“But the following caps the climax of absurdities. Moroni has rent his
coat, and taken `a piece thereof, and wrote upon it,’ and `fastened it upon the
end of a pole thereof, and then after earnest an prayer: `He went forth among
the people, waving the rent of his garment in the air, that all might see the
writing which he had wrote upon the rent’ . . . . It is not strange that a man
of meagre literary attainments as Joseph Smith . . . should be guilty of a
great many blunders in composition, should make use of inelegant, and even
vulgar expressions, should often choose the wrong word to express his thought.”
M.
T. Lamb, The Golden Bible (1887), 57.
The words of this passage in
Alma 46:19 have been slightly amended in editions subsequent to 1830 to read
“waving the rent part of his garment” and “writing which he had written upon
the rent part.” John Tvedtnes sheds additional light on this phrase as it
appeared in the 1830 edition.
During the
years 1968-71, I taught Hebrew at the University of Utah. My practice was to
ask new students to respond to a questionnaire, giving some idea of their
interests and linguistic background. One student wrote that she wanted to study
Hebrew in order to prove the Book of Mormon was a fraud. She approached me
after class to explain.
When I inquired
why she felt the Book of Mormon was fraudulent, she stated that it was full of
errors. I asked for an example. She drew my attention to Alma 46:19, where we
read, "When Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people,
waving the rent part of his garment in the air." She noted that in the
1830 edition (p. 351), this read simply "waving the rent of his
garment." In English, the rent is the hole in the garment, not the piece
torn out of the garment. Therefore, Moroni could not have waved it. This was an
error, she contended, and adding the word part later was mere deception.
This was my
first introduction to variations in different editions of the Book of Mormon.
Without a Hebrew background, I might have been bothered by it. But the
explanation was clear when I considered how Mormon would have written that
sentence. Hebrew does not have to add the word part to a verbal substantive
like rent as English requires. Thus, broken in Hebrew can refer to a broken
thing or a broken part, while new can refer to a new thing. In the verse the
student cited, rent would mean rent thing or rent part. Thus, the
"error" she saw as evidence of fraud was really a Hebraism that was
evidence for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.
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