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Our “voice” is more than the sound we make when we communicate. Our voices are a complex mixture of our past experiences, our present purposes, and our future hopes. They reflect personal idiosyncrasies and passionate ideologies. We can learn much from a study of voices, especially when it comes to voices of prophets of old and particularly the Savior himself.

Identifying the distinctive voices in the Book of Mormon can be a useful lens to gain more spiritual insights from its pages. Doing so illuminates and emphasizes specific gospel teachings. It also helps answer questions regarding what themes specific individuals in the Book of Mormon talk about most frequently and how the teachings of one Book of Mormon prophet differ from or complement the teachings of another. This can shed important light on the messages of the individual voices in the Book of Mormon.

In addition, the different voices in the Book of Mormon provide a type of evidence about the book’s truthfulness. Consider the unique voices of some of your closest friends. Are there distinctive words or phrases they frequently use that could help you identify their voices? Because several different people write or are quoted in the Book of Mormon, their unique voices should be found within its pages. If there were no differences in voices, it could suggest that the Book of Mormon was authored by one individual, and that it is not what the text indicates. In fact, there are discernible differences in the voices present in the Book of Mormon. As a simple way of visualizing some of the distinctive voices in the Book of Mormon, compare the following three word clouds.[1]

Figure 1.1. Jacob's word cloud.

Figure 1.2. Alma’s word cloud.

Figure 1.3. Jesus Christ’s word cloud.

A cursory look at these three word clouds shows different words that are emphasized by each of these speakers. Jacob speaks of brethren, Alma says now, and Jesus honors the Father with distinctive frequencies. Each of these words (and many others) will be discussed in further chapters; I mention them here to illustrate that one can literally see differences in the words used by different individuals in the Book of Mormon.

A more refined approach scholars have used to explore Book of Mormon authorship is through stylometry, which is a statistical analysis of individual writing styles. One application of stylometry that has received attention in Book of Mormon scholarship is sometimes referred to as “wordprints.” This branch of stylometry suggests that just as everyone has a unique fingerprint, authors likewise have a distinct voice and style. Contrasted with a subjective recognition that various authors have a similar theme or tone in their writing, stylometry uses quantifiable metrics and statistical techniques to inform the analysis. Stylometry, or wordprint analysis, has been used by scholars to determine the authorship of many disputed texts, including some of the Federalist Papers, writings purportedly authored by Shakespeare, Wuthering Heights, and several other works of literature.

I first heard about wordprints in my teen years; I learned about them in connection with the “Unabomber”—a twentieth-century terrorist who planted sixteen bombs that killed three people and injured nearly two dozen others.[2] From 1978 to 1995 the Unabomber was one of the most wanted criminals in the United States but managed to evade local and state police—even the FBI. In 1995 the Unabomber demanded that a paper he had written about the dangers of technology be published in major newspapers. The New York Times and the Washington Post agreed to publish it, hoping that somebody could identify his writing style, and that’s exactly what happened. The Unabomber’s brother recognized the style of prose and tipped off the FBI; on April 3, 1996, the Unabomber was arrested.

Just before the Unabomber’s brother contacted the FBI, the FBI had begun working with a BYU statistics professor who specialized in wordprints. They wanted him to do a stylometric analysis on the Unabomber’s essay and compare it with their list of suspects. The professor they contacted was John Hilton (the first)—my grandfather! I remember the excitement I felt when I learned that my grandfather’s work was contributing to fighting crime.

As fascinated as I was with the work my grandfather did with the FBI, I was even more intrigued when I learned of the work he and others were doing on wordprints and the Book of Mormon. Their initial studies on wordprints in the Book of Mormon looked at sample sizes of at least five thousand words and examined “the use of the small, function words, i.e., the, and, but, of, etc.,” in an effort to determine whether “different authors did indeed write the various strands within the Book of Mormon.”[3] The idea was that the ways individuals used these small words could indicate unique writing patterns. My grandfather and his colleagues found that “it is statistically indefensible to propose Joseph Smith or Oliver Cowdery or Solomon Spaulding”[4] as authoring text attributed to Nephi or Alma. Although two wordprint studies disputed these findings,[5] the most recently published study on Book of Mormon wordprints concluded that “the Book of Mormon displays multiple writing styles throughout the text consistent with the book’s claim of multiple authors and that the evidence does not show the writing styles of alleged nineteenth-century authors to be similar to those in the Book of Mormon.”[6]

