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.

What is on the page

The bar at the foot of the screen sets the view. Interlinear puts a transliteration and an English gloss under each Hebrew word: one gloss for one word, standing in Hebrew order, so it does not read as English prose and is not meant to. Dual sets the Hebrew beside the printed English, verse by verse. Hebrew Only clears the apparatus away, Transliterate keeps the sound, and No Nikkud strips the vowel points and leaves the consonants alone, as in a Torah scroll.

Tap any word and its root card opens: the root, what it means, its forms and its glosses, and how many times it occurs in each of the six volumes. That last column is the point of the card. A word chosen for the Book of Mormon can be weighed against the use of the same root in the Hebrew Bible, and where a root is rare there, or not there at all, the card says so. The translation is testable from inside the reader, which is how it should be.

Read against the Tanakh

All six volumes are here in one place because this book cannot be read in Hebrew on its own. A mark on a verse means another volume is quoting it or leaning on it, and will take you there: 146 of them run from 2 Nephi into Isaiah, 67 from 3 Nephi into Matthew, 23 from 3 Nephi into Malachi. The Isaiah chapters sit a tap from Isaiah and the Sermon at Bountiful a tap from the Sermon on the Mount, in the same script, so the quotation and the verse it quotes can be read side by side instead of from memory.

Where the two diverge, the printed English of the Book of Mormon decides and the Hebrew follows it, adding where the English has more, and leaving out where it has less. 3 Nephi does not read like Matthew, and this edition does not quietly make it.

Translated into Classical Biblical Hebrew by Chris Lambe.

The full introduction (how to use the edition, why the scorecards, and the translator’s own preface to this volume) is in the front matter, which opens from the contents on the previous page.