The Book of Moses opens not with creation but with the man who will be told about it. Moses 1 is an extended vision narrative, and it is one of the most distinctive features of the Pearl of Great Price: it has no counterpart in the Hebrew Bible. Genesis begins “In the beginning”; the Book of Moses begins one step earlier, with Moses himself being prepared to receive the account that Genesis records.
The chapter unfolds in three movements, and the symmetry is part of its meaning. In the first, Moses is caught up to “an exceedingly high mountain” and sees God face to face. He is transfigured so that he can endure the divine presence; God shows him “the world… and all the children of men which are, and which were created”; and Moses learns something about himself — that he is a son of God, made “in the similitude of mine Only Begotten.” Then the presence withdraws, and the contrast is immediate and deliberate. Left to his own strength, Moses falls to the earth, and the chapter gives him one of its most quoted lines: “for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.”
The second movement tests what the first has established. Satan arrives — “Moses, son of man, worship me” — and Moses meets the demand not with raw resistance but with comparison. He has just seen the glory of God; he asks Satan, “Where is thy glory, that I should worship thee?” Knowing the difference is what makes him able to refuse. After a moment of genuine fear, Moses commands Satan to depart in the name of the Only Begotten, and Satan leaves.
The third movement restores and completes the first. The divine presence returns, the vision widens, and Moses — now seeing the earth and its inhabitants — asks God to tell him why these things are so. The answer reaches far past this world: God speaks of worlds “without number,” created “by the Son.” But it narrows back to a single, much-quoted purpose statement: “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” The chapter ends with a commission: Moses is to write what God will speak, and is told that his words, though they will be lost among men, will one day be restored.
That commission is the hinge. Moses 1 exists to frame what follows. Having seen the Creator, learned his own standing as a son of God, withstood the counterfeit, and received his charge to write, Moses is now prepared — and the very next chapter, Moses 2↗, begins the creation account that runs closely parallel to Genesis 1↗. The vision is the doorway; the Genesis material is the room it opens to.
Language & Translation Notes
Relationship to Genesis and Theological Notes
A note on sources. The Book of Moses originated in Joseph Smith’s revision of the Bible — the work usually called the Joseph Smith Translation — begun in June 1830. The notes here concern the chapter’s structure and its relationship to Genesis.
An extended prologue with no Genesis parallel. Moses 1 stands before the material of Genesis 1 rather than within it. Where the Hebrew Bible opens directly with creation, the Book of Moses supplies a preceding vision in which the creation is shown to Moses before it is recounted to him — and through him to the reader.
The threefold pattern. The chapter’s three movements — the vision of God (vv. 1-8), the confrontation with Satan (vv. 12-22), and the renewed vision and commission (vv. 24-42) — are arranged so that the counterfeit is met between two encounters with the genuine. Moses can reject Satan’s claim precisely because the surrounding visions have shown him what real glory is.
Setting up Moses 2. The commission to write, at the chapter’s close, leads directly into Moses 2, which parallels Genesis 1 closely. Moses 1 thus reframes the creation account that follows as something Moses received by revelation and was charged to record — a frame the Genesis text itself does not provide.