Egyptian Heiroglyphics, Joseph Smith, Book of Abraham, Oh My!

One of the interesting facets of Mormonism is the fact that Joseph Smith can be directly tested as a translator. Joseph Smith purchased two Egyptian papyrus scrolls from a traveling antiquities dealer named Michael Chandler. When he began translating some of the scrolls, he told his followers that he had discovered a scroll with a lost book of Abraham. Then, he said that the other scroll was a lost book of Joseph written by Joseph when he was in Pharoah's court in Egypt. Joseph Smith published his book of Abraham in Nauvoo, along with three facsimilies that he copied from the Egyptian papyri. However, he was murdered before he published more of the Book of Abraham, and the book of Joseph. The papyri were eventually lost, and forgotten.

However, in the 1960's they were rediscovered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They were bound to a kind of backing material, and this backing had maps of 1830's Kirtland, Ohio written on it. One of the sheets looked almost identical to Facsimile one from the set of facsimilies published by Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith had written some notes on the Papyri, and he had copied some of the characters in the exact order on which they were found in the papyri. That pretty much sealed the deal that these were the same papyri that Joseph Smith used in translating the Book of Abraham.

However, the disappointment came when Egyptologists went to translate the text. They were nothing more than scrolls from the Book of Breathings, a spell book which enabled an Egyptian man to make it into the afterlife after death.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints makes all of their scriptures available online including The Book of Abraham. I am not yet good enough in Heiroglyphics to translate the Book of Breathings. It is poetry, and poetry is the most difficult writing in any language to translate. However, I have been translating several Egyptian narratives, such as The Shipwrecked Sailor, and The Eloquent Phesant. Thus, I can say with certainty that the style of the Book of Abraham is not something that corresponds to the way Egyptian narratives are written. It sounds much more like a translation from Hebrew, which would make sense, since Joseph Smith was studying Hebrew at the time he "translated" the Book of Abraham. Dr Robert Ritner, a professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago who was commissioned to do an entire translation of Joseph Smith's scroll, makes the same observation when he says that "The narrative style of the Book of Abraham does not correspond to Egyptian verbiage" [From the Institute for Religious Research's video documentary The Lost Book of Abraham]. Also, my professor, who is both an Egyptologist and a Hebrew Scholar, has told me that scrolls of the Book of Breathings that were put in the coffins of deceased Egyptians was a practice that did not exist until around the time of Christ, thousands of years after Abraham.

It is an interesting, and very fruitful discussion to have with Mormon missionaries when they come to your door. Also, an excellent video documentary put out by the Institute for Religious Research called The Lost Book of Abraham is currently available online. Though it is around an hour long, it is very educational, and well worth the time to sit and watch it:

Richard Elliot Freedman and Mormonism

I usually listen to Dr. James White's program The Dividing Line when I can. While I don't agree with Dr. White on all issues [paedobaptism, amillenialism, etc.], I really respect the work that he does in the countercult ministry. Dr. White inspired me to start dealing with the documentary hypothesis, and I have covered a whole lot of ground. The hardest part of the documentary hypothesis is trying to figure out how most scholars categorize each section of the Pentatuch. I have been spending time doing reading on that topic, but, as a grammarian, I also have been doing tons of reading on Hebrew grammar, and comparative semetics as that is my main area of interest.

Anyway, I was listening to yesterday's program, and I heard a call from a Mormon gentleman. The conversation was very polite, but I was somewhat disturbed at the sources the Mormon gentleman was using. Now, I will admit, I am not a scholar of Mormonism. What little I know comes from a few phone calls I have heard on Dr. White's program. However, as a Hebrew student, I was greatly distressed at some of the arguments he was making. I would like to address some of them here, and deal with them individually.

First of all, he quoted from Richard Elliot Freedman's work Commentary on the Torