“As soon as you encounter the phrase ‘and it came to pass,’ you know you’re reading or hearing the Bible. Specifically, you’re dealing with the King James Version.”

—Joel S. Baden, Lost in Translation

Vayehi - And it came to pass (וַיְהִי) The Hebrew word vayehi comes from היה (hayah, “to be” or “to become”) and most literally means “and it was” or “and it happened.” In Biblical Hebrew it is frequently used as a narrative marker, especially to introduce a new event or time setting such as “when,” “after,” or “in the days of.” The King James Version often renders this construction as “and it came to pass,” while modern translations usually express the same idea more naturally through the tense of the following clause. For example, Genesis 4:8 begins with vayehi and the KJV reads, “And it came to pass, when they were in the field...” (Genesis 4:8)

The Hebrew behind the familiar phrase “and it came to pass” is usually וַיְהִי (vayehi / wayhî), from the verb היה (hayah), meaning “to be” or “to become.” Grammatically, vayehi is a third-person masculine singular narrative form, and at its most basic level it means something like “and it was” or “and it happened.”

What makes the word interesting is that Hebrew often uses וַיְהִי without referring to some particular thing that “was.” Instead, it can help move a narrative forward or introduce a time setting. It may precede something like “when…,” “after…,” “in the days of…,” or “at the end of….”

In those situations, the word functions less like an independent statement and more like a narrative marker telling the reader that the next event belongs at this point in the story.

That means the King James phrase can sound more substantial than the Hebrew really is. “And it came to pass” does not necessarily mean that some particular event literally “came to pass.” It is often simply the KJV’s traditional way of representing a Hebrew construction that establishes the setting of a past narrative.

Genesis 4:8 gives a good example. The Hebrew begins:

“And it was, in their being in the field…”

That would be awkward English. The KJV renders it:

“And it came to pass, when they were in the field…”

Modern translations can simply say:

“When they were in the field…”

The phrase can disappear because its function has already been communicated naturally through English grammar. Nothing essential has necessarily been lost.

The same Hebrew root also appears as an ordinary verb. Genesis 4:2, for example, tells us:

“Abel was a keeper of sheep.”

There is no need for “came to pass” because Abel is clearly the subject of the verb.

A useful way of thinking about וַיְהִי is therefore that it can perform two related jobs:

There is also a future-oriented counterpart, וְהָיָה (vehayah), roughly “and it will be,” which the KJV often renders “and it shall come to pass.” Again, the important function can be establishing the time frame rather than expressing some special concept of “coming to pass.”

This becomes particularly interesting in an LDS context because “and it came to pass” is everywhere in the Book of Mormon.

That raises an obvious question: Why is it there, and does its presence tell us anything about how the Book of Mormon was translated?

Several LDS scholars have proposed that the phrase may reflect a Semitic narrative structure behind the English text. Some of the more interesting discussions come from Donald W. Parry, Royal Skousen, and Brant Gardner.

The basic argument is straightforward.

Biblical Hebrew frequently uses וַיְהִי to move a narrative from one event or period to another. The King James translators often rendered this as “and it came to pass.”

If the Book of Mormon ultimately comes from a culture descended from ancient Israelites, perhaps this kind of narrative structure survived in Nephite writing and was then represented in English using the familiar KJV phrase.

This is at least plausible. But simply finding the phrase itself is not especially remarkable, since Joseph Smith already knew the language of the King James Bible.

The more interesting arguments involve how the phrase is used.

Donald Parry points out that vayehi is especially associated with historical narrative in Biblical Hebrew. It does not occur with anything like the same frequency in poetry, sermons, prayers, speeches, and similar material.

Something comparable appears to happen in the Book of Mormon.

“And it came to pass” occurs constantly while the narrator is describing events, but becomes much less common in sections such as:

When the narrative resumes, “and it came to pass” returns.

That is more interesting than merely counting how often the phrase occurs. The argument is that its distribution behaves like a narrative device, somewhat like the way vayehi functions in Biblical Hebrew, rather than simply being biblical-sounding decoration scattered randomly throughout the text.

That does not prove anything by itself, but it is a better argument than simply saying, “The Book of Mormon uses the same phrase as the Bible.”

Royal Skousen’s work on the earliest Book of Mormon text adds another interesting piece.

According to Skousen, the original dictated text contained even more occurrences of “it came to pass” than the Book of Mormon does today—about 1,494 occurrences. A number were removed or smoothed out in later editing, including changes associated with the 1837 edition.

