Evidence Infinite and Infinitesimal:
Joseph Smith Leaves Traces of Prophetic Proof
By James T. Summerhays

To download free articles from BYU Studies written by scholars of ancient scripture, go to byustudies.com’s articles section on the Pearl of Great Price or Old Testament. To get Kent Jackson’s article, click here.

The basis for testimony in LDS theology is a witness of the Holy Spirit. Our decisive paradigm is the spiritual realm. There is, however, a dimension to our faith that makes an LDS spiritual undertaking less mystical than traditional religious experience. This dimension is the principle of proof.

We welcome empirical evidence into our circle of religious fervor. God, through modern revelation, says, “I will reason as with men in days of old, and I will show unto you my strong reasoning” (D&C 45:10).

Joseph Smith once remarked that facts are stubborn things, and the world would prove him to be a true prophet through circumstantial evidence and experiment (Times and Seasons 3:922).

Ours is a tactile religion as well as a spiritual one. Ours is a history of real gold plates that many men hefted and examined, personal Deities with tangible flesh and bones, and authentic angels that can reach down and shake a person’s hand. Our history has the Urim and Thummim, seer stones, Egyptian mummies, ancient papyri, and other physical artifacts that rivet our minds to the reality of it all. Reality. That is a word that sums up our religious yearning. We seek after the clear-as-crystal reality of all things, whether those things span the vast, infinite expanse or are as small as the falling sparrow.

If one wants strong reasoning and evidence, there is plenty to go around. A recent article in BYU Studies by Kent P. Jackson examines evidence from the Book of Moses, a text that Latter-day Saints believe Joseph Smith translated through divine means. The article involves a tiny, detailed piece of substantiation, more of the “falling sparrow” variety than of the “infinite expanse” variety. It is profoundly convincing expressly because of its obscurity.

“On two occasions while he worked on his New Translation of Genesis in 1830,” writes Jackson, “the Prophet Joseph Smith dictated to his scribe Oliver Cowdery a word combination that in English is awkward and ungrammatical, though in the Hebrew it is not: ‘Behold I.’ The first occurrence reads, ‘Behold I I am the Lord God Almighty.’ The second reads, ‘Behold I send me.’ Both passages are in the Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, but ‘Behold I’ is not found in either of those passages today because, after the time of Joseph Smith, each was edited out of the text.” These passages, Moses 1:3 and Moses 4:1, were likely changed so they would read in the English with more fluidity and elegance, as in “Behold, here am I, send me” (Moses 4:1, as found in the 1902 edition to the present edition). Thankfully we still have the original manuscript so the significance of these passages is not lost.

If Joseph Smith were indeed an inspired translator of ancient texts, it would make sense that such Hebraisms would surface in his translations. Jackson explains that the Hebrew word hineni is made up of the word hinneh (behold) with –ni, a first-person-singular pronoun, added to the end of the word — hence “Behold I.” Hineni is found in about 180 places in the Hebrew Old Testament, but in 1830 Joseph had no access to a Hebrew Bible, let alone any knowledge of the Hebrew language. It would be another five years before he turned his attention to a Hebrew school in Kirtland, Ohio.

Probably because of its clumsiness, no English Bible translation of Joseph’s day translated hineni as “Behold I” when an “I” or “me” pronoun directly followed, so Joseph would not have copied any “Behold I I” phrases there. And, as Jackson points out, nowhere else did Joseph Smith use the phrase “Behold I” in the same way it appears in Moses, and therefore it is unlikely the phrase represented Joseph’s speech pattern.

All these facts beg the question: If Joseph Smith were an imposter, how on earth did a Hebrew construction so obscure find its way into his translation? It would take more than a genius to think of including this little detail among the hundreds of thousands of words Joseph Smith translated into English in such a short amount of time. Jackson proposes that “Behold I” was once found in the original Hebrew text of Genesis.

Of course, many ancient poetic forms can be found in modern LDS scripture confirming the belief that Joseph received power from God to translate ancient texts. Unlike “Behold I,” many of these are large in scope. Some people propose explanations as to how he knew about these forms and that through extraordinary brilliance could mimic these Hebraic literary stylistic elements. (Think of the large chiasmic forms that grace Book of Mormon pages.)

Jackson has demonstrated for the first time a Hebrew word combination found in the book of Moses that is so tiny and obscure in its detail that it becomes a compelling argument for the claims of Joseph as a prophet — one could argue that a genius imposter can invent sweeping poetic forms that, in a general way, mimic the great Israelite prophets of the past — but to include a Hebraism so tiny, and so unknown in the English translations confirms, in my mind at least, that Joseph was working in an inspired medium that brought to light the pure and original meaning and, in this case, the original wording of the biblical text.

The first principle of the gospel involves faith; we speak the language of faith; we live by faith; but faith never need exclude sound evidence. In fact, sometimes it is a spark of evidence that a yearning soul clings to that inspires the journey of faith in the first place (see JST Heb. 11:1). Latter-day Saints believe in reality, whether it be an intangible though oh-so-real witness from the Holy Spirit, or the tactile realm of sacred things and holy personages that can be seen or touched or talked to. Whether the evidence is infinite or infinitesimal, the mountain of evidence supporting Joseph as a prophet continues to amass, and the breathtaking vista from atop that mountain will delight and convince those who seek after all things authentic.

To download free articles from BYU Studies written by scholars of ancient scripture, go to byustudies.com’s articles section on the Pearl of Great Price or Old Testament. To get Kent Jackson’s article, click here.