Therefore, when ye are about twenty
and four years old I would that ye should remember the things that ye have
observed concerning this people; and when ye are of that age go to the land
Antum, unto a hill which shall be called Shim; and there have I deposited unto
the Lord all the sacred engravings concerning this people. (Mormon 1:3)
Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making
of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004), 327, sees this
passage as an example of Joseph’s autobiography appearing in the Book of
Mormon:
While Smith was a different age than
Mormon when he retrieved the record (Mormon was “about” twenty-four, Smith
twenty-one) the similarity in storyline is apparent.
Meanwhile, “I being eleven years old,” Mormon reports, “was carried by my
father into the land southward, even to the land of Zarahemla” (1:6). Although
Smith’s father was not the one who conveyed him southward, Joseph Jr. was ten
or eleven when his family moved south from Norwich, Vermont, to Palmyra, New
York. Considering the pain Joseph Jr. suffered during the trip due to being
forced to walk on an injured leg, he may have wished that his father had been
there to help carry him.
While there is an obvious parallel
between Mormon’s excavating the records from the hill and Joseph’s digging the
plates from the Hill Cumorah, the parallel between Mormon at eleven and Joseph
Smith’s journey to Palmyra from Vermont is strained. The only actual parallel
is their travel south. Furthermore, the Smith family actually went more toward
the west than south, and conceptually they were going to the western frontier.
Even this detail (direction), the strongest parallel, is an artifact of the way
Vogel describes it. (Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and
Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, 6 vols. [Salt Lake City: Greg
Kofford Books, 2007], 6:49-59 n. 4)
