Common Book of Moses Criticisms

The Major Criticisms, Their Origins, and the LDS Responses

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Joseph Smith’s Book of Moses is easy to misunderstand because it did not come into existence the way the Book of Mormon or Book of Abraham did. There were no plates, no Egyptian papyri, and no surviving ancient document that Joseph said he was translating in the ordinary sense. The text began in June 1830, only weeks after the Church of Christ was organized, when Joseph started revising the King James Bible with scribes. What Latter-day Saints now call Moses 1 was dictated as a separate vision of Moses. Joseph then moved into Genesis, expanding, rewriting, and sometimes lightly editing the biblical text. The work continued through the opening chapters of Genesis into early 1831.^[1]^[2]

The result is the Book of Moses now printed in the Pearl of Great Price. Moses 1 gives a long encounter between Moses, God, and Satan that has no direct counterpart in Genesis. Moses 2–4 retell Creation and the Fall. Moses 5 expands Adam and Eve’s life after Eden and the story of Cain. Moses 6–7 turn the few biblical verses about Enoch into a long prophetic narrative about preaching, warfare, Zion, divine sorrow, and the future of the earth. Moses 8 moves into Noah and stops shortly before the Flood itself.

That origin changes the nature of the criticism. It is too simple to say that Joseph “mistranslated an ancient manuscript,” because no such manuscript was in front of him. Latter-day Saint explanations have long treated revelation as the mechanism. The historical question is harder: when Joseph called the project a “translation,” was he restoring words or teachings that had genuinely existed in antiquity, receiving inspired commentary that was never meant to reproduce an original manuscript word for word, or creating a nineteenth-century expansion of the King James Bible in the language of revelation?^[17]

The strongest criticisms do not depend on rejecting revelation in advance. They ask what kind of explanation best fits the text we actually have. The Book of Moses follows the King James Version closely, addresses theological questions that mattered in Joseph Smith’s religious world, and develops themes that were becoming central to his own revelations. On the other hand, some of its Enoch material has real points of contact with ancient traditions that were obscure or unavailable in Joseph’s immediate environment. Neither side gets much help from pretending the difficult evidence is not there.

Book-Wide and Origin Questions

What Joseph Smith Was Actually Doing

Joseph Smith began his Bible revision in June 1830. The surviving manuscript commonly called Old Testament Revision 1 (OT1) shows the process clearly. The opening vision now known as Moses 1 was followed by a heading introducing a revelation concerning the “first book of Moses called Genesis.” From there Joseph and his scribes worked directly through the English Bible, retaining most of the King James wording while inserting new material, changing phrases, and sometimes restructuring passages.^[1]^[2]

This matters because the Book of Moses is not independent of the English Bible in the way an ordinary ancient translation would be. The King James Version is the visible base text. Joseph was not consulting Hebrew manuscripts in 1830, and his formal Hebrew study came years later. Even believing descriptions of the project characterize it as a revelatory revision rather than conventional language work.^[17]^[18]

Critics see a problem when restored ancient history appears in language and structures tied to a 1611 English translation. If Moses 2–8 represents material once written by the historical Moses and later lost, why does the restored form so often preserve the exact phrasing, sequence, and interpretive peculiarities of the King James Version?

The Latter-day Saint answer is straightforward. Joseph did not need to reconstruct an ancient Hebrew text. God could reveal additions and corrections while allowing Joseph to use the familiar Bible as a framework. On that model, King James dependence is expected. The revelation is in the changes and expansions, not necessarily in an independently reconstructed base text.

That response is stronger than critics sometimes admit. Merely finding “thee,” “thou,” or King James syntax proves very little. Joseph wrote scripture in biblical English throughout his career. The better criticism looks at places where his new theology appears to grow out of the wording or literary problems of the English Bible itself.

What Did “Translation” Mean?

Modern readers normally hear “translation” and think of moving a text from one language into another. Joseph Smith used the word more broadly. His Bible project involved English revision under claimed revelation. The Church’s own historical materials describe him dictating “inspired changes and additions” rather than producing a linguistic translation from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.^[17]

That weakens one common criticism. It is inaccurate to judge Moses as if Joseph had claimed, “I have a Hebrew manuscript of Genesis and this is my literal rendering.” He did not.

But the broader use of “translation” does not settle whether the added narratives are ancient. Moses 1:41 presents God telling Moses that people would take words from the book he would write and that those words would later be restored. That passage encourages a restoration model in which at least some of Joseph’s additions represent genuinely lost Mosaic material, not merely modern commentary.^[3] Early Latter-day Saints also treated the resulting narratives as revelation about real ancient people and events.

So two claims need to be separated. Joseph’s method need not have been conventional translation. That is a reasonable apologetic point. A second claim, that the added content therefore comes from an ancient Mosaic record, still requires evidence.

The King James Bible Under the Book of Moses

The dependence on the King James Version is obvious from the first creation chapter. Moses 2 follows Genesis 1 sentence by sentence, often word for word, while adding speakers and interpretive material.^[4]^[11] Moses 3 similarly follows Genesis 2 while inserting a major explanation that the creations had first existed “spiritually” before they were “naturally” upon the earth.^[5]^[12]

Some retained wording is especially revealing. Moses 2:21 keeps the KJV’s “great whales” from Genesis 1:21, an old English rendering of a Hebrew term more broadly referring to great sea creatures or sea monsters. Moses 2:28 preserves “replenish the earth,” wording that meant “fill” in early modern English but sounds different to a modern reader.^[4]^[11] These are not devastating errors. They are fingerprints of the English source Joseph was using.

