Coincidences

I love history, but I am no Biblical Scholar. Anyone who reads my posts won’t be surprised that I have opinions about scholars. I value scholarship as critical context for studying the scriptures and considering other important spiritual information. I don’t find the “scholarly consensus” definitive, but I do consider it very important.

Scholarship is challenging for a layperson like me because it changes as more information becomes available, and because so little information about the past exists, changes can happen quickly and dramatically. Even the history of my lifetime (born in 1980) is being revised and interpreted differently today than even 10 years ago.

One benefit of trying to understand history is that it can help us evaluate the possibility, plausibility, or inconceivability of events we cannot definitively understand because we weren’t there. That framework matters as I engage with Jeremiah’s era in the Old Testament and its important connection to Book of Mormon origins.

So, for today, let’s consider the fascinating set of historical coincidences that make the Book of Mormon’s opening story plausible. This isn’t an effort to “prove” anything about the Book of Mormon; history can’t do that, especially when gaps in the historical evidence — questions about horses and steel, and specific locations — make parts of the Book of Mormon inconceivable.

The set of coincidences I am talking through today, however, was once a set of unproven critiques of the Book of Mormon. People openly mocked the idea of writing scripture on metal plates in 1830, and it is now well attested across the ancient Near East. A Hebrew-Egyptian hybrid script was unthinkable until the 1960s. Neither resolved quickly. Both took more than a century.

This set of historical coincidences centers on Lehi’s family in Jerusalem, and I love this era of Israelite history, so let’s jump in.

A Scroll in the Temple

Josiah became king of Judah in 640 BC at the age of eight, after palace officials assassinated his father, Amon. His grandfather Manasseh had reigned fifty-five years before that and had run Judah essentially as an Assyrian province—foreign altars in the temple courts, foreign cults in the countryside, tribute paid, and massive deviation from the Torah and the prophets.

As Josiah grew into his reign, Assyria began to fall apart. Sometime after 631, when King Ashurbanipal died, the empire devolved into civil war. Babylon began its revolt in 626, culminating in the Babylonians and Medes sacking Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, in 612. For the first time in a hundred years, a king in Jerusalem could act without outside influence.

Concurrently in 627, the thirteenth year of Josiah’s reign, a young man from a priestly family in Anathoth, just outside Jerusalem, began to prophesy. His name was Jeremiah, and he became Jerusalem’s preeminent “warning prophet” for over 40 years.

King Josiah saw Assyria’s collapse as an opportunity to restore what was lost, and in 622 BC, the eighteenth year of his reign, he ordered repairs to the temple; during the work, the high priest Hilkiah found a scroll.

And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD. — 2 Kings 22:8

Shaphan read it aloud to the king, and the scriptures say that Josiah tore his clothes.

Anciently, rending your garments was a formal act in Israel, not an angry outburst—the same thing Jacob does when he believes Joseph is dead, the same thing David does at the news of Saul’s death. You seize the neckline of your robe and tear it downward, publicly mourning what has happened. Josiah heard the law read and mourned, possibly because he understood in that moment how far the nation had drifted from what the text described, and what the covenant with God required.

After that he began to clean house. Literally, he cleaned out the temple. He removed the vessels made for Baal and the Asherah pole, burned them in the Kidron Valley, and deposed the priests who had been serving at the high places. He tore down shrines from one end of the country to the other and pushed north into what had been Israel. He sought a complete restoration—the temple returned to the single purpose it was built for, and worship pulled back to one place. Then he kept a Passover, and the record says no one had kept one like it since the days of the judges (over 400 years earlier).

This is where our coincidences begin. The lost Torah and many additional prophetic writings had sat hidden in the temple for generations, unread and unknown; some of it had probably deteriorated or been destroyed outright—but it had been lost long enough that the king of Judah had never heard it read. The record does not tell us what Josiah concluded about preserving the writings, only that the compiling began in the years immediately after.

In the years after 622, the scribes of Jerusalem gathered what they could find—the books of Moses, the records of the kings, and many writings of earlier prophets—and began editing and compiling them into a single collection.

