Book of Moses
"[6] The chapters that now make up the Book of Moses were first published in the church newspapers Evening and Morning Star and Times and Seasons in the 1830s and 1840s.[7]: Ch.
[citation needed] Richards published everything he had at the time, and what is now the Book of Moses was later added by Orson Pratt in the 1878 edition of the Pearl of Great Price.
Moses 2–8 generally follow the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, but often provide alternative interpretations of the text or significant additional detail not found in the Bible.
[7] Although several brief studies of the teachings of the Book of Moses had previously appeared as part of apologetic and doctrinally focused LDS commentaries on the Pearl of Great Price, the first detailed verse-by-verse commentary—and the first to incorporate significant amounts of modern non-LDS Bible scholarship—was published by Richard D. Draper, S. Kent Brown, and Michael D. Rhodes in 2005.
[37] In 2009, an 1100-page volume by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw was published, titled In God's Image and Likeness, which contains a comprehensive commentary on Moses 1–6:12, and incorporates a wide range of scholarly perspectives and citations from ancient texts.
[38] In his master's thesis, Salvatore Cirillo cites and amplifies the arguments of D. Michael Quinn[39] that the available evidence that Smith had access to published works related to 1 Enoch has moved "beyond probability—to fact.
"[4]: 138 Perhaps even more significant is the fact that the principal themes of "Laurence’s 105 translated chapters do not resemble Joseph Smith’s Enoch in any obvious way.
Yale University critic of secular and sacred literature Harold Bloom, who classes the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham among the "more surprising" and "neglected" works of LDS scripture,[49] is intrigued by the fact that many of their themes are "strikingly akin to ancient suggestions" that essentially restate "the archaic or original Jewish religion, a Judaism that preceded even the Yahwist."
While expressing "no judgment, one way or the other, upon the authenticity" of LDS scripture, he finds "enormous validity" in the way these writings "recapture … crucial elements in the archaic Jewish religion … that had ceased to be available either to normative Judaism or to Christianity, and that survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly.
Stephen Webb concludes that Smith "knew more about theology and philosophy than it was reasonable for anyone in his position to know, as if he were dipping into the deep, collective unconsciousness of Christianity with a very long pen.
