How the Book of Mormon Was Translated

The Book of Mormon has a translation story unlike any other scripture — a record engraved on metal plates in an ancient script, rendered into English in a matter of weeks in 1829. Understanding how the English text came to be is the natural starting point for understanding why the record is now returning to Hebrew.

Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from a set of ancient metal plates written in the script the record calls reformed Egyptian. The bulk of the work was completed over roughly three months in early 1829, with Oliver Cowdery serving as principal scribe — Joseph dictating, Oliver writing down the words as they were given. The resulting English text was published in 1830.

The outcome is remarkable on its own terms: a lengthy, internally consistent text of more than a quarter-million words, produced in a matter of weeks by a young man with little formal schooling, who had no training in Egyptian — ancient or reformed — and no access to it.

Joseph Smith consistently testified that he translated the Book of Mormon “by the gift and power of God” — not by scholarly knowledge of ancient languages. Moroni himself had written on the plates that the record would come forth in this way, and the phrase appears on the Book of Mormon’s title page and in the testimony of the Three Witnesses, printed in every edition since 1830.

The Lord provided physical instruments to aid the work: the “interpreters,” also called the Urim and Thummim — two seer stones set in a frame — given to Joseph along with the plates, and a separate seer stone he had found some years earlier. Witnesses described Joseph placing a stone in a hat to block out light, then dictating the English words that appeared to him, sometimes for hours at a time, without notes or a manuscript of his own to consult. Emma Smith, who served as an early scribe, later recalled that it would have been impossible for someone as unlearned as Joseph to produce such a book by any natural means she could account for.

The Church does not claim to know every detail of how the process worked moment to moment. What it teaches plainly is the source of the translation: the gift and power of God, not Joseph Smith's own learning.

The 1829 translation was revelatory — bringing an unknown ancient record into English by divine gift. Every translation since, into more than a hundred languages, has been a different kind of work: careful, human, scholarly labor, taking Joseph Smith’s English text and carrying its meaning faithfully into a new tongue, including this Hebrew edition.

Here is where the Hebrew edition occupies a special place. Every later translation moves the text outward — from English into a modern language for a modern audience. The Hebrew translation moves it, in a sense, back: toward the Semitic language of the record’s own authors, the language of the scripture they carried from Jerusalem.

That makes translating into Hebrew a distinctive task. Restoring the covenant language that's native to this text, the Hebrew names that were always its own, the scriptural cadence buried under a century and a half of English — that's the real task, more than just accuracy or readability. The goal is a Hebrew text that reads to a Hebrew reader the way scripture is meant to read — accuracy is the floor here, not the ceiling.

Modern Hebrew is the living language of Israel — excellent for everyday life, but not the register of scripture. To a reader who knows the Hebrew Bible, a modern rendering of a sacred text can feel like a newspaper where scripture should be. Earlier Hebrew editions of the Book of Mormon were in Modern Hebrew, and readers noticed the mismatch.

This edition is in Biblical Hebrew — the Hebrew of the Torah and the prophets. It is the same instinct that leads most English readers to read the Book of Mormon in the elevated cadence of the King James Bible rather than in casual modern prose: the language should sound like scripture, because it is scripture. For a Hebrew reader, that means Biblical Hebrew.

Rendering a text into Biblical Hebrew is painstaking work. It is not a spoken language today, so there are no native speakers to consult — only the deep corpus of the Hebrew Bible and the scholarship built around it. Every choice has to be measured against how the biblical writers actually used the language.

The aim throughout is a text that is both accurate to the meaning of the English and natural within Biblical Hebrew — faithful to the doctrine and detail of the record, while reading as genuine scriptural Hebrew rather than as a mechanical, word-for-word conversion.

In practice, each book moves through several passes: an initial draft rendered directly from the English and checked against the vocabulary and syntax of the Hebrew Bible; a review pass focused on consistency — making sure a term translated one way in 1 Nephi is handled the same way in Moroni; and a final read-through for the ear, since Biblical Hebrew is, above all, a language meant to be read aloud. Feedback from early readers has shaped word choices along the way, and the text continues to be refined as more of it reaches readers.

Some of the most interesting work happens at the level of individual words and phrases:

• Covenant terms. Words like brit (covenant), teshuvah (repentance), and mashiach (messiah) already carry deep scriptural meaning in Hebrew. Choosing them well lets the Hebrew say directly what the English could only approximate.
• Recurring phrases. The English “and it came to pass” corresponds to the Hebrew wayehi — a single word that is the natural engine of Hebrew narrative. Handling these repeated phrases consistently shapes the feel of the whole text.
• Names. The record’s Hebrew names are restored to Hebrew script and form, reconnecting them to the roots they came from.
• Consistency across the whole book. A term rendered one way in one book must be handled the same way throughout, so the text reads as a unified whole.

The result of that work is now free to read — the complete Book of Mormon in Biblical Hebrew, verse by verse alongside the English.