. . .

The Nature of the Original Language (hereafter, NOL) argues among other things, for the significant and distinctly puzzling presence, particularly in the original dictated-English manuscript of the Book of Mormon, of elements of Early modern English that seem to reflect the state of the language between roughly 1530 and 1730. As a small part of its analysis, accordingly, NOL devotes a few of its pages to a very brief discussion of the phrase secret combination(s).

By this point, nobody reading this essay should be surprised that the data in NOL fail to support the environmentalist theory (according to Dan Vogel, “long regarded as obvious”) that the phrase secret combination(s) points inescapably, as a “code name” to Freemasonry:

When we look up the term secret combination in Early English Books Online (EEB), we find no references whatsoever to Masonry, not from the term’s first citation in 1602 up through all the subsequent citations in the 17th century. Instead, the term is used with respect to political evolution and assassination in the early 1600s, especially the conspiracy of Guy Fawkes and other Catholics in their failed attempt to blow up Parliament and the King on 5 November 1604. The term is ore generally used later in the century to refer to political and religious conspiracies, especially Catholic ones.

In EEBO, there are 40 citations of the singular secret combination and 21 of the plural secret combinations.

Turning to the next century, the 1700s, NOL finds forty-seven examples of the singular secret combination and thirty specimens of the plural in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). One text in ECCO, from the very end of the eighteenth century—Francis Wollaston’s 1799 book A Country Parson’s Address to His Flock—describes at least a subset of the Freemasons as “an avowed combination against all religion, all government, and all good order among men.” The vast majority of the passages, however, refer to quite non-masonic political conspiracies—unless, of course, we count the following two: a 1796 passage uses the term secret combinations to designate masons but not in connection with Freemasonry. Rather, it refers to an attempt by actual “working masons” to control wages. Similarly, a 1791 book employs the unmodified word combinations to describe attempts by literal masons to control labor production.

If anybody out there still seriously maintains that references to secret combinations in the Book of Mormon necessarily refer to nineteenth-century Freemasonry, NOL’s conclusion offers no comfort whatever on that score:

In general, then, the term secret combination was historically used to refer to political combinations, which is also how the Book of Mormon uses the term. Claims that the Book of Mormon usage refers to Freemasonry are not at all supported by the text. The combinations in the Book of Mormon are always secret and deal with gaining and holding political power, especially by means of murder, including the assassination of political leaders . . . . [I]nterestingly, on both EEBO and ECCO we find citations that refer to combinations using oaths and covenants—that is, we find in textual sources dating from the 1600s and 1700s this method of ensuring secrecy in combinations, long before the period in the late 1820s when Freemasonry would have supposedly led Joseph Smith to include such practices in his description of Book of Mormon combinations.

Gregory Smith’s declaration that “this element of the environmental hypothesis has now been robustly disproven” seems even more obviously true now than it was in 2014. There is simply no serious reason to believe that the Book of Mormon term secret combinations was ever an “obvious” code name for Freemasonry. This venerable argument for the nineteenth-century composition of the Book of Mormon fails.