Royal Skousen reports that the original text of the Book of Mormon contains expressions which seem inappropriate or improper in some of their uses. For example, in the original text a good many occurrences of the phrase "and it came to pass" are found in inappropriate contexts. In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith removed at least 47 of these apparently extraneous uses of this well-worked phrase. In most cases, there were two or more examples of "it came to pass" in close proximity; in some cases, nothing new had "come to pass." Now the King James phrase "and it came to pass" corresponds to a Hebrew word meaning "and it happened." When translating the Hebrew Bible, the King James translators avoided translating this Hebrew word whenever it wouldn't make sense in English, especially when too many events were "coming to pass" or when nothing had really "come to pass"--in other words, in those very places that the original text of the Book of Mormon "inappropriately" allows "and it came to pass" to occur. Consider the following example (where the deleted phrase "it came to pass that" is in brackets) with a corresponding example from Genesis, given in the original before the King James translators took it out:
2 Nephi 4:10--and it came to pass that when my father had made an end of speaking unto them behold [it came to pass that] he spake unto the sons of Ishmael yea and even all his household (1837).
Genesis 27:30--and it came to pass as soon as Isaac had made an end of blessing Jacob and [it came to pass that] Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the presence of Isaac his father that Esau his brother came in from his hunting.
Other Book of Mormon examples of multiple occurrences of "it came to pass" which were edited by Joseph Smith in 1837 are found in Alma 8:18-19 and Alma 14:4-5.
What is important here is to realize that the original text of the Book of Mormon apparently contains expressions that are not characteristic of English at any place or time, in particular neither Joseph Smith's upstate New York dialect nor the King James Bible. Subsequent editing of the text into standard English has systematically removed these non-English expressions from the text--the very expressions that provide the strongest support for the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon is a literal translation of a non-English text. [Royal Skousen, "The Original Language of the Book of Mormon: Upstate New York Dialect, King James English, or Hebrew?," in Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Spring 1994, F.A.R.M.S., pp. 35-38]