Common Book of Moses Criticisms

The Major Criticisms, Their Origins, and the LDS Responses

◆

The Book of Moses is a Latter-day Saint scripture found in the Pearl of Great Price. It is Joseph Smith’s expanded revision of the opening chapters of Genesis. He began producing it in June 1830 while revising the King James Bible. Joseph did not have a separate ancient manuscript in front of him. Instead, he worked from the English Bible and dictated changes, corrections, and large new sections that he understood as revelation.^[1]^[2]

The book begins with a new vision of Moses that is not found in Genesis. It then retells the Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain, Enoch, and Noah. Some sections stay close to the King James Bible. Others add whole stories and doctrines. Enoch, for example, goes from a few verses in Genesis to a major prophet who preaches, builds Zion, sees God weep, and receives visions of the future.

That makes the Book of Moses different from the Book of Mormon or Book of Abraham. There are no plates or papyri that can be compared with Joseph’s English text. The main question is what his additions represent. Were they lost ancient teachings restored by revelation? Were they inspired explanations of Genesis for a modern audience? Or were they Joseph Smith’s own nineteenth-century expansion of the Bible?^[17]

The evidence can be tested from several directions: the King James Bible Joseph used, his early revelations and theology, modern scholarship on Genesis, and ancient traditions about Adam and Enoch. The recurring problem for an ancient-restoration model is the pattern created by those comparisons. The Book of Moses repeatedly follows the KJV, expands places where the English Bible raises interpretive problems, and places distinctly Christian and early Restoration teachings into the primeval world. A handful of ancient Enoch parallels are worth examining, but most are broad, and none independently establishes that Joseph recovered a lost Mosaic text.

“an enduring testimony to the divinely inspired work of Joseph Smith”— Kent P. Jackson, History of the Book of Moses ^[18]

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]

The criticism is more specific than the mere presence of King James English. If Moses 2–8 restores ancient material, its dependence on the exact phrasing, sequence, and even interpretive quirks of a 1611 English translation needs explanation. The more an added doctrine appears to arise from the wording Joseph was reading, the less the result resembles recovery of an independent ancient source.

Latter-day Saint readers can answer that revelation could work through the familiar Bible rather than reconstructing Hebrew. That keeps a revelatory model possible, but it reduces the model’s historical testability: almost any modern wording or dependence on the KJV can be absorbed into the translation process.

King James vocabulary such as “thee” and “thou” proves very little by itself. The more relevant cases are places where Joseph’s additions appear to solve problems created by the English Bible he had in front of him. Those passages look less like ancient material resurfacing and more like nineteenth-century interpretation becoming scripture.

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 changes and additions he understood as inspired rather than producing a linguistic translation from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.^[17]

The Church’s historical account describes Joseph’s method directly:

Rather, he used a copy of the King James Bible as the starting point for his translation, dictating inspired changes and additions to scribes.^[17]

That distinction matters, but it only changes the mechanism. Joseph was not claiming a conventional Hebrew-to-English translation; he was claiming revelatory authority to correct and expand the Bible.

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.

The historical problem begins with the second claim: whether the new material actually preserves ancient content. A broad definition of “translation” does not provide evidence for that antiquity. It simply leaves room for revelation as an explanation.

“It probably doesn’t restore the original text, but it does restore meaning …”— Thomas A. Wayment, LDS Perspectives interview ^[31]

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 shows the KJV dependence more clearly. 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] Neither wording choice proves fabrication, but both are fingerprints of the English source Joseph was using.

A more specific 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.

“better explained by Smith’s effort to remove difficulties in the KJV … than by an actual restoration of ancient texts.”— Philip L. Barlow, Harvard Theological Review ^[20]

Restoration or Inspired Expansion?

One way to preserve a revelatory reading is to treat the Book of Moses as inspired expansion rather than restored wording. On this model, Joseph reads Genesis, receives theological ideas, and turns them into new scripture without claiming that every sentence once existed in an ancient manuscript.

That model accounts for the surviving manuscripts and KJV dependence with fewer assumptions than a strict restoration model.

But it also retreats from the historical claim at the center of the controversy. If Moses 6–7 is inspired nineteenth-century scripture about Enoch rather than restored Enochic material, ancient parallels become theological convergences rather than evidence that Joseph recovered a lost text. Christian language and modern concerns also become easier to explain precisely because the model no longer requires them to come from Adam, Enoch, or Moses.

