Vocabulary: “Continual peace” refers to the quality and depth of the peace, not necessarily the duration. This phrase is applied to a period as short as a single year (Alma 3:32) and to another as long as twenty-two years (Mosiah 10:5). This expression is not found in the standard works outside of the Book of Mormon.
Variant: The printer’s manuscript has the heading “Chapter III,” rather than our current chapter 1. Words of Mormon is a transition between the text of the small plates and the text of the large plates. What we are missing is the material from the large plates dealing with King Mosiah1, for whom this book should be named. It is therefore probable that this section would have been Mosiah chapter 2, which must have been lost with the 116 manuscript pages. (See Mosiah, Part 1: Context, Chapter 2, “Mormon’s Structural Editing: Chapters and Books.”)
Text: One of the curious aspects of the book of Mosiah is what isn’t here. In all of the books that Mormon abridged from the large plates of Nephi (Alma, Helaman, 3 Nephi, and 4 Nephi) there is a preface that explains the contents of each book. There isn’t one for Mosiah. Mosiah is very much the same kind of book as the others, so logic tells us that it should have been present. The best explanation for its absence is that it was written on the plates, but was part of the lost 116 pages, along with what appears to have been Mosiah chapter 1 and perhaps 2.