A more serious example appears in Moses 3:5. Genesis 2:5 in the KJV says that every plant was created “before it was in the earth” and every herb “before it grew,” followed by the explanation that God had not yet caused it to rain.^[12] Moses expands this into a doctrine of spiritual creation: God had created all things spiritually before they existed naturally on the earth.^[5] Modern critical scholarship generally reads Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as distinct literary accounts with different structures, not as a single sequence that requires a hidden spiritual stage between them.^[21]^[22]

Anthony A. Hutchinson made this kind of argument in detail in his 1988 essay “A Mormon Midrash? LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered.” Rather than treating Joseph’s creation texts as restorations of a damaged original, Hutchinson argued that they can be read more naturally as expansive interpretations of the KJV, similar in broad function to midrash.^[19] Philip Barlow later summarized the point in the Harvard Theological Review, noting that Joseph’s revisions can be understood as reworkings of the English Bible rather than recoveries of an original Hebrew text.^[20]

The apologetic response is that revelation can work through an existing translation. That remains possible. But the closer a new doctrine depends on a problem, wording choice, or ambiguity peculiar to the KJV, the less the text looks like an independent recovery of ancient wording. The strongest version of this criticism is not “Moses sounds like the KJV.” Of course it does. It is that Joseph’s additions sometimes behave like answers to the KJV as Joseph encountered it.

Restoration or Inspired Expansion?

There is a middle position that is often lost in arguments over authenticity. A believer does not have to claim that every new sentence in the Book of Moses once stood in a lost manuscript written by Moses. The text could be understood as inspired expansion: Joseph reads Genesis, revelation supplies theological meaning, and the result becomes new scripture for his own community.

That view fits the mechanics of the surviving manuscripts well. It also explains why the text can preserve the KJV while adding ideas that are not present in Genesis.

The cost is that it gives up much of the historical claim critics are usually testing. If Moses 6–7 is inspired nineteenth-century scripture about Enoch rather than restored Enochic text, then parallels with ancient Enoch literature become interesting theological convergences, not evidence that Joseph recovered a lost document. Likewise, anachronistic Christian language becomes easier to accommodate because the text is not being presented as a transcript of what Adam or Enoch literally said.

There is no single official LDS formulation that forces every verse into one category. In practice, believing explanations move among restoration, revelation, commentary, and expansion. Those categories can coexist, but they should not be switched whenever one model runs into trouble. Historical evaluation needs to ask what a particular claim is supposed to establish.

Nineteenth-Century Theological Fingerprints

The Book of Moses repeatedly answers questions that were alive in Joseph Smith’s Christian environment: Was Adam’s Fall an unqualified catastrophe or part of God’s plan? Are children guilty because of Adam? How does human agency relate to Satan? Was the gospel known before Jesus? What is baptism for? Can scripture be corrupted and restored? Is God emotionally affected by human suffering? What does it mean to build Zion?

None of those subjects is uniquely nineteenth century. Most have long histories in Jewish and Christian thought. A critic cannot prove modern authorship merely by finding a familiar theological topic.

The cumulative pattern is more useful. Moses 4 explicitly describes Satan trying to destroy human agency.^[6] Moses 5 turns Adam’s sacrifice into a symbol of the future sacrifice of Jesus Christ and says the gospel was preached “from the beginning.”^[7] Moses 6 declares that children are whole from the foundation of the world and that “original guilt” cannot be answered upon their heads, then gives Adam a Christian baptism involving Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and rebirth by water, Spirit, and blood.^[8] Moses 7 defines Zion as a community that is “of one heart and one mind,” dwells in righteousness, and has no poor among them.^[9]

These are not random embellishments. They form a theological system that looks remarkably at home beside Joseph Smith’s other early revelations. That does not prove conscious fabrication. If Joseph believed revelation was restoring one eternal gospel, continuity would be expected. Historically, though, it means that the text often explains ancient Genesis through problems and doctrines that were already becoming Joseph Smith’s own.

The Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts

The manuscripts are one of the best controls against exaggerated criticism. OT1 preserves the first dictated revision. A second manuscript, usually called OT2, was created as the work continued and was revised further. The Book of Moses in today’s Pearl of Great Price was assembled from this larger revision history, not handed down as one untouched block of text.^[2]^[18]

Portions of the Enoch material appeared in early Church newspapers. Franklin D. Richards later gathered selections into the first Pearl of Great Price in 1851. That edition did not contain all the material now found in Moses 1–8. The Pearl of Great Price was canonized by the LDS Church in 1880 after later editorial development.^[18]^[37]

This history does not discredit the text. Scripture can have an editorial history. But it does undercut a simplistic picture in which the present Book of Moses arrived all at once as a fixed ancient document. The surviving record shows dictation, copying, revision, selection, and later canonization.

How Ancient Parallels Should Be Judged

Ancient parallels are a serious part of the Book of Moses debate because Joseph’s long Enoch narrative appeared before several important Enochic texts became widely accessible in English. The right response is neither to dismiss every parallel nor to count every resemblance as evidence.