LDS explanations often move among restoration, revelation, commentary, and expansion. Those categories are flexible enough to absorb very different kinds of evidence, but that flexibility reduces the ancient-source claim’s historical testability. If a passage can be ancient when it has an ancient parallel and modern revelatory expansion when it reflects Joseph’s environment, little evidence can count against the model.

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 began in the nineteenth century. The problem is their concentration and form. Again and again, the Book of Moses answers Christian questions in language and categories that fit Joseph Smith’s own religious setting.

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]

Taken together, these are not random embellishments. They form a theological system that sits comfortably beside Joseph Smith’s other early revelations. A revelatory explanation can call that continuity restoration, but historically the simpler observation is that the Book of Moses repeatedly gives ancient figures doctrines that Joseph himself was developing in the same period.

The Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts

The manuscripts make the production history unusually visible. 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]

Editorial history is not evidence of fraud by itself, but it conflicts with a simple picture in which the present Book of Moses arrived as a fixed ancient text. The surviving record shows dictation, copying, revision, selection, and later canonization, all inside a nineteenth-century publication process.

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. The claim of textual restoration therefore lacks independent textual support.

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 comparison carries more evidentiary weight than generic ancient parallels 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.

The parallel is worth noting, but its evidentiary value is limited. It shows that Moses 1 shares a sequence of motifs with an ancient apocalypse; it does not establish that Joseph recovered Mosaic material, and the differences are large enough that common biblical-apocalyptic conventions remain a plausible explanation.

“a powerful and, in several respects, unique witness of the antiquity of Moses 1”— Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, David J. Larsen, and Stephen T. Whitlock ^[27]

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. Without more specific evidence connecting its wording and sequence to pre-Christian Mosaic tradition, the passage can be explained as a revealed Christian interpretation of Moses.

“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]

Because the idea was already widely available, it provides little evidence for ancient restoration and little evidence for dependence on any one modern source. Joseph did not need Thomas Dick in particular to imagine multiple worlds. The concept was already in the intellectual air.

The point is not that Joseph had to copy Thomas Dick or any one author. Multiple worlds already belonged to the religious and scientific conversation of his time. Moses 1 therefore requires no inaccessible ancient source to explain the idea, and the phrase adds to the broader nineteenth-century fit of the chapter.

“the plurality of worlds idea saturated both the scientific and religious communities of Joseph’s time”— Robert E. Paul, Dialogue ^[29]

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 criticism carries substantial evidentiary weight 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.

“The first account of creation, in Genesis 1:1 to 2:4a, is a classic P composition.”— Yale Bible Study, Genesis: Introduction ^[21]

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]

A positive view of the Fall was not invented in the nineteenth century. Christian traditions had long discussed whether God could bring a greater good out of humanity’s fall. Joseph’s distinctive addition is the specific package of agency, embodied experience, procreation, ordinances, and a universal Restoration gospel.

Joseph Smith’s distinctive contribution 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.

“such new doctrines as the Christian gospel being taught to Adam and Eve, as well as their baptism”— Terryl Givens and Brian M. Hauglid, The Pearl of Greatest Price ^[41]

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.

Ancient expansions of Adam show that Joseph was not unique in elaborating Genesis, but they do not reproduce his specifically Christian ordinance system or independently verify his version.

“Highly Christianized in viewpoint, it provides background for the Cain narrative in Genesis 4:1 and helps answer questions caused by story’s abrupt introduction.”— Anthony A. Hutchinson, “A Mormon Midrash?” ^[19]

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 Book of Moses did not spell out the full nineteenth- and twentieth-century priesthood-ban rationale. It did, however, supply scriptural language linking blackness, Cain, Canaan, curse, and exclusion. Later LDS racial theology added more than the text says, but it did not build from nothing.

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]

Because primordial-language speculation was widespread, a specific literary source cannot be shown from the idea alone. But that same background makes the passage easy to place in Joseph’s world. His later “Sample of Pure Language” shows that the subject was not incidental; he continued trying to recover sacred primordial vocabulary.

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.

“the seventeenth-century Anglo-European search for pure language freed from Babel’s curse is remarkably similar to Smith’s quest”— Samuel Morris Brown, Church History ^[30]

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 directly uses primeval history to answer 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.

