One late-19th century critic of the Book of Mormon levelled the following charge against Alma 46:19 in the Book of Mormon:
The simplicity of many portions of the Book of Mormon is very touching; witness the following:
“And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people waving the rent of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had wrote upon the rent!!!”*--[page 334.]
. . .
* That a “rent” can be visible—sometimes too visible—is an undoubted fact, but how a man could write upon a rent is not so easy of demonstration. Possible corroborative evidence of the practicability of this performance might have been given by the Irishman who gave as a recipe for making a cannon: “Take a round hole and pour melted iron around it.” (Thomas B.H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints [1873], 544, emphasis in original)
Stenhouse was not the only critic of the Book of Mormon to level this charge against the Book of Mormon. Catholic William Whalen wrote the following about this passage in 1967, almost a century after Stenhouse’s volume:
[T]he strangest malapropism appears in Alma 46:19. “And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent [part] of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had wrote [written] upon the rent [part] . . . “ The words in brackets have been added or altered in recent editions but the original edition seemed to give the impression that a “rent” is something on which a man can write! (William J. Whalen, The Latter-day Saints in the Modern World [rev ed.; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967], 48)
This is actually evidence of a Hebrew background to the Book of Mormon. Hebrew does not have to add the word part to a verbal substantive like rent as English requires. Thus, broken in Hebrew can refer to a broken thing or a broken part, while new can refer to a new thing. As John Tvedtnes explained:
[I]n the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, we read that "when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent of his garment in the air" (p. 351). When the word "rent" is used as a noun in English, it may refer to a hole caused by rending, but not, to my knowledge, to a portion of a rent cloth; the unlikely usage of "rent" in English as a noun no doubt contributed to the fact that, in subsequent editions of the Book of Mormon, it was changed to read "rent part" (Alma 46:19). But the Hebrew would, in this instance, use but one word, qera’, "rent (part)," coming from qāra', "he rent, tore," for nouns, in Hebrew, are derived from roots--as are Hebrew verbs--by addition of certain vowel patterns that distinguish them from other parts of speech. (John A. Tvedtnes, Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon: A Preliminary Survey)
There are many instances in the Hebrew Bible of this. The word piece (קְרָעִים) in the KJV text could be literally translated as rent:
And Ahijah caught the new garment that was on him, and rent it in twelve pieces (1 Kgs 11:30; alt. “twelve rents”)
And he said to Jeroboam, Take thee ten pieces: for thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee. (1 Kgs 11:31; alt. “ten rents”)
And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more: and he took hold of his own clothes, and rent them in two pieces (2 Kgs 2:12; alt. "two rents")
Instead of being a problematic verse for the Book of Mormon, Alma 46:19 is another piece of evidence for the authenticity of the text.
