In this post, I'd like to give another example where Moroni brackets a long aside with details about the brother of Jared.
The final verse of Ether 3 and first verse of Ether 4 (originally part of the same chapter) read as follows:
28 And it came to pass that the Lord commanded him that he should seal up the two stones which he had received, and show them not, until the Lord should show them unto the children of men. (Ether 3)
1 And the Lord commanded the brother of Jared to go down out of the mount from the presence of the Lord, and write the things which he had seen; and they were forbidden to come unto the children of men until after that he should be lifted up upon the cross; and for this cause did king Mosiah keep them, that they should not come unto the world until after Christ should show himself unto his people. (Ether 4)
We then get a long narrative aside about sealed writings, faith, etc., from Moroni himself (not part of the account he is abridging), after which we resumes the brother of Jared account in Ether 6:
1 And now I, Moroni, proceed to give the record of Jared and his brother.
2 For it came to pass after the Lord had prepared the stones which the brother of Jared had carried up into the mount, the brother of Jared came down out of the mount, and he did put forth the stones into the vessels which were prepared, one in each end thereof; and behold, they did give light unto the vessels. (Ether 6)
This is a really interesting feature of the text. It is worth noting that repetitive resumption is found in the Old Testament, but it was not recognized and described by Bible scholars until long after the publication of the Book of Mormon.
This puts it into a similar (but distinct) category as chiasmus, as a literary technique which is also found in the Bible, but was not described by scholars until well after 1829 when the Book of Mormon text was laid down. Unlike chiasmus, which has a poetic purpose, repetitive resumption has an editorial purpose -- it isn't beautiful, it is functional, and it makes the most sense when writing without modern-day symbols such as parentheses.
So if one wants to assert that Joseph Smith authored the book (which I definitely don't) it would be useful to come up with a way to explain how he managed to seamlessly insert many examples of two different forms of literary repetition, both of which were unrecognized by scholars of his day, both of which retain the underlying usefulness (poetic examples of chiasmus and functional/editorial examples of repetitive resumption). It would be helpful if a critic could point me to examples of repetitive resumption contemporary to Joseph Smith, or something similar. (Some critics make exactly this type of claim about a literary technique known as "ring-form" to explain chiasmus, but I find their overall argument pretty weak).
The faithful perspective needs no such explanation, these literary techniques which had lost their usefulness in our modern language were very useful to scribes trained in a literary system without punctuation or even spaces between words. Chiasmus allows the pattern of repeating characters to point the eye of the reader to a central message. Repetitive resumption allows the reader to reorient into the main narrative flow by noting the repeated characters acting as parentheses around a side comment. Mormon and Moroni were trained in this scribal tradition, so it would be expected to find examples of these techniques in the text, which was revealed to, not authored by Joseph Smith.