A useful parallel should be ancient, tied to the same character or narrative, specific enough to be surprising, not already obvious from Genesis, and difficult to explain from sources available to Joseph. A generic feature such as “Enoch receives visions” is weak evidence because Genesis already says Enoch “walked with God” and was taken by God. An unusual name attached to an unusual narrative role deserves more attention.

The same rule applies to critical source hunting. If a nineteenth-century book mentions multiple worlds, that does not prove Joseph copied it. If Protestant ministers debated original sin, that does not prove a sermon became Moses 6. Availability establishes possibility and cultural context, not dependence.

Reading the Criticisms through the Text

Moses 1

A Revelatory Prologue With No Genesis Equivalent

Moses 1 is unlike the chapters that follow it. Genesis does not contain this scene. Moses is taken into God’s presence, shown the world, left physically weak after the divine glory departs, confronted by Satan, and then given a vast vision of the earth and “worlds without number.” God explains his purpose with the famous statement, “this is my work and my glory - to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39).^[3]

Critics see a distinctly Joseph Smith-like revelatory prologue. It establishes several themes that would become prominent in the Restoration: direct visions, Satan as an active personal adversary, an expansive inhabited cosmos, human divine potential, lost scripture, and a prophet authorized to restore it.

There is no independent evidence that Moses 1 once stood before Genesis. Modern biblical scholarship does not identify a missing Mosaic prologue resembling it. That makes the claim of textual restoration difficult to demonstrate.

The Apocalypse of Abraham Parallel

Latter-day Saint scholars have compared Moses 1 with the Apocalypse of Abraham, a Jewish pseudepigraphal work generally placed in the first centuries of the Common Era and preserved in Slavonic manuscripts. In that text, Abraham is called by God, guided by the angel Yahoel, confronted by the evil figure Azazel, ascends, and is shown a vast view of creation and human history.^[26] LDS writers argue that the sequence resembles Moses 1 more closely than a generic “prophet sees heaven” comparison.^[27]

This is one of the better ancient-parallel arguments in Moses 1 because it compares narrative sequences rather than isolated words. The Apocalypse of Abraham was not available to Joseph Smith in English in 1830. Its first English publication came much later.

Still, it is not a close textual match. The prophet is Abraham, not Moses. The setting, sacrifice, angelic guide, ascent imagery, and details of the evil encounter differ. Both works also draw on a large stock of biblical apocalyptic motifs: mountain revelation, a chosen patriarch, an adversary, heavenly vision, cosmic knowledge, and a review of history.

So the parallel is worth preserving, but it does not establish that Moses 1 is ancient Mosaic material. At most, it shows that Joseph’s revelatory narrative can resemble a genuine ancient Jewish ascent tradition in a sustained way that is not reducible to one borrowed phrase.

Satan and the Demand for Worship

Moses 1:12–22 gives Satan a direct encounter with Moses. Satan calls Moses “son of man” and commands, “worship me.” Moses rejects him, appeals to his experience with God, and finally commands Satan to depart “in the name of the Only Begotten.”^[3]

Critics point out that this scene sounds less like the Pentateuch than later Jewish and Christian demonology. It also strongly recalls the New Testament temptation of Jesus, where Satan asks Jesus to worship him. The use of “Only Begotten” makes the Christian frame explicit.

An LDS response can point to ancient traditions of adversarial beings confronting prophets, including Azazel in the Apocalypse of Abraham. That is fair. But ancient parallels to demonic opposition do not make the specifically Christian form of Moses 1 Mosaic. The passage is best treated as a revealed Christian interpretation of Moses unless stronger evidence connects its distinctive wording and sequence to pre-Christian Mosaic tradition.

“Worlds Without Number”

Moses 1:33–35 says God created “worlds without number” and that many had already passed away.^[3] Some critics treat this as a suspiciously modern cosmology.

The concept was not new in 1830. The plurality of worlds had been debated for centuries and was widely discussed by the early nineteenth century. Thomas Dick’s The Christian Philosopher, first published in the 1820s and issued in New York in 1826, integrated astronomy with Christian theology, and other writers likewise discussed inhabited worlds.^[29]

That cultural background makes the idea poor evidence for ancient restoration, but it also makes direct-source claims weak. Joseph did not need Thomas Dick in particular to imagine multiple worlds. The concept was already in the intellectual air.

The criticism is therefore limited. “Worlds without number” fits Joseph’s period, but cultural fit is not proof of borrowing. Its value is cumulative: Moses 1 repeatedly expands the Bible in directions that were both religiously meaningful and intelligible in Joseph’s own world.

Moses 2–4

Creation and the King James Framework

Moses 2 is unmistakably Genesis 1 with additions. God narrates the process to Moses and repeatedly identifies the creative agent as the Only Begotten, but the order and much of the wording follow the KJV closely (Moses 2:1–31; Genesis 1:1–31).^[4]^[11]

Moses 3 then follows Genesis 2 while introducing the spiritual-creation explanation. In Moses 3:5, God says everything had been created spiritually before it was naturally upon the earth. The chapter then narrates the formation of Adam, the garden, the animals, and Eve in roughly the Genesis 2 order.^[5]^[12]

Critics argue that Joseph is harmonizing two biblical creation accounts. Genesis 1 creates plants, animals, then male and female humanity. Genesis 2 begins with a barren setting, forms the man, plants the garden, forms animals, and then creates the woman. Modern scholars generally understand the chapters as distinct literary traditions placed together by later editors, even though the older documentary labels and exact compositional models remain debated.^[21]^[22]

Joseph’s solution is theological rather than literary. The apparent earlier creation can be “spiritual,” followed by natural creation in the second narrative. That is a coherent harmonization if one accepts the revealed premise. It is not what the Hebrew text itself requires, and it does not anticipate the compositional explanation favored in modern scholarship.