Some of the original constructions are particularly awkward in English.

For example, an early version of 2 Nephi 4:10 read something like:

“and it came to pass that when my father had made an end of speaking unto them behold it came to pass that he spake…”

The second occurrence was eventually removed.

That sounds terribly repetitive in English, but something structurally similar can occur in Hebrew narrative.

Simplified, the pattern can look like:

And-it-was, when X happened, and then Y happened.

Normal English would simply say:

When X happened, Y happened.

This is more interesting because the earliest Book of Mormon text sometimes preserves an awkward structure that later editors naturally wanted to clean up.

Skousen’s argument should still be stated cautiously. This does not demonstrate that the underlying language was Hebrew. At most, constructions like these may be compatible with translation from a non-English source and resemble Semitic narrative patterns.

That is a much narrower claim than saying that they prove the Book of Mormon is an ancient Hebrew text.

Brant Gardner approaches the phrase somewhat differently. He suggests that expressions like “and it came to pass” can function almost like paragraph markers.

Modern writing gives us paragraph breaks, indentation, punctuation, headings, chapters, and other visual ways of telling the reader that one thought has ended and another has begun.

Ancient narrative did not necessarily use those same devices.

A repeated formula could therefore perform a similar function:

Previous event → “and it came to pass” → next narrative unit

If that is correct, we may sometimes be reading the phrase incorrectly when we instinctively hear:

“AND THEN SOMETHING CAME TO PASS…”

Instead, we might mentally translate it as:

“Then…”

or:

“At this point in the story…”

or sometimes simply:

[New narrative section]

That fits quite well with the way vayehi can function in Biblical Hebrew.

For me, this is interesting largely because of my Mormon upbringing and the way I understood the Book of Mormon for most of my life.

But I am hesitant to treat this as meaningful evidence for the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

One difficulty with arguments based on Hebraisms is that the Book of Mormon itself does not claim that the surviving record was simply written in ordinary Biblical Hebrew. It describes its writing as “reformed Egyptian,” whatever precisely that means, and says that its language and writing had changed over the centuries.

We therefore have no independently known “Reformed Egyptian” grammar against which we can compare the English Book of Mormon.

That makes arguments based on English Hebraisms complicated.

It is certainly possible for features of one language to survive translation into another. Translators can preserve unusual word order, repeated formulas, idioms, and other structures from a source language. So the fact that the plates were not supposedly written in ordinary Hebrew does not mean that Hebraic features could not survive.

But it also means that we cannot simply work backward from a KJV-sounding English construction and confidently reconstruct Hebrew underneath it.

“And it came to pass” illustrates that problem especially well.

Dr. Joel S. Baden uses Exodus 16:10 as an example. The King James Version reads:

“And it came to pass, as Aaron spake unto the whole congregation…”

The NRSV simply reads:

“As Aaron spoke to the whole congregation…”

Baden argues that the modern rendering is not only better English but is actually closer to the way the sentence would have functioned for an ancient Israelite.

That raises an important question about what we mean by translation.

Is the goal to reproduce the grammar of the source language as literally as possible? Or is it to communicate the same idea naturally in the language of the reader?

If the Book of Mormon translation was intended to sound like scripture to an English-speaking audience in the early nineteenth century, I do not find it particularly strange that it would use King James language. The KJV provided Joseph Smith and his audience with their familiar vocabulary for biblical narrative. If a source construction meant something like “and then,” “and it was,” or introduced a new temporal clause, “and it came to pass” would have been an entirely understandable biblical way to render it.

But that creates the other possibility as well.

Joseph Smith already knew the King James Bible. If he were composing the Book of Mormon himself and wanted it to sound like scripture, “and it came to pass” is exactly the sort of phrase we would expect him to use.

That is why I do not think the phrase is particularly strong evidence in either direction.

If Joseph translated an ancient text, the phrase could represent a narrative construction in the underlying record rendered into familiar KJV English.

If Joseph authored the Book of Mormon, the phrase could simply reflect his familiarity with biblical language and his attempt to write a scriptural narrative.

The more interesting observations—the concentration of the phrase in narrative sections, the awkward repetitions in the earliest text, and its possible function as a structural marker—make the question worth studying. They may tell us something about how the Book of Mormon text works.

I am much less convinced that they tell us where the Book of Mormon came from.

And perhaps that is the most useful distinction.