The Book of Ether on Half a Page Interesting ideas concerning the Book of Ether
by a scholarly Church member
In his commentary, Moroni explains that the Book of Ether originated from 24 gold plates, but says “…the hundredth part I have not written.” As it is, the Book of Ether takes up about 31 pages in the English Book of Mormon so the whole story unabridged would have taken over 3100 pages in English. So how could Ether write so much information on just 24 gold plates? This is an experiment to see how he might have done this astonishing feat.
If Ether wrote on both sides of the 24 plates, it would make 48 pages. A hundredth of that is 0.48 pages, not quite half a page. Moroni’s commentary makes up about 22% of our version. If we remove that as well as all the chapter headings and verse numbers, run all the text together and shrink the text to 3-point font we get the text below. Could the characters on the 24 gold plates have been that small? (That may be why the interpreters were necessary to read the plates—maybe they were magnifying glasses.) Below you will find a link that leads to an 8½ x 11-inch layout with 0.25” margins on all sides. I still didn’t quite get it in half a page. If Ether used plates the size of posters, perhaps it could be done. The Jaredites and Ether spoke Adamic so in that perfect language, a single symbol could have represented a whole sentence. Perhaps that’s how he got so much information in so little space.
The Book of Ether on Half a Page
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