This is one of the stronger criticisms because it tests what the revision does with a real feature of Genesis. Instead of revealing that the two accounts arose from different literary histories, the Book of Moses makes them stages in one continuous sacred history. That is exactly the sort of move a nineteenth-century harmonizing interpreter might make.

An LDS reader can answer that revelation was never obligated to anticipate modern source criticism. God could reveal the theological relationship between the accounts rather than their editorial history. That preserves faith, but it does not supply independent historical evidence that Moses 3 restores an original Mosaic arrangement.

Satan Before Eden and the Problem of Agency

Genesis 3 introduces the serpent without narrating a premortal rebellion. Moses 4:1–4 adds an entire backstory. Satan offers himself as the redeemer, proposes to save everyone, seeks God’s honor and power, and is rejected because he “sought to destroy the agency of man.” He then becomes the devil and father of lies.^[6]^[13]

Critics call this anachronistic because the scene contains a mature Christian demonology and a theological concept of agency absent from Genesis. Traditions about Satan’s heavenly rebellion developed over centuries from interpretations of biblical passages and later Jewish and Christian literature. The Latin Life of Adam and Eve, for example, has Satan explain that he rebelled after refusing to honor Adam.^[28] That is a real ancient parallel to a pre-Fall Satanic rebellion, but it is not the same story as Moses 4. It contains no proposal to become a universal redeemer and no explicit plan to abolish human agency.

The ancient traditions weaken any claim that Joseph invented the general idea of Satan rebelling before the Fall. Christians had been telling versions of that story long before 1830. They do not independently confirm the distinctive Restoration version.

The Fall as a Necessary Step

Moses 4–5 recasts the Fall inside a larger plan of redemption. Adam and Eve experience mortality, sacrifice, receive revelation about Christ, and eventually rejoice in the consequences of the Fall (Moses 5:4–12).^[7]

Critics sometimes label any positive view of the Fall a nineteenth-century invention. That goes too far. Christian traditions had long debated whether God could bring a greater good out of the Fall, and the idea of the “fortunate fall” has deep roots.

What is more characteristic of Joseph Smith is the way the Book of Moses connects the Fall with agency, embodied experience, procreation, Christ’s atonement, ordinances, and a universal gospel plan. This integrated system fits early Restoration theology closely. It may be revealed theology, but it is not strong evidence of a recovered primitive Genesis text.

Moses 5

Adam and Eve Become Explicit Christians

Genesis moves quickly from Eden to Cain and Abel. Moses 5 inserts a large body of Christian teaching between them. Adam offers sacrifice. An angel tells him the sacrifice is “a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten.” Adam is commanded to repent and call upon God in the name of the Son. The Holy Ghost bears record of the Father and Son. The chapter later says that “the Gospel began to be preached, from the beginning” (Moses 5:4–9, 58–59).^[7]

The criticism is not simply that Jesus exists before his mortal birth. Christianity itself teaches Christ’s preexistence in various forms. The historical problem is that the text places a recognizably Christian gospel system, with the Only Begotten, atonement symbolism, repentance in the Son’s name, and the Holy Ghost, into the primeval world thousands of years before Christianity.

The LDS answer is exactly that this is the restoration. The gospel was not invented in the first century. Adam received it first, later peoples lost or corrupted it, and Christ’s mortal ministry renewed what had always been the same plan of salvation.

That is internally coherent, but the historical evidence outside Joseph Smith’s revelations is thin. Ancient Jewish Adam literature does expand Adam’s post-Eden life, repentance, sacrifice, angelic instruction, and conflict with Satan.^[28] Those texts show that Genesis inspired extensive ancient elaboration. They do not present Adam receiving baptism in Jesus Christ or an LDS-like Christian gospel.

The apologetic parallels establish that ancient Jews and Christians also expanded Adam. They do not independently verify Joseph’s particular expansion.

Cain’s Mark and Later Racial Theology

Moses 5:36–40 retells Cain’s curse. The Lord places a “mark” on Cain so that others will not kill him. The text does not say in this chapter that the mark is black skin.^[7] Critics sometimes quote later LDS teachings as if Moses 5 itself explicitly identifies the mark with race. It does not.

The racial issue becomes more direct in Moses 7. Moses 7:8 says a “blackness came upon all the children of Canaan,” and Moses 7:22 says the “seed of Cain were black, and had not place among” the people Enoch saw.^[9] Those are real passages and should not be softened into something the text does not say.

Later Latter-day Saints connected Cain, Ham, Canaan, black ancestry, and priesthood restriction in ways that went beyond the wording of the Book of Moses. The LDS Church’s current essay on race acknowledges that Brigham Young announced the priesthood restriction and that nineteenth-century racial explanations invoked biblical curses involving Cain and Ham. The Church now disavows theories that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse.^[33]

The fair criticism is historical rather than genetic. The Book of Moses supplied scriptural language that later LDS leaders could place inside a racialized biblical framework. It did not itself lay out the full nineteenth- and twentieth-century priesthood-ban rationale, and it would be inaccurate to make Joseph’s 1830 text say everything later leaders said.

