Despite its members, flawed and frail,The human species as a massCame not upon this earth to failThe test divine. It came to pass.
-- Yes and No (spoken by the Joseph Smith character)
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."
6 comments:
Interesting analysis, and solidly confirms my very general impression. "It came to pass" in the BoM typically functions as just a filler-phrase, presumably to give time for thinking. I would wish that Joseph had edited it out during transcription for publication - to save this reader from needing to do it.
Using the phrase as a way to buy time for thinking doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's a lot more natural to just pause or clear your throat or say "uh" (if they said such things back then) or take a break. Using a standard filler phrase would inevitably box him in awkwardly, making it harder to continue the telling.
Your theory also suggests he was having a hard time knowing what to say next on a pretty regular basis, as if he was just barely coming up with the next part of the story every few sentences. If so, I would expect to see key story details contradicted over time (especially pronouns), but we don't see that in the text.
I suppose we could assume he knew the story well in his head and he just needed time to Biblify it but using a standard filler to buy time for that still strikes me as incredibly awkward and unlikely.
To me it's more likely he misunderstood the meaning of the phrase and overused it. If so, I think this analysis supports the idea of the BoM being a cultural translation more than anything.
Apparently the word that the KJV translators translated into "it came to pass" occurs over 1,200 times in the Old Testament. However, only in 727 of those instances did they used "it came to pass", with the other ~500 times translated into other words or phrases.
The implication, of course, is your analysis isn't what you think it is - yet. You have only compared Joseph's use with the instances in which the KJV translators decided to use that phrase, not actually the full sample of where it occurs in the text from which they translated. A simple explanation for your chart showing the KJV overwhelmingly using "it came to pass" in time-expression instances is because the bias of translators was to use that phrase in those instances, and another phrase in other instances, whereas Joseph strictly and consistently used whatever word or symbol that gave him that phrase in all instances that he found it.
That may or may not be true, but I just bring it up as a possibility to demonstrate your analysis is incomplete.
If the phrase, or whatever it is supposed to be translating, did once have a substantive meaning - then presumably that meaning is lost to modern readers; - because to people nowadays the phrase has no discernable function, and seems completely redundant.
Anonymous above is bruce g charlton
No. I imagine instances where there is no time expression its translated "Behold." I'm sure this is the case without bothering to check, since "behold" is frequent in the KJV. And since the real function of "and it came to pass" in the Hebrew Bible is like "behold" in that its an attention grabber. You could just say "Cain slew Abel when they were in the firled" or "Behold Cain slew Abel when they were in the field" as "And it came to pass Cain slew Abel when they were in the field" and its basically the same but the latter two have an attention grabber thingy. But Joseph Smith is not using it to grab attention. He uses it way too much for that. I can imagine had he latched upon "behold" instead of "and it came to pass" we'd have the same problem with "behold," namely him starting nearly every sentence with it, especially in 1 Nephi. So no, it has to be admitted that Joseph Smith overused it to try and make the book sound ancienty.
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