Other facets of the 1830 BOM inconsistent with its allegedly divine nature included out-of-place verbiage such as the decidedly Americanized name “Sam” (1 Nephi 2:5, 17) and the French word adieu (Jacob 7:27), which is an odd farewell to find in a book originally written in “Reformed Egyptian” centuries before Christ, then translated into English in the 1800s. Most of the errors in Joseph’s 1830 BOM have since been corrected by LDS church leaders. As of 2001, in fact, the book had undergone a textual facelift consisting of nearly 4,000 substantive changes. This despite the fact that Smith declared his original BOM to be “the most correct of any book on earth.”

Not every error, however, has been removed from the BOM. Those that remain involve a wide variety of disciplines: anthropology, history, geography, zoology, and botany. For example, Joseph’s Israelites leave Palestine for the New World before the Babylonian captivity and proceed to build synagogues in the Americas “after the manner of the Jews.” But the Jews in Palestine did not construct synagogues until after their Babylonian captivity had begun.

Consider, too, the problem in 1 Nephi 17:5, which describes Arabia as being “bountiful” because of its fruit and wild honey. The fact is that Arabia has never had bountiful supplies of either fruit or honey. The BOM also speaks of a river in Arabia named Laman continually flowing to the Red Sea (1 Nephi 2:6-9), yet there has never been such river in Arabia. And then there is the description in 1 Nephi 18:25 of the New World having cows, oxen, asses, horses, and goats “for the use of man” 600 years before Christ. In reality, there were no such animals in the New World until Europeans brought them to the continent several hundred years later.