“baptism has been a vital part of God’s salvific plan for his children from the very beginning.”— Seth S. Larsen, Religious Studies Center ^[42]

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 is a particularly clear example of later Christian theology appearing in 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]

Enoch had already been expanded far beyond Genesis in ancient Jewish literature, where he became a visionary, scribe, heavenly traveler, teacher, and revealer of secrets. That makes Enoch the richest field for ancient comparison, but it also means generic features such as visions and heavenly knowledge carry little evidentiary weight by themselves.

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 contains the largest cluster of ancient parallels in the Book of Moses, but it also contains several direct connections to Joseph Smith’s own concerns. 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.

The ancient Enoch corpus shows that long Enoch expansions existed centuries before Joseph. That makes Enoch a more complicated case than Adam or Noah. Still, broad features such as visions, heavenly knowledge, judgment, and cosmic travel were already part of Enoch’s inherited literary reputation and do not by themselves point to a lost source behind Moses 7.

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 relevant historical question is whether Joseph had 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.

The documentary position is narrower. Laurence’s 1 Enoch existed in English, but there is no good evidence Joseph used it. At the same time, Enoch was not a blank slate in 1830: Jude, biblical scholarship, and discussions of apocrypha already presented him as more than the few lines in Genesis. Later-discovered Qumran material can still produce genuinely unexpected comparisons, but it should not be treated as if Joseph had no Enochic concepts available at all.

“the relevant portions of 1 Enoch for Smith’s writings were far better known and broadly discussed than has previously been recognized”— Colby Townsend, Dialogue ^[23]

The Mahijah and Mahaway Parallel

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 is unusual enough that it should not be dismissed as a generic parallel. Still, its value is narrower than it is often made to sound.

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.

The surviving evidence does not identify a confident explanation for the similarity, but it is still a single name-and-role correspondence between narratives that differ in their details. It does not supply shared wording, a shared plot, or a chain of transmission connecting the Book of Giants to Joseph’s text.

Among the ancient comparisons, Mahijah/Mahaway is one of the few that remains genuinely puzzling. That makes it worth preserving as an unresolved point, not treating it as verification of the Book of Moses as a whole.

“potentially provides further evidence for the Book of Moses and its account of Enoch’s ministry having distinctly ancient roots”— Aaron P. Schade and Matthew L. Bowen ^[25]

“First, the names in the two traditions are not the same, contra Nibley’s argument.”— Colby Townsend, Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies ^[43]

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]

Joseph’s later Missouri program cannot simply be read backward into a text dictated before July 1831. But the chronology still fits development inside Joseph’s own movement. Gathering and New Jerusalem ideas were already present, Moses 7 gave them an antediluvian model, and later revelations made Zion increasingly concrete.^[35]

A revelatory model reverses the causal direction and says the ancient pattern was revealed because Joseph’s generation was meant to restore it. The historical record cannot test that supernatural claim. What it can show is that Zion language was already developing around Joseph and that Moses 7 became part of that same development, so an inaccessible ancient source is not required to explain the theme.

“the Lord gave Joseph Smith and the early Saints Enoch’s Zion as a doctrinal blueprint for latter-day Zion”— Aaron P. Schade and Matthew L. Bowen ^[35]

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.

“a striking portrayal and one quite inconsistent with the notions of God’s ‘impassibility’ developed in high Christian theology”— Daniel C. Peterson, quoted by ScriptureCentral ^[44]

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 distinctive, but the ancient comparisons remain mostly thematic. A historical explanation does not need a lost Enoch text to account for it: Genesis already gives a grieving God, and Joseph’s own theology was moving toward a more relational deity. Without a closer ancient parallel, the scene fits Joseph’s developing theology at least as well as a restoration model.

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.

The racial language does not by itself date the text, because pre-modern interpreters had long racialized biblical curses. But it fits Joseph’s environment with little strain. He lived in a culture saturated with arguments linking scripture, ancestry, curse, and race, so the passage does not require ancient recovery to explain its ideas.

As a criticism of the text’s later racial use, the evidence is more direct. 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]

“Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse”— The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ^[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]

Most scientific and historical problems with a global Flood, extreme patriarchal ages, and compressed primeval chronology already belong to Genesis. Joseph inherited those features rather than creating them. What matters more for the Book of Moses is what he adds to the inherited story.

