Quotation and Attribution

What happens when a text names the prophet it is quoting — and the prophet’s book, as the corpus holds it, reads differently. The corpus’s texts cite one another constantly, and the plainest of those citations check out word for word: the register carries dozens of connections where a revelation names its source outright — a handful naming book, chapter, and verse and reproducing the text exactly (The Revelation of John Explained, Baptism for the Dead and the Record, and Questions on Isaiah are built on such named citations). This page collects the opposite class: the handful of places where a Doctrine and Covenants text attributes wording to a named prophet, and the attributed prophet’s frozen book does not carry that wording as assembled — while other texts in the corpus carry it verbatim and make the same attribution. Each case below is stated as textual fact, checkable at its references. What the pattern means is confined to one marked interpretation at the end, and the real-world question it gestures at is explicitly out of this wiki’s scope.

For the Book of Mormon’s own quotation system — the Isaiah blocks, self-glossing, re-voicing — see the Intertextuality essay; this page is about attribution across the corpus’s works.

The Moses case: every element present, the assembled sentence absent

D&C 133:63 attributes a sentence to Moses:

“And upon them that hearken not to the voice of the Lord shall be fulfilled that which was written by the prophet Moses, that they should be cut off from among the people.” (D&C 133:63)

Both elements of that sentence have Mosaic carriers, with one qualification reported below. The prophet-prophecy stands in Deuteronomy:

“The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken;” (Deuteronomy 18:15)

And the cut-off penalty is standard Mosaic penalty language. Counting the phrase-frame “cut off from among his people” / “…their people”, it stands at nine verses of the frozen books of Moses (Exodus 31:14; Leviticus 17:4, 17:9, 18:29, 19:8, 20:18, 23:29; Numbers 9:13, 15:30), always in the third-person form, as in:

“For whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that same day, he shall be cut off from among his people.” (Leviticus 23:29)

Near forms, counted separately: Numbers 19:20 reads “cut off from among the congregation”; Leviticus 17:10, 20:3, and 20:6 carry the active form, “will cut him off from among his people”; and shorter forms of the penalty recur beyond the phrase-frame — “cut off from Israel” (Exodus 12:15), “cut off from his people” (Leviticus 7:20), and kin. Nine is the phrase-frame count, the rule the register’s record states.

What no frozen book of Moses carries is the fusion — the prophet-prophecy with the cut-off penalty attached. Deuteronomy’s own stated penalty for not hearkening is different:

“And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.” (Deuteronomy 18:19)

The qualification: the verse’s own words are “hearken not to the voice of the Lord” (D&C 133:63) — the verse does not itself mention a prophet raised up, and reading that clause as Deuteronomy’s prophet-prophecy is the reading the fused carriers below supply. On the face reading, the nearest Mosaic carrier is the penalty for despising the Lord’s own word — “Because he hath despised the word of the LORD, and hath broken his commandment, that soul shall utterly be cut off; his iniquity shall be upon him.” (Numbers 15:31) — which carries neither the prophet clause nor the from-among-the-people phrase.

The assembled sentence — prophecy plus cut-off — is exactly what three other texts carry, each in a Moses frame (Acts names Moses in the verse preceding its carrier, Acts 3:22):

“…unto the fulfilling of the words of Moses, which he spake, saying: A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you, like unto me… And it shall come to pass that all those who will not hear that prophet shall be cut off from among the people.” (1 Nephi 22:20)

“Behold, I am he of whom Moses spake, saying: A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me… And it shall come to pass that every soul who will not hear that prophet shall be cut off from among the people.” (3 Nephi 20:23)

“And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.” (Acts 3:23)

Three attributions, three carriers, one absent source-form — that is the strict census of the fused sentence. The bare clause “cut off from among the people” stands at six corpus verses in all: the two Nephite carriers, D&C 133:63 itself, D&C 1:14 (the same hear-not-then-cut-off shape, attributed to no prophet), Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:55 (the cut-off clause in a Moses frame — “according to the prophecy of Moses” — without the prophet-prophecy half), and Joseph Smith—History 1:40, where the messenger, having quoted Acts “precisely as they stand in our New Testament,” restates the penalty in the cut-off form. The New Testament carrier is the sharpest edge of the fact: on the corpus’s own narrative, Acts stands in a transmission line apart from Nephite scripture, and it carries the fused sentence the same way, with “destroyed” for “cut off” (Acts 3:23); what that may indicate is weighed in the interpretation below. The register’s record for the D&C end is , which reports this chain in its note.

