How can we know that during these times we are not abandoned or forsaken, but that Heavenly Father is there?
Even setting aside its doctrinal richness and its vital importance as a second witness for the Savior Jesus Christ, the Book of Mormon is a strikingly complex document — far more so, probably, than most of its readers realize.
It features hundreds of individual characters, many of them bearing quite uncommon names, who belong to a multitude of groups, subgroups and small factions. It describes three migrations from the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western Hemisphere. It employs at least three distinct dating systems.
Yet, amazingly — and particularly so for a book that was dictated within a remarkably short time, at high speed (roughly nine to 11 pages of the English printed edition per day) — it's internally consistent. It doesn't contradict itself.
It both presupposes and reflects a complicated geographical backdrop to its stories, involving scores of place names and topographical indicators. Yet places maintain their proper relationships to each other even when they're mentioned only a few times over hundreds of pages.
Read the rest at the Deseret News.
It features hundreds of individual characters, many of them bearing quite uncommon names, who belong to a multitude of groups, subgroups and small factions. It describes three migrations from the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western Hemisphere. It employs at least three distinct dating systems.
Yet, amazingly — and particularly so for a book that was dictated within a remarkably short time, at high speed (roughly nine to 11 pages of the English printed edition per day) — it's internally consistent. It doesn't contradict itself.
It both presupposes and reflects a complicated geographical backdrop to its stories, involving scores of place names and topographical indicators. Yet places maintain their proper relationships to each other even when they're mentioned only a few times over hundreds of pages.
Read the rest at the Deseret News.
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