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.

Questions about a global Flood belong mostly to Genesis. Joseph’s distinctive expansion is that Noah preaches a Christian ordinance system before Christianity, reinforcing the same backward projection already seen with Adam and Enoch.

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]

Jackson’s rebuttal is direct:

The few overlaps that do exist are vague, superficial, and coincidental.^[32]

The Clarke evidence does not explain Moses 1, the huge Enoch expansion, Adam’s baptism, or most of the distinctive Book of Moses material. Its importance is different. If some JST changes did come from a contemporary Bible commentary, then the larger revision project was capable of incorporating ordinary nineteenth-century study alongside claimed revelation.

Calling the whole Book of Moses plagiarism from Clarke goes beyond the evidence. But Clarke does not have to explain the whole book to matter historically.

The larger revision project could apparently incorporate ordinary commentary, harmonization, and textual study alongside claimed revelation. That undercuts the assumption that every non-KJV change is presumptively ancient or revealed, even though Clarke does not explain the distinctive Enoch material.

“There are no parallels to Clarke between Genesis 1–Genesis 24.”— Thomas A. Wayment, LDS Perspectives interview ^[31]

“none of the examples they provide can be traced to Clarke’s commentary”— Kent P. Jackson, Interpreter ^[32]

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 conflicts with the dominant scholarly model of Genesis’s compositional history.

A reconciliation is possible by separating revelation from Mosaic authorship. Moses could have received traditions later transmitted by scribes, or the Book of Moses could restore teachings associated with him without claiming that he personally wrote Genesis in its final form. But each move makes “restoration” less specific and less historically testable.

But it is a reconciliation, not evidence. The more flexible the model becomes, the less modern source criticism directly contradicts it. It also makes the meaning of “restoration” less historically testable.

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.

The Book of Moses sits inside Joseph’s rapid theological development and reads naturally as an early stage of it. Chronology cannot test a divine cause, but historically the sequence is straightforward: ideas appear in Joseph’s scriptural projects, grow more elaborate, and then reappear in later revelations and teachings.

“The fourth and fifth types of change are harmonizing the Bible internally and rendering it compatible with Smith’s own experience and revelations.”— Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible ^[45]

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?

Some popular objections overreach, but trimming them away leaves a substantial historical case.

King James language by itself does not settle the question, and the existence of an 1821 English 1 Enoch does not prove Joseph read it. Adam’s penitential immersion in a later text is not the same thing as baptism in Jesus Christ, and Adam Clarke does not explain the Book of Moses as a whole. None of those limits touches the central objections: the text repeatedly depends on the KJV at the level of wording and interpretation, Christianizes primeval history, and tracks Joseph Smith’s own developing theology.

The criticisms with the greatest evidentiary weight are tied to specific textual and historical evidence.

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.

The ancient Enoch evidence is much smaller in scope than the nineteenth-century evidence. General visionary and apocalyptic parallels are expected. The Apocalypse of Abraham comparison is more sustained, and Mahijah/Mahaway remains unusually specific. Those points complicate a simple source story, but they do not explain the KJV dependence, Christian ordinances, racial language, Zion development, or the larger pattern of Joseph’s theology appearing inside primeval history.

The Cumulative Case

Historical arguments do not need a single smoking gun. The case rests on convergence. Joseph worked from a known English Bible, preserved its language and sequence, expanded its interpretive pressure points, and placed Christian and early Restoration doctrines into stories set thousands of years before Christianity.

The ancient parallels matter where they are specific and genuinely difficult to explain, especially Mahijah/Mahaway. But they are exceptions inside a much larger textual pattern. Most of the Book of Moses can be explained from Genesis, the King James Bible, familiar Christian traditions, and Joseph Smith’s own developing religious ideas without positing a lost Mosaic source.

On ordinary historical grounds, a nineteenth-century revelatory expansion of Genesis explains more of the evidence with fewer assumptions than a restoration of lost Mosaic text. That conclusion does not disprove a supernatural claim, which historical method cannot test. It does mean the surviving manuscripts, language, theology, and literary structure point much more directly to Joseph Smith’s own time than to an independently recoverable ancient source.