The Ezekiel case: the image present, the phrase and the figure absent

D&C 29:21 attributes its wording to Ezekiel:

“And the great and abominable church, which is the whore of all the earth, shall be cast down by devouring fire, according as it is spoken by the mouth of Ezekiel the prophet, who spoke of these things, which have not come to pass but surely must, as I live, for abominations shall not reign.” (D&C 29:21)

A search of all 48 frozen Ezekiel chapters finds no occurrence of “whore of all the earth” and no great-and-abominable-church figure. What frozen Ezekiel does carry — abundantly — is the image: Ezekiel 16 and Ezekiel 23 are the frozen Old Testament’s densest whoredom-and-harlot chapters, applied there to named cities. The phrase and the figure the revelation attributes to Ezekiel stand instead in the Book of Mormon:

“And the blood of that great and abominable church, which is the whore of all the earth, shall turn upon their own heads; for they shall war among themselves…” (1 Nephi 22:13)

The register’s record is Of the members of this class, this one has the widest verified absence: the zero-hit search runs over a whole prophetic book.

The Nephi case: an attribution with no carrier at all

D&C 98:32 names a source for the war-and-forgiveness law it has just stated:

“Behold, this is the law I gave unto my servant Nephi, and thy fathers, Joseph, and Jacob, and Isaac, and Abraham, and all mine ancient prophets and apostles.” (D&C 98:32)

No frozen text states that law — the three-fold patient bearing, the warning, the hundred-fold reward — in wording that can be paired. The frozen Book of Mormon has defensive-war material whose doctrine corresponds (the provisions around Alma 43:46–47 and 3 Nephi 3:20–21), but correspondence of doctrine is not shared wording, and pairing them would be an inference the texts do not license. This member has no register record at all; it stands in the verification log’s open uncertainties, which is where an attribution without a groundable second end belongs.

The self-describing case: a source the text says is not yet extant

Section 93 does openly what the cases above leave implicit. It quotes at length from what it calls the record of John — and tells the reader, twice, that the source it is quoting is not the record we hold:

“And John saw and bore record of the fulness of my glory, and the fulness of John’s record is hereafter to be revealed.” (D&C 93:6)

“And it shall come to pass, that if you are faithful you shall receive the fulness of the record of John.” (D&C 93:18)

The section’s John-quotations share phrases with the frozen Gospel of John but do not reproduce its wording, and the register leaves those pairings wiki-asserted for exactly that reason (Light and Truth states the naming question precisely). Here the corpus is not silent about citing an unheld source — it asserts it.

The frame the texts themselves supply

The corpus carries its own account of why a quoted source and a held book might differ, stated as prophecy in the Book of Mormon’s opening vision:

“…for behold, they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away.” (1 Nephi 13:26)

“Wherefore, thou seest that after the book hath gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God.” (1 Nephi 13:28)

And the record describes its own scriptural source as a distinct transmission line: the brass plates, which

“did contain the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents;” (1 Nephi 5:11)

“And also the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah; and also many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah.” (1 Nephi 5:13)

Those are the texts’ claims, quoted as such. They are not evidence about the real-world history of any manuscript.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this

The members of this class can be read as a coherent pattern rather than a set of coincidences: if the corpus’s own account of scripture transmission is taken as the frame — a fuller prophetic corpus on the brass plates (1 Nephi 5:11–13), with “plain and precious things taken away” from the line that became the Gentiles’ book (1 Nephi 13:28) — then attributions whose wording survives in Nephite scripture but not in the extant Old Testament are what that account would predict. The Acts case cuts both ways and should be weighed both ways: that a New Testament text carries the same fused Moses-sentence could indicate a common older source behind both lines — or simply that first-century quotation practice assembled composite citations freely, which is a documented habit of the New Testament’s own Old Testament quotations. The texts do not settle which reading is right, and this page does not either. The textual facts are the quoted passages above; this reading is offered for the reader to weigh, not asserted.

Whether the real-world Old Testament actually lost material between Zedekiah’s reign and the extant manuscripts is an external, real-world question outside this wiki’s scope. What the wiki maps is exact and internal: which text attributes which words to whom, and where those words do and do not stand in the frozen corpus.

Sources & method

Doctrine and Covenants sections 29, 93, 98, and 133 (verse text only; headnotes excluded); quotations verified against Deuteronomy 18, Exodus 12, Leviticus 7, Leviticus 17, Leviticus 20, Leviticus 23, Numbers 15, Numbers 19, D&C 1, 1 Nephi 5, 1 Nephi 13, 1 Nephi 22, 3 Nephi 20, Acts 3, Joseph Smith—Matthew 1, and Joseph Smith—History 1. Distribution figures are counts of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing. This page cites existing register records and mints none.