Critics of the Book of Mormon have without reason asserted that this is plagiarism from Shakespeare. There is not the slightest ground for that assumption. To compare the grave (the Hebrew Sheol) with a country from which a traveler could not return, was but natural to one who as Lehi, had spent so many years traveling and now was nearing the grave. The simile is at once striking and simple and original.
The lines from Shakespeare which have been mentioned as plagiarized are the following, which the immortal bard credits to Hamlet in Act I, scene 3:
... "Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life;
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns—puzzles the will;
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly others that we know not of,"
Shakespeare, it will be observed, considers that our ignorance of the world beyond, on account of absence of communication between the two worlds, keeps some of us from committing suicide, because we prefer battling with the evils with which we are familiar to venturing out against unknown evils. That thought is as far from the expression of Lehi as the east is from the west.
The probability is that Shakespeare borrowed his line from Job and misunderstood it, and therefore gave it a meaning which Job never intended it to have.
Job, speaking of the days of man as few and full of trouble says, in part,
“Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass.” (16:22)
The idea that Job expresses is this that the days and months of man on earth are determined by the Lord, and that no living man can pass those boundaries set for his life. Like the grass and the flowers, man flourishes in the time determined, and then the harvester comes and cuts him down. Job is not speaking of the boundaries between this life and the life hereafter; he is speaking of the days and months which the Almighty, as he understood it, had determined for him on earth. He considered himself as a hireling, who had a certain task to perform before he was entitled to a rest. (See v. 6) The question of the status of the dead in Sheol is not involved in this passage of the Book of Job, although he had wonderfully clear ideas on this subject, as on the subject of the resurrection. (See 19:23-27)