Abstract: The Restoration of the Gospel began in an atmosphere of ardent and urgent expectations of the Second Coming of Christ. We are, after all, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Those expectations were shared far beyond the ranks of those who eventually joined the Church. But the early nineteenth-century men and women who did become Latter-day Saints were commanded that, having been warned, they should warn their neighbors. However, nearly two full centuries since the founding of the Church, and more than two centuries since Joseph Smith’s First Vision, the Lord’s Second Advent has still not arrived. Does that mean that this isn’t a time for warning? That the time to warn our neighbors hasn’t yet come? No, not at all. We remain under the divinely given obligation to spread the word and, yes, to warn. And there are many ways to do so.


The most important of the Latter-day Saint missionary tracts of the nineteenth century, by a considerable distance, was Parley P. Pratt’s A Voice of Warning. By that time a member of the still-new Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Elder Pratt wrote the lengthy text over a two-month period while on a mission to New York, and it was published in 1837. Eventually, it appeared in more than thirty English editions and was translated into several other languages. In it, Elder Pratt detailed differences between the still-developing doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and those of other Christian denominations. He used biblical texts to explain the Restoration, described the recovery of the Book of Mormon, proclaimed the Latter-day Saint belief in modern-day revelation, and outlined some of the events that would precede the Second Coming of Christ.
It’s perhaps a little bit difficult for us, now a quarter of the way [Page viii]through the twenty-first century and drawing ever nearer to the dawn of the Church’s third hundred years, to appreciate the significance of A Voice of Warning. But Latter-day Saints had created only a small body of writing by 1837, so it loomed large for that reason alone. And, even physically, it wasn’t small: Printed editions of it range between 133 and 248 pages in length; the audiobook version of it runs nearly five-and-a-half hours.
The English Book of Mormon was less than a decade old by 1837, the Doctrine and Covenants had only been published in 1835, and the Pearl of Great Price was still decades in the future. However, A Voice of Warning was important for far more than its relative literary bulk within the nonscriptural literature of the fledgling Restoration. In it, Parley Pratt set forth an orderly account of Latter-day Saint beliefs as they stood at the time and created many of the scriptural arguments that members of the Church have used ever since to elucidate, justify, and defend their faith. They’re familiar to us now, but they were once new.
I’m interested here, though, in the title that he chose for his pioneering work: A Voice of Warning. It’s fairly clear that the first Latter-day Saints expected the Second Advent of the Savior to come much sooner than it has—every meteor shower seemed to be a sign that the Lord’s coming was very near at hand—and I think it safe to say that our sense of the imminence of that event has lessened quite a bit. Perhaps, indeed, a bit too much. For “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). The Second Epistle of Peter exhorts its audience
That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour: Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. . . .
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing,

 
In the October 29, 2025 episode of The Interpreter Foundation Podcast, our hosts Terry Hutchinson, John Gee, and John Thompson interview special guest Richard E. Turley Jr. about President Dallin Oaks (Turley is the author of In the Hands of the Lord: The Life of Dallin H. Oaks) and Turley’s upcoming Joseph the Prophet biography commissioned by the First Presidency. The audio track is also included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast).
 




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The Interpreter Foundation Podcast is a weekly discussion of matters of interest to the hosts and guests of the show. The views expressed on the Interpreter Podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Interpreter Foundation, nor should statements made on the show be construed as official doctrinal statements of the Church.
 

 
In the October 7th Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, our hosts Terry Hutchinson, Kevin Christensen, and Mark Johnson discuss the Come, Follow Me Doctrine & Covenants lesson for November 3 – 9 covering D&C 125 – 128.
You can listen to or download the Come, Follow Me segment of the October 7th episode of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The Discussion segment of the October 7th podcast can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-podcast-october-7-2025.
 




Podcast: Download



 
The Interpreter Foundation Podcast is a weekly discussion of matters of interest to the hosts and guests. The views expressed on the Interpreter Podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Interpreter Foundation, nor should statements made on the show be construed as official doctrinal statements of the Church.
 

Abstract: This study argues that the Book of Mormon both adopts and develops the instructional wisdom tradition found in Proverbs 1–9 and other pre-exilic Near-Eastern texts. After outlining the structure, rhetoric, and themes of Hebrew instructional wisdom, it tracks those features through major Book of Mormon discourses. Particular attention is given to the personification of Wisdom, the tree-of-life and great-whore polarity, temple motifs, and the democratic invitation to pursue the “mysteries of God” through personal revelation. The analysis suggests that Book of Mormon authors preserve a strand of Israelite temple wisdom largely suppressed in the post-exilic biblical record. By reading restored scripture back into its ancient literary context, the paper offers fresh insight into both corpora: Proverbs’ “enigmas” become transparently eschatological, while the Book of Mormon’s doctrinal core takes on new depth as a deliberate wisdom inheritance. The study concludes that recognizing this shared sapiential framework clarifies the Book of Mormon’s purpose as a covenant guide and underscores its claim to recover “plain and most precious” truths lost from the biblical canon.


[Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared as Alyson Skabelund Von Feldt, “‘His Secret Is with the Righteous’: Instructional Wisdom in the Book of Mormon,” FARMS Occasional Papers 5 (2007): 49–83. As this important paper is not currently available online, it is reprinted here for the benefit of our readers. It has been updated and edited by the author.]
[Page 438]While studying the topic of personal revelation a number of years ago, a furious cross-referencing of Doctrine and Covenants 76 landed me in the Old Testament book of Proverbs, and I stopped to explore the territory. I turned to chapter 1 and read straight through until the wonder wore off somewhere after chapter 8. I first understood the dominant message to be an impassioned invitation to search for the knowledge of the mysteries of God, to seek personal revelation. But a note fell out of my Bible that I must have made some time before when preparing a Gospel Doctrine lesson or studying for a BYU religion test. It characterized Proverbs as “a collection of folk sayings; hard to see as scripture.” This did not seem an apt description of the passages I had just breathlessly encountered.
Over the years, I have learned that my reading of Proverbs 1–9 that night was unusual. Though scholars recognize that the author beseeches the reader to find wisdom, they almost always take this to be practical knowledge about how to live life richly, rather than how to obtain the riches of eternal life.1
What has also surprised me is that many of the writers of the Book of Mormon were familiar with the literary forms, themes, and vocabulary of Hebrew wisdom literature, of which Proverbs 1–9 is an example, and made them part of their own sacred recordkeeping. What’s more, Book of Mormon authors clearly understood the search for wisdom to be a quest for eternal life and the mysteries of God.
This paper begins with a short introduction to Hebrew wisdom literature. I will then turn to an exploration of similarities between selected Old Testament wisdom texts, primarily Proverbs 1–9, and passages in the Book of Mormon, and I will investigate how the two sources elucidate each other.
Instructional Wisdom in Ancient Israel and the Near East
Scholars believe that wisdom sayings develop naturally in families and villages because of the human need to capture and distill the lessons of life and make them memorable. A literary wisdom tradition emerged anciently throughout the Near East, particularly in Egypt and Mesopotamia.Show more...