In their book Mormonism, Shadow or Reality?, Jerald and Sandra Tanner write,
“The book by Josiah Priest throws new light upon a controversy regarding a quotation from William Shakespeare which is found in the Book of Mormon. Since Shakespeare was not born until 1564, we would not expect the Book of Mormon to quote from his words. Anti-Mormon writers, however, feel that they have identified a quotation from his works. This is a statement made by Lehi almost 600 years before Christ: “…from whence no traveler can return;…” (2 Nephi 1:14) Notice how similar this is to the words of Shakespeare: “…from whose bourn no traveller returns…” (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, as quoted in Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Vol. 1, page 237)
Josiah Priest’s book, The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed, published in 1825, quotes this line from Hamlet, indicated by the quotation marks,
“I told him that after my death he must collect such articles as were allowed him of mine, particularly my papers, and deliver them to Dr. De Fludcar; he promised me he would. I then requested him to leave me, as my time was short, and I had some preparation to make before I went hence to ‘that bourne from whence no traveller returns.'” (Emphasis added.)
Did Joseph Smith really plagiarize Priest? Being the word nerd I am, I decided to do a little digging to see what I could find. I really love studying the language of the Book of Mormon. It’s one of my favorite things. For me it’s like solving a puzzle or riddle. It’s immensely satisfying to find evidence supporting the Book of Mormon, which is exactly what happened here. As I suspected when I began, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation why this phrase appears in the Book of Mormon. But first a little background.
Some time ago I was listening to a lecture by the late Dr. Michael Heiser, a very well-known theologian in evangelical and scholarly circles. We lost a giant when he passed earlier this year. I can’t recommend most of his work enough. (I have some very minor quibbles with some of his interpretations, but he’s an excellent scholar and teacher with a deep and abiding love of the gospel). At any rate, he stood at the podium with the following statements, which served as his thesis, projected on the wall behind him:
“God did not create a new culture for Israel that was foreign to the rest of the known world at that time.”
“God worked in and through ancient Israel as it culturally was. He did not change Israel’s worldview so He could dispense revelation to them.”
Those are two very excellent statements. I wholeheartedly agree. When it comes to the scriptures, understanding the culture that produced it is paramount. We can get into some very deep exegetical weeds when we try to impose 21st century ideas and worldviews onto ancient texts. He then said in the lecture,
“God doesn’t change the culture, clean it up first, and say ‘now we can talk.’ He comes to people as they are, knowing what they know or what they don’t know, and says, ‘let’s get something down here that you can understand. Not only what you can understand, but the people who are going to read what put down will understand, too.’ He’s communicating in their language and worldview. They’ll get it. Because I, God, am choosing to come to this place, at this time in history, to these people—that’s God’s decision. And I’m going to start revealing who I am.’
God’s revelation to Israel had to be culturally decipherable. They had to get it. They had to understand it. It also had to be culturally consistent. In other words, God couldn’t fill the Old Testament with things that were foreign to the culture to whom he was communicating, or they’d go ‘what?’” (Emphasis added)
I latched onto this idea of cultural decipherability when I first learned of it. It’s come to play a very prominent role in my approach to scripture. If it sounds familiar to you, Nephi makes essentially the same argument in the Book of Mormon,
“Wherefore, the things which I have written sufficeth me, save it be a few words which I speak concerning the doctrine of Christ; wherefore, I shall speak unto you plainly, according to the plainness of my prophesying. For my soul delighteth in ; for after this manner doth the Lord God work among the children of men. For the Lord God giveth light unto the ; for he speaketh unto men according to their , unto their understanding. (2 Nephi 31:3, emphasis added.)
I think there are a few words missing here. It should probably read, “The Lord God giveth light unto the understanding of men.” But the point remains, God communicates with man according to man’s language. We might ask ourselves then, Who’s the king of the English language? William Shakespeare, of course. I don’t think anyone would argue the contrary. He is truly Zeus on Mt. Olympus when it comes to the language we speak. Everything flows downhill from him. Hephzibah Anderson notes Shakespeare’s immense influence on the English language,
“…during his 52 years on earth, he enriched the English language in ways so profound it’s almost impossible to fully gauge his impact. Without him, our vocabulary would be just too different. He gave us uniquely vivid ways in which to express hope and despair, sorrow and rage, love and lust. Even if you’ve never read one of his sonnets or seen a play – even if you’ve never so much as watched a movie adaptation – you’re likely to have quoted him unwittingly. It’s almost impossible to avoid.”
