Under
the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, 2003, Excerpts
One night in the
autumn of 1823, when Joseph was seventeen, ethereal light filled his bedroom,
followed by the appearance of an angel, who introduced himself as Moroni and
explained that he had been sent by God. He had come to tell Joseph of a sacred
text inscribed on solid gold plates that had been buried fourteen hundred years
earlier under a rock on a nearby hillside. Moroni then conjured a vision in
Joseph’s mind, showing the exact place the plates were hidden. The angel
cautioned the boy, however, that he shouldn’t show the plates to anyone, or try
to enrich himself from them, or even to attempt to retrieve them yet. By gazing
into his most reliable peep stone, Joseph further learned that in order for him
to be given the plates, God required that he marry a girl named Emma Hale and
bring her along on his next visit to the hill, in September 1827.
High on the steep
west slope of the hill, Joseph dug beneath the rock in the dark of night, while
Emma stood nearby with her back turned to him. He soon unearthed the stone box
that he had been prevented from removing four years earlier. The box contained
a sacred text, “written on golden plates, giving an account of the former
inhabitants of this continent,” which had been hidden on the hill for fourteen
hundred years. They were filled with engravings in Egyptian characters and
bound together in a volume. The stack of metal pages stood about six inches
high. Joseph gathered up the plates and headed home with them. Later, nineteen
witnesses would testify that they had actually seen the gold book.
Although the text was
written in an exotic, long-dead language described as “reformed Egyptian,”
Moroni had also given Joseph a set of divinely endowed spectacles that would
allow the person wearing them to comprehend the strange hieroglyphics. By means
of these magic glasses, Joseph began deciphering the document, dictating his
translation to a neighbor named Martin Harris, who acted as his scribe. After
two months of painstaking work they completed the first 116 page translation. Moroni
retrieved the golden plates and magic spectacles, and Joseph reluctantly
allowed Harris to borrow the manuscript to show his skeptical, disapproving
wife. Disaster then struck: Harris somehow mislaid all 116 pages. The
prevailing view is that his wife was so furious that Harris had gotten involved
in such nonsense that she stole the pages and destroyed them.
In September 1828,
however, after much praying and contrition on Joseph’s part, Moroni returned
the plates, and the translation resumed, initially with Emma Smith serving as
scribe. But the angel hadn’t returned the spectacles along with the plates this
time around, so to decipher the Egyptian characters Joseph relied instead on
his favorite peep stone: a chocolate-colored, egg-shaped rock.
Day after day, Joseph
would place the magic rock in an upturned hat, bury his face in it with the
stack of gold plates sitting nearby, and dictate the lines of scripture that
appeared to him out of the blackness. He worked at a feverish pace during this
second phase of the translation, averaging some thirty-five hundred words a
day, and by the end of June 1829 the job was finished.
Nine months after the
translation was completed, the 588-page book finally rolled off the presses and
went on sale in the printer’s brick storefront in downtown Palmyra. Little more
than a week after that – on April 6, 1830 – Joseph formally incorporated the
religion that we know today as the Church of Latter-day Saints. The religion’s
foundation – its sacred touchstone and guiding scripture – was the translation
of the gold plates, which bore the title The Book of Mormon.
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