[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to present the second installment from a book entitled Labor Diligently to Write: The Ancient Making of a Modern Scripture. It is being presented in serialized form as an aid to help readers prepare for the 2020 Come Follow Me course of study. This is a new approach for Interpreter, and we hope you find it helpful.]

 

 
Chapter 4: Mormon Making Chapters
Modern readers are so accustomed to books with chapters that we do not find it strange to see chapters in the Book of Mormon. In many ancient writings, the physical limitations of the writing medium limited the text, and there was no need for chapters. It is possible that in the Old World, chapters may have evolved only after a writing medium that could contain more text than a scroll became available. One researcher has suggested that between 3,000 to 5,000 words would fit on a scroll and that number of words also describes the size of a typical chapter.78 As for dating the origin of chapters, we begin to see Egyptian documents with chapters in the second millennium bc.79
[Page 48]The evidence we have from the dictation of the Book of Mormon underscores that chapters were original to the plates — both for the small and large plates. Royal Skousen’s examination of the original manuscript suggests that, just as with breaks between books, there was something Joseph saw as he translated that caused him to indicate to his scribe that there would be a break, later marked as a chapter.80
Mormon learned the concept of creating chapters either from his possible scribal education or at least from seeing chapters on the large plates.81 From a writer’s viewpoint, the problem with chapters is when they should end. Mormon created a large enough number of chapters that we can examine them to deduce the logic he used to decide when to end a chapter and begin another.
As I noted in the section on “Mormon’s Alternative Sources,” our modern copies of the Book of Mormon do not always reflect the chapters that Mormon created. In 1879, Orson Pratt created a new edition of the Book of Mormon that has become the foundation for all subsequent Latter-day ...