Reading the Book of Mormon and the Bible side by side

The Book of Mormon and the Bible cover the same thousand years and never once mention each other. Neither record knows the other exists. Read separately, that is unremarkable. Laid on a single line, it becomes one of the more striking things about either book.

Two records, one line

The overlap runs from about 600 BC to about AD 400. On one side of the world a small kingdom is destroyed, carried into exile, brought back, occupied by Greeks and then Romans, and finally scattered. On the other, a family that left just before the destruction becomes two nations, fights for a thousand years, and dies out.

The Book of Mormon is unusually careful with time. Its writers count years from Lehi's departure, then from the sign given at Christ's birth, and they say so in the text. That makes it one of the easiest ancient records to place on a timeline — and it means the parallels below are the book's own arithmetic, not an editor's guesswork.

600 BC: what was happening in Jerusalem

Lehi leaves Jerusalem at the start of the reign of Zedekiah, which the record places six hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Zedekiah is the last king Judah will have. He is on the throne because Nebuchadnezzar put him there, after Babylon took the city once already and deported its leading families. Jerusalem at that moment is a client state with a puppet king, and everyone can see what is coming.

Jeremiah is in the city, saying so, and being imprisoned for it. Lehi is one of several prophets warning the same thing. Daniel is already in Babylon, taken in the first deportation. Ezekiel will be taken in the second. Four prophetic voices, one crisis, and only one of them ends up outside the Bible.

Read this way, Lehi stops being an isolated figure. He is one of a crowd of men saying the same unpopular thing in the same decade, and the only difference is that he is told to leave.

A note on the year: Babylonian records place Zedekiah's accession in 597 BC, while the Book of Mormon's own count works from 600 BC. The gap is a known question, and the entries on this site follow the book's internal reckoning while saying where it sits against the Babylonian dates.

The fall of the city, and the boy who got out

About eleven years after Lehi sails, Jerusalem falls for the last time. The walls come down, the temple of Solomon is burned, and the kingdom of Judah ends. Zedekiah watches his sons killed and is then blinded and taken to Babylon.

The Book of Mormon adds one line to that account which the Bible does not have. A son of Zedekiah named Mulek escaped. His people crossed the sea and settled in a land the Nephites would not find for four hundred years.

So by roughly 585 BC there are three groups from Jerusalem in three places: the exiles in Babylon, the remnant left in the land, and two separate parties on the other side of an ocean who do not know about each other. Only the first two are in the Bible.

The long middle, on both sides

The centuries between the exile and the Roman period are thin in the Bible and thick in the Book of Mormon. Setting them together fills in a lot of empty page.

Nothing here is a connection between the two records. They are strictly parallel and never touch. That is the point. Two peoples, out of contact for six hundred years, arrive at the same moment from opposite directions.

The same event, half a world apart

At the birth, a night passes in the Americas with no darkness in it, and a new star rises. In Judea, shepherds are told, and men come from the east following a star. Neither account mentions the other, and both describe a sign in the sky.

Thirty-three years later the two records converge again and diverge in tone completely. In Jerusalem the crucifixion is followed by three hours of darkness and an earthquake, and the temple veil is torn. In the Book of Mormon the same hours bring three days of darkness, cities destroyed, and the whole face of the land changed.

Then the two accounts part for good. Christ ascends in Acts 1. In 3 Nephi he descends, and the Book of Mormon spends its most careful chapters on what happens next.

Two endings, a generation apart

The parallel holds to the very end, and the final pairing is the sharpest one in either book.

In the Old World, Jerusalem is destroyed by Rome in AD 70 and the temple never rebuilt. In the New, four generations live in peace after Christ's visit, then the peace fails, and the wars run for two centuries until the last battle at Cumorah around AD 385.

Moroni, alone, finishes the record and seals it up about AD 421. Eleven years earlier, on the other side of the world, Rome had been sacked for the first time in eight hundred years. Both civilisations are ending in the same generation, and neither knows anything about the other.

What the parallel changes

Read alone, the Book of Mormon can feel as if it happens outside time — a self-contained story with its own weather. Put on a line beside the Bible, it stops being a parallel world and becomes part of the same century-by-century record, with Babylon and Athens and Rome running along the top of the page.

That is most of the reason this site exists. Everything above is on one line, in order, and can be scrolled through rather than reconstructed.