The Very Things Which the Brother of Jared Saw

Of the plates that Joseph Smith received from the angel Moroni, which ancient prophet wrote the largest portion? If we take only what we have in the Book of Mormon today, i.e. what Joseph actually translated after the 116 pages were lost, the answer to that question would clearly be Mormon. He wrote the text from the Words of Mormon through Mormon 7, comprising about 337 pages of the current book we have today. That makes up about 63.5% of the book, with the rest of the writings coming from the writers on the small plates (1 Nephi 1 – Omni) and Moroni (Momon 8 – Moroni 10). If we included the lost 116 pages, that percentage would of course be even higher. But even then, the answer to the question is still probably not Mormon. The reason is that in the plates that Joseph received, an estimated one-half of them were sealed and not translated by Joseph. It was David Whitmer who said that about one-half of the plates Joseph received were sealed (and Orson Pratt suggested that it was even more at two-thirds). That sealed portion was all written down by Moroni, not Mormon. As Moroni was abridging the Jaredite record, he wrote, “Behold, I have written upon these plates the very things which the brother of Jared saw; and there never were greater things made manifest than those which were made manifest unto the brother of Jared. Wherefore the Lord hath commanded me to write them; and I have written them. And he commanded me that I should seal them up; and he also hath commanded that I should seal up the interpretation thereof; wherefore I have sealed up the interpreters, according to the commandment of the Lord.” That sealed portion contains the revelation that the brother of Jared received, and it is yet to be revealed to us. But we have this promise that one day we can receive it: “And in that day that they shall exercise faith in me, saith the Lord, even as the brother of Jared did, that they may become sanctified in me, then will I manifest unto them the things which the brother of Jared saw, even to the unfolding unto them all my revelations, saith Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of the heavens and of the earth, and all things that in them are” (Ether 4:4-5, 7). Once we have the faith of the brother of Jared, the revelation he received will be given to us.

               When Mormon wrote about the Jaredite plates that King Limhi brought back to King Mosiah who subsequently translated them, he said this: “And this account shall be written hereafter; for behold, it is expedient that all people should know the things which are written in this account” (Mosiah 28:19). It appears that Mormon was planning to include the account of the Jaredites based on this statement, but of course he never did. That fell to Moroni, who abridged them into the current book of Ether that we have today. As I mentioned recently, if we take Moroni’s statement literally about his version not even being 1/100^th of the full account of the Jaredites, that means he had the equivalent of 3000 of our pages to read through and then abridge as a summarized account comprising the book of Ether. He wrote this, “And now I, Moroni, proceed to give an account of those ancient inhabitants who were destroyed by the hand of the Lord upon the face of this north country. And I take mine account from the twenty and four plates which were found by the people of Limhi, which is called the Book of Ether” (Ether 1:1-2). That “account from the twenty and four plates” had been translated by Mosiah, and so I believe Moroni had to read through all of that and then condense it into the short book we have today. And not only did he write the book of Ether after reading an enormous history of the Jaredites, but he also copied down the vision of the brother of Jared that was then added to the plates. It’s not clear why he couldn’t simply take Mosiah’s translation and put it in, but for some reason he had to copy it himself and add it: “I have written upon these plates the very things which the brother of Jared saw…. Wherefore the Lord hath commanded me to write them; and I have written them. And he commanded me that I should seal them up” (Ether 4:4-5). It may be that Mosiah didn’t write it on plates but on some other material that could still last hundreds of years to reach Moroni. At any rate, for Moroni to engrave the vision which was at least as lengthy as our current Book of Mormon would have been an enormous task, especially given how difficult and painstaking it must have been to write on the plates. So he certainly wasn’t just wandering those final decades, but he was reading, abridging, and copying down a prodigious amount of material. And we certainly hope that his labors in writing down the vision of the brother of Jared was not for naught. We must strive to treasure the scriptures we do have now so we can be prepared at some future day to receive for ourselves “the things which the brother of Jared saw.”