If the Book of Mormon were proven to have only one author with no unique voices, that could potentially be problematic, although it could be argued that distinctive voices might disappear in the processes of redaction and translation. However, while a redactor certainly could eliminate original voices, Mormon often tells readers that he is using the direct words of another individual (for example, Alma 35:16), and some authors are clearly speaking in their own voice without redaction (for example, Nephi and Jacob). This suggests that at least some individual voices should remain intact. Moreover, while academic research on the relationship between stylometry and translation is ongoing, several studies suggest that individual voices can still be heard after the process of translation.[7]

Although multiple stylometric studies clearly show distinctive voices in the Book of Mormon, some might wonder, “Is it possible for a clever author to create distinctive voices within a text?” The answer is yes, it is possible. For example, scholar Dorota M. Dutsch examined Roman literature written by notable Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence, and she found that the female characters of these authors had distinctive patterns of speech relative to male speakers.[8]

More recently, scholars Paul Fields, Larry Bassist, and Matt Roper used stylometry to show that famous nineteenth-century novelists were able to create a distinct voice for multiple fictional characters, including the narrators, in their stories.[9] However, these scholars also found that “the level of voice diversity among Book of Mormon characters surpassed the diversity among fictional characters created by the 19th-century novelists. The Book of Mormon’s voice diversity value was more than twice that of the average for the 19th century novelists.”[10]

This research suggests that while it is technically possible for sophisticated authors to create multiple voices for different characters, the distinctive voices in the Book of Mormon go beyond what would likely be created by one sophisticated author. This finding is particularly striking when we acknowledge that Joseph Smith was twenty-three years old and had very little formal education at the time of the Book of Mormon translation. While I am certainly not advocating basing one’s testimony of the Book of Mormon on wordprints, at a minimum, the different voices in the Book of Mormon can demonstrate a level of complexity clearly beyond Joseph’s capabilities.[11]

This textual intricacy is enhanced when we recognize that stylometry is not the only useful approach for examining different voices in the Book of Mormon. Roger Keller examined individual voices by studying “content words,” or words that “are theologically, culturally, and historically significant.”[12] He created related groups of words and analyzed them to determine whether there were statistically significant differences in how they were used. For example, Keller identified a group of 109 words related to the ancient Near East, such as Babylon, Egypt, Jeremiah, and Moses. Keller found that “the authors who are most distant in time from the Ancient Near East context use the words of this group the least, while those nearest in time [for example, Lehi, Nephi, and Jacob] use them the most.”[13] This led Keller to argue that the Book of Mormon is in fact a multiauthored work, noting that “there are clear and recognizable differences in the content words used and the meanings attached to them by the authors within the Book of Mormon.”[14]

Other studies have shown unique writing patterns of Book of Mormon authors by examining words or phrases they use in distinctive ways. For example, in his book Understanding the Book of Mormon, Grant Hardy shows that Mormon’s narrative style is different from Nephi’s: “[Mormon] does not offer much scriptural exegesis, and he has little interest in House of Israel connections or messiah theology—the word messiah occurs twenty-three times in Nephi’s writings but only twice in Mormon’s work.”[15]

John W. Welch has focused on the different names for Jesus Christ used by Book of Mormon authors. He wrote, “The many personal testimonies of Jesus Christ . . . differ in their emphasis and style. Most interestingly, the attributes of Jesus Christ emphasized by the various prophets are often the attributes with which each prophet especially identified because of his own spiritual experiences, callings, and individual circumstances. . . . Each Book of Mormon prophet related to and testified of Jesus in his own individual way.”[16] Collectively, these and similar studies suggest that, based on unique words, phrases, and emphases, the Book of Mormon was in fact written by multiple authors—just as it claims.

