Is There a Hebrew Translation of the Book of Mormon?

Yes. A complete Hebrew translation of the Book of Mormon now exists, and it is free to read online — the full text, verse by verse, with the Hebrew and English side by side.

This is a question many people have asked, and for most of the book’s history the honest answer was “not really.” The Book of Mormon has been translated into well over a hundred languages, yet a faithful, complete Hebrew edition remained missing for a long time. That gap has now been filled.

The full Book of Mormon can be read in Hebrew today, at no cost, with nothing gated behind an account. Every book and chapter is available, presented alongside the English so the two can be read together.

If that is all you came for, you can begin reading now. If you want to understand why this took so long — and why earlier attempts fell short — the history below explains it.

The Book of Mormon's history in Hebrew goes back further than most readers realize, and involves more than a simple story of neglect. Before this edition, at least two efforts had put some portion of the book into Hebrew — an early partial excerpt and a full Church-published edition — and each is worth knowing about honestly.

The earliest known Hebrew rendering was a small excerpt translation published in the 1920s — a scholarly curiosity more than a devotional edition, and never intended to be the complete text.

In the early 1980s, the Church itself published a Hebrew translation, printed in a limited run. It was withdrawn from circulation not long afterward — not for doctrinal reasons, but as part of a broader diplomatic agreement. At the time, the Church was negotiating with the State of Israel and the city of Jerusalem to build the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, and the project drew strong opposition from Israel's Orthodox religious establishment, who feared it would be used for missionary work aimed at Jews. To secure the center's construction, the Church made a formal commitment — still honored today — that neither it nor anyone affiliated with its Jerusalem programs would proselytize in Israel. Withdrawing the Hebrew edition from print was part of de-escalating that controversy. The Church has, by its own commitment, stepped back from producing or distributing an official Hebrew edition of its own — which is precisely why later Hebrew translations, including the one this site presents, have come from outside the Church's own publishing effort rather than from it.

For many years, there simply was no complete, freely available, carefully vetted Hebrew Book of Mormon that a curious reader could pick up and trust. Anyone who went looking — and many did — came away with fragments, out-of-print rarities, or nothing at all.

The efforts described above shared a deeper limitation beyond being out of print or limited in scope: the two full or near-full attempts were both in Modern Hebrew.

Modern Hebrew is the living, spoken language of Israel today. It is superb for conversation, journalism, and everyday writing — but it is not the language of scripture. To a reader steeped in the Hebrew Bible, a modern rendering of sacred text can feel oddly flat, closer to a newspaper or a novel than to the word of God. Readers who encountered the Modern Hebrew editions often described exactly that impression.

The parallel in English is familiar. Most readers of the Book of Mormon in English read it in an older, elevated register — the cadence of the King James Bible — because that register sounds like scripture. A breezy, modern paraphrase would feel wrong for the same text. Hebrew readers have the same instinct, and for them the scriptural register is Biblical Hebrew — the Hebrew of the Torah and the prophets.

A translation in Biblical Hebrew reads to a Hebrew speaker the way scripture is supposed to read — its forms familiar, its vocabulary carrying real weight, sitting comfortably beside the sacred texts they already know. That's the bar a Hebrew Book of Mormon has to clear, and it's the one this edition was built to.

The answer to the question is no longer “not really.” It is: yes, here it is — complete, faithful, in Biblical Hebrew, and free.