The coincidence
of Mormon discovering the small plates at the very moment Smith lost the
abridgment cannot help but arouse suspicion. Were the Words of Mormon anything
more than Smith’s transparent attempt to escape his plight after the loss of
the 116 pages? It looks like a device, but if Smith was retrofitting the text
to get out of a tight spot, he worked hard at making the small plates
convincing. Inside the Book of Mormon, the small plates are more than a
contrivance to replace the lost 116 pages. they were a potent political
document in Nephi’s long-standing feud with his brothers. Nephi forged the small
plates just after his father died and when he had split with his brothers Laman
and Lemuel. The book of First Nephi and his first five chapters of Second Nephi
were an extended apologia for his part in the breakdown of brotherly relations and
the division of Lehi’s family into feuding nations. The moral of story after
story was that Nephi acted with the blessing of God and his father Lehi, while Laman
and Lemuel had resisted both. The small plates were not just the physical carrier
of the story but a strategic document in the internal dynamics of the Nephite
drama.
Political
aims drove the writing so long as the brothers lived together. After the separation,
the story’s underlying purpose shifted, and Nephi’s record became a different kind
of book. As the Lamanites became a more distant threat rather than an
ever-present reality, the need for justification of Nephi’s rule faded, and the
small account changed. Instead of an indictment of Laman and Lemuel, it
provided instruction o the coming of the Messiah, the last days, and the end of
Nephite civilization. The small plates could indeed have been an invention to
rescue the floundering translator, but the plates were no make-do patch job. The
text conformed itself to the changes in Nephite history. At first the small
plates intensified the basic Mormon plot of Nephite versus Lamanite and when that
issue faded turned to the Nephites’ evolving needs. (Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph
Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2023], 172)