Moses 6

The “Language of Adam” and the Book of Remembrance

Moses 6:5–6 says Adam’s descendants kept a “book of remembrance” in the “language of Adam” and that those taught to write by inspiration possessed “a language which was pure and undefiled.”^[8]

Critics connect this with older speculation about a primordial language. That connection is solid as cultural context. Jewish and Christian thinkers had debated the language of Eden for centuries. Some identified it as Hebrew, while others proposed a lost original language. The search for a pure pre-Babel language survived into the early modern and nineteenth-century worlds.^[30]

Joseph’s interest did not stop with Moses 6. In 1832 he dictated a short “Sample of Pure Language” assigning revealed terms such as “Awman” to God.^[38]

This is not good evidence of direct borrowing from a specific source. The idea was too widespread. It is also not strong evidence of ancient recovery merely because ancient and medieval writers believed Adam had a special language. Genesis itself invites the question by portraying Adam naming animals before Babel.

The Book of Remembrance has similarly broad parallels in traditions about primordial books, genealogies, and heavenly records. Those comparisons show that Joseph was working with an old religious motif. Unless a proposed parallel reproduces the distinctive combination of Adamic language, inspired literacy, genealogy, and wording in Moses 6, it should be treated as background rather than proof.

Original Guilt and Children

Moses 6:54 states that “the Son of God hath atoned for original guilt” and that the sins of parents cannot be answered upon the heads of children. The following verses say little children are whole from the foundation of the world.^[8]

This language lands directly in a Christian debate over original sin and infant salvation. It also lines up with a concern Joseph had already addressed in the Book of Mormon, where Moroni 8 condemns infant baptism.

Critics see theology moving backward into Adam’s mouth. The passage does not merely tell an ancient story. It answers a doctrinal controversy in Christian vocabulary.

The LDS response is that Adam was taught the same gospel later revealed through Christ. Again, that is the claim under examination. There is no clear pre-Christian Jewish evidence that Adam taught a doctrine of Christ’s atonement removing “original guilt” from infants. The passage is one of the clearer examples of the Book of Moses using primeval history to settle a Christian theological question.

The Baptism of Adam

Moses 6:51–68 goes further. Adam is told to believe in Jesus Christ, repent, and be baptized in his name. He is then “caught away by the Spirit of the Lord,” carried into water, laid under the water, brought forth, and receives the Spirit. The text explains rebirth through “water, and of the Spirit, and by the blood” of the Only Begotten.^[8]

Critics regard this as a major anachronism. Baptism in the name of Jesus Christ is a Christian ordinance placed at the dawn of human history.

There are ancient Adam traditions involving water. In the Latin Life of Adam and Eve, Adam stands in the Jordan up to his neck for a prolonged period as an act of penitence, while Eve performs a similar penance in the Tigris.^[28] Latter-day Saint apologists have compared this with Adam’s baptism.

The comparison is real but limited. The ancient scene is penitential immersion, not Christian baptism in the name of Jesus. There is no administrator, no baptismal formula, no death-and-rebirth ordinance, and no closely matching sequence of water baptism followed by the Holy Ghost. Later Christian and Mandaean traditions sometimes go further, but their dates and dependence on developed baptismal religion make them poor evidence for what Adam historically practiced.

So ancient water traditions soften the claim that “nobody ever imagined Adam in sacred water.” They do not independently support the full Moses 6 ordinance. The Christian baptism of Adam remains one of the strongest examples of later theology being projected into primeval history unless revelation is assumed.

Enoch’s Calling

Genesis 5 gives Enoch only a few lines: he lives, fathers Methuselah, “walked with God,” and is taken because God took him.^[15] Moses 6 turns him into a reluctant prophet. Enoch hears God’s voice, protests that he is slow of speech and hated by the people, receives a promise of divine power, washes his eyes with clay, sees spirits God created, and begins a major preaching mission (Moses 6:26–36).^[8]

The expansion itself is not suspicious. Ancient Jewish literature also transformed the spare biblical Enoch into a visionary, scribe, heavenly traveler, teacher, and revealer of secrets. That is exactly why Enoch is the most serious ancient-parallel question in the Book of Moses.

But “Enoch became a prophet with visions” is too generic to carry much weight. Genesis already makes him extraordinary. The useful question is whether Joseph’s specific additions overlap ancient Enoch traditions in details he could not reasonably have known.

Moses 7

The Scale of the Enoch Expansion

Moses 7 is where the argument gets harder for both critics and apologists. Enoch sees peoples and wars, exercises miraculous power, establishes Zion, watches the city taken into heaven, sees God weep, hears the earth mourn, views Satan’s dominion, sees Noah’s Flood and Christ’s crucifixion, and receives a vision extending to the last days.^[9]

Critics can explain part of this as expansion from biblical seeds. Genesis says Enoch walked with God and was taken. Genesis 6 introduces giants, violence, corruption, and the Flood soon afterward. The New Testament and Christian tradition had already turned Enoch into a prophetic figure. Joseph also had strong contemporary interests in Zion, apocalypse, and the recovery of lost revelation.