The Origin of This Book

I first began an in-depth exploration of the voices in the Book of Mormon in 2011. I was a brand-new assistant professor in ancient scripture at Brigham Young University; I had been hired at the same time as Shon Hopkin and Jennifer Brinkerhoff Platt. The three of us had a mutual friend in Randal Wright, an institute teacher in Texas who suggested we all work together on a project to identify the different voices in the Book of Mormon. We hired an extremely capable BYU student named Jana Johnson as a research assistant and began the process of determining who was speaking in any given Book of Mormon passage.

The five of us first independently read the Book of Mormon, notating who was speaking in each verse. We then reviewed our individual findings and examined more closely passages in which we disagreed on who was speaking. After creating an integrated version of the Book of Mormon parsed out by the person speaking, we compared our work to other scholars who had made similar efforts, and in some cases we adjusted our original speaker designations.[17]

It was often straightforward to identify which Book of Mormon figure was speaking. For example, Nephi begins his record saying, “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents . . . ,” making it clear who the first speaker is (1 Nephi 1:1). Nephi goes on to introduce his father’s story, and in verses 12–13, Nephi writes, “As he [Lehi] read, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord. And he [Lehi] read, saying: [‘]Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations![’] Yea, and many things did my father read concerning Jerusalem.”

However, in some instances, discerning the differences between these voices could be tricky. As Latter-day Saint historian Richard Bushman commented, Mormon “quotes other prophets and sometimes quotes them quoting still others. Moroni injects a letter from his father, and Nephi inserts lengthy passages from previous scriptures. Mormon moves in and out of the narrative. . . . Almost always two minds are present, and sometimes three, all kept account of in the flow of words.”[18]

The Book of Mormon’s “editorially complex narrative structure”[19] and constant change of speaker made it difficult, at times, to always determine precisely who was speaking in any given passage. This isn’t surprising when the person that is speaking changes more than seventeen hundred times! An example from Jacob 5 illustrates the layers of quotations that can be more closely examined through a study of individual voices. In the following passage, notice how Jacob quotes Zenos, who in turn quotes the Lord (who portrays the voice of the master of the vineyard):

Jacob

1 Behold, my brethren, do ye not remember to have read the words of the prophet Zenos, which he spake unto the house of Israel, saying:

Zenos

2 Hearken, O ye house of Israel, and hear the words of me, a prophet of the Lord.

3 For behold, thus saith the Lord,

The Lord

I will liken thee, O house of Israel, like unto a tame olive-tree, which a man took and nourished in his vineyard; and it grew, and waxed old, and began to decay.

4 And it came to pass that the master of the vineyard went forth, and he saw that his olive-tree began to decay; and he said:

The Master of the Vineyard

I will prune it, and dig about it, and nourish it, that perhaps it may shoot forth young and tender branches, and it perish not.

In assigning specific voices to individual passages, especially in the more complicated sections, my colleagues and I made a critical methodological assumption—we chose to take the Book of Mormon authors at face value. For example, when Nephi writes, “Laman said unto Lemuel and also unto the sons of Ishmael: Behold, let us slay our father, and also our brother Nephi, who has taken it upon him to be our ruler and our teacher, who are his elder brethren” (1 Nephi 16:37), we assigned the italicized portion of this verse to Laman.

This assumption certainly imposes limitations. The possibility (indeed likelihood) exists that since Nephi was writing some thirty years after the event occurred, he was paraphrasing Laman’s words rather than providing a word-for-word account of what Laman actually said. Nephi is not the only historian who faced such challenges. Thucydides, a Greek historian living in approximately 400 BC, wrote of the difficulties of maintaining an accurate history, saying, “With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”[20]

As I will discuss later in this chapter, there clearly are times in the Book of Mormon when a narrator is likely creating dialogue as Thucydides did—that is, with the intent of adhering to the general sense of what was being said but not necessarily providing a direct quote. However, in other instances, it appears that words may have been recorded with more precision. For example, at the beginning of Alma 5, Mormon records, “These are the words which [Alma] spake to the people in the church which was established in the city of Zarahemla, according to his own record,” and then proceeds to include Alma’s first-person voice (Alma 5:2; see also Mosiah 2:8; 17:4; Alma 35:16). Thus in many cases we can be confident that the words we are reading belong to the individual reported to have said them.

