This short chapter consists entirely of Moroni’s address to Joseph Smith. He had similarly written to Joseph in Mormon 8:16 and again writes to him here as though they were having a face-to-face conversation.
The phrase “according to my memory” is arresting, for it opens the possibility that Moroni wrote the book of Ether from memory rather than from a text. However, the basic consistency of the king-list with the narrative sequence suggests that Moroni could not have relied completely on his memory.
Moroni’s mention of “the things which I have sealed up” is Yahweh’s command to write but seal Jared’s vision of the future (Ether 4:5). Moroni declares that he has done so and it is apparently on the plates Joseph will have; nevertheless, Moroni forbids Joseph to “touch” or “translate” them—evidently meaning that he was also not to try to read them. “Unsealing” required the translators, which Joseph had, and presumably would have employed without these instructions.
The Sealed Portion of the Plates: The sealed portion is not consistently identified in the internal evidence from the text or the external descriptions. The text suggests that the entire Book of Mormon was “sealed.” Moroni wrote on the Title Page that the work is “Written and sealed up, and hid up unto the Lord.” This description obviously applies to the entire text. Within it, a specific section of Ether remains sealed. Moroni would not need to tell Joseph not to translate it if the seal were physical. But obviously, Joseph can see it and presumably could translate it. Otherwise, Moroni would not have given him this warning.
Both Isaiah 29:11–12 and 2 Nephi 27:6–22 describe the Book of Mormon as sealed. However, fulfilling that prophecy requires that the unlearned man be able to read and deliver that sealed book (2 Ne. 27:30); in other words, after unsealing, it is no longer hidden in the earth and no longer in an unknown language. Retrieval and translation break that seal.
Inside the now “unsealed” Book of Mormon, however, is a small sealed section containing the brother of Jared’s revelation vision. It must remain sealed—perhaps so that Lord can consistently refer to the entire book as sealed even when most of it has been “unsealed” by translation. This explanation may provide a reasonable interpretation for Moroni’s instructions: “I have told you the things which I have sealed up; therefore touch them not in order that ye may translate” (Ether 5:1), and for Nephi’s warning: “Touch not the things which are sealed, for I will bring them forth in mine own due time” (2 Ne. 27:21).
In contrast are descriptions of the plates’ physical form. Daniel H. Ludlow notes the varied descriptions:
Moroni wrote his account of the vision of the brother of Jared on the plates of Mormon, but he was commanded by the Lord to “seal up” this account (Ether 4:4–5). Joseph Smith was commanded not to translate this sealed portion. It is not absolutely clear what portion of the plates of Mormon was sealed. Joseph Smith simply said: “The volume was something near six inches in thickness, a part of which was sealed.” George Q. Cannon said that “about one-third” was sealed, whereas Orson Pratt maintained that the sealed portion comprised “about two-thirds” of the plates. Neither of these two brethren indicate where they obtained their information.
Certainly there is no question that a portion of the plates was sealed. Joseph Smith says so and the text itself requires it. The problem isn’t whether there was a sealed portion, but what that portion looked like to the witnesses. Robert J. Matthews proposes an intriguing solution to the problem of the physical description:
In the testimonies of the Three Witnesses and the Eight Witnesses there is no mention that any part was sealed.… The Prophet Joseph Smith, President Cannon, and Elder Pratt each said the volume was six inches in thickness. They mentioned also that a part was sealed. Brother Whitmer made no mention of the thickness of the volume, nor did he mention a sealed part, whereas Martin Harris gave the thickness of the volume to be four inches (considerably less than that given by the others) but did not mention any sealed portion. Thus, whenever a sealed portion was mentioned, the volume was consistently spoken of as being six inches. If the entire volume (sealed and unsealed) equaled six inches, and if one-third of it was sealed, then the unsealed part would equal the four inches spoken of by Martin Harris. This may account for the different descriptions. The fact that Brothers Harris and Whitmer were eyewitnesses and had handled the plates might suggest that they were describing only the unsealed portion that the Prophet had translated.
Is it possible that the unsealed portion was sometimes detached from the sealed portion during the time Joseph Smith was translating? Such a procedure would make for ease in handling, since the plates were relatively heavy and would be cumbersome. While working with the translation and moving the plates, it would be a convenience to handle only the part to be translated. Since neither Brother Harris nor Brother Whitmer mentioned anything about a sealed portion, it may be that they were describing only the plates that were used in the translation of the Book of Mormon and which did not include the sealed portion.
