Sefer Mormon: The Book of Mormon in Classical Biblical Hebrew

To the Reader

For ten years I looked for this book and it did not exist.

I had studied Classical Biblical Hebrew. I had shelves full of Tanakh, Talmud, Zohar, grammars, lexicons. I had read the Book of Mormon in English, in Spanish, in Samoan — over and over, my whole life. And the one thing I wanted to do with it, I could not: I wanted to read it in Hebrew.

Not modern Hebrew. The Hebrew of the prophets. The Hebrew Nephi tells us his father spoke — the language of Jerusalem before the exile, the living tongue of the First Temple. I wanted to open a book and see וַיְהִי on the page where "and it came to pass" had always been. I wanted to hear בְּרִית where the English said "covenant" and know I was hearing the same word Abram heard at the ceremony of the pieces. I wanted the Book of Mormon to sound like what it claims to be.

Nobody had made that book. So I made it.

What you hold in your hands is the next step — an interlinear that lays the Hebrew and English side by side, word by word, so that anyone can walk through the text at the pace of the language itself. You do not need to know Hebrew to use this book. That is the whole point.

The Book of Mormon presents itself as an Israelite record. Its authors think in Hebrew categories, build arguments with Hebrew parallelism, and lean on covenant terms that do not map cleanly into English. President Russell M. Nelson has noted that חֶסֶד has no true one-word equivalent in English, and that translators end up reaching for multiple approximations—“mercy,” “goodness,” “lovingkindness,” and (in older English usage) even words like “goodly.” When Nephi writes about חֶסֶד, he is not using a vague feeling-word. He is invoking covenant loyalty and steadfast love—the kind of word that anchors prophetic appeals in the Tanakh (see Exodus 34:6).

This covenant language is not an abstraction in the Book of Mormon; it is carried forward by transmission. In the opening verses of 1 Nephi, the pattern is Deuteronomic: faithful parents teach, a son receives and is formed, and then he teaches again by writing for future hearers and readers. In the book’s grand arc, the Messiah fulfills the law; in the human arc, record-keepers fulfill covenant obligation by preserving, teaching, and passing the covenant forward.

When Lehi blesses his sons, the patriarchal formulae are not borrowed from Genesis — they are the same tradition, because Lehi is a patriarch operating within the same covenant framework as Jacob and Isaac before him.

English can obscure this architecture. You can read “grace,” “mercy,” and “salvation” and quietly import later categories onto a text that is trying to speak in covenant terms. This interlinear does not replace the English; it is a tool for seeing what the English often cannot show: repeated covenant keywords, root connections, and the way a claim becomes explicit through biblical patterns of speech.

How to Use This Book

Each verse is presented as a sequence of word blocks, read from right to left. The upper line is the Hebrew word in its pointed (vocalized) form. Directly beneath it is the English gloss — a compact, hyphenated translation of that specific word.

The glosses are not elegant English. They are not meant to be. They are meant to be transparent — to show you what each Hebrew word is doing in its clause. A gloss like "and-it-was" for וַיְהִי tells you three things at once: the conjunction (and), the narrative tense (vav-consecutive), and the root (to be). That is more grammatical information than most English translations will ever give you in a single word.

Read the Hebrew line if you can. If you cannot, read the glosses and you will have a rough but honest rendering of each word. Over time, you will begin to recognize recurring terms — יְהוָה (the Lord), בְּרִית (covenant), חֶסֶד (lovingkindness), צֶדֶק (righteousness), מִשְׁפָּט (judgment) — and the theological landscape of the Book of Mormon will open in ways the English alone cannot show you.

A good way to use the interlinear is to track repeated words on purpose. When a covenant term returns, treat it as a signal, not as a synonym choice. Biblical texts often teach by repetition: the same word returns, the same pattern returns, and the reader is meant to notice.

The Hebrew in this volume follows a strict discipline: Classical Biblical Hebrew constrained to vocabulary and forms attested before 600 BC. This is the register scholars call Mikraic — the language of the Mikra, the Hebrew Bible. No post-biblical vocabulary. No rabbinic constructions. No modern coinages, except a small set of theological terms built from biblical roots and documented separately.

Where a concept in the Book of Mormon has no single pre-exilic Hebrew equivalent, the approach is what I call a hybrid or controlled adaptation: faithful where theology demands precision, idiomatic where Hebrew demands naturalness. The word order follows the Verb-Subject-Object pattern native to biblical narrative. The covenant terminology maps directly onto its Tanakh parallels.

This is not a speculation about what the original plates contained. It is a disciplined exercise in hearing the Book of Mormon in the linguistic world it claims for itself — the world of First Temple Israel.

I did not set out to produce an academic work. I set out to fill a gap on my own shelf. The deeper I went into the Hebrew, the more the Book of Mormon opened up — not as a text that needs defending, but as a text that defends itself. The Hebraisms are not decorative. They are structural. The covenant language is not borrowed. It is native.

I speak English, Samoan, and Spanish, and I have studied the Book of Mormon in all three my entire life. But it was Hebrew that brought me closest to what Nephi was trying to say. I hope this interlinear does the same for you.

May it bring you nearer to the God of Israel, who engraved His people on the palms of His hands and does not forget.

— Chris Lambe

Reading Hebrew

קריאת עברית

Hebrew is read right to left. In this interlinear edition, each Hebrew word appears above its English gloss, with a transliteration to help you pronounce it. This guide introduces the Hebrew alphabet and vowel system so you can begin reading on your own.

The Aleph-Bet (Consonants)

Nikkud (Vowel Points)

Biblical Hebrew writes vowels as small dots and marks placed above or below the consonant letters. These are called nikkud (literally "dotting"). The consonant is always spoken first, followed by its vowel.

The Dagesh (Dot Inside a Letter)

A dot placed inside a consonant is called a dagesh. For three letters, it changes the pronunciation:

For all other letters, the dagesh simply indicates a doubled or strengthened sound.

The Maqqef (Hebrew Hyphen)

The maqqef ־ is a small horizontal line that joins two or more words into a single unit, much like a hyphen in English. For example: אֶת־הָאָרֶץ (et-ha'arets) = "[ACC]-the-land."

Practice: Words from the Book of Mormon

Try sounding out these common words. Remember: read right to left, consonant first, then its vowel.

אוֹלִיבֶר קַאוּדֶרִי
דָּוִד וִיטְמֶר
מַרְטִין הַרִיס

כְּרִיסְטְיָן וִיטְמֶר
יַעֲקֹב וִיטְמֶר
פֶּטְרוּס וִיטְמֶר הַצָּעִיר
יוֹחָנָן וִיטְמֶר
חִירָם פֵּיג׳
יוֹסֵף סְמִית הַזָּקֵן
חִירָם סְמִית
שְׁמוּאֵל ה׳ סְמִית