Before There Was Genesis

Moses 1: The Chapter the Bible Lost

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Open a Bible to page one. There's a problem already.

It starts with "In the beginning," which sounds right. But what you're holding is midstream. The prologue is gone — the context that would have told you who's speaking, why it matters, and what God is actually trying to accomplish in this whole story. That chapter was cut, lost, buried somewhere in the long process between Sinai and the printing press.

Moses 1 is that chapter. The Restoration gave it back.

Joseph Smith's work reviewing and correcting the Bible, what we call the Joseph Smith Translation or JST, recovered more than textual footnotes. It recovered worldview. Moses 1 was the first thing the Lord revealed when Joseph began that work in June 1830, and that timing is worth noticing. God didn't want us reading the Old Testament without it.

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What Moses Actually Saw

The chapter opens on a mountain. God speaks to Moses face to face. What follows is not a commandment. It's a vision of staggering scale: Moses sees the earth, worlds plural, "without number" (Moses 1:33). He sees the sweep of creation. And then, before Genesis 1 begins, God states his purpose plainly:

"For behold, this is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." (Moses 1:39)

Read that twice. God's purpose is not hidden. It's not encoded. He announces it directly to a man standing on a mountain, and then the Old Testament begins.

The OT — all its wars, genealogies, priestly regulations, and laments — is God working out that one stated purpose. Every covenant, every prophet sent into impossible situations, every near-disaster-averted at the last possible moment is a chapter in that story. Without Moses 1, you lose the mission statement. And without a mission statement, the OT reads like a corporate memo with no header: dense, confusing, occasionally alarming.

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A Bible With a Transmission History

Here's the thing about scripture that fundamentalists and secular critics both tend to avoid: the Bible was copied, edited, translated, and assembled by human hands across centuries. That's not an attack on it. That's what the Bible is.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic, gathered into a canon through Jewish councils, translated into Greek (the Septuagint), then into Latin (the Vulgate), then eventually into English through multiple rounds of scholarship, ecclesiastical politics, and hard-won philological labor. The King James Version most Latter-day Saints use came out of a committee of fifty scholars who began their work in 1604. Fifty scholars means fifty opinions, fifty theological backgrounds, and a commission from a king who had his own views about what the text should say.

None of this makes the Bible unreliable as scripture. It does mean the Bible has a history, and that history matters.

The Restoration staked out a position that is genuinely unusual in the religious world. The eighth article of faith says we believe the Bible is the word of God "as far as it is translated correctly." That clause is not skepticism. It's not a claim that the text is hopelessly corrupt. It's intellectual honesty about a transmission process that was human all the way down — paired with confidence that God has provided correction for what was lost.

Moses 1 is the clearest example of that correction. It is not a doctrinal footnote; it's the operating system for the rest of the text.

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Abraham Saw It Too

Moses was not the only prophet given this vision before beginning his recorded ministry. Abraham received something strikingly similar.

In Abraham 3, the Lord shows Abraham the stars and the planets, the intelligences organized before the world was. He sees the premortal council. He learns that he was chosen before he came to earth. Two prophets, in different centuries, separated by geography and culture, are both shown the cosmos and their place in God's ongoing work before the narrative of their lives gets underway.

The pattern is deliberate. The Pearl of Great Price gives us both visions precisely because they frame each other. Moses sees the breadth of creation. Abraham sees its organization and purpose. Together they describe a God whose work spans eternity and whose attention is fixed on people, not systems.

The JST doesn't stop with Moses 1. It clarifies and restores passages across both testaments. Some changes are small adjustments to clarify meaning. Others are substantive. All of them suggest a body of scripture that was richer and more complete before the long process of transmission worked on it. That body of scripture is still being recovered, bit by bit, through revelation, scholarship, and the four standard works functioning as a whole.

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Where This Leaves You

So where does that leave you, opening this book in January?

With an advantage almost no Christian in history had. Four volumes of scripture, cross-referencing each other, with the Restoration as the framework that holds them together. The Book of Mormon quotes Isaiah and then explains him. Doctrine and Covenants expands the covenant theology the OT introduces. The Pearl of Great Price hands you Moses and Abraham, the two prophets who anchor the whole Old Testament, before a single other story begins.

You are not reading the Old Testament the way it was lost. You're reading it with the context intact.

That doesn't dissolve all the difficulty. Leviticus is still Leviticus. Some passages will still trouble you, and honest engagement with scripture allows for that. Faithful discipleship includes the passages you wish weren't there, and sitting with them without rushing to resolution is its own kind of study.

But you're reading with the mission statement now. You know what God said he is doing. Whatever else happens in these forty-odd books — the floods, the fires, the wars, the long silences between prophets — it happens inside a declared purpose: the immortality and eternal life of every person who has ever lived.

That's what the whole story is.

President Russell M. Nelson has connected Moses 1:39 directly to what God asks of us in our day: gathering Israel, temple worship, family history work. In his October 2018 general conference address, "The Correct Name of the Church", he described the current work of the Church as participation in God's ancient and ongoing mission. The promise in Moses 1:39 is not a relic. It is current policy, and you are part of carrying it out.

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Open Your Come Follow Me Manual

This week's Come Follow Me lesson centers on Moses 1, with particular attention to identity. After God tells Moses "thou art my son," Satan appears and immediately attacks that claim (Moses 1:12–22). The first question the adversary ever raises turns out to be: who do you think you are?

The manual invites you to consider how knowing you are a child of God changes the way you resist spiritual opposition. It's worth working through slowly.

Come Follow Me Manual – Week 1