That the Three Witnesses may have viewed only the unsealed portion of the plates is suggested by a number of factors: first, by their individual expressions already quoted; second, from the report that an angel came and showed them the plates and “turned over the leaves one by one,” which would not be the case with the sealed plates; and third, from a voice that spoke to the witnesses at the time saying: “These plates have been revealed by the power of God, and they have been translated by the power of God. The translation of them which you have seen is correct, and I command you to bear record of what you now see and hear.”
Matthews has correctly described the uneasy interface between text and description. What he does not highlight is that most of those who appear to indicate a physically sealed portion are also men who did not see the plates. They received their information in some other way. However, rather than removing and replacing the sealed portion, I suggest that a simpler explanation is the passage of time and the telling of the story. Those who described the physically sealed portion received their information from the oral lore of the new community rather than visual confirmation.
As Matthews noted, those who saw the plates did not mention a sealed portion. Although Emma Smith did not see them, her 1879 description does not account for (though it does not explicitly preclude) a physically sealed portion: “The plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen tablecloth, which I had given him to fold them in. I once felt of the plates, as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one does sometimes thumb the edges of a book.”
Orson Pratt and George Q. Cannon (quoted above by Ludlow) clearly accept a physically sealed portion but neither one of them met Joseph Smith until after the Book of Mormon’s publication. Joseph Smith’s 1842 description of the plates in the Wentworth Letter does not clearly describe a physically sealed portion, but it does not absolutely preclude one either: “These records were engraven on plates which had the appearance of gold, each plate was six inches wide and eight inches long, and not quite so thick as common tin. They were filled with engravings, in Egyptian characters and bound together in a volume as the leaves of a book with three rings running through the whole. The volume was something near six inches in thickness, a part of which was sealed. The characters on the unsealed part were small, and beautifully engraved.”
According to the reporter interviewing David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses, in 1881: “The plates which Mr. Whitmer saw were in the shape of a tablet, fastened with three rings, about one-third of which appeared to be loose, in plates, the other solid, but with perceptible marks where the plates seemed to be sealed, and the guide that pointed it out to Smith very impressively reminded him that the loose plates alone were to be used, the sealed portion was not to be tampered with.”
David Whitmer’s statement indubitably describes a sealed portion. An 1878 interview is even more specific:
He [David Whitmer]—The Book of Mormon is true, as true as any record can be, I saw the angel, and I saw the sword of Laban, and the breastplate, and the Urim and Thummim, and the plates and the director, and the angel stood before us, and he turned the leaves one by one.
I [Dr. P. Wilhelm Poulson]—Did the angel turn all the leaves before you as you looked on it?
He—No, not all, only that part of the book which was not sealed, and what there was sealed appeared as solid to my view as wood.
I—How many of the plates were sealed?
He—About half of the book was sealed. Those leaves which were not sealed, about the half of the first part of the book, were numerous, and the angel turned them over before our eyes. There is yet to be given a translation about Jared’s people’s doings and of Nephi, and many other records and books, which all has to be done, when the time comes.
I suggest that these late dates (1881 and 1878) are significant. Whitmer was seventy-six at the second interview. One difficulty in using historical information in Mormon studies has been difference in perceptions that could very well result from memory lapses caused by the passage of time. In the case of the Book of Mormon, some persistent and multiply attested descriptions of the translation process are, nevertheless, known to be incorrect.
I am not suggesting deliberate deceit or an organized conspiracy. The early Saints were formed by both internal shared beliefs and by external pressures into a cohesive group. To a high degree, they not only considered themselves different from the non-group but also considered themselves to be very like other group members. They formed, in other words, a “folk group.” Folklorist Jan Brunvand defines this concept:
A folk group, some folklorists suggest, is any group that has some shared traditions—as large as a nation, as small as a nuclear family. Most groups conceived of as folk groups, however, have tended to be regional (Ozark residents), religious (Pennsylvania “Dutch,” or Mennonites), ethnic (Basque-Americans), or interconnected by national background, family, occupation, hobby, or the like.…
Members of small and geographically concentrated religious groups often share certain esoteric traditions of lore and behavior. A prime American example of such a group is the Mormons (or Latter-day Saints) of Utah.
While Brunvand singles out Mormons during the Utah period as a folk group, I argue that the same pressures created the same folk mentality in Kirtland, Missouri, and Nauvoo. As one consequence, data pertaining to earlier Church periods behaves according to rules of oral traditions more than those of written transmission. The Saints were certainly recordkeepers, but they were also storytellers within their community. The longer the period between experience and retelling, the more that retelling could be influenced by factors not directly related to the original experience. This is not to say that there is a disconnect between the retelling and reality. It is simply a recognition that the data contained in late reminiscences should be understood in the context of the folk group, not as independent written descriptions.
