The Pearl of Great Price is the smallest of the four Latter-day Saint Standard Works, and the most miscellaneous. It is not a single work but a folder — five quite different texts, written across Joseph Smith’s ministry and only later bound together. Franklin D. Richards first assembled them as a pamphlet in England in 1851; the church canonized the collection in 1880.
The longest text is the Book of Moses, eight chapters that restore material lost from the opening of Genesis. It includes a visionary prologue with no biblical parallel (Moses 1↗), an expanded creation account, and a substantial body of teaching about Enoch and his city of Zion that the Bible does not contain.
The Book of Abraham, five chapters, was translated by Joseph Smith from Egyptian papyri the Church acquired in 1835. It carries some of Latter-day Saint scripture’s most doctrinally weighty material — a vision of premortal existence and a divine council before the creation (Abraham 3). The relationship between the published Book of Abraham and the Joseph Smith Papyri fragments that survived a 19th-century fire and were rediscovered in 1967 is a subject the Church addresses in its Gospel Topics essay “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham.” The canonical text is scripture.
The remaining three texts are brief. Joseph Smith—Matthew is a revision of the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24, drawn from Smith’s wider work of revising the Bible. Joseph Smith—History is his autobiographical account of the First Vision and the earliest events of the Restoration, taken from his 1838 history. The Articles of Faith are thirteen short statements of Latter-day Saint belief, written by Smith in 1842 as part of the letter known as the Wentworth Letter.
For all its brevity, the Pearl of Great Price is doctrinally load-bearing. Several teachings central to Latter-day Saint thought — the premortal existence of human spirits, the council in heaven, the Enoch-and-Zion ideal of a consecrated society, the covenant lineage descending from Abraham — are articulated here more fully than anywhere else in the canon. It is the volume a reader can finish in an afternoon and return to for a lifetime.