Richard Friedman, an American biblical scholar whose work here is standard reading in the field, spent his career on a single question — who actually wrote the Hebrew Bible — and argues that Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch were central to that work, and that the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings emerged from their handling of these records. Whatever the exact hands, this is when Israel’s centuries of writings began to consolidate into the compilation that would eventually become our modern Hebrew Bible.

Beyond compiling and editing the records, another important task was preservation. Typically, records were written on papyrus or parchment, which is cheap and fast but doesn’t last—it burns, rots, and requires copying within a few generations. We can never know for certain, but since the records were lost for centuries, much of the material likely deteriorated and was lost forever. Anything meant to survive centuries would need to be inscribed on metal. It wasn’t the most common because it was difficult and more expensive, but it is easy to see why preserving versions of the new compilation in a more permanent way would be important.

In 1979, archaeologists excavating a burial cave just outside Jerusalem found two small silver sheets rolled like scrolls, inscribed in Old Hebrew with the priestly blessing from Numbers 6. They date to the seventh century BC. They are the oldest surviving biblical text, 500 years older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they were found within walking distance of the temple, from the exact era we are talking about.

Unfortunately, Josiah’s reforms did not last. In 609, he rode to Megiddo to block Pharaoh Necho, who was marching north to prop up the last of Assyria, and Necho killed him there. His sons immediately began appeasing outside influences in Jerusalem and ended the reforms.

Fortunately, Jeremiah kept working, compiling, and warning. Around 604, barred from entering the temple, he dictated everything he had prophesied to Baruch, who wrote it on a scroll and read it aloud there. They carried the scroll to Josiah’s son, Jehoiakim. It was winter, and the king sat in his apartment with a fire in front of him; as they read every few columns to him, he cut them off with a knife and threw them into the flames until everything was gone. So, Jeremiah got another scroll, dictated it all again, and continued his efforts for the rest of his life.

Lehi’s Jerusalem

A word for readers unfamiliar with the Book of Mormon. It opens with Lehi, a prophet living in Jerusalem, who is warned to take his family and flee before the city is destroyed. Before they leave, his sons return for a set of engraved metal plates that hold the scriptures of their people. That record travels with them, and the rest of the book is the history of their descendants.

The Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem began in 597, when Nebuchadnezzar deported the city’s leading families and installed Zedekiah as a puppet king. In the years that followed, Zedekiah repeatedly sent for Jeremiah in secret, asking whether there was any word from the Lord—and each time refused to act on the answer: they needed to repent, change, and return to the covenants.

Zedekiah’s reign coincides with Lehi’s origin story in the Book of Mormon.

The early chapters of the Book of Mormon are very direct about the location and timing of events, which is critical when evaluating the plausibility of its origins. Aside from naming Jerusalem as the location and dating the events during the reign of Zedekiah, Nephi also says something very interesting:

Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians. — 1 Nephi 1:2

This detail is an important coincidence, given that historians couldn’t read Egyptian writing until Champollion announced his decipherment in Paris in 1822, and they had no reason to think Hebrew scribes might have created a hybrid writing system.

It wasn’t until 1966 that Yohanan Aharoni published a study of Hebrew pottery shards showing that Judean scribes wrote their numerals using Egyptian hieratic signs. In 1991, Orly Goldwasser identified a scribe at Lachish working in that same hybrid tradition. The full study of the Hebrew/Egyptian blend came in 2008, when German Egyptologist Stefan Wimmer named it Palestinian Hieratic and cataloged it as its own script.

They found a couple hundred inscriptions from Israel and Judah written in Hebrew but using Egyptian hieratic signs and numerals. The script appears in no neighboring kingdom. The dating is also interesting: Egypt stopped using these signs after the tenth century BC, yet Judean scribes kept using them for another three hundred years. Most surviving examples come from the late seventh century, and most come from Jerusalem and the territory south of it.

Then the practice stops. After the exile, it disappears entirely.

So Egyptian-Hebrew hybrid writings like Nephi’s have been discovered only in Israel and Judah, concentrated around Jerusalem, in the decades Lehi lived there. Many critics of the Book of Mormon doubted this detail until scholarship established it between 1966 and 2008.

