Review
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Title: Voices in the Book of Mormon: Discovering Distinctive Witnesses of Jesus Christ
Author: John Hilton III
Publisher: BYU Religious Studies Center
Genre: Non-fiction, textual criticism
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 274
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-9503-0449-3
Price: $27.99
Reviewed by El Call for the Association of Mormon Letters
I feel uniquely qualified to review Voices in the Book of Mormon. I did my undergrad in linguistics, and I’m currently working on an MA in corpus linguistics. I’ve referenced work by John Hilton III in my own papers. During my time at BYU, I helped create files for use in WordCruncher (the program that Hilton uses for analyzing speakers in the Book of Mormon). I also worked briefly with Paul Roper and Matthew Fields, whose work Hilton cites, on the textual impact of a translator’s voice. Not only that, but my own work involves a degree of communicating linguistic analysis to non-linguists.
Hilton struggles with one of the things I’ve noted as a particular difficulty as well. Linguistic analysis often returns lots of little facts that need to be interconnected in a way that feels cohesive. He does overcome some of this with how he structures the book’s chapters, but the nature of the research—especially when including specific numbers—means that there’s some inherent choppiness in the text.
For a book intended for a lay audience, there are very few visualizations in Voices. The only ones in the entire book are a few word clouds demonstrating the differences between three different speakers in the Book of Mormon. Otherwise, all data is communicated through tables or within the text. It’s much easier for readers to grasp what the data is saying when it isn’t just a series of numbers.
A strength of Voices is that Hilton clearly explains linguistic concepts like log-likelihood and statistical significance and reiterates definitions across the chapters. Hilton includes “Therefore, What” sections in the book that add a framing to help religious readers internalize the ideas presented within the chapters.
Overall, Voices in the Book of Mormon book provides fascinating insights regarding speakers in the Book of Mormon. Even setting aside the question of the Book of Mormon’s divine origins, its speakers have distinct vocabularies and communication styles that add weight to their arguments. Hilton does an excellent job explaining these distinctions and why those distinctions might matter.