According to David Seely, many of the images of God touching man with his hand in the Old Testament denote sickness, plague, judgment, destruction, and so forth. . . . . The Book of Mormon has a significantly different set of imagery regarding God's positive contacts with man. This set is consistent and well developed throughout the book. Central to it is the image of an embrace, of being circled about by the arms of Christ. The Book of Mormon invites all to "come unto Christ" (1 Nephi 6:4; Moroni 10:32). A profound picture of what this means is frequently given of Christ waiting to embrace -- to encircle with his arms -- his children who come to him . . . Mormon, at the end of his ministry, is saddened by the final destruction of his people because "this people had not repented that they might have been clasped in the arms of Jesus." (Mormon 5:11). "O ye fair ones," he exclaimed, "how could ye have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you!" (Mormon 6:17).
Hugh Nibley has traced the origins of this atonement imagery to a Semitic word that in the Bible is usually translated "atonement." Nibley finds one of the primary meanings of this term to be encircling or surrounding. This means that the embrace imagery in the Book of Mormon is a continuation or variant of a Near Eastern way of speaking. [David Rolph Seely, "The Image of the Hand of God," in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon, p. 149]