page_title: Golden plates
section_title: Returning the plates
hierarchical_section_title: Golden plates / Story / Returning the plates
caption_attribution_description: English: A 21st century artistic representation of the Golden Plates, Urim and Thummim, Sword of Laban, and Liahona
context_page_description: According to Latter Day Saint belief, the golden plates are the source from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, a sacred text of the faith. Some witnesses described the plates as weighing from 30 to 60 pounds, golden in color, and composed of thin metallic pages engraved with hieroglyphics on both sides and bound with three D-shaped rings.
  Smith said that he found the plates on September 22, 1823, on a hill near his home in Manchester, New York, after the angel Moroni directed him to a buried stone box. He said that the angel prevented him from taking the plates but instructed him to return to the same location in a year. He returned to that site every year, but it was not until September 1827 that he recovered the plates on his fourth annual attempt to retrieve them. He returned home with a heavy object wrapped in a frock, which he then put in a box. He allowed others to heft the box but said that the angel had forbidden him to show the plates to anyone until they had been translated from their original "reformed Egyptian" language.
  Smith dictated the text of the plates while a scribe wrote down the words which would later become the Book of Mormon.
context_section_description: After translation was complete, Smith said he returned the plates to the angel, but he did not elaborate about this experience. According to accounts by several early Mormons, a group of Mormon leaders, including Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and possibly others accompanied Smith and returned the plates to a cave inside the Hill Cumorah. There, Smith is said to have placed the plates on a table near "many wagon loads" of other ancient records, and the Sword of Laban hanging on the cave wall. According to Brigham Young's understanding, which he said that he had gained from Cowdery, on a later visit to the cave, the Sword of Laban was said to be unsheathed and placed over the plates and inscribed with the words: "This sword will never be sheathed again until the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and his Christ."
  Smith taught that part of the golden plates were "sealed." The "sealed" portion is said to contain "a revelation from God, from the beginning of the world to the ending thereof." Many Latter Day Saints believe that the plates will be kept hidden until a future time, when the sealed part will be translated and, according to one early Mormon leader, transferred from the hill to one of the Mormon temples.
  David Whitmer is quoted as stating that he saw just the untranslated portion of the plates sitting on the table with the sword (and also a breastplate). Apparently, Whitmer was aware of expeditions at Cumorah to locate the sealed portion of the plates through "science and mineral rods," which, he said, "testify that they are there."
caption: A 21st-century artistic representation of the Golden plates, Urim and Thummim, Sword of Laban, and Liahona
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