Folklorist F. C. Bartlett ran some experiments to determine how the passage of time altered lore within the same folk group and found: “As a general rule, visual imagery tends to become more active the longer the interval preceding reproduction, and, at least in the case of stories containing the report of a number of incidents, increased visualization provides conditions which favor transformation.” As Bartlett notes, visualization is particularly susceptible to and perhaps increases transformation over time. That, of course, is precisely David Whitmer’s experience as one of the Three Witnesses: a visual memory that he retells a number of times. LDS historian Kenneth W. Godfrey examined the various interviews with Martin Harris against the remembrances of other witnesses to the events of the restoration. He finds that Whitmer is “not always consistent in the way he remembered latter-day Saint beginnings.” While Whitmer was certainly involved in early events, his recollections were shaped by multiple forces. Godfrey describes one such set of influences:
He told a St. Louis Republican reporter that when Joseph Smith saw the plates, his first thought was how much they were worth, and the angel then hurled him down the Hill Cumorah. Whitmer further reported that it was “six months” before Joseph “obtained possession of the stone box that held the plates” (actually four years passed before Joseph secured the plates of gold).
Whitmer probably did not learn all these details on his visit to Palmyra in 1828. Joseph and Emma lived in Harmony, Pennsylvania, at the time Whitmer traveled to Palmyra, but what he remembered provides important details regarding talk in the Manchester area at the time he transacted business there. Oliver Cowdery wrote accounts of early events in Mormon history, published in the Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate in 1835, and Whitmer’s own accounts of these early events may well have been influenced by Cowdery’s writings.
Whitmer, although an early participant in the events of the restoration, was also a long-time participant in the lore community of the saints. Some of his recollections likely derived from the lore community rather than experience. Bartlett further notes:
In repeated reproduction, a subject’s own earlier versions gain an increasingly important influence as time elapses. Upon its first presentation a story or picture is considered from a certain point of view, or under the influence of a certain attitude. This attitude not only persists, but usually plays a greater part with the lapse of time. To this, no doubt, is due the fact that inventions and transformations, once introduced, show great tenacity, and tend to be formed into related series. In a similar manner, an invention once introduced may easily bring about changes in material which has, up to this point, been correctly reported.
The relevant point here is that an alteration in the speaker’s attitude can affect his resulting retelling. Once a new detail has been introduced into the tale it “not only persists, but usually plays a greater part with the lapse of time.” I suggest that this is the very mechanism by which one of the eleven witnesses could have completely missed the physically sealed portion of the plates in early recountings but be detailed and insistent about it in late repetitions.
I therefore see Bartlett’s descriptions of creating and transmitting lore within a folk group as important to the development of verbal testimony about important aspects of Mormon origins. The sealed portion of the plates begins with the text itself, which treats any text kept from human understanding as “sealed.” It may be sealed by being hidden but, more likely, is written in an unknown language. The seal is broken after the work is delivered to one with the “keys” (interpreters) who can read and make public the text. That others have and can read it is the breaking of the seal.
The next step in our line of transmission is from the text to Joseph Smith and Martin Harris. The Anthon incident was clearly formative, not only for Martin Harris but for the early community. Just as Martin Harris saw Anthon’s response as a confirmation of prophecy, so, too, did the folk group of first believers in the Book of Mormon. That story formed an important faith-foundation for them.
I argue that the sealed book as a fulfillment of prophecy led directly from the spiritual sealing of the brother of Jared’s vision to David Whitmer’s eventual description that the sealed portion looked “as solid as wood.” I suggest that the faith community found it easier to understand the sealed portion as a physical presence. That more tangible concept was never directly contradicted but was embellished until there were specific descriptions of the sealed portion’s size and characteristics. Modern artistic representations flow from and continue to contribute to this embellishment of the original meaning.
Bartlett describes this transformation of lore:
Both familiarization and rationalization are, in fact, results of a common tendency to change all presented material into such a form that it may be accepted without uneasiness, and without question. The influence of this tendency is exerted upon absolutely all material which is received into and preserved within a mental system. Sometimes the effect is that specific reasons are evolved to account for the form of given material; sometimes, even when such reasons are lacking, the form of the material is changed into something which can be readily accepted simply because it is familiar.
Rather than resort to a removable sealed portion that is sometimes missing and sometimes present, I suggest that the variations represent normal elaborations of a common story over time and within the same lore community. The logic underlying folk etymologies, in my opinion, also operated in this case, inserting a more comprehensible physical sealing in place of the very important but less understandable spiritual sealing of the text.