Let’s think more deeply about Moroni’s visit to Joseph Smith the night of September 21st, 1823 in honor of its 200th anniversary. You can read about this night in Joseph Smith—History 1:27–54. Let’s estimate how much Moroni might have communicated to Joseph.

In that day, people typically went to bed not long after sundown, which on that day in New York was at 6:53 PM, and the sun rose the next day near 6:43 AM.  From dusk to dawn was about 12 hours long, so the dark of night would have been about 10 hours. It is possible, with gaps between visits Moroni’s visits (which seem to be very short) and ended at a cock crow, Joseph spent a total of 8 hours with Moroni. Eight hours divided 3 visits means each visit was 2 hours and 40 minutes, or 160 minutes.

How much might have Moroni communicated in that time? An analysis of TED talks “found that the average speaking rate was 173 words per minute, but ranged from 154 to 201 words per minute” (“Average Speaking Rate and Words per Minute” by Dom Barnard).  The total length of 160 minutes times 173 words per minute equals 27,000 words per interview. 

A perfect, resurrected being who had prepared for the interview (see “The Language of the Original Text of the Book of Mormon” for hints of this possibility) it seems could easily speak 30,000 words per interview. Including the next day’s interview, it would be a total of nearly 120,000 words!

Joseph’s description of the interviews, from beginning his prayer to telling his father of them is almost exactly 1,500 words (JS-History 1:30-50). If we count the words in the cited scriptural quotations, we add another 1,500 words.

We have perhaps 10% of what Moroni told Joseph in one of the interviews that night, or if all 3,000 words recorded were repeated in each interview, at most 10% of the total as well. We might have recorded as low as 2.5% of the total spoken in all the interviews.

This blog post is less than 400 words. You could read it 300 times to approximate 120,000 words. The Book of Mormon itself contains approximately 270,000 words. Joseph might have heard contents—portions repeated admittedly—approaching nearly half of that book.

That’s a lot of teaching from a heavenly messenger.