Yet the ancient Enoch corpus proves that long expansions of Enoch were not a modern Mormon invention. Second Temple Jewish writers had already made Enoch a cosmic seer and mediator of heavenly knowledge. Some details in the Book of Moses deserve comparison on their own terms.

What Enoch Literature Was Available in 1830?

Claims that “the Book of Enoch was completely unknown in Joseph Smith’s day” are false. Scottish archbishop Richard Laurence published the first complete English translation of 1 Enoch in 1821.^[23]^[24] Knowledge of Enoch traditions also circulated through biblical scholarship, encyclopedic discussion, the New Testament book of Jude, and references to lost apocryphal literature.

The harder question is access. An English translation existing in Britain does not prove Joseph Smith read it in rural New York or Pennsylvania. Research into American availability before and around 1830 has not produced good evidence that Joseph owned, borrowed, or consulted Laurence’s 1821 edition.^[23] Claims about an easily available American edition before the Moses material are disputed.

This leaves an uncomfortable middle. Critics should not say Enoch was unavailable in principle. Apologists should not say Joseph could have known nothing beyond Genesis. What can be said with confidence is that Laurence’s 1 Enoch existed in English, while some of the Enochic texts most often used for LDS parallels, including the Aramaic Book of Giants fragments from Qumran, were discovered long after Joseph’s death.

The Strongest Parallel: Mahijah and Mahaway

Moses 6:40 introduces a man named Mahijah who asks Enoch a direct question. Moses 7:2 later has Enoch refer to a place called Mahujah. These unusual names attracted Hugh Nibley’s attention after publication of the Qumran Book of Giants fragments.

In the Book of Giants, an ancient Enochic work preserved in Aramaic fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a figure whose name is written MHWY and commonly rendered Mahaway travels to Enoch to seek an interpretation connected with troubling dreams.^[25]^[39] The Israel Antiquities Authority identifies 4Q530 as an Aramaic copy of the Book of Giants, and scholarly treatments place Mahaway in the role of a messenger who travels to Enoch.^[39]^[40]

The resemblance is more specific than “Enoch has visions.” The names Mahijah/Mahujah and Mahaway are phonetically similar, they occur in Enoch narratives, and both figures are associated with approaching Enoch to seek information. The Qumran fragments were unavailable in 1830.

This deserves to be counted as genuine evidence in the apologetic column.

It is not as exact as it is sometimes presented. In Moses 6, Mahijah is simply one of the people questioning Enoch about his origin and authority. In the Book of Giants, Mahaway is a giant or giant-associated messenger sent to consult Enoch about dreams and coming judgment. Moses also contains both Mahijah and Mahujah, and the textual relationship among the names is debated. The narratives are not duplicates.

Could coincidence, shared biblical name patterns, or later textual complications explain it? Possibly. But dismissing it as a generic Enoch motif is not persuasive. Among the proposed ancient parallels, this is one of the few that meets several demanding criteria at once: unusual name, same ancient figure, comparable narrative function, ancient attestation, and post-Joseph discovery.

One good parallel still does not prove the whole Book of Moses ancient. It does mean a serious critical account should leave room for evidence that is genuinely difficult to reduce to obvious biblical borrowing.

Enoch’s Zion and Joseph Smith’s Zion

Moses 7 says Enoch’s people become “of one heart and one mind,” dwell in righteousness, and have “no poor among them.” Their city is called Zion and is eventually taken into heaven (Moses 7:18–21).^[9]

Critics have linked this directly to Joseph Smith’s program of building Zion. The chronology needs care. Joseph’s interest in a New Jerusalem and gathering was already developing in 1830. The Enoch material was dictated in late 1830, before the July 1831 revelation designating Missouri as the land of Zion, but not before Zion language existed in the movement.^[34]^[35]

That makes a simple “Joseph copied his later Missouri program into Enoch” chronology wrong. A better argument is reciprocal development. Joseph was already thinking about gathering and New Jerusalem themes while revising Genesis. Moses 7 then supplied an ancient prototype for a society without poverty, and the Enoch narrative in turn helped shape what Zion came to mean in the Restoration.^[35]

The LDS explanation reverses the causal direction: God revealed ancient Zion precisely because Joseph’s generation was being called to build it again. Historically, both models fit the sequence. The text cannot by itself tell us whether Enoch’s Zion caused Joseph’s program by revelation or whether Joseph’s developing communal theology produced Enoch’s Zion. The chronology rules out some careless critical claims but not the broader nineteenth-century-development argument.

God Weeping

Moses 7:28–33 contains one of the Book of Moses’s most memorable scenes. Enoch sees God weep over human wickedness and asks how a being who created countless worlds can weep. God answers by pointing to human beings as his children, their agency, and the misery they inflict on one another.^[9]

Latter-day Saint writers have emphasized the scene as an unusual theology of divine compassion. They have also compared it with ancient traditions in which heaven, prophets, or divine beings mourn over human sin.

The first thing to say is that a sorrowful God is not alien to the Bible. Genesis 6:6 says the Lord grieved at his heart over human wickedness. Jeremiah, the Psalms, and prophetic literature frequently use grief and lament language around divine judgment. Moses 7 is more vivid because it makes God literally weep and builds a dialogue around the tears.

