Seer Stone

The Book of Mormon Translation Process  (From the book, 400 Questions and Answers About the Book of Mormon, by Susan Easton Black, beginning on page 15)

“What details did scribes of the Book of Mormon add about the translation process?

During the translation process, scribe David Whitmer observed, ‘Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat and put his face in the hat, drawing (the hat) closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine.  A piece of something resembling parchment would appear and on that appeared the writing.

One character at a time would appear and under it was the interpretation in English.  Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear and another character with the interpretation would appear.’

How did Emma Smith describe the translation process?

In an 1856 interview Emma Smith recalled, ‘When my husband was translating the Book of Mormon, I wrote a part of it, as he dictated each sentence, word for word and when he came to proper names he could not pronounce, or long words, he spelled them out and while I was writing them, if I made any mistake in spelling, he would stop me and correct my spelling, although it was impossible for him to see how I was writing them down at the time.’

Later, in an 1879 interview, Emma said that Joseph ‘would dictate to me hour after hour; and when returning after meals, or after interruptions, he could at once begin where he had left off, without either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him.  This was a usual thing for him to do.  It would have been improbable that a learned man could do this and for one so ignorant and unlearned as he was, it was simply impossible.’

In the same interview, she also stated, ‘I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him, he sitting with his faced buried in his hat,

with the (seer) stone in it and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us…The plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen tablecloth, which I had given him to fold them in.  I once felt of the plates, as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape.  They seemed to be pliable like thick paper and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one does sometimes thumb the edges of a book.’

How do modern Book of Mormon scholars feel about the description of the translation process given by David Whitmer and Emma Smith?

Royal Skousen, a professor of English language at BYU weighed in on the translation process and the question of whether Joseph Smith spelled proper names.  Skousen writes, ‘Over the twenty-one years that I have worked on the Book of Mormon Manuscript Project…we now know much more about the original text of the Book of Mormon, especially its Hebrew-like syntax, archaic vocabulary and systematic phraseology.  We now have a much clearer insight into how Joseph Smith translated (however one interprets the word ‘translated’) with strong evidence that he dictated the text word for word and that he controlled for the spelling of the strange Book of Mormon names.’”

Finally from another source, namely, the BYU Religious Education Review, page 16, Fall 2016, by Rachel Cope, Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine at BYU we read:

“It is interesting that most Church members in our day do not know about the seer stones because they were a familiar topic in Joseph Smith’s day and well known to historians since that time.  To Joseph Smith and early Church members, the idea of seer stones was normative, not because they were any easier to explain in the 1830s but because it was apparently a well-known fact that Joseph translated the Book of Mormon with seer stones.

It wasn’t a secret; people knew about them.  On the other hand, artwork that depicts the translation has excluded seer stones from the miraculous process that Joseph used to translate the gold plates.

By releasing the photograph of the seer stone (chocolate colored stone with an oval shape) in the Ensign (October 2015), the Church has begun a process of normalization, a process of recapturing the miracle in historical terms.”