1 Nephi's Chiastic Structure

If you don't already know what a chiasmus is, I'll give this short description. It's a Hebrew literary art form using repetition combined with parallelism. Envision if you will a stair case which goes up to an apex and then back down to the ground floor. There are an equal number of steps going up and down.

This is a visual representation of the structure. Now, instead of steps you have a phrase or short passage which contains a meaning. The repetition comes into play with each step and its mirror on the other side saying a similar thing or the same thing using different words. The parallelism comes because they sequence of the sayings is reversed so each list of expressions is a mirror. They lead to and enhance the apex, the highest step which doesn't repeat.

With this in mind, this is the chiastic structure of 1 Nephi
a. Chapter 1 - Lehi has a dream and he warns the Jews.
  b.  Chapter 2 - Lehi flees Jerusalem for the Promised Land
    c.  Chapters 3-5 - Nephi miraculously gets the plates
      d.  Chapter 7 - Ishmael joins the group along with his family
        e.  Chapter 8 - The vision of the Tree of Life
          f.  Chapter 10 - The Prophecy of the coming of the Lamb of God to the Jews
            g. Chapter 11 - The Spirit of God testifies of the coming of Jesus Christ
          f.  Chapter 12 - Prophecy of Jesus appearance to Nephi's descendants in the New World
        e.  Chapter 15 - The interpretation of the vision of the Tree of Life
      d.  Chapter 16 - The marriages of Ishmael's daughters to Lehi's sons and Zoram
    c.  Chapter 17 - Nephi miraculously builds a boat
  b.  Chapter 18 - Lehi's group, now led by Nephi leave the Old World for the Promised Land
a. Chapters 19-22 - Nephi warns the Jews of the latter days of the destruction of Satan's followers

And all this was thought up by a 22 year old farm boy from upstate New York who could barely read, a minister and a school teacher who culled all this from the bible, a history book and a novel. Ah... right.

The truth of it is this: It's less of a leap to believe it was revealed by God than to think they dreamt all this up. You have to keep in mind, once Joseph started translating, it was just him, the scribe, the plates (under a linen), the stone or stones and the hat. They did it in a room where others often stood by and watched. Hours on end, day after day they did this. So, if there really were years of preparation... he still had to memorize all of this so he could recite it to the translator. Keep in mind there were people in the room who never joined the church, yet they said the same thing about what happened.

Emma never outed her husband even though she had cause to do so. The Whitmers, who were eye witness to the effort never renounced or denounced the process. Ockham's Razor (the simplest explanation is often the correct one) demands accepting the translation of the Book of Mormon by the power of God as fact. Nothing else is even plausible. Which is why critics twist themselves and their logic into pretzels to try and explain it away as something man-made. It can't be done.