Shakespeare is responsible for so many ubiquitous words and clever turns of phrase, some of which you may not even be aware of. I certainly wasn’t. Anderson continues,
“If you’ve ever been ‘in a pickle’, waited ‘with bated breath’, or gone on ‘a wild goose chase’, you’ve been quoting from The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet respectively.
Next time you refer to jealousy as ‘the green-eyed monster,’ know that you’re quoting Othello’s arch villain, Iago. (Shakespeare was almost self-quoting here, having first touched on green as the colour of envy in The Merchant of Venice, where Portia alludes to “green-eyed jealousy.”)
Allow yourself to ‘gossip’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and you’re quoting him. ‘The be-all and end-all’ is uttered by Macbeth as he murderously contemplates King Duncan, and ‘fair play’ falls from Miranda’s lips in The Tempest. And did I mention that he invented the knock-knock joke in the Scottish play?
Some phrases have become so well used that they’re now regarded as clichés – surely a compliment for an author so long gone. ‘A heart of gold’? You’ll find it in Henry V, while ‘the world’s mine oyster’ crops up in The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
Given Shakespeare’s broad and unparalleled influence, would we accuse anyone adding “wild goose chase” or “heart of gold” to a literary or poetic work of plagiarism? Of course not. Those expressions have become part of our cultural lexicon. This same concept holds true for the Book of Mormon and the cultural lexicon of the early 1800s. Here’s the important thing to remember: the Book of Mormon is a cultural translation, not a 1:1 translation. If it were a literal translation, it’d be incomprehensible. Who knows what expressions and idioms the Nephites used over the course of their 1,000 year history, especially since that language was gradually corrupted. The English translation had to be culturally decipherable to its target audience—1830s American readers. The first rule of translation is to convey meaning from one language to another. Cultural decipherability is the act of a merciful God who communicates with them in ways they understand. If the Book of Mormon were translated today, parts of it would be different. Same in substance and meaning, but different textually.
For this reason, the Book of Mormon is filled to the brim with words, expressions and idioms contemporary to the time in which it was published. Words and phrases like “betwixt,” “one eternal round,” “adieu,” “wanderers in a strange land,” “hiss and byword,” “water my pillow,” “much of my gospel,” “by the power of him” and countless others are found in its pages because they were part of the wider cultural lexicon, some dating back to the mid 17th century. We should expect to find them as they reflect the way people wrote and spoke. I’ve collected about two dozen of these examples, and I suspect there are hundreds more waiting to be found. (I hope to write a book on this topic in the future.)
Returning to the question at hand, if Josiah Priest paraphrased Shakespeare (“whence” is not found in the original quote), then perhaps we could charge Joseph Smith with plagiarism, or at the least of taking “inspiration” from Priest. That phrase, however, was in very wide circulation, either as a direct quote or as a paraphrase, sometimes credited with quotation marks and sometimes not, both well before and well after The Book of Mormon or Josiah Priest. Let’s look at some examples:
“The joy with which, a few minutes before, he would have welcomed such a belief, was now converted into an awe unspeakable, undefinable. The wish of death is commonly but disgust of life, and looks forward to nothing further than release from worldly care: but the something yet beyond the something unknown, untried, yet to come, the bourne whence no traveller returns to prepare succeeding passengers for what they may expect, now abruptly presented itself to her consideration, —but came to scare, not to soothe. All here, the cried, I have wished to leave but — have I fitted myself for what I am to meet? (Frances Burney, Camilla, or the Picture of Youth: A Novel, p. 246, 1796)
“Surely God is not the only pitiful and tender-hearted ‘father in the universe, that will act without mercy towards his illegitimate offspring, who decline the education and regimen of his household, or the sons of the bond woman, if they once pass that bourne whence no traveller returns. Is there no difficulty in all this on the common system?” (Niel Douglas, The Antidote Against Deism, p. 65, 1802.)
