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Much of the Joseph Smith Translation consists of changes the Prophet made to verses already in the Bible. But there are some sections that have no biblical counterpart and thus represent something entirely new. In this and the following chapters we will look at some sections that can be called “new text” because they are entirely original to the JST and are often profound departures from what Bible readers are familiar with. The most prominent examples of new text are in the book of Genesis, beginning with the Visions of Moses at the very start of the New Translation and continuing through other additions that dramatically reinvent the first book of the Bible. Our focus here and in chapters 6–8 will be on the early Genesis chapters that later were excerpted from the JST and given the title “Book of Moses.” These early chapters of Joseph Smith’s Genesis constitute one of the greatest revelations in all of history, and they are the written source for some of the most unique teachings of the Latter-day Saint faith.

“A Revelation given to Joseph the Revelator June 1830,” the first page of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible, Old Testament Manuscript 1, page 1. The scribe was Oliver Cowdery, and the text corresponds with Moses 1:1–19. On this page we can see the lack of punctuation that characterizes almost all of the original dictation of the Joseph Smith Translation. Courtesy of Community of Christ Archives.

A Revealed Narrative

The New Translation begins with a text unlike any other that Joseph Smith had produced prior to it.[1] By the summer of 1830, he had received over two dozen revelations, all in the voice of God addressing his new Church, its members, and others. This text, in contrast, was the account of a series of events, and its speaker was not God but a narrator. The text on the dictated manuscript is identified as “A Revelation given to Joseph the Revelator,” and on the Prophet’s final manuscript it is called “A Revelation given to Joseph the Seer.”[2] The text begins with somewhat of a description: “The words of God which he spake unto Moses at a time when Moses was caught up into an exceeding high Mountain.” In 1878 Elder Orson Pratt of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles gave it the title “The Visions of Moses,” and that is still the best title for it.[3] Since 1851 it has been in the Pearl of Great Price, and beginning in 1902 it was labeled chapter 1 of the Book of Moses, which consists of the first few chapters of Genesis from the Joseph Smith Translation.

In this chapter and in subsequent chapters, Genesis passages, quoted from Joseph Smith’s final text on OT2, will sometimes differ in wording from the text in the Pearl of Great Price. Later in this book, in chapters 20–22, we will see why. Verse numbers from Moses 1 in the 2013 Pearl of Great Price are included here for reference.

We can divide the narration in the Visions of Moses into four scenes:

1. God appears to Moses (verses 1–9)
2. Moses reflects on and recovers from the theophany (verses 10–11)
3. Satan appears to Moses (verses 12–23)
4. God appears a second time to Moses (verses 24–42)

In the first scene, God comes to Moses and teaches him who he, Moses, is and by implication who all humans are: “Thou art my son,” and “thou art in similitude of mine Only Begotten.” Twice God uses the phrase “Moses my son.” God tells him of his Only Begotten, who would be the Savior: “He is full of grace and truth. But there is none other God beside me.” God’s glory comes upon Moses so he can endure the divine presence, and in that condition he can be taught about God’s creations: “I will show thee the workmanship of mine hands—but not all, for my works are without end.” Moses is shown a panoramic vision of “the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are and which were created.”[4]

The second scene begins as God withdraws from Moses and the prophet is left to himself, requiring many hours to recover from the experience. It must have been a stunning revelation for one who was raised as royalty at the height of ancient Egypt’s glory to realize that compared with God and his works, “man is nothing.” Moses had come to understand what true glory is: “Mine eyes have beheld God—but not my natural eyes but my spiritual, for my natural eyes could not have beheld, for I should have withered and died in his presence. But his glory was upon me and I beheld his face, for I was transfigured before him.”[5]

With this understanding Moses is prepared for the third scene in the narrative, when Satan comes tempting him. Satan immediately counters God’s message by addressing the prophet as “Moses, son of man,” emphasizing Moses’s humanity after God had emphasized Moses’s divine inheritance. Twice in the narrative Satan commands Moses to worship him, the second time more emphatically than the first. Satan claims to be the Only Begotten but Moses, having been previously encircled in God’s glory, knows the difference between a divine being and an impostor. Eventually he invokes the name of the Only Begotten and commands Satan to depart.[6]

God returns in the fourth scene, and Moses is again encircled in divine glory. The earlier vision of God’s creations is opened again, but this time on a grander scale. Moses sees the entire earth, “yea even all the face of it. And there was not a particle of it which he did not behold, discerning it by the Spirit of God.” He also sees the inhabitants of the earth, “and there was not a soul which he beheld not.” He is then apparently shown scenes even beyond the bounds of our own earth to other inhabited worlds: “And he beheld many lands, and each land was called earth, and there were inhabitants upon the face thereof.”[7] In his astonishment Moses asks, “Show me I pray thee why these things are so and by whom thou madest them.” God responds that he had made “worlds without number,” all by his Only Begotten Son. Yet for all of his creative works, spanning through time and space, there is one central purpose: “This is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and the eternal life of man.” Those words are the high point of the vision.[8]

Moses had seen a glimpse of a broad cosmic scene, but the details that God was willing to share with him were limited: “Only an account of this earth and the inhabitants thereof give I unto you.” With that Moses would need to be satisfied, and apparently he was: “Tell me concerning this earth and the inhabitants thereof, and also the heavens, and then thy servant will be content.”[9] These are the words that tie the Visions of Moses to what then follows in Joseph Smith’s Bible revision—the Genesis Creation account. They show that the Moses text is the prologue to, and provides the setting for, that account. The text contains other references that likewise show that it is not independent of the Bible but connects with it in important ways. It mentions Moses’s experience at the burning bush in the past tense and his power over water and his delivering of Israel from bondage in the future tense, providing a rough chronological setting for the visions.

The connection with the rest of the New Translation is made very clear. God tells Moses that he will speak to him about this earth, and Moses will write the things God says. The day would come, however, when people would disregard God’s words and remove many of them from the book Moses would write. The remedy for that loss is foretold: “I will raise up another like unto you, and they shall be had again among the children of men, among even as many as shall believe.”[10] Undoubtedly it was Joseph Smith who would be the one like unto Moses whom God would raise up to restore the lost words, and thus this narrative anticipates its own latter-day restoration. The fact that we have the narrative reminds us compellingly of the importance of the mission of the Prophet Joseph Smith.

Beginning the New Translation

Did Joseph Smith know when this revelation began that he was starting a revision of the Bible? We have no indication what he knew when he started, but on the same page of the dictated manuscript and about an inch and a half after the Visions of Moses ends, we read these words: “I reveal unto you concerning this Heaven & this Earth write the words which I speak I am the beginning & the end the Almighty God by mine only begotten I created these things yea in the beginning I created the Heaven & the Earth.”[11] With those words, a revision of Genesis had begun. If Joseph Smith did not know it when he started dictating this revelation about Moses, he certainly knew it when he finished it, because the Genesis translation follows immediately in lineal and sequential fashion on the same sheet of paper.

Perhaps there were earlier hints as well. Over a year earlier, when Oliver Cowdery was engaged as scribe for the Book of Mormon, God told him in a revelation that there were “records which contain much of my gospel, which have been kept back because of the wickedness of the people,” “ancient records which have been hid up, that are sacred,” which Cowdery would help bring to light. “Behold, other records have I, that I will give unto you power that you may assist to translate.”[12] We do not know how Joseph Smith understood passages like these when they were revealed to him.

The doctrinal content of the Visions of Moses is extraordinary. Joseph Smith had received revelations previous to this one in June 1830. Most of them had to do with the beginnings of the Restoration, the publishing of the Book of Mormon, and the establishment of the Church of Christ. Some had doctrinal content, but that content was on themes familiar to readers of the Bible, reaffirming biblical teachings.[13] What makes this revelation stand out so dramatically is what a departure it is from everything that was known in the Church at the time it was received: humans as God’s children created in the similitude of God’s Only Begotten Son, Satan claiming and aspiring to be the Only Begotten, other inhabited worlds without number throughout the universe, and God’s fundamental work and glory “to bring to pass the immortality and the eternal life of man.” These were not the theological interests of the early Latter-day Saints; they were dramatic departures into entirely new realms.

Notes

[1] See Kent P. Jackson, “The Visions of Moses and Joseph Smith’s Bible Translation,” in “To Seek the Law of the Lord”: Essays in Honor of John W. Welch, ed. Paul Y. Hoskisson and Daniel C. Peterson (Orem, UT: Interpreter Foundation, 2017), 161–69.

[2] OT1, page 1; OT2, page 1.

[3] The title “Visions of Moses” was used first in the 1878 edition of the Pearl of Great Price.

[4] OT2, page 1 (Moses 1:4–8).

[5] OT2, page 1 (Moses 1:9–11).

[6] OT2, pages 1–2 (Moses 1:12–22).

[7] The chapter summary to Moses 1 in the 2013 Pearl of Great Price states, “Moses sees many inhabited worlds.” That verse 29 refers to other worlds is perhaps suggested in the fact that Moses had already seen all of our earth and its inhabitants. Alternatively, verse 29 restates and expands on verses 27–28.

[8] OT2, pages 2–3 (Moses 1:25–39).

[9] OT2, page 3 (Moses 1:35–36).

[10] OT2, page 3 (Moses 1:40–41). Earlier in the story, following the account of Satan’s outburst because Moses would not worship him, we are given another clue about the history of the account: “Now of this thing Moses bore record, but because of wickedness it is not had among the children of men” (OT2, page 2).

[11] OT1, page 3 (Moses 2:1). That the revision of Genesis on the dictated manuscript begins immediately after the Visions of Moses and on the same sheet of paper rules out the possibility that the Moses revelation was added to a preexisting Genesis revision. See the diagram in Scott H. Faulring, Kent P. Jackson, and Robert J. Matthews, eds., Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible: Original Manuscripts (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2004), 77.

[12] Doctrine and Covenants 6:26; 8:11; 9:2. These passages could refer to the Book of Abraham also.

[13] See, for example, Doctrine and Covenants 19:1–4; 20:17–18.