Some LDS comparisons reach ancient Enoch and later Jewish or Christian texts, but many are motif-level parallels: Enoch weeps, heaven weeps, clouds shed tears, or creation laments. Those are worth noting but are not the same as a supreme God personally weeping and explaining his tears through parental love and agency.

The passage is unusual enough to resist a quick dismissal. It can be read as Joseph Smith developing a striking theology of divine vulnerability. It can also be read by believers as restored ancient insight. The ancient comparisons make the idea less isolated, but they do not currently provide a close enough match to establish provenance.

The Earth Speaks and Mourns

Moses 7:48 personifies the earth as “the mother of men.” She cries from her depths, says she is pained and weary because of the wickedness of her children, and asks when she will be cleansed and allowed to rest. Enoch hears her and weeps (Moses 7:48–49).^[9]

Ancient and biblical literature frequently personifies the land or creation. The earth can cry out because of Abel’s blood, mourn under judgment, or react to human sin. Genesis 4:10–12, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other biblical texts gave Joseph plenty of language for a morally responsive earth.^[14]

LDS scholars have collected additional ancient parallels, including Enochic and later traditions in which creation complains or mourns.^[25] These strengthen the claim that the motif has ancient roots. But the general theme is already so biblical that it has limited value as evidence of inaccessible ancient knowledge.

The most distinctive part of Moses 7 is the sustained voice: earth as “mother of men,” exhausted by her children’s wickedness and pleading for sanctification and rest. Unless an ancient source reproduces that cluster closely, the parallel should be treated as thematic rather than evidentiary.

Cain, Canaan, and Blackness

Moses 7 is also where the racial criticism becomes unavoidable. Enoch sees a land whose people are described as the children of Canaan, and “a blackness came upon” them (Moses 7:8). Later, the text says “the seed of Cain were black, and had not place among them” (Moses 7:22).^[9]

These verses are separate from the mark placed on Cain in Moses 5. The Book of Moses does not give a complete racial theory connecting every dark-skinned population to Cain, Ham, or Canaan. Later Latter-day Saint writers built those connections within a wider nineteenth-century biblical racial tradition.^[33]

Still, the text itself associates blackness with cursed or excluded antediluvian groups. It later became usable scripture for racist interpretation. That historical effect cannot be blamed entirely on later readers.

As a criticism of ancient origin, though, the racial language is not decisive. Pre-modern interpreters had long racialized biblical curses, and Joseph lived in a culture saturated with arguments linking scripture, ancestry, and race. The passage fits that environment, but establishing a specific source or motive is harder.

As a criticism of the text’s legacy, the case is much stronger. Whatever Joseph intended, these verses entered an American religious culture that already used Genesis to organize racial hierarchy, and later Saints used similar ideas to defend priesthood and temple restrictions that the Church now disavows.^[33]

Moses 8

Noah, the Flood, and What Joseph Actually Added

Moses 8 bridges Enoch to Noah. It preserves the biblical genealogical framework but adds Noah’s ordination, preaching, Christian language, baptism, the Holy Ghost, and a more developed religious conflict before the Flood (Moses 8:13–30).^[10]

Criticism here can become sloppy because most scientific and historical problems with a global Flood, extreme patriarchal ages, and compressed primeval chronology already belong to Genesis. Joseph did not invent them. If Moses 8 merely repeats Genesis, it tells us little about the origin of the Book of Moses.

The more relevant criticism is that Joseph strengthens the Christianization of the primeval world. Noah’s sons are called “sons of God” in a priesthood context, Noah preaches faith and repentance, baptism appears, and the Holy Ghost is part of the pre-Flood gospel.^[10] Genesis 6 contains none of that Christian ordinance system.^[16]

LDS readers see continuity: Noah had the same gospel Adam had. Critics see the same pattern found in Moses 5–6, where later Christian institutions are projected backward to make all dispensations look like one Restoration gospel.

The Flood itself should not be used as filler in a Book of Moses criticism article. Whether Genesis describes a global event is a large separate debate. The Book of Moses becomes independently relevant where it adds doctrine, reinforces literal chronology, or makes the antediluvian world explicitly Christian.

The JST and Contemporary Bible Scholarship

Did Joseph Smith Copy Adam Clarke?

One of the most repeated modern criticisms of the Joseph Smith Translation is that Joseph borrowed from Methodist scholar Adam Clarke’s Bible commentary. Thomas Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemmon argued that a number of JST changes show dependence on Clarke, a widely used commentary available in Joseph Smith’s environment.^[31] Kent P. Jackson later disputed the strength of those examples and argued that the proposed parallels are often vague, coincidental, or explainable without direct use of Clarke.^[32]

This debate is relevant to the Bible revision as a whole, but it is frequently overstated when applied to the Book of Moses. Even scholars arguing for Clarke influence do not use the commentary to explain the huge Enoch narrative, Moses 1, Adam’s baptism, or most of the large Genesis expansions. Clarke may help explain some small revision choices elsewhere in the JST. It is not a source for “the Book of Moses” in any comprehensive sense.

So “Joseph plagiarized the Book of Moses from Adam Clarke” should be retired. The evidence does not support it.

The more defensible point is broader. Joseph’s revision occurred inside a culture of Bible commentary, harmonization, textual correction, and theological explanation. If he used Clarke in some parts of the larger JST, that would show that the project could incorporate ordinary study alongside revelation. It would not explain the distinctive Book of Moses material or settle whether any of its additions are ancient.

