Moroni is alone. When Moroni began writing in his father’s record, this “aloneness” was one of the first things he mentioned:
Mormon 8:5
5 Behold, my father hath made this record, and he hath written the intent thereof. And behold, I would write it also if I had room upon the plates, but I have not; and ore I have none, for I am alone. My father hath been slain in battle, and all my kinsfolk, and I have not friends nor whither to go; and how long the Lord will suffer that I may live I know not.
Moroni finishes his father’s record, and that completes the work as his father had envisioned it. There was the addition of the book of Ether that had been promised in the text, and Moroni adds that. We do not know how long it took, but perhaps Moroni understood that he would be preserved at least until he finished abridging the record of Ether (as his father appears to have understood that he would live through the final battle – see comments following Mormon 6:1).
At the end of addition of the book of Ether it could be argued that Moroni believed that the entire text was now finished. Therefore he “supposed not to have written more.” There was nothing left to say according to the outline of the text that his father had created. Nevertheless, Moroni is alive, and lonely. He needs someone to talk to, and “talks” to his journal-on-the-plates. This is a very personal statement from a man in very unusual circumstances. Almost as though it were a surprise, he tells us that ye has “not as yet perished.”
Redaction: E. Cecil McGavin has noted an important stylistic difference between Moroni’s work on Ether and the texts that we will find in the book of Moroni:
“Another interesting difference between the actual writings of Moroni and his abridgments was pointed out by E. Cecil McGavin in a series of radio talks over KSL radio in 1941. According to Brother McGavin, the term “and it came to pass” is used by Moroni 117 times in forty pages of his abridgment of the records of the Jaredites. Yet in thirteen pages of his own writing, consisting of over 7,000 words, he does not use the expression a single time.” (Daniel H. Ludlow, A Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1976], 330.)
There is a very important reason that there should be a distinction focusing on the phrase “and it came to pass.” There is a difference in the type of documents we have in Ether and Moroni, with Ether being a retelling of historical information. The phrase “and it came to pass” has a particular function in historical narrative, along with the paired “and now” (see the Redaction section following 1 Nephi 1:20). The shift in the narrative purposes between the Ether material and the types of material in Moroni dictate the shift in the stylistic inclusion of the phrases that mark the passage of events in the historical narrative of Ether to the absence of such markers when there is not historical narrative, such as we have in Moroni.