Today is International Day of the Bible. I wanted to participate somehow so I decided to share a portion of an article found in Meridian Magazine today. The rest of this interesting article can be found at the following link:
Confirming Evidences
Prophets commanded to record God’s words were assured that their work would stand (see Mormon’s concerns and the Lord’s response in Ether 12:23-26, for example). Moses was also promised that although his account of the creation of the world would suffer textual losses—in the latter days, his record would be restored to its original in order to further God’s work of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of all mankind (see Moses 1:39). The Savior declared to him: “And now, Moses, my son, I will speak unto thee concerning this earth upon which thou standest; and thou shalt write the things which I shall speak. And in a day when the children of men shall esteem my words as naught and take many of them from the book which thou shalt write, behold, I will raise up another like unto thee; and they shall be had again among the children of men—among as many as shall believe.” (Moses 1:40-41)
Nephi was similarly shown in vision that over time, many plain and precious truths would be “taken away” and other truths would be “kept back” from books in the Bible (see 1 Nephi 13:26, 32, 34, 40). But an angel assured him that in the latter days, “other books” would be brought forth, and that “these last records…shall establish the truth of the first [the books of the Bible] which are of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, and shall make known the plain and precious things which have been taken away from them; and shall make known to all kindreds, tongues, and people, that the Lamb of God is the Son of the Eternal Father, and the Savior of the world; and that all men must come unto him, or they cannot be saved.” (1 Nephi 13:39-40)
As Dr. Hugh Nibley pointed out, these other books have come and are still coming: “The substantial historicity of biblical tradition has been vindicated [by the discovery of parallel ancient documents] to an extant which few unprejudiced bystanders could…have deemed possible a generation ago.”(8)
In just the last few decades, there has a literal flood of ancient near-eastern historical and religious documents unearthed containing confirming writings verifying the authenticity of the ancient biblical record. “They’re not found as separate documents,” Dr. Nibley wrote, “but in batches—whole libraries turn up.” And their discoveries are not coincidental. “These new finds are the originals, and we’ve never had anything like this happen before….The people who hid them were aware that they were hiding them for a long term, a long rest, to come forth at a later time, so that when they would come forth they would not be distorted and changed.”(9)
Dr. Nibley pointed out that one scholar, Edward Meyer, announced in 1908 that “’twenty-five years ago there existed not a single historical document’ to confirm the early history of Israel as given in the Bible. It was quite suddenly in the late 1800s that such documents began to appear, and then it was like the coming of our spring floods, with great collections of stuff—no mere trickle—pouring out year after year in breathtaking sequence that appears not yet to have reached its crest.”(10)
Dr. Nibley further added, “The texts that have turned up with such dramatic suddenness in the past few years, as if a signal had been given, are the first ancient documents which have survived not by accident but by design. They were hidden away on purpose, to be dug up at a later date.”(11)
