Modern scholarship is revealing the Book of Mormon’s surprising subtlety.
For example, Terrence Szink has demonstrated that Nephi’s account of his family’s journey from Jerusalem to the Americas is modeled, unmistakably and in detail, on Israel’s exodus out of Egypt in part in “Nephi and the Exodus," published on maxwellinstitute.byu.edu.
Visionary prophetic figures led both groups to lands of “promise” from lands under divine condemnation, miraculously reaching safety across major water barriers from those pursuing or threatening them. In both accounts, rebellious members of the group “murmured” at their hunger, lamented leaving their homes for the wilderness, said that they would have preferred death to their present journey, and wished to return to perilous lands from which they’d been delivered. A metallic object (the Nephites’ Liahona and the Israelites’ brazen serpent) is significant in both accounts.
Both Moses and Nephi received instructions from the Lord atop mountains — about building, respectively, a tabernacle and a ship. In each account, rebels reaped divine wrath through wild partying, forgetting the Lord who’d delivered them. And similarities appear in nuances of language as well as in broader themes.
“It seems to me,” Szink concludes, “that such a large body of parallels cannot be accounted for by coincidence. It appears that Nephi purposefully wrote his account in a way that would reflect the Exodus. His intention was to prove that God loved and cared for the Nephites just as he did the children of Israel during the Exodus from Egypt.”
That the parallels are likely intentional also appears in the fact that, at 1 Nephi 4:1-3 and 17:23-44, Nephi expressly identifies parallels between his story and the biblical exodus, using language in the latter passage that recalls the crossing of the Red Sea.
“Certainly,” Szink further suggests, “this connection could not have been a product of Joseph Smith’s writing. The parallels to Exodus occur at dozens of places throughout the Book of Mormon record. No hasty copying of the Bible could have produced such complex similarities. … In fact, because they are so quiet and underlying, no Latter-day Saint until our day has even noticed these comparisons. Nephi clearly composed a masterpiece full of subtle literary touches that we are only now beginning to appreciate.”
George Tate has likewise argued that Nephi’s account of the Lehite journey to the New World consciously echoes the Israelite exodus in “The Typology of the Exodus Pattern in the Book of Mormon,” online at rsc.byu.edu. Beyond the motifs already mentioned above, he notes references in both the Nephite and Israelite accounts to a (paschal?) lamb, miraculous provision of food in the wilderness when murmuring erupts among the hungry travelers, and even the passage of 40 years. To these, Mark Johnson has added such details as the burial of a deceased patriarch at a significant location and the transfiguration of Moses and Nephi before their people in “The Exodus of Lehi Revisited," online at ojs.lib.byu.edu.
As biblical scholar James Plastaras has observed, the exodus “shaped all of Israel’s understanding of history. It was only in light of the exodus that Israel was able to look back into the past and piece together her earlier history. It was also the exodus that provided the prophets with a key to the understanding of Israel’s future. In this sense, the exodus stands at the center of Israel’s history” (see "The God of Exodus: The Theology of the Exodus Narratives," Bruce Publishing, 1966).
“In summary,” Kent Brown writes at the conclusion of his own discussion of the topic in “The Exodus Pattern in the Book of Mormon,” which is online at rsc.byu.edu, “the Book of Mormon can be seen as the repository of an extraordinarily rich tradition with deep, ancient roots. Taken as a whole, the work proves to be one of stunning complexity and nuanced subtlety — no small conclusion.”
This sophisticated and authentic employment of the Israelite exodus narrative strongly suggests that the author of 1 Nephi — to say nothing of the rest of the Book of Mormon — was thoroughly steeped in the Hebrew Bible. But that description scarcely fits the young Joseph Smith. Even at 18, according to his mother — that is, in roughly 1823, when Moroni first visited him — he “had never read the Bible through in his life.” And when the Book of Mormon was translated later in the 1820s, his biblical knowledge doesn’t seem to have been dramatically greater.
Daniel Peterson teaches Arabic studies, founded BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, directs MormonScholarsTestify.org, chairs mormoninterpreter.com, blogs daily at patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson, and speaks only for himself.