The translation
How the Book of Mormon was put into Hebrew.
The Book of Mormon calls itself a record written by Israelites in the learning of the Jews. Sefer Mormon takes that at its word and renders the book in the Hebrew those Israelites carried out of Jerusalem: the Hebrew of the Bible. These are the standards the whole text is held to.
The Hebrew of the Bible, not of Tel Aviv
Modern Hebrew would have been easier. It has words for everything and a grammar every Israeli knows. But the Book of Mormon is not a modern book, and its people never spoke modern Hebrew. So the vocabulary is held to what the Hebrew Bible attests, the narrative runs on the biblical converted tenses, and the sentences are built the way Genesis and Kings build them: short clauses joined by ו, construct chains instead of “of”, the verb first.
That also means English idiom is not carried across word for word. It is re-thought into the idiom the Bible would have used for the same thing. In the first verse, “having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days” becomes:
The doubled verb עָזֹב לֹא־עֲזָבַנִי is the Bible’s own way of saying “in no wise”, and חֶסֶד יְהוָה, the LORD’s covenant mercy, is what “favor” meant to a Hebrew writer. Nothing in the sentence is a word the prophets did not have.
Pointed like the Masoretic text
Every word carries the full Tiberian pointing: vowels, dagesh, shva, the short qamats marked as its own sign (כׇּל). Pointing is what makes a Hebrew text readable aloud and checkable on the page, and it is what lets the reader speak the text in a Hebrew voice. There are no cantillation marks; those belong to the synagogue reading of the Bible itself.
The Bible’s own words where the book quotes it
Long stretches of the Book of Mormon are Isaiah: 2 Nephi 12 to 24 is Isaiah 2 to 14, and 3 Nephi carries Malachi and Micah. Where the Book of Mormon’s English follows the King James text, the Hebrew is the Masoretic text of that verse, word for word, so that a reader who opens Isaiah beside 2 Nephi finds the same Hebrew. Where the Book of Mormon’s wording departs from the Bible, the Hebrew departs with it, in the same biblical register.
Names
Names that exist in the Bible keep their biblical spelling: Jacob is יעקב, Enos is אנוש, Jerusalem is יְרוּשָׁלַיִם. Names the Book of Mormon introduces are written in Hebrew letters to the sound the Church’s pronunciation guide gives them, so that a Hebrew reader and an English reader say the same name: Nephi נֶפִי, Alma אלמא, Mosiah מושיה, Helaman הילמן, Moroni מורוני. God is אֱלֹהִים; the Lord is יְהוָה, as the LORD of the Bible.
Grammar held to the Bible
A translation this long can drift, so the text is checked as a whole, not verse by verse alone. Every inflected form in the Book of Mormon is compared against the forms the Hebrew Bible actually attests, tens of thousands of them, so that a verb ending or a suffix that never occurs in the Bible cannot survive here. The same checks hold agreement in place: a prophet addressing one man is answered in the singular and a crowd in the plural; a masculine addressee never takes a feminine suffix; the emphatic אָנֹכִי is kept for the voice of God, and people say אֲנִי.
The Hebrew text was closed in September 2026. It is now fixed: the reader, the app and the print editions carry the same words, and the only thing still edited is the English gloss beneath them.
A gloss under every word
The interlinear puts one English gloss under each Hebrew word, in Hebrew order, glossing the Hebrew that is actually there rather than pasting in the King James phrase. So רָאוּ עֵינַי reads “saw · my eyes”, and a student sees at once that Hebrew puts the verb first. The transliteration line follows the Sephardi values used in Israel: shabbat, not shabbos; a doubled letter shown doubled, vayyitten; the short qamats as o, kol.
Read it
The whole text is free at sefermormon.com, where it sits beside the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, all in Hebrew and all interlinear. The print editions carry the same text, and so does the app.