Omni 1

(February 19, 2014)
Certain things just ring true to me as I read the Book of Mormon.  I understand that, lately, I have been focusing on those evidences in my scripture reading, but I find them meaningful nonetheless in their capacity to encourage me to accept the literal Restoration and devote my life to Christ as I should.

In this chapter, we see so many different authors, and it does not seem at all like the text before or the text after.  It is simply a complete change of pace from the rest of the Book of Mormon.  But what most struck me was the language that described the Tower of Babel – in particular, the fact that it was never called the Tower of Babel.  Not here, and not in Ether.  Why would that be the case?  After all, it was clearly called the Tower of Babel in the Bible.  But, of course, that was the name given to it by the authors of the scriptures many centuries later – to the people of the Tower of Babel, it would more likely be called something like the ‘Tower of Nimrod,’ or something similar.  To those who did not follow Nimrod, it would just be the tower at the time the Lord confounded the languages.

Babel would have made perfect sense to have included in the record here if the Book of Mormon had been authored rather than translated.  That it was not included, though, makes just one more example of the reality of the translation.