You already know the Book of Mormon’s most repeated promise: “inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land.”

You have read it so many times that it has become background noise. But here is what almost no one stops to ask: where did that formula come from?

The answer is the Old Testament—and specifically, a three-thousand-year-old diplomatic tradition that governed every major empire in the ancient world.

Once you see that, the Book of Mormon’s promise stops being background noise and starts being a precise covenantal document.

And the Old Testament, which many Latter-day Saints find distant and difficult, snaps into focus as the place where everything began.