The Egyptian connection was not exclusive to the writings. Egypt governed Canaan for centuries before the judges, and its scribal habits outlasted its rule. In Lehi’s lifetime, Egypt’s influence was pervasive. As mentioned earlier, Pharaoh Necho killed Josiah at Megiddo in 609 and personally installed Jehoiakim on Judah’s throne as a vassal. For several years, Jerusalem answered to Egypt. During this period, Egyptian names, goods, and scribal training were common.

The cultural, political, and military relationship with Egypt also drove the conflict in the years of Lehi’s Jerusalem.

By the time Lehi’s story begins, Babylon had taken over Jerusalem, and Zedekiah was its vassal king, paying tribute to Nebuchadnezzar. Egypt was the only rival big enough to challenge that, so Jerusalem’s court split into two camps: submit to Babylon and survive as a subject kingdom, or rebel and count on Egypt to rescue them. Zedekiah eventually rebelled, the Egyptian forces turned back, and Babylon burned the city and the temple.

Jeremiah spent forty years warning them of the destruction to come if they kept rebelling against God. He said Babylon was the Lord’s instrument of judgment, that the city would fall because of their wickedness, and that submission was the only path that didn’t lead to destruction. He told the men on the walls that those who stayed in the city would die, and those who surrendered would live.

Jeremiah recorded the king’s officials accusing him of weakening the hands of the soldiers, which is why they lowered him into a cistern to die. He was tried for his life on another occasion and acquitted only because some of the elders remembered that Micah had said similar things a century earlier and been spared.

Another prophet, Uriah, was not spared. He preached the same warning under Jehoiakim, fled to Egypt to save himself, and was extradited and executed — handed over by the very power the rebellion party was counting on.

Lehi also preached that Jerusalem would be destroyed. The people mocked him, and eventually he received a vision to leave Jerusalem, which led to the most important directive: obtain the records compiled over the past decades so they could preserve the most important knowledge and covenants with God as they left Jerusalem for good.

The Brass Plates

Almost immediately after Lehi’s family leaves Jerusalem, Lehi sends his sons back for the records known as the Brass Plates. Nephi’s account of what they came home with is important.

And he beheld that they did contain the five books of Moses… And also a record of the Jews from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah; And also the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah; and also many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah. — 1 Nephi 5:11–13

It is a sort of table of contents for the Brass Plates. Throughout the Book of Mormon, we get additional details about writings compiled on these plates that don’t exist in our current Hebrew Bible.

Zenos, whose allegory of the olive tree takes up all of Jacob 5, is quoted or paraphrased by six different Book of Mormon writers. Zenock. Neum. Ezias. Prophecies of Joseph in Egypt that appear nowhere in Genesis. If the plates were simply a copy of the current Hebrew Bible, none of that would be there. If they are a collection assembled in Jerusalem before the editing was finished, it is what you would expect—writings still in circulation that someone later decided not to keep. I want to hit on this more, but first let’s finish our review of the Hebrew Bible’s compilation.

When Jerusalem fell in 586, the survivors were carried to Babylon. With no temple, no land, and no king, the writings were the only thing holding the covenant together, so the exiles carried what had been compiled, along with writings that had not been compiled, and kept working. For example, the writings of Ezekiel and Daniel. Both prophets were deported from Jerusalem between 605 and 597, so scribes didn’t even have access to their writings yet in 597, when Lehi left Jerusalem—the same year the record on the Brass Plates stopped.

Persia eventually conquered Babylon in 539, and King Cyrus let the exiles go home to Jerusalem. The ones who returned found the city in ruins. Haggai and Zechariah urged leaders to rebuild the temple in 520, and they finished the second temple in 516. Around 458, a scribe named Ezra arrived from Babylon carrying a further compiled record of the law and the prophets, and in 444 the people gathered in the square at the Water Gate and asked him to read it to them. He stood on a wooden platform from morning until midday while the Levites moved through the crowd explaining it. One hundred and seventy-eight years after Josiah had a similar experience and tore his clothes, the people wept while they listened.

Ezra is often credited with compiling the Hebrew Bible we have today, but many scholars believe the final compilation of the Torah was completed between 450 and 398. Malachi comes last, closing the Old Testament with a promise that Elijah will return and the children’s hearts will turn to their fathers.

Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah, and Malachi are not minor books to a Christian. Ezekiel gives the good shepherd who gathers the scattered flock, the valley of dry bones, and the promise of a new heart and a new spirit. Daniel gives the Son of Man and the seventy weeks that Christians have used for centuries to calculate the timing of the Messiah. Zechariah gives the king riding on a donkey, the thirty pieces of silver, and the one they pierced—the New Testament Gospel writers quote him throughout the entire Gospel narrative. Malachi gives the messenger who prepares the way, and Elijah.

The primary purpose of the Book of Mormon is to establish another testament of Christ. Yet, except for Isaiah, most of the Hebrew writings used to establish Christology in Israelite society came from books not found in the Book of Mormon. Not quoted, not named, not attributed, across a thousand years of the Book of Mormon record, except when Christ comes as the resurrected Lord in Bountiful and gives them words they did not have in the Brass Plates.

These scriptures, which ye had not with you, the Father commanded that I should give unto you. — 3 Nephi 26:2

As mentioned above, Isaiah is an important exception we need to consider. The Book of Mormon quotes him at great length, and many scholars hold that much of the Isaiah material it quotes was written during or after the exile—after Lehi was gone. That is the most common historical objection to the Brass Plates, and it remains unanswered. This does not mean it is definitely an issue, as scholars still disagree on when Isaiah actually finished writing, and which chapters he wrote versus which were edited later. Many Latter-day Saint scholars have written on it from several directions, which tells you it is a live question rather than a settled one.

The Book of Mormon and the Hebrew Bible are similar in an important way. They are both compilations of centuries of writings. This means many things that could have been included were left out, and editors heavily edited and redacted the texts to create a cohesive narrative. Most of those decisions in the Hebrew Bible began in 622 BC and continued for nearly 300 years. The version of the Brass Plates Lehi and his family obtained was compiled at the very beginning of that process, during the first time a compilation could have existed, but long before the final compilation was completed.

Plain and Precious Things

The Book of Mormon mentions Christ constantly, centuries earlier than anything comparable in the surviving records to date. Nephi describes the Virgin Mary, His ministry, baptism, and the crucifixion around 592 BC. Jacob, Nephi’s younger brother, uses the name Christ. King Benjamin, Abinadi, Alma, and Samuel all preach a fully formed doctrine of atonement and resurrection before anyone in Jerusalem is supposed to have had one. For most skeptics, that is the single strongest argument that the book was written by a nineteenth-century Christian. Pre-exilic Israelites did not talk this way. The Old Testament we have doesn’t speak this way.

Margaret Barker thinks that may be because of what happened in 622.

Barker is a Methodist preacher and Old Testament scholar in Derbyshire, England, and a past president of the Society for Old Testament Study. She has spent her career reconstructing what Israelite religion looked like before the exile, working from texts that preserve fragments of the older faith. She is not a Latter-day Saint.

In her books and essays, she argues that Josiah’s reform did more than clear out foreign corruption. She believes Josiah enabled one particular group to dominate religion in Jerusalem around 620 BC — the Deuteronomists (the scribes and priests who drove the reform and produced the books that came out of it, including Deuteronomy) — and that the purge followed their ideals, and that their scribes later shaped much of the Old Testament we have today. What went out with the purge, on her reading, was an older temple theology: the temple as a place where God’s presence could actually be encountered, prophets who saw visions and were ministered to by angels, the wisdom tradition, and a second divine figure alongside the Most High — a son who would come.

In 2005, the Library of Congress invited Barker to a conference marking the bicentennial of Joseph Smith’s birth. She framed her argument as a single question: Are the revelations to Joseph Smith consistent with the situation in Jerusalem around 600 BC—the reign of Zedekiah, who is named in the opening verses of First Nephi?

The opening pages of First Nephi show Lehi praying and seeing a pillar of fire on a rock. He is carried away in vision and sees God on his throne surrounded by angels. One of them comes down and hands him a book, and he reads it. Then he goes out and tells Jerusalem what is in it, and they mock him and try to kill him.

