If you don’t have this book already, I recommend that you download (for free!) one of the best tools for study of the Book of Mormon, Donald W. Parry’s  Poetic Parallelisms in the Book of Mormon: The Complete Text Reformatted (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute for Religious Research, 2007), available as a PDF file from the Maxwell Institute. This text is reformatted to distinguish narrative from sections employing various forms of parallelism. For example, it is now especially easy to see many examples of Book of Mormon chiasmus just by browsing the text.

In my opinion, one of the more valuable ways to enhance one’s study and appreciation of the Book of Mormon is to recognize the portions that employ the many forms of parallelism that are known in ancient Near Eastern tests, especially the Old Testament. The interesting structures and parallels employed are often difficult to note when reading a translation that formats everything as prose. Reading Isaiah, for example, can be much more meaningful when it has been formatted in verses reflecting the underlying Hebrew poetry. While any effort to reformat the Book of Mormon based on possible poetical elements in the original text will face speculation and error due to our current lack of the original gold plates to inspect, it is still possible to identify many seemingly deliberate examples of parallelism that are worthy of consideration. Parry does not capture all the interesting parallel-rich passages that may be present (in part because some candidates, like Janus parallelism or other structures, have only recently been identified), but he has done a great job in capturing many and in highlighting many cases where more may be going on in the text than a casual reader would recognize. It’s definitely worth keeping on your electronic devices and using it regularly as you explore the richness of the Book of Mormon, an ancient “voice from the dust” worthy of much more attention.