Hebrew instead — but Hebrew, too, had been changed by his people over time, and so no other people would know their language, meaning God preserved the means to interpret it (Mormon 9:32–34).

Earlier, Nephi had already described the record’s language as “the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2). Between these two passages, the record gives a consistent picture: an Egyptian-derived script, chosen for compactness, used by a people whose underlying learning was Hebrew.

It helps to separate two things that are easy to blur: the script a text is written in, and the language it represents. These are not the same. A script is a set of characters; a language is the words, grammar, and meaning behind them. Throughout history, languages have been written in borrowed or adapted scripts.

That is the situation the Book of Mormon describes. The characters were Egyptian in origin, adapted over generations — “reformed.” But the people were Israelites carrying Hebrew scripture, and their thought and expression were Hebrew. The script was a practical tool; the intellectual and religious substance was Hebrew.

That's not just a technical distinction — it explains something readers notice in the English translation: the text is full of Hebrew-style constructions rather than Egyptian ones. The Hebrew shows through the translation because Hebrew, not Egyptian, was the living language of the record's authors.

Reformed Egyptian is a genuinely debated subject. Here's both sides of it, without picking a winner.

Critics point out that “reformed Egyptian” is not a script attested by name in the broader historical record outside the Book of Mormon, and they treat that as a difficulty for the book’s claims. Defenders respond that adapting one language's writing system to another was well attested in the ancient Near East, and point to a specific case: Papyrus Amherst 63, a papyrus copied in Demotic Egyptian script during the Ptolemaic period but preserving far older Aramaic religious material, including a passage closely paralleling Psalm 20. The document, known to scholars for over a century but only substantially deciphered in recent decades, is direct proof that a Northwest Semitic language really was written down in Egyptian characters in antiquity — precisely the pattern Nephi and Moroni describe. Mormon Egyptologist John Gee and scholar John A. Tvedtnes have both pointed to it as exactly this kind of precedent. A small, isolated community altering an inherited script over a thousand years, defenders add, is not implausible on its face. They also note that the record itself anticipates the objection, presenting “reformed Egyptian” as a term for the writers' own evolved characters rather than a claim about a widely known script.

Every reader brings their own priors to this one. What's true regardless of where you land: the text makes a specific, checkable-sounding claim about its own script, and nothing outside the Book of Mormon confirms that claim directly. What is not in dispute is what the record says about itself — and that its underlying learning was Hebrew.

In February 1828, Martin Harris carried a sheet of characters to New York City — copied, Joseph Smith said, directly from the plates, alongside a sample translation of some of them. He showed it to Charles Anthon, a classicist at Columbia College, hoping for expert confirmation before he committed his own money to printing the book. Joseph Smith's later account, recorded in Joseph Smith—History 1:64–65, says Anthon pronounced the characters and the translation correct and wrote Harris a certificate to that effect — until Harris mentioned they had come by way of an angel, at which point Anthon reportedly took the certificate back and tore it up.

Anthon told a different story, more than once. In an 1834 letter to Eber D. Howe, he described what he'd seen as "Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes, Roman letters inverted or placed sideways," arranged in perpendicular columns and ending in a circle divided into compartments that he took for a copy of a Mexican calendar — and he flatly denied ever calling any of it "reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics." Writing again in 1841, he remembered columns "like the Chinese mode of writing" and "the most singular medley" he had ever beheld. In both letters, Anthon maintained that he had warned Harris he was being defrauded, not that he had certified anything.

The actual paper Harris carried to Anthon hasn't survived. What has survived is a separate document of roughly 217 characters, most likely copied by early Church member John Whitmer sometime between 1829 and 1831 — long popularly called the Anthon Transcript even though the handwriting doesn't match Joseph Smith's own hand from 1828. It's held today by the Community of Christ. Mormon scholars read Anthon's own description — unfamiliar symbols in tight columns, a circular figure among them — as not obviously inconsistent with what Joseph Smith described him examining, whatever conclusion Anthon drew from it. Critics point to the sharper contradiction: Harris said Anthon authenticated the characters and then recanted; Anthon said he never authenticated anything at all. Both accounts can't be fully true, and no surviving document settles which one is closer to what actually happened in that room in 1828.

Whatever one concludes about the script of the plates, the language the authors would have preferred — and the language their scripture was written in — was Hebrew. The complete Book of Mormon can now be read in Biblical Hebrew, free, alongside the English.