It's worth pointing out, however, that handling exposition the way we science fiction writers do it is not correct, either, in documents that actually arise from the alien culture. It's easier and smoother to read, but it still points up the strangeness. Heinlein wrote "the door dilated" specifically because he knew his readers would not expect it to dilate, and would recognize it as an item of future techology. But someone in that culture, writing about someone leaving a room, would rarely bother to mention the door at all. "He left" would do the job nicely, because there would be nothing unusual about the door to make it worth pointing it out. And if the writer claimed to be writing a shortened or abridged story, he would hardly waste his time on unnecessary explanations of things that didn't seem unusual in any way. So even the sophisticated method of science fiction exposition is not appropriate in the Book of Mormon, and in fact is not used.

The remarkable thing in the Book of Mormon is that only once in the whole book does the author stops cold to explain something. Do you remember where that is? It has to do with the monetary system. In the middle of the account of Zeezrom, the lawyer, the action suddenly stops cold. Why? Because the value of money is surely something that would have changed across the 300 or 400 years between Zeezrom and Mormon. That's a cultural difference Mormon would recognize. And, predictably, like any naive writer, he stops the action in order to explain the unfamiliar facts. But notice how he does it. There is no absolute reference. Apparently one of those words or values in his list still meant something in the fourth century A.D. He didn't think to tell us exactly what you could buy with a senon, and certainly not in any terms that would mean anything to an 1820s reader, because Mormon must have considered the value of some element in the monetary system to be obvious. So even in the one place where we do get an "expository lump," it's handled exactly as a writer from the alien culture would have handled it, and utterly without reference to the 1820s.

Structure. The organization of the books in the Book of Mormon is peculiar in the extreme. Each of the books that Mormon wrote—Mosiah, Alma, Helaman—spends much of its time talking about someone other than the person the book was named for. The Book of Mosiah starts with King Benjamin and then proceeds to tell us mostly about the prophet Alma. Then the Book of Alma turns out not to be about Alma the elder, but rather about Alma the younger—and even at that, the latter half of the book focuses on his son Helaman. But the Book of Helaman is not about Helaman, the son of Alma. Rather it starts out with Heleman's son, Helaman Junior. And partway through the Book of Helaman, we find that it is now about Helaman's son Nephi. But when we come to the Book of Third Nephi, it is not about that Nephi at all. Rather it is about his son Nephi.

What an odd pattern, don't you think? A book named for one man is as much about his son or successor. And when a book seems to be named for that son or successor, it turns out actually to be named for the successor's successor, who happens to have the same name. This pattern holds true even with the book named for Mormon himself—which was finished by his son, Moroni, who tells us later that he never expected to write a book that had his own name on it. He would have been content to have written the last part of the book named for his father.

I have no idea what this means. I simply point it out because it makes no sense in terms of Joseph Smith's culture, and it is hard to fathom why an American in the 1820s, whose only scriptural model was the Old and New Testaments, would structure his own work of scripture this way. The Book of Ruth is about Ruth. The Book of Isaiah includes the writings of Isaiah, and not a single story about Jonah or Ezekiel. The gospels are named for their authors, but Mark doesn't pick up midway through the book of Matthew. Why would Joseph Smith, if he was trying to create a hoax that would be accepted as scripture by 1820s Americans, not simply pick one of the patterns in the Bible and follow it? Why would he come up with such a bizzarre structure?

And then why did he throw in the Jaredites? I'm not even going to bother to explore the enormous complexity of Moroni's abridgement of Ether's abridgement of the Jaredite records. Hugh Nibley has a book on it that's better than anything that I could say. Suffice it to say that if you read The World of the Jaredites, you'll realize that the book of Ether is rich in a culture that is strikingly different from the rest of the Book of Mormon—and from anything else that Joseph Smith would have any inkling of.

* * *

A Life-Changing Book

If you attempted to produce something like the Book of Mormon today, using the best science fiction writers, fully aware of all that we know about the culture of Meso-America, fully aware of everything that we know about how you create a fake document, it would still be obvious, if not immediately, then within 15 or 20 years. The cultural assumptions behind the book would reveal themselves, showing clearly exactly when the book was really written. But the Book of Mormon has been around a lot longer than that, and believe me, folks, I really do understand a lot about how science fiction is made and I can't find anywhere that it's done wrong. Search all you like through that book. I have, and I can't find a flaw. Yet we should expect to find a consistent pattern of getting it wrong. Not just one example, but thousands of examples within a book that long, but—they are not there.

Now, does this mean that I've proved the Book of Mormon true? Obviously not. You can always still suppose that perhaps Joseph Smith or whoever wrote the Book of Mormon was the greatest and luckiest creator of phony documents from made-up alien cultures ever in history. The Book of Mormon only matters because it's a life-changing book.

The truth, the important truth of the Book of Mormon is only understood with the Spirit through faith. If you don't believe in the book, it's not going to change your life. And I mean believe in it in a way far different from believing it's a genuine artifact. You have to believe in it also as something meant for you as a guide to your life. So, I have very little interest in attempting to prove the book. I haven't proven it here. The only real proof is when you prove it with your life, living the gospel it teaches and participating in the Church that was established with that book as the mortar holding it all together.

But I do think it is important for us to look at this book, not just as wisdom literature, but also as a genuine artifact from another time. Those of us who already believe it must study this book as the product of a culture, as the product of the minds and hearts of the individual writers. When we do that, we will much better understand what it's for and what it means.

That's part of what I'm trying to do in my Homecoming books, examine the Book of Mormon, not as a scholar because I'm not one, but as somebody whose business is making assumptions about the hearts and minds of individual human beings, and telling stories about them that try to be as honest as possible. There are thousands of other ways to approach this book, of obtaining important, useful information from it, and I hope we'll use those ways, because if we treat it, as many Mormons do, as nothing more than a source of proof texts, we are missing the point and cheating ourselves of most of the value of this great work of scripture.

Joseph Smith didn't write the Book of Mormon, though he did translate it, so that his voice is present when we read, including the flaws in his language and understanding. Those who wrote the original were also fallible human beings who will reveal their culture and their assumptions just as surely as the writers of I Love Lucy did. But unlike the writers of that TV show, the prophets wrote and translated under the direction of the Lord, out of love for us. It's well worth finding out who these men were, the culture from which they wrote, how it's different from ours, and how it's also very much the same.

Adapted from a speech given at the BYU Symposium on Life, the Universe, and Everything. February 1993. Copyright © 1993 Orson Scott Card.