The experiment shown in this video is quite interesting.
Ants are presented with a few types of sugar and a few artificial sweeteners. By the end, the ants had left the artificial sweeteners mostly untouched but had interacted heavily with the sugar, carrying most of it away.
This means if you hadn't known which was artificial and which was real, you could have actually tested which was which, reliably, based on the extent to which the ants interacted with them.
I would suggest we might be able to conduct a similar test of scripture, using Joseph Smith's translation of the Bible (JST).
This is similar to the situation with the Kinderhook Plates (KP). They were claimed to be ancient, and people wanted Joseph Smith to translate them. But he did not. In fact, we now know Joseph didn't even attempt a secular translation which many historians and apologists have mistakenly concluded.
The KP is like the artificial sugar, and Joseph Smith is like the ants. Now, it should be noted that the ants did interact a little with the artificial stuff, but quickly realized it was no good.
The most important thing to realize from the outset here is the JST was neither intended nor claimed to be a full correction of the Bible. In fact, according to Apostle George Q. Cannon, Brigham Young recounted Joseph telling him the Lord had restrained him from giving his translation of the Bible "in plainness and fulness," and that Joseph had hoped to one day be able to do so.
So, just because something from the King James Version (KJV) is carried over into the JST does not mean it is part of Joseph Smith's translation.
If you separate what Joseph Smith added from what was carried over from the KJV, instead of seeing it as one united text, some differences become apparent.
As with the KP, until they were proven to be fake in 1981, many church members have felt a need to defend all the details of the Noah flood story.
I do believe Noah was a real prophet, and he built an ark. But I also believe the Book of Mormon when it says many plain and precious truths were lost from the Bible. I believe this applies to both the Old Testament as well as the New Testament.
And of course we naturally want to defend the most beloved stories of the Bible. I suspect this may be one of the reasons the Lord did not allow Joseph to correct things as fully as Joseph would have wanted, lest the world should look upon His restored church as an attack on the Bible.
But what I'm proposing is that Latter-day Saints might not need to feel obligated to defend all the details.
For instance, not just once or twice but all seven times where the Book of Moses refers to the flooding event of Noah, it says "floods," plural, rather than "flood." But whenever the word is carried over from the KJV, Joseph just leaves it as "flood." Just like the ants not bothering to interact very much with the artificial sweeteners.
Seeing the phrasing in Moses about the earth being "covered by floods" as a reference to the number of floods and how widespread they were, rather than covering every inch, is like the phrase "world war" not literally referring to war over every inch of the earth. This would also add some context to claims about everything dying - i.e. that the floods would be so severe that anyone caught in them would die, similar to saying that nothing can survive a nuclear weapon (which doesn't mean a bomb will kill everything on the planet).
And we are all familiar with the claim that the flood covered the mountains. But that line is a word-for-word carry over from the KJV. Of course, just because it is in the KJV doesn't make it false, but it does mean you don't have to die on that hill (no pun intended).
Then there's the curious case of Moses 7:52. The Lord promises that a remnant of the seed of Noah "should always be found among all nations," but that only makes sense if people who are not of the seed of Noah would also be on the earth. Otherwise, who would the seed of Noah be "among?" This reminds me of how the Book of Mormon alludes to other people while the references almost seem inadvertent.
Now, perhaps you are thinking Joseph may not have realized the implications of his wording. But, interestingly enough, Joseph's scribe, John Whitmer, tried at some later point (the ink is much darker) to change the wording in the manuscript in order to get rid of the implication. It was obviously not merely a correction in grammar but a clear change in meaning. See the picture at the bottom of this post, for reference. Nevertheless, the original wording is what made it to publication.
In the JST account of Noah, we can see a clear progression along a spectrum from less problematic to more problematic as we move from Joseph's own added lines, to lines he made small alterations to, to lines Joseph made no changes to.
In terms of what Joseph may have been allowed to change, he may have been allowed to, among other things, add information which scholars of his day had already noted, and would thus not offend or seem to attack the Bible. If so, this may help account for the similarity between some of Joseph's changes and some of the information proposed in the Adam Clarke Bible Commentary. So, rather than saying Joseph took ideas from Clarke, it may be the case that Joseph was allowed to include the things Clarke got right.
So, I think the JST can be seen as somewhat of a hybrid. Some content may be Joseph's elucidation of the original lost ancient text. Some, a matter of Joseph trying to work with the KJV where it includes apocryphal content. And some may be Joseph allowing apocryphal content to carry over without any alteration. The alternative would be for Joseph to delete it, which would be declaring that some of the parts of the Bible don't belong there, which, again, people weren't ready for.
A couple tangential final notes:
I see no reason why Noah couldn't have lived 3,000+ years B.C. and, in fact, if there was a massive reset on civilization, that could account for the coincidence of the "first" written languages cropping up around that time. People may have needed to reinvent language if the "confounding of language" event consisted of written records (and those few elites who would have known how to write) being destroyed by God. The writers of Genesis would have had no personal means of knowing that written language had only been around for such a short while, yet they place the confounding of language within a reasonable margin of error for the Biblical timeline vs modern dating.
Consider this verse of scripture:
Yea, and behold I say unto you, that Abraham not only knew of these things, but there were many before the days of Abraham who were called by the order of God; yea, even after the order of his Son; and this that it should be shown unto the people, a great many thousand years before his coming, that even redemption should come unto them.
(Helaman 8:18, emphasis added)
Consider the significance of those words: "a great many thousand years."
This could mean a very large number of years, potentially.
And, of course, I realize the scriptures give us some genealogy concerning who begat who, but this could easily be a record of notable names rather than every descendant. For instance, I am a "son of Abraham," yet Abraham lived 4,000 years ago. The New Testament starts out in Matthew with the words, "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." Or, in reverse it could be said, "Abraham begat David, David begat Jesus Christ." I realize the Bible says that specific people lived certain numbers of years and begat other specific persons. But in light of the fact that we may say David begat Jesus, it may just be the case that at a certain age a particular named person in the Bible begat the lineage from which their said descendant came. For instance, we might ask at what age David begat Jesus. The answer may be the age at which David begat Solomon, from whom Jesus came. This might not seem to be appropriate terminology in modern-day English, but then again it also would not "seem" appropriate to us today to say that Jesus was the son of David, or that David was the son of Abraham, and thus to omit everyone in-between. So it would be very hasty for us to assume that the Bible is telling us that a person was born at or even close to the time they are listed as being "begat."
For those interested in a more thorough treatment of this issue, research the word "begat" (the Hebrew word, "yalad") and the Hebrew word, "ben," Also, I find this article by Jeff Lindsay on D&C 77 and the Age of the Earth quite insightful.
As for the John Whitmer change in wording which I referenced above:
click to enlarge the below image
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