In a single chapter, we encounter three of the four things Barker argues were removed: the temple presence encountered directly, the prophet who sees visions, and the angels who minister to him. Nephi presents none of it as unusual. He presents it as normal for prophets.

Her arguments align with a prophecy Nephi records about the Bible’s transmission:

[T]here are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God. — 1 Nephi 13:28

She concludes that much was excluded or edited from the Hebrew Bible, and that one casualty was the understanding that the Jehovah of the Old Testament is Jesus Christ.

Barker is currently a minority voice, as her full reconstruction of pre-exilic Israelite religion sits outside the mainstream of Old Testament scholarship, and she even has Latter-day Saint critics—including William Hamblin, who argues Josiah’s reforms were a necessary correction to genuine corruption rather than a purge of something true. In my opinion, those things are not mutually exclusive. Purging corruption and purging important truths could happen at the same time.

I find her work fascinating because she arrived at it independently of Latter-day Saint belief, studying texts that have nothing to do with us, and ended up somewhere unexpectedly close to what Nephi describes.

As mentioned in the previous section, the Book of Mormon is saturated with Christ, but not from the passages a nineteenth-century Christian would reach for. No Daniel. No Zechariah. No Malachi until Christ hands it to them himself. Most of it comes from somewhere else — from Lehi and Nephi directly, and from Zenos and Zenock, prophets who exist only on a set of plates that left Jerusalem before the Deuteronomists finished their work.

If Barker is right, that is what you would expect. The record that left the city in 597 would carry more of the older theology intact because it left before the final editing was finished.

A Series of Coincidences

What Had to Line Up

640 BC — Josiah becomes king of Judah at eight, inheriting a nation that has spent a century as an Assyrian province.

622 BC — During temple repairs, a scroll turns up, and the king of Judah discovers he has never heard his nation’s law read aloud.

The years after 622 — The scare is so severe that Jerusalem’s scribes spend the next generation gathering scattered writings into a single collection, the first time Israel’s scriptures exist as a collection at all. Permanence becomes its own problem, and what matters most gets inscribed on metal rather than papyrus. This is also when editing and compiling choices begin, leading to exclusions and to the reformers’ theology replacing what came before — what Nephi would call losing plain and precious things.

609 BC — Josiah is killed at Megiddo, and his sons end the reforms, but the compiling continues. Assyria, then Egypt, then Babylon take turns ruling Jerusalem, and the pressure produces a generation of warning prophets.

597 BC — Nebuchadnezzar deports Jerusalem’s leading families and installs Zedekiah. Lehi leaves. The record his sons carry away stops at the start of Zedekiah’s reign — this same year.

586 BC — Zedekiah rebels and Babylon burns the city and the temple Josiah had cleansed. The Hebrew-Egyptian hybrid script — attested in Israel and Judah, in no neighboring kingdom, concentrated around Jerusalem in Lehi’s own decades — disappears with the exile.

539 to 516 BC — Persia conquers Babylon, Cyrus sends the exiles home, and the second temple is finished seventy years after the first one burned. Setting Isaiah aside, Christians reach for the prophets written after 597 first to find Christ in the Old Testament. The Book of Mormon never uses them.

444 BC — Ezra reads the law aloud at the Water Gate, and the people weep as they listen, 178 years after a king did the same and tore his clothes.

450 to 398 BC — The Torah reaches the form we have today, a century and a half after the Brass Plates left Jerusalem. Anything carried off in the interval would be incomplete in precisely the ways the Book of Mormon says its record is incomplete.

When The History Was Discovered

Available before the Book of Mormon

1753 — A French physician, Jean Astruc, notices two names for God in Genesis. The first crack in the assumption that Moses wrote the five books alone. It points to multiple sources but says nothing about when or who.

1780s — The German professor Johann Eichhorn extends the analysis across the five books of Moses. It confirms the pattern of multiple authors exists, but gives no specifics on when or why.

1799 — Rosetta Stone is pulled from a fort wall near Rashid. Makes Egyptian writing a public fascination for the next thirty years.

1805 — A German scholar named de Wette ties Deuteronomy to Josiah’s era. The closest anyone came to this complete idea before Joseph Smith was born.