Source Criticism and Mosaic Authorship

Who Wrote Genesis?

The Book of Moses is framed as words revealed to or associated with Moses and includes a prediction that words would be taken from “the book which thou shalt write” (Moses 1:40–41).^[3] Traditional Christian readings often treated the Pentateuch as substantially written by Moses.

Modern biblical scholarship does not generally treat Genesis in its present form as a book personally composed by Moses in the second millennium BCE. Scholars disagree about the exact number, dates, and boundaries of the sources and editorial stages, but the Pentateuch is widely understood as a composite work with a long history of composition and redaction.^[21]^[22]

This creates tension with a simple restoration model. If Genesis itself emerged through multiple traditions and editors long after the period traditionally assigned to Moses, the idea that Joseph was restoring passages excised from a single pristine Mosaic manuscript becomes historically difficult.

An LDS response can separate revelation from modern assumptions about authorship. Moses could have received visions that were transmitted through later scribes, or the Book of Moses could restore teachings associated with Moses without claiming that he personally authored every line of Genesis in its final form. That is a viable reconciliation.

But it is a reconciliation, not evidence. The more flexible the model becomes, the less modern source criticism directly contradicts it. It also becomes harder to test what “restoration” is supposed to mean.

The Nature of God and Joseph Smith’s Developing Theology

The Book of Moses presents God in ways that are both biblical and distinctively important to later Mormon thought. God speaks face to face with prophets. Humans are his children. Human agency matters to him. His work concerns their immortality and eternal life. He can grieve so deeply that Enoch sees him weep.^[3]^[9]

It would be a mistake to read Joseph Smith’s full Nauvoo theology back into an 1830–31 text. Moses does not clearly teach all the later ideas associated with divine embodiment, plurality of gods, eternal intelligences, temple sealing, or exaltation. Those developments came later.

What it does show is a theology already moving toward a highly relational cosmos. God’s purposes are organized around human destiny. Prophets enter his presence. Heaven and earth interact constantly. Zion can become so holy that a community crosses the boundary between earth and heaven.

This is part of the cumulative nineteenth-century argument because the Book of Moses sits inside Joseph’s rapid theological development. It also complicates that argument because a believer can interpret the same pattern as revelation unfolding line upon line. Chronology can show development. It cannot by itself tell us whether development was human or divine.

One related Lucifer’s Lantern article, “Why Didn’t Joseph Smith Preach from the Book of Mormon?”, looks at how Joseph’s Bible revision became one of the main places where his theology kept expanding after 1830.^[36] The Book of Moses is an early example of that pattern: Joseph was not only correcting biblical wording. He was using the Bible revision as a setting in which large new bodies of doctrine emerged.

Which Criticisms Hold Up?

Several popular objections are weaker than they first sound.

King James language by itself does not disprove revelation, because Joseph openly worked from an English Bible. The existence of an 1821 English 1 Enoch does not prove Joseph read it. The existence of parallels between Moses and ancient Enoch literature does not prove Joseph restored an ancient document. Adam standing in water in a later Adam text is not the same thing as baptism in Jesus Christ. And the Adam Clarke theory should not be stretched into an explanation for material it does not explain.

The stronger criticisms are more focused.

The Book of Moses repeatedly develops theology from the structure and wording of the KJV. Its harmonization of Genesis 1 and 2 looks like a response to the received English Bible rather than recovery of its compositional history. Its primeval characters teach a detailed Christian gospel using Jesus Christ, baptism, Holy Ghost, original guilt, and agency in ways not independently attested in ancient Jewish sources. Its expanded narratives closely track Joseph Smith’s early theological concerns. Its current form also comes through a visible nineteenth-century process of dictation, copying, revision, publication, and canonization.

On the apologetic side, the Enoch evidence is not all equal. General visionary and apocalyptic parallels are expected. The Apocalypse of Abraham comparison to Moses 1 is more sustained and deserves notice. The Mahijah/Mahaway correspondence in the Book of Giants is unusually specific and was unavailable to Joseph in its Qumran form. That does not outweigh every other feature automatically, but it should not be waved away.

The Cumulative Case

No single feature of the Book of Moses proves that Joseph Smith restored an ancient text, and no single criticism proves that he composed it without revelation. Some common attacks fail because they treat his Bible revision as though he claimed to be translating a surviving Hebrew manuscript. Some apologetic arguments fail for the opposite reason, turning loose ancient motifs into evidence of textual recovery.

The more persuasive question is cumulative. The Book of Moses emerges directly from Joseph Smith’s revision of the King James Bible, preserves its language and structure, answers theological questions that fit his religious environment, and expands Genesis in ways closely connected with his developing theology. Ancient parallels become strongest only where they are specific, genuinely ancient, tied to the same narrative, and difficult to explain from the Bible or Joseph’s environment. A few, especially the Mahijah/Mahaway comparison, deserve that higher level of attention.

The historical question is not whether an ancient parallel can be found somewhere or whether a nineteenth-century analogue can be found somewhere. It is whether the hypothesis that Joseph Smith restored genuinely ancient Mosaic material explains the total evidence better than the hypothesis that the Book of Moses is a nineteenth-century revelatory expansion of Genesis.