Goff’s conclusion is strengthened when we remember that Mormon could not have had a first-hand account of the abduction, and therefore was required by circumstances to create the text himself. In such a case, structuring the story to fit text from the brass plates would be perfectly understandable.
Tvedtnes suggests that the “feast of the Lord” in Judges 21:19 suggests that the Book of Mormon event may have been a feast as well, probably the Feast of Tabernacles. John W. Welch, Robert F. Smith, and Gordon C. Thomasson suggest that this festival might have occurred on the fifteenth of Av, an ancient “matrimonial holiday for youth” during which maidens would dance. Both of these suggestions have merit in that the Book of Mormon certainly implies a festival occasion. However, it seems unlikely that an Old World festival continued to be practiced more than 450 years later among the Lamanites, who apparently engaged in fairly wholesale rejection of their ancestral religion. Even among the Nephites, the endurance of such a custom seems unlikely. Furthermore, the matrimonial festival on the fifteenth of Av virtually requires the presence of young men to watch and thereby be attracted to the maidens—a detail that contradicts an essential element of the Book of Mormon story in which not even guards were present, even respectfully out of sight of the actual dancing.