Abstract In an earlier paper, I concluded that Lehi and Nephi were highly trained Josephite scribes and were associated with an official Jerusalem scribal school that preserved ancient Manassite traditions. There they acquired advanced writing skills and classical Hebrew and Egyptian, which would become the scriptural languages of the Nephite peoples. These they maintained in the new promised land and passed on from generation to generation through the entire thousand-year Nephite dispensation, even though the Nephite language itself would naturally evolve. Evidence of how they did this surfaces repeatedly throughout the Book of Mormon. The following paper documents how both Mormon and his son Moroni abridged and concluded the religious, military, and political records of Book of Mormon peoples, thus preserving key elements of the vast Nephite records collection for a later dispensation. That scribal process parallels the roles and schools of other cultures of the ancient Near East.

The picture of Moroni. the last Nephite prophet, and his activities after the final battle which seems to prevail with contemporary readers of the Book of Mormon is both simple and straightforward. Still a relatively young man, Moroni is usually described as being completely alone, hiding from still vengeful Lamanites while working to complete his father’s abridgement of the Nephite records, which he would then hide up in the same hill where the great battle had occurred. But the ongoing accumulation of relevant scholarly discoveries about ancient scribalism and more careful readings of Moroni’s own account now invite the construction of a significantly revised and enriched description of Moroni’s last days.

As it turns out, the occasional references to the Nephite records in Mormon’s abridgement and in Nephi’s Small Plates do constitute a complete record of the transmission of the Nephite records from [Page 96]one generation to another. When we read these accounts from the perspective of ancient Near Eastern (hereafter ANE) history and record keeping, it becomes obvious that the Nephites from Nephi to Mormon maintained an official scribal school that kept detailed records of the people, the prophecies and revelations given to the prophets, and the wars and contentions with the Lamanites.

Nephite society may have been tiny in comparison to the great empires of Assyria, Hatti, Egypt, and Babylon. Consequentially, its small governing elite seemed to share the leadership responsibilities of the government administration, the military, the priesthood, and the educational and record-keeping functions of scribes that would have belonged to more specialized peoples in those great ANE empires. In Nephite society, the scribal responsibilities passed back and forth among kings, judges, prophets, and military leaders, suggesting that they were also trained scribes (as will be discussed below). The scribal responsibility always centered in the same charge: to maintain and preserve the same sets of records and other sacred objects and to educate successor generations in high literacy and in the classic languages (Egyptian and Hebrew) of the Brass Plates, their “holy scriptures.” The Nephite experience with scribal training most likely followed the documented pattern of earlier ANE societies, in that students dropped out at different training levels. Many more students achieved minimal or functional literacy than persevered to the highest levels.

The larger scribal charge was always understood in the context of the same prophecy that had been given to Nephi, Lehi, and even to Abraham. These prophets had seen in vision that in the last days the records of the Nephites would become the key tool by which the descendants of Lehi, the Gentiles, and the house of Israel would be gathered in by the Lord as they received the knowledge of the gospel originally revealed to the first Nephite prophets and tau...