Who Speaks in the Book of Mormon?

Although 150 different voices are present in the Book of Mormon, many of these are individuals who speak only a few words, including people from Amnor to Zeram.[21] The fifteen individuals who each account for at least 1 percent of the Book of Mormon are listed in table 1.1 (see the appendices for a list of all the voices in the Book of Mormon). Collectively, these fifteen voices account for 87 percent of the words spoken in the Book of Mormon. Throughout this book I will refer to these fifteen individuals as “major speakers” in the Book of Mormon.

Table 1.1. Book of Mormon speakers attributed with more than 1 percent of the text.[22]

* Reasons for separating these speakers will be discussed in the following section.

The number of words spoken by some of these speakers is in many cases no surprise. For instance, because of their key roles as primary Book of Mormon narrators, Mormon and Nephi obviously have the top two positions. Some may not have realized, however, that Alma’s voice is heard more than that of Nephi’s brother Jacob or Mormon’s son Moroni. Certain individuals speak more (or less) than might be expected. For example, because of Helaman’s[23] lengthy epistle in Alma 56–58, we hear his voice more than Lehi’s, the prophet who taught in Jerusalem and traveled to the promised land.

Once we identified the different voices in the Book of Mormon, we worked with the developers of the software program WordCruncher[24] to develop a database we called “Voices of the Book of Mormon.”[25] This database can be used to determine who spoke a particular word or phrase in the Book of Mormon. Traditional electronic database searches show where a specific word appears in the Book of Mormon. For example, using a traditional database to search for occurrences of the word Gentiles provides the results listed in table 1.2.

Table 1.2. Occurrences of the word Gentiles organized by book.

While this is interesting information, it is not immediately clear which individuals most frequently talk about Gentiles. Thus, adatabase that can identify not only where passages appear but who says them can be a useful tool in analyzing the text of the Book of Mormon. The Voices of the Book of Mormon Database makes this explicit, as demonstrated in table 1.3.

Table 1.3. Occurrences of the word Gentiles attributed to major speakers.[26]

While table 1.2 indicates that Gentiles is used fifty-six times in 1 Nephi and thirty-five times in 3 Nephi, it may be more interesting to discover that Jesus Christ is represented as using the word thirty-eight times, while the primary author of the Book of Mormon, Mormon, uses it only sixteen times. When one accounts for the total number of words spoken, Jesus Christ proportionally uses the word Gentiles nearly twice as often as any other major speaker.[27]

The idea of “proportionally using” a word will be used throughout this book. This is an important concept because if words in the Book of Mormon were randomly distributed, we would expect Jesus, who speaks 5 percent of the text, to account for 5 percent of the usage of a specific word. When we see that he accounts for 26 percent of Gentiles, or 30 percent of baptize (see chapter 5), it suggests an unusual speech pattern that bears further investigation. In this book I will often use the measurement of the number of times a word appears per one thousand words an individual speaks. This provides a proportional measurement that accounts for the different number of words spoken by the various individuals in the Book of Mormon.

The findings we have discussed thus far depend on the accuracy with which my colleagues and I identified the voices in the Book of Mormon. Because this is such a crucial point, I next briefly discuss the methodology we used when assigning voices to passages in situations when the speaker wasn’t completely clear.

Difficult Choices in Assigning the Voice

As I previously mentioned, for much of the text, identifying the speakers in the Book of Mormon is straightforward. Some areas, however, were quite difficult. These included labeling the voices of Deity, discerning between real and hypothetical quotations, dealing with potential allusions, and handling statements that may not have been said.

