SOURCE: "The Book of Mormon," in Joseph Smith: The First Mormon, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977, pp. 98-105.

Hill, herself a Mormon, is an Assistant Professor and head of Teachers 'Central Laboratory at Hunter College Library in New York. In the following excerpt, Hill briefly describes the content of the Book of Mormon and the responses of contemporary and subsequent readers.

The Book of Mormon, nearly six hundred pages of small print in the first edition, contains the chronicles of three groups of immigrants to the New World, most of it concerning a period from about 600 B.C. to A.D. 421. It is in fifteen main divisions, or books, each named after its principal author, and is based upon three sets of plates, or engraved records, the Plates of Nephi (which are of two kinds, larger plates of secular history and smaller sacred records), the Plates of Mormon, an abridgment...