ספר מורמון

About this volume

For the preface to the whole edition — why it exists, whose Hebrew is in each volume, and how to read an interlinear — see To the Reader.

An Israelite record

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 several approximations at once — “mercy,” “goodness,” “lovingkindness,” and in older English even “goodly.” When Nephi writes about חֶסֶד he is not using a vague feeling-word. He is invoking covenant loyalty and steadfast love, the word that anchors prophetic appeals across the Tanakh (Exodus 34:6).

English can bury that architecture. Read “grace,” “mercy,” “salvation” and you can quietly import later categories onto a text that is speaking in covenant terms. This edition does not replace the English. It shows you what the English cannot: which word is repeating, which words share a root, and how a claim is being made through a biblical pattern of speech rather than stated outright.

The clearest way to see it is in the first verse of the book. Read it as covenant credentials that turn on a center point — and the center is חֶסֶד יְהוָה.

The verse turns on חֶסֶד and comes back out the way it went in. He is born into the covenant and ends by passing it on; he is taught by his father and ends taught by God. That is not decoration. It is the argument, and it is made by the shape of the sentence.

The same thing happens across the book. When Lehi blesses his sons the patriarchal formulae are not borrowed from Genesis — they are the same tradition, because Lehi is a patriarch working inside the same covenant framework as Isaac and Jacob before him. In the opening chapters the pattern is Deuteronomic: faithful parents teach, a son receives and is formed, and then he teaches in his turn by writing for readers he will never meet. Record-keeping is not how the story is preserved. It is the covenant obligation being kept.

The Hebrew of this volume

The Hebrew here follows a strict discipline: Classical Biblical Hebrew, held to vocabulary and forms attested before 600 BC. This is the register scholars call Mikraic, the language of the Mikra. No post-biblical vocabulary. No rabbinic constructions. No modern coinages, apart from 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 equivalent, I have used what I would call a controlled adaptation: faithful where theology demands precision, idiomatic where Hebrew demands naturalness. Word order follows the verb-subject-object pattern native to biblical narrative. Covenant terminology maps onto its Tanakh parallels rather than being invented fresh.

That discipline is this volume’s alone. The Doctrine and Covenants is a nineteenth-century book and is allowed nineteenth-century things; the Tanakh and the New Testament I did not translate, and they are held to no rule of mine.

This is not a claim about what the 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.