The Lord, the Father, and Jesus Christ

One challenge we faced was how to attribute the various titles given to God when he speaks. For example, “the Lord” speaks in 1 Nephi 17:53, “the Lord God almighty” speaks in 2 Nephi 28:15, and “the Lord of Hosts” speaks in Jacob 2:29. Five quotations (all by Jacob) are attributed to “God.”[28] In some cases these terms appear to be used interchangeably. For example, in 2 Nephi 28:32 we read, “Wo be unto the Gentiles, saith the Lord God of Hosts! For notwithstanding I shall lengthen out mine arm unto them from day to day, they will deny me; nevertheless, I will be merciful unto them, saith the Lord God, if they will repent and come unto me; for mine arm is lengthened out all the day long, saith the Lord God of Hosts.” Although quotations in this verse are attributed to “the Lord God” and “the Lord God of Hosts,” it seems most probable that these quotes refer to the same being. Thus, we grouped all nonspecific quotations by Deity as being attributable to the Lord.

The titles for Deity described above stand in contrast to the very specific designations of the Father and Jesus Christ. At times the Father or Jesus is explicitly quoted as speaking. For example, in 2 Nephi 31:10–13 Nephi writes:

Nephi

Can we follow Jesus save we shall be willing to keep the commandments of the Father? And the Father said:

The Father

Repent ye, repent ye, and be baptized in the name of my Beloved Son.

Nephi

And also, the voice of the Son came unto me, saying:

The Son (Jesus Christ)

He that is baptized in my name, to him will the Father give the Holy Ghost, like unto me; wherefore, follow me, and do the things which ye have seen me do.

Nephi

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, I know that if ye shall follow the Son . . .

In this passage, Nephi clearly delineates the voice of the Father and the voice of Jesus Christ. Several other passages give similar explicit identifications of either the Father or Jesus Christ as the speaker. While good arguments could be made for combining the voices of Jesus Christ, the Father, and the Lord into one voice, my colleagues and I determined that if a statement was specifically attributed to the Father or Jesus Christ, or if context made it very clear that they were speaking (for example, 3 Nephi 11:7), we categorized that statement as coming from them. Generic references to Deity (for example, “Lord” or “God”) were assigned to the Lord.

When we analyzed the text based on these conventions, we found that the voice of Jesus Christ has distinguishing characteristics, indicating there are real textual differences in words explicitly attributed to Jesus Christ. Many of the insights we can gain from this identification are described in chapter 5.

Hypothetical statements

In some instances, people in the Book of Mormon appear to make statements attributed to the hypothetical phrases of others. For example, Samuel the Lamanite prophesies of a curse that will come upon the wicked, stating, “Yea, in that day, ye shall say: O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches” (Helaman 13:33). To whom should the italicized words be attributed?

In instances like this one, we determined that while it is certainly possible that future individuals would in fact speak these exact words, it was equally likely that the prophet was speaking hypothetically, as in “These are the kinds of words that will be spoken in a future day.” Thus in these situations we attributed the words being spoken to the original speaker (in this case Samuel), not a future hypothetical speaker.[29]

Potential allusions

At times speakers in the Book of Mormon appear to allude to what others had previously said. For example, Alma, when speaking to Corianton, says, “And behold, again it hath been spoken, that there is a first resurrection, a resurrection of all those who have been, or who are, or who shall be, down to the resurrection of Christ from the dead” (Alma 40:16). In this case, Alma acknowledges that he is drawing on a previous source, although he does not identify who this person is. Because of the difficulty in correctly attributing allusions, we did so only in cases when the speaker explicitly cited another individual as the source of the statement. Thus, in this case, we counted the words as coming from Alma, even though they could be reasonably attributed to Abinadi.[30]

Statements that may not have actually been said

Although we chose to take every statement ascribed to an individual as actually having been stated by that person, this was problematic in some cases. For example, it sometimes appears unlikely that the source authors would have had access to the actual conversation that took place. One instance of this is when Mormon reports on the five who run to the judgment seat to verify Nephi’s prophecy of the death of the chief judge. We read that

when Nephi had spoken these words, certain men who were among them ran to the judgment-seat; yea, even there were five who went, and they said among themselves, as they went: [“]Behold, now we will know of a surety whether this man be a prophet and God hath commanded him to prophesy such marvelous things unto us. Behold, we do not believe that he hath; yea, we do not believe that he is a prophet; nevertheless, if this thing which he has said concerning the chief judge be true, that he be dead, then will we believe that the other words which he has spoken are true.[”] (Helaman 9:1–2)

