Tradition has labeled Moses as the author of the first five books of
the Old Testament, including Genesis. The Bible itself does not make that
claim, and the Joseph Smith Translation gives a careful corrective (see below).
The book of Genesis, while recounting ancient events, shows evidence of being
written and compiled during a later period. Historical references in Genesis,
and the language in it, reflect later centuries, suggesting that the book as we
have it now is the result of the transmission of accounts from more ancient
times and the careful weaving together of a variety of earlier sources. . . . The
Joseph Smith Translation tells us something of the composition of Genesis. It
begins with Moses, with the account of series of visions that Moes experienced
in which he learned much about God and God’s creative work. In that account, God
tells Moses that He would reveal to him concerning “this heaven and this
earth,” and Moses was to write down the words that God would say. What follows immediately
is the creation account that we are familiar with from Genesis 1-2 (Moses 2-3),
and thus from what we can see that Moses was the recorder of the account in its
early biblical form.
In the Joseph Smith Translation, God himself is the speaker in the
account of the creation and in the narration of Adam and Eve’s experiences in
the Garden of Eden. God’s narration ends when the first parents were expelled
from Eden and humankind’s mortal journey began, and the text tells us that
Moses’s service in recording God’s words ended at that point as well. From then
on, the text of Genesis is in the words of later unnamed narrators whose
accounts were placed together to create the first book of the Bible as we have it.
That pattern of unnamed narrators continues through all the rest of the Bible’s
historical books. (Kent P. Jackson, Genesis: A New English Translation with
The Joseph Smith Translation and Commentary [Provo, Utah: BYU Religious
Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2025], xiii-xiv)
