These three phrases are also, of course, found in the King James Version of the Bible, which is no doubt why Joseph Smith used them so often in the BoM; it just sounded so darned biblical. The trouble is that he got carried away with it.
Here's a summary of the occurrences of "Behold," "It came to pass," and "Exceedingly" in the BoM and the King James Version of the Bible. (I haven't highlighted the "beholds" yet in the SABOM, but I'll get to them eventually.)
| BoM | King James Version | |
| Behold | 1669 | 1275 |
| It came to pass | 1424 | 452 |
| Exceedingly | 287 | 39 |
Each of these phrases occurs more often in the BoM than in the Bible, with "exceedingly" occurring over seven times as often. And that's without taking the their sizes into account. The Bible is nearly five times as big as the BoM.
Here's how the comparison looks when size is taken into account.
(Occurrences per 100 verses; 6553 verses in the BoM, 31102 in the Bible)
| BoM | King James Version | |
| Behold | 25.47 | 4.10 |
| It came to pass | 21.7 | 1.45 |
| Exceedingly | 4.38 | 0.13 |
Now let's repeat the analysis using all three of Joseph Smith's favorite phrases.
(Occurrences per 100 verses)
| BoM | King James Version | |
| Behold, it came to pass exceedingly | 51.6 | 5.68 |
So these phrases occur nearly ten times more often in the Book of Mormon as they do in the Bible. (And they occur rarely anywhere else.)
Here's how Richard Dawkins put it on Real Time with Bill Maher.
Joseph Smith made it [The Book of Mormon] up in the 19th century ... in 17th century English.... It's got charlatan written absolutely all over it. How it could have possibly caught on and still be going strong today ... and even having candidates for president is beyond me.
It's beyond me too, but it looks like it is not beyond the GOP.
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