Book of Mormon scholar Brant Gardner points out,

The fact that five messengers went to investigate was no doubt part of Nephi’s record, but it seems unlikely that Nephi would also have recorded the conversation, since it occurred “among themselves, as they went.” Even if they reconstructed this conversation later, possibly in reporting it to Nephi, it was not a word-for-word report. While oral cultures demonstrate a proficient memory for certain types of practiced texts, that does not translate into remembering conversations that they had not expected to need to know.[31]

Another example of this kind of difficulty concerns Alma and Amulek’s speech to the people in Ammonihah. Did someone acting in the function of “court reporter” transcribe the conversations that took place, or did Alma write a retrospective account? If Alma recorded what transpired at Ammonihah six months after it occurred, how literally should we take the words he attributes to himself, Amulek, Zeezrom, or Antionah?

Because there is no way to arrive at conclusive answers to these questions, we retained our convention of assigning voices to the person attributed in the text. Thus, the identification of 150 voices does not necessarily indicate a belief that the final editor of the ancient text (usually Mormon) was always quoting the original speakers’ words verbatim. Nevertheless, for many of the major writers of the Book of Mormon, we have enough of their words to make the case that we can hear their distinctive voices.

Therefore, What?

The Book of Mormon is a rich text that bears close exploration. Hugh Nibley observed, “The Book of Mormon is tough. It thrives on investigation. You may kick it around like a football, as many have done; and I promise you it will wear you out long before you ever make a dent in it.”[32] Examining the Book of Mormon by the person who is speaking provides new ways to investigate the fulness of what the Book of Mormon offers.

In this chapter, we have seen an overview of the diverse speakers in the Book of Mormon. Although there are some limitations, most of the time we can clearly identify individual speakers. Carefully analyzing individual Book of Mormon voices has helped me better understand the unique viewpoints, speaking patterns, and personalities of those who speak in the Book Mormon. This has led to spiritual insights that I would have otherwise missed, bringing a greater appreciation for this sacred text.

In addition, annotating the text of the Book of Mormon with names of the individuals who speak makes it easier to see the text’s intricacy. This complexity strongly suggests that the Book of Mormon is a multiauthored work and that Joseph Smith did not write the Book of Mormon. While not required for deep spiritual conviction, this type of intellectual evidence can strengthen our faith. As Austin Farrar wrote, “Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.”[33]

Before his call to the Quorum of the Twelve, David A. Bednar was a university professor. While working as a professor, he and a colleague wrote a textbook together. On one occasion he shared how writing this book deepened his understanding of the Book of Mormon:

One of the books I authored with a colleague... [is] 650 pages long... contains seventeen chapters, and... took us two years to write. The colleague with whom I wrote this book also has a Ph.D., which means that we... [have] more than 16 years of formal higher education between the two of us. It is a remarkable experience to receive a box of these brand-new books from the publisher... I opened up the box and thumbed through one of the books. As I did so, I looked out the window of my office and asked myself the question, "Why did you write this book?" When you really think about it, investing so much time and effort into a project that quickly becomes obsolete is rather foolish. As I... was pondering [that question], the thought came to me, "Because now you know by experience that Joseph Smith could not have written the Book of Mormon..."

With eight years of university training, with two years of very dedicated work, with an editorial staff, with personal computers, with spell checkers and thesauruses on-line, with the Internet and the other resources that are so readily available, when I picked up the book that I had written and opened it up, I still found mistakes. And within a matter of twelve months, this upon which I had worked so hard and so long was obsolete and had to be revised...

...Intellectually I know the Book of Mormon is true; and I know it through personal experience as an author. and that type of knowledge is nice. But what is most important is the witness of the Spirit. And I know by the witness of the Spirit, I know intellectually, and I know as an author and by personal experience that Joseph Smith could not and did not write the Book of Mormon.[34]

My hope is that this chapter has strengthened your interest in and testimony of the Book of Mormon, the good people that grace its pages, and the validity of this book of scripture. I also hope the following chapters will offer you additional understanding—not only in seeing the Book of Mormon’s complexity but also in identifying life-changing doctrines taught by specific individuals with unique voices. This will be seen in the following chapters, beginning with analysis of Jacob’s distinctive voice.[35]

Notes

[1] “A word cloud is a collection, or cluster, of words depicted in different sizes. The bigger and bolder the word appears, the more often it’s mentioned within a given text.” “Word Clouds and the Value of Simple Visualizations,” Boost Labs, . In creating these word clouds, I eliminated commonly used words (such as the, it, or, and,etc.) so that differences in more significant words could be more easily visualized.

