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“Color in the Book of Mormon”

“Color in the Book of Mormon”

Last updated on: May 1, 2026 at 1:17 pm by Dan Peterson

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“Color in the Book of Mormon” 2026-05-01T13:17:23-06:00 Dan Peterson

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An illustration of Newton’s prism by Gabriela Corrêa dos Santos (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

A new article, this one written by David Grandy, has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 68 (2026) : 421-442: “Color in the Book of Mormon”:

Abstract: Given that only four colors are mentioned in the Book of Mormon (white, black, red, and gray), readers may ask, “Where are all the other colors?” But this is a distinctively modern question, that is, one keyed to the early modern understanding of color pioneered by Isaac Newton. The Book of Mormon does not embody this understanding. Instead, it reenacts difficulties associated with grasping color meanings intrinsic to the Bible and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey*. These difficulties support the claim that we are reading an ancient record.*

Professor Grandy’s article is accompanied online by “Interpreting Interpreter: Ancient Color Schemes,” written by Kyler Rasmussen:

This post is a summary of the article “Color in the Book of Mormon” by David Grandy in Volume 68 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. All of the Interpreting Interpreter articles may be seen at https://interpreterfoundation.org/category/summaries/. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreter series is available at https:/interapreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.

A video introduction to this Interpreter article is now available on all of our social media channels, including on YouTube at https://youtube.com/shorts/xsk2BUYVhLQ.

The Takeaway: Grandy examines the use of color in the Book of Mormon, concluding that the text appears to align with ancient understandings and references to color, and failing to reference a more modern schema.

And, of course, please don’t forget to watch the fourteenth installment of our Becoming Brigham series (and any other episode that you may have missed). After all, the Interpreter Foundation has been at death’s door for many years now, according to some of its critics, so who knows how much longer these videos will continue to be available?

The Hale Centre Theatre, in Sandy, Utah, is (as I’ve often said before and will certainly say again, barring unforeseen catastrophe) a local, state, and regional treasure. My wife is there at this very moment. (Photo from the Hale Centre Theatre website)

On Wednesday night, my wife and I attended a performance at the Hale Centre Theatre in Sandy of Hallmarked, an original musical comedy that was created locally by people associated with the theater. (This run constitutes its world premiere.). It was amusing. Anybody who is at all familiar with the stunningly formulaic but surprisingly popular romantic comedies that are continually shown on the Hallmark Channel, especially at Christmas season, will have no difficulty in recognizing the tropes and the jokes. Hint: The story is set in the small and friendly town of Idyllic, Vermont, and the male and female leads are, respectively, Monty (whose nickname is Romeo) and Julia. Pretty subtle, don’t you think?

The play was performed in the Sandy Hale’s new, smaller third venue, the Beehive Stage. It was our first time to attend a play in that space. Upon returning home, it being too late at night to get into anything substantial, we finished the evening off by watching the concluding episode of the second season of the British crime drama Sherwood. After Hallmarked, we needed something wholesome.

A field of lettuce in modern Israel (Wikimedia Commons public domain image). I’m reliably informed that the crop, which I’ve occasionally seen while traveling in the Middle East, is also grown in North America somewhere.

I ate a salad yesterday. A salad that was made of vegetables. Going by what my nutrition monitors over at the Peterson Obsession Board say — at the last two counts, taken several days apart, eleven threads out of twenty-four on the board’s first page were devoted wholly or in part to me and to my cartoonish depravity and comic irrationality (which isn’t their all-time high but is still somewhat above average for them) — this may have been my first actual salad since roughly the middle of the first Reagan administration. It was quite good though, and I could almost swear that I’ve tasted something like it at least once before.

The cover of the book (Amazon.com)

This morning, I finished Reggie Anderson and Jennifer Schuchmann, Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters With the Hereafter (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2013). I’ve shared several passages from it here over the past week or so.

It’s a very readable and enjoyable book and, notwithstanding the title and the somewhat unrepresentative quotations that I’ve cited here, it’s mostly not concerned with stories of the miraculous or with the afterlife. Overwhelmingly, it’s the reminiscences of a devoutly Christian Alabama-born family physician in rural Tennessee. But miracles and the life to come are a major underlying theme of the book and of Dr. Anderson’s life.

I’ve been derided by the usual suspects for suggesting that what Dr. Anderson himself characterizes as a pivotal, life-altering “dream” about heaven, the next world, and the fate of his murdered family members may, in fact, have been more than a mere dream. I’m said, in fact, to be desperate to view it as veridical, partly because of my alleged personal terror of death. Actually, while I see it as having slight evidentiary value for my position, that value comes mostly from its consistency with a large body of other accounts. By itself, it would be a weak reed, incapable of bearing much weight.

But the fact is that Dr. Anderson himself treats it as more than a mere dream. Repeatedly, throughout the book, he describes what he saw in it as more real than this world. And he plainly doesn’t regard it as just a product of his own subjective imagination. As he says on page 273, “my time in heaven confirmed to me that God was real and he was good.” He believes that he really learned from it important facts about the state and state of mind of his deceased relatives. I’m simply taking seriously what he himself plainly takes seriously.

Some of my critics have actually been trying to write Dr. Anderson’s religious history without having read his book (in which he recounts his religious history, including his youthful reasons for losing his faith) and constructing motives for him, without having read his book. Their speculations are worth roughly what it costs to read them.

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