1819 — Thomas Young publishes on the hieroglyphs in English. The first material to discuss hieroglyphs available to American readers in their own language.

1822 — Champollion announces the decipherment in Paris. Egyptian becomes readable for the first time in fourteen centuries.

1829 — the Book of Mormon is dictated.

Discovered afterward

1878 — The German scholar Wellhausen, whose framework still marks the starting place of Old Testament scholarship, identifies four separate authors behind the Hebrew Bible. J, a southern writer who calls God by the divine name; E, a northern writer who uses Elohim; D, the author of Deuteronomy and the histories after it; and P, the priestly writer of ritual and genealogy. Forty-eight years after the Book of Mormon was printed, and the first time anyone had those strands sorted into sequence.

1943 — The German scholar Martin Noth argues that Deuteronomy through Kings is one planned work. The first argument that Deuteronomy and the histories that follow — Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings — were composed as a single work by a single hand.

1966 — The Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni identifies Egyptian hieratic numerals in Hebrew on pottery shards used for everyday writing. First hard evidence that Judean scribes wrote Hebrew using Egyptian signs.

1979 — Silver scrolls are discovered in a burial cave outside Jerusalem. Scripture inscribed on precious metal, in Jerusalem, in the seventh century. The practice the Brass Plates assume.

1987 — Friedman names Jeremiah as the writer and Ezra as the final editor. This places the compiling hand in Lehi’s city during his lifetime, and the finishing hand a century and a half after he was gone.

1991 — The Israeli Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser identifies a scribe at Lachish working in the hybrid tradition.

2005 — Barker presents her case on what Josiah’s reform removed. It supplies a mechanism for a Christology that otherwise seems impossible in 600 BC.

2008 — The German Egyptologist Stefan Wimmer publishes the full study of Palestinian Hieratic. Establishes the script’s boundaries: Israel and Judah only, clustered around Jerusalem, ending at the exile.

Joseph Smith’s “Golden Bible”

The Book of Mormon was translated and published between 1827 and 1829, by a farmer in his early twenties with almost no formal schooling.

Set aside for a moment whether Joseph was a prophet. Instead, ask what it would take to invent the first chapters of First Nephi—to place a family in Jerusalem in a particular decade and get the details exactly right.

You would need to know that a compilation of Hebrew scripture was underway then, and that it wouldn’t be finished for another century and a half. You would need to know which prophets were already written down and which were not, so that your characters carry the first group’s writings and never quote the second. You would need to know that important records in that era were engraved on metal. You would need to know that Jerusalem’s scribes wrote Hebrew using Egyptian characters, a practice that existed only in Israel and Judah and vanished at the exile. You also need to know that Jerusalem’s religion had recently lost something that might explain why your characters talk about a coming Messiah in ways the Old Testament never does.

Then you would need to assemble it all into a coherent story and write it with limited education or editing.

Someone will reasonably say that some of this was sitting in his own Bible. Josiah and the scroll are in 2 Kings 22. Zedekiah, Jeremiah, and the fall of Jerusalem are all there. Many Bibles of the period even carried marginal dates.

What it doesn’t give Joseph is the process and the context I have discussed. Read 2 Kings straight through, and you’ll learn that someone found a scroll and a king tore his clothes. You won’t learn that they were gathering the writings at that moment, that the gathering had never happened before, that it would take another three hundred years to finish, or that a collection carried out of the city partway through that process would be missing specific things and keeping others.

In 1829, nobody had much of that picture. Neither a New York farmer nor the best Hebrew scholar in Europe.

Three scholars had made a start. Astruc had noticed that Genesis uses two names for God. Eichhorn had shown the pattern ran through all five books of Moses. De Wette argued that Deuteronomy was written in Josiah’s era—the only pre-1829 scholarship that comes anywhere near this essay’s thesis. All of it in French, German, and Latin, in academic monographs, read by a handful of Americans at Harvard, Andover, and Princeton.

Grant that Joseph Smith knew every word of it. All he has is that Moses didn’t write the entire Torah and that some of it was written during King Josiah’s reign.

Egypt is the only thing on the list he most likely knew about, and Egypt was genuinely everywhere in 1829. Napoleon’s expedition had made it front-page material, the Rosetta Stone had been public property for thirty years, and Champollion had cracked the hieroglyphs seven years earlier. A young man in New York could easily have known that Egypt had ancient writing and that scholars were racing to read it.

But Champollion taught the world to read Egyptian. He said nothing about Judean scribes. Nephi’s second verse does not claim that Egyptian writing existed—it claims that Jews in Jerusalem wrote Hebrew using Egyptian characters. Nobody established that for another 140 years.

Everything else he would have needed to get right came later, and most of it came much later. Wellhausen sorted the four authors of the Hebrew Bible in 1878. Noth argued for a single collating hand in 1943. Friedman placed Jeremiah at the center in 1987. Barker argued about what Josiah removed in 2005. Scholars pinned down the Hebrew/Egyptian hybrid script between 1966 and 2008. The silver scrolls were still in the ground until 1979.

To Top It Off

No evidence exists that Joseph Smith engaged with even the limited information available at the time.

The nearest circulating library to the Smith farm was the Manchester Library, five miles out, with roughly 275 volumes by 1830. Robert Paul reviewed its records for BYU Studies and found no record of Joseph Smith ever holding a membership, concluding that in the 1820s he was simply not part of that literary culture.

Even his most ardent detractors didn’t accuse Joseph Smith of being a learned person known for reading and study. They claimed he made everything up. What is true is that if he made it up, quite a few coincidences had to line up perfectly for the origin story to be even plausible.

I don’t believe these coincidences necessarily prove the Book of Mormon is historical, as I said at the beginning: history cannot do that.

I do think they provide enough evidence to make the Book of Mormon’s historicity entirely plausible.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Harper, 1987; revised 1997)
Margaret Barker, “Joseph Smith and Preexilic Israelite Religion,” BYU Studies 44:4 (2005), 69–82. Also published in John W. Welch, ed., The Worlds of Joseph Smith (BYU Press, 2005)
Margaret Barker, The Mother of the Lord, Volume 1: The Lady in the Temple (Bloomsbury, 2012) — extends her Josiah argument; her section on Jeremiah runs pp. 54–75
William J. Hamblin, “Vindicating Josiah,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 4 (2013) — the LDS response to Barker
John W. Welch, David Rolph Seely, and Jo Ann H. Seely, eds., Glimpses of Lehi’s Jerusalem (FARMS, 2004) — nineteen scholars on Jerusalem around 600 BC
Robert Paul, “Joseph Smith and the Manchester (New York) Library,” BYU Studies 22:3 (1982)
Martin Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (1943), published in English as The Deuteronomistic History
Palestinian hieratic — Yohanan Aharoni, “The Use of Hieratic Numerals in Hebrew Ostraca and the Shekel Weights,” BASOR 184 (1966), 13–19. Orly Goldwasser, “An Egyptian Scribe from Lachish and the Hieratic Tradition of the Hebrew Kingdoms,” Tel Aviv 18 (1991), 248–53. Stefan Wimmer, Palästinisches Hieratisch: Die Zahl- und Sonderzeichen in der althebräischen Schrift (Harrassowitz, 2008). Also useful: Philip

Podcasts

Faith Matters Podcast: Encouraging faithful inquiry amid complexity.
Comeback Podcast: Sharing Stories of those who left the church and came back.
Unshaken with Jared Halverson: In-depth historical and doctrinal studies for those wrestling with tough questions.
Leading Saints: Insights into modern leadership and discipleship, often addressing nuanced challenges.

Books

Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days (Vols. 1–2): Thorough Church history, incorporating modern research.
Planted by Patrick Q. Mason: A compassionate approach to faith challenges.
The Crucible of Doubt by Terryl and Fiona Givens: Thoughtful exploration of faith reconstruction.
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman: A deeply researched biography reflecting Joseph’s certainty and complexity.
Making Sense of the Doctrine and Covenants by Steven C. Harper: A summary of the history and context for each section of the Doctrine and Covenants.

Blogs and Articles

Gospel Essays: Accessible discussions suited for individual and group study.
Faith Matters: Engages contemporary faith topics with candor.