Record keeping

I have always been amazed at how dense the information must have been on the record of Ether—24 plates that contained a record from the creation of man to the destruction of the Jaredites and while Moroni only included that portion from the tower of Babel to the end it still takes up 30 pages in our modern record. As I consider closer I realized that our 30 pages include at least 4 pages that were commentary by Moroni and while there were thousands of years of history and many important events from the creation of man to the tower of Babel our modern record is only 16 pages long. In other words, it seems that only about one third of the record of Ether was skipped by Moroni so that what was 16 pages in the language of Ether (and we don’t know the size of those pages) amounts to 26 pages in our English version (including chapter headers that we have added).

Perhaps more importantly, my consideration on the topic makes me appreciate how deliberate the record keepers must have been on selecting what they recorded considering the difficulty in making and keeping the records as well as how careful they must have been in creating the record because of the virtual impossibility of making corrections if they made a mistake with any of their characters.