Text: The differentiation between the two plates is their subject matter, a difference Yahweh mandated. This second set contains a record of ministry and prophecies, while the large plates are more historical. In this characteristic, the large plates also resembled the brass plates which overlapped our Old Testament in significant ways. The Old Testament contains spiritual accounts embedded in historical texts. It contains as much of the mundane as it does of the sacred, while the sacred serves to point the moral of the mundane in many cases.
These new plates, then, depart from the established tradition perpetuated in the large plates and construct a new literary paradigm for recording Yahweh’s workings. This new paradigm intentionally omits much historical context for the sake of the spiritual lesson. This paradigm dictates the structure of Nephi’s narrative. He summarizes years in the wilderness in a sentence but devotes several chapters to a vision of a few hours. Unlike anything else in the Old Testament, except perhaps for the personal passages in Isaiah, the small plates are a personal record of a major prophet. Even Joseph Smith’s canonized personal narrative focuses only on two significant events: the First Vision and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. His prophetic writings, preserved primarily in the Doctrine and Covenants, are, despite his later editing, occurrences of the moment, while Nephi crafted his account as a continuous narrative designed for a future purpose that he did not fully know at the time.