“We are constrained to pity the being who is thus forcibly thrust from the warm precincts of light and life, to that dreadful bourne whence no traveller returns. The stage can give these scenes, but here the catastrophe is genuine.” (The European Magazine and London Review, July-December 1806, p. 213)
“This majestic vagueness staggered old Crusty at first, but he recovered his equilibrium, and said, ‘Why, yes, now I think of it, you are right; he has travelled farther than most of us, for about two centuries ago he visited that bourn whence no traveller returns. Well, when he was alive — he was a student of Christchurch — he used to go down to a certain bridge over the Isis and enjoy the chaff of the bargemen.'” (Charles Reade, The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth and Other Stories, p. 97, 1806.)
“One while the sun of prosperity gilds the horizon ; another, the gloomy clouds of winter darken it, and storms and floods roll themselves along. But, amidst all the vicissitudes through which you pass, you are hastening onwards to that bourn whence no traveller returns.” (John Clayton, The Traveller’s Directory, A Sermon, p. 31, 1810)
“But purposes will not overtake practices, nor words, deeds ; and finding that I am fast journeying to that land whence no traveller returneth, and that soon must I be, instead of the teacher of twenty, one of the twenty who are taught,–after serious communing with myself I have thought no farther time was to be lost, and that the grain should be laid up in the store or ere the winter or the moth cometh.” (Abraham Eldon, The Continental Traveller’s Orace, or Maxims for Foreign Locomotion, p. 97, 1828)
“Passing through the vale of misery, she found springs to refresh, from whence to draw comfort and strength; or looking beyond it, she caught as it were a Pisgah view of a better and a happier place; beyond that bourne from whence no traveller returns, she saw a fair, a goodly land, where an inheritance had been purchased for her by its Lord, even at the costly price of His own blood.” (Selina Bunbury, The Pastor’s Tales, p. 31, 1827)
There are dozens more examples, but these are sufficient to demonstrate that Shakespeare and his language were part of the literary lexicon of Joseph Smith’s day. You’ll also notice that “whence” is not found in Shakespeare’s original but had become part of the phrase by the mid-1700s (including Priest’s book), which is why it appears that way in the Book of Mormon. So, if we wish to accuse Joseph Smith of plagiarism, we must also accuse Francis Burney, Niel Douglas, Charles Reade, John Clayton, Abraham Eldon, Selina Bunbury, Josiah Priest and dozens of others who didn’t use quotation marks, indicating they were citing Shakespeare. But that would be an unfair charge against those whom I cited and it’s an unfair and unwarranted charge against Joseph Smith. It’s not plagiarism, but rather an example of drawing on a common cultural reference point. “From whence no traveller returns” and its variations were plucked from the literary ether by writers as a poetic and elegant means of describing death on the printed page. I’m sure a fair number of these writers “unwittingly quoted” the Bard of Avon, but if this expression was part of their cognitive literary and cultural tradition, why wouldn’t they use it? “I go to that bourne from whence no traveller returns” is much more evocative and pleasing to the ear than “I’m going to die soon.” It’s a no-brainer.
If we consult Google’s Ngram viewer, we find that “from whence no traveller returns” reached peak usage between 1820-1840 AD, before falling precipitously in the second half of the century. Again, it’s no surprise at all that we find it in the Book of Mormon. No surprise at all. It fixes the Book of Mormon in a specific time and place. While I have the utmost respect for Jerald and Sandra Tanner for their immeasurable contributions to Mormon Studies, I disagree with their assertion we wouldn’t expect to find it in the Book of Mormon. We absolutely would, and should, expect to find it. To be sure, this isn’t what Lehi said (it’s not a 1:1 translation) but it conveys the meaning of what Lehi said.
Pablo Picasso once allegedly said that “good artists copy, great artists steal.” God, being the greatest artist of them all, will naturally draw from the best contemporary sources in communicating with his children. I mean, obviously. Sidney Sperry, one of the most ardent defenders of the Book of Mormon, wrote,
“We hold that Joseph Smith translated the Nephite text of the Book of Mormon and that he used the best vocabulary at his command. If such a vocabulary demonstrated a knowledge of works of Shakespeare, so much the better.”
I don’t believe Joseph Smith chose those words. I believe they were the words a merciful God gave to him, and by extension, to us, but I agree with his point. John Walton, another excellent theologian, wrote that scripture “is an act of communication, not a repository of facts.” I (mostly) agree with that. I’m grateful we find a bit of the Bard in the Book of Mormon and that God communicated with us in a small degree through him. He is, after all, the king of the language the Book of Mormon was first translated into. Not only is God merciful, He also very good taste.
BOOK OF MORMONISM 
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