[2] See “The Unabomber,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber.

[3] Roger R. Keller, Book of Mormon Authors: Their Words and Messages (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1996), xii. See also Wayne A. Larsen and Alvin C. Rencher, “Who Wrote the Book of Mormon? An Analysis of Wordprints,” in Book of Mormon Authorship: New Light on Ancient Origins, ed. Noel B. Reynolds, Religious Studies Monograph Series 7 (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1982), 157–88; and John L. Hilton, “On Verifying Book of Mormon Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship,” BYU Studies Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1990): 89–108.

[4] Hilton, “On Verifying Wordprint Studies,” 101.

[5] See David I. Holmes, “A Stylometric Analysis of Mormon Scripture and Related Texts,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society) 155, no. 1 (1992): 91–120; and Matthew L. Jockers, Daniela M. Witten, and Craig S. Criddle, “Reassessing Authorship of the Book of Mormon Using Delta and Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23, no. 4 (2008): 465–91. Multiple weaknesses in the Holmes study were identified by John B. Archer, John L. Hilton, and G. Bruce Schaalje, “Comparative Power of Three Author-Attribution Techniques for Differentiating Authors,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 6, no. 1 (1997): 47–63. In response to the Jockers et al. article, researchers identified several flaws with its methodology. See Bruce G. Schaalje et al., “Extended Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification: A New Method for Open-Set Authorship Attribution of Texts of Varying Sizes,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 26, no. 1 (2011): 71–88.

[6] Matthew Roper, Paul J. Fields, and G. Bruce Schaalje, “Stylometric Analyses of the Book of Mormon: A Short History,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 43.

[7] See, for example, Jan Rybicki, “The Great Mystery of the (Almost) Invisible Translator: Stylometry in Translation,” in Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies, ed. Michael P. Oakes and Meng Ji (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 231–48; and Richard S. Forsyth and Phoenix W. Y. Lam, “Found in Translation: To What Extent Is Authorial Discriminability Preserved by Translators?,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 29, no. 2 (2014): 199–217.

[8] See Dorota M. Dutsch, Feminine Discourse in Roman Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 51.

[9] These authors were Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), and James Fenimore Cooper. This research, which still has not been formally published, was reported at “Book of Mormon Evidence: Voice Diversity,” updated November 22, 2021, Evidence Central, Charis Legacy Foundation, https://evidencecentral.org/recency/evidence/voice-diversity.

[10] “Book of Mormon Evidence: Voice Diversity.”

[11] Among many other excellent books and articles illustrating the textual complexity of the Book of Mormon, the idea that Hebrew elements remained a key part of the book even through translation can be found in Donald W. Parry, Preserved in Translation: Hebrew and Other Ancient Literary Forms in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2020).

[12] Keller, Book of Mormon Authors, 4.

[13] Keller, Book of Mormon Authors, 8. Keller also notes two exceptions to this general pattern—namely, Nephi₂ and Mormon in his sermonic materials.

[14] Keller, Book of Mormon Authors, xiii.

[15] Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 91. Hardy also notes that Moroni’s writing style is distinctive from both Nephi₁’s and Mormon’s. Because Hardy primarily focused on Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni in his book, in the present volume I focus on the distinctive characteristics of other major Book of Mormon speakers.

[16] John W. Welch, “Ten Testimonies of Jesus Christ from the Book of Mormon,” in A Book of Mormon Treasury: Gospel Insights from General Authorities and Religious Educators (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2003), 316; emphasis added.

[17] We compared our work with Robert Smith’s critical text, which was based on John L. Hilton and Kenneth D. Jenkins, “A Full Listing of Book of Mormon References by Author and Literary Form,” FARMS Preliminary Report (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1983). However, they identified only major speakers and called minor speakers “Misc.” My colleagues and I identified (where possible) every speaker. In addition, we examined Alvin C. Rencher’s speaker divisions, which were the basis of Larsen and Rencher, “An Analysis of Wordprints,” 157–88. We also consulted the use of quotation marks in Grant Hardy’s The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) to identify how he chose where to begin or end quotes. For Isaiah passages we consulted John D. W. Watts, Isaiah 1–33, Word Biblical Commentary 24 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1985); and Watts, Isaiah 34–66, Word Biblical Commentary 25 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987). Separately, I want to highlight two individuals who had been making efforts to split apart the text like my colleagues and I were doing. We did not compare our work to theirs, as theirs was unpublished at the time. However, in 2016 they published their work as A New Approach to Studying the Book of Mormon. Those interested in a printed copy of the Book of Mormon separated by voices could consult this study edition of the Book of Mormon. See Lynn A. Rosenvall and David L. Rosenvall, A New Approach to Studying the Book of Mormon (Olive Leaf Foundation, 2016).

[18] Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 119.

[19] Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 156.

[20] Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, book 1, chap. 1, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm. I thank Ben Spackman for pointing this out to me.

[21] Amnor and Zeram are quoted as speaking together, along with Manti and Limher, in Alma 2:24–25.

[22] Additional speakers who account for at least 1,000 words include the lord (master) of the vineyard (2,428 words, 0.9% of the text); Ammon, the son of Mosiah (2,280 words, 0.85% of the text); Nephi, the son of Nephi (2,213 words, 0.8% of the text); an angel speaking to Nephi (1,973 words, 0.7% of the text); Zeniff (1,815 words, 0.7% of the text); the Father (1,501 words, 0.6% of the text); Limhi (1,383 words, 0.5% of the text); and King Mosiah₂ (1,178 words, 0.4% of the text). All other speakers account for fewer than 1,000 words.

[23] Three individuals named Helaman appear in the Book of Mormon. The first is a brother of Mosiah (see Mosiah 1:2); he does not speak in the Book of Mormon. The second is the son of Alma, and the third is Helaman, the son of Helaman, who speaks in Helaman 5:6–12. The only Helaman who speaks with sufficient frequency to examine his words is Helaman, the son of Alma. For simplicity in the present volume, I will refer to him simply as Helaman.

[24] This software is available at http://wordcruncher.com.

[25] More details on this database, including instructions for downloading and using it, can be found at https://johnhiltoniii.com/voices-in-the-book-of-mormon/.

[26] Other speakers who use Gentiles include the angel speaking to Nephi (eighteen times), the Father (seven times), and Nephi’s brethren (one time).

[27] See John Hilton III et al., “Gentiles in the Book of Mormon,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 33 (2019): 267–88.

[28] See 2 Nephi 10:8–19.

[29] For additional examples, see Alma 5:16 and 3 Nephi 14:22.

[30] It appears that Alma is using Abinadi’s words (see Mosiah 15:21). This is discussed further in chapter 9.

[31] Brant Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, vol. 5, Helaman through 3 Nephi (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), 137. It could be argued that this line of reasoning diminishes the value of this study since many of what I term as “voices” in the Book of Mormon could have been invented dialogue. However, the insights described throughout this book lead me to believe there is significant merit in distinguishing the various speakers in the text, particularly those individuals whose words account for 1 percent or more of the Book of Mormon text.

[32] “A Twilight World,” in The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol. 5, Lehi in the Desert / The World of the Jaredites / There Were Jaredites (Provo, UT: FARMS; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988), 149.

[33] Austin Farrar, “Grete Clerk,” in Light on C. S. Lewis, comp. Jocelyn Gibb (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1965), 26; cited in Neal A. Maxwell, “Discipleship and Scholarship,” BYU Studies Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1992): 5.

[34] David A. Bednar, "Come Unto Christ," BYU—Idaho devotional, January 29, 2000,

[35] As noted previously, Grant Hardy has extensively analyzed Nephi’s voice, so I begin with Jacob. See Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, 12–86.