"It came to pass" in the Book of Mormon does NOT match biblical usage

Despite its members, flawed and frail,

The human species as a mass

Came not upon this earth to fail

The test divine. It came to pass.

-- Yes and No (spoken by the Joseph Smith character)

You can't really write about the Book of Mormon without talking about "it came to pass," which occurs approximately once every 200 words, 8.7 times as frequently as in the King James Bible. Mark Twain famously called the phrase Joseph Smith's "pet" and said, "If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet."

From the apologetic point of view, the prevalence of "it came to pass" is consistent with the Book of Mormon's being an ancient text written by Bible-reading Hebrews, and the greater frequency of the phrase in the Book of Mormon can perhaps be explained by the fact that it is typically used in narrative passages, and the Book of Mormon is more consistently narrative in nature than the Bible. For example, the biblical books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and Lamentations contain not a single instance of "it came to pass"; but no comparable books of poetry or "wisdom literature" exist in the Book of Mormon. 

From a more skeptical point of view, "it came to pass" is just Joseph Smith trying to make his book sound biblical and going a bit overboard with it -- just as someone trying to imitate King James language today might do so by sticking -eth on the end of all sorts of words, even where it would never have been used in authentic 17th-century English.

From the former perspective, "it came to pass" in the Book of Mormon is a Hebraism, a sign that it was written by the same sort of people who wrote the Bible. From the latter, it is a pseudo-Hebraism, a clumsy attempt by a non-Hebrew to imitate a Hebrew stylistic feature.

I come down firmly on the pseudo-Hebraism side of the argument. Here's why.

"It came to pass" essentially means "it happened," and you will find that in the Bible its function is almost always (96% of the time) to indicate when something happened. That is, it is almost always used together with a time expression. Here are the first few occurrences of "it came to pass" in the Bible, with the time expressions underlined:

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord (Gen. 4:3).

And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him (Gen. 4:8).

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose (Gen. 6:1-2).

And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth (Gen. 7:10).

And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made (Gen. 8:6).

Does the Book of Mormon show a similar pattern of usage? In a word, no.

For the purposes of the above chart, "with a time expression" means that immediately before or after the words "it came to pass (that)" is an adjunct phrase indicating when the event in question came to pass. I was quite generous about what I counted as a time expression; even the common BoM phrase "now it came to pass" made the grade, since now is, at least literally and etymologically, a time adverb. However, instances like the following were categorized as "with no time expression":

And it came to pass that the three hundred and sixty and sixth year had passed away (Morm. 4:10).

And it came to pass that the days of Ether were in the days of Coriantumr (Ether 12:1).

In the Mormon reference above, the passing of the 366th year is what came to pass, not an expression of when it came to pass. In the Ether reference, nothing at all comes to pass (i.e., happens), and the use of the phrase must be considered a solecism. Grammatically speaking, in each of these sentences, the time reference after "it came to pass that" is the subject and is thus not a syntactic adjunct.

Anyway, regardless of the linguistic details of how I classified "it came to pass" sentences, the main point is that the same classification method was used for the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon, with extremely different results.

My conclusion is that the majority of the instances of "it came to pass" in the Book of Mormon do not reflect any stylistic feature of the original records but rather come from Joseph Smith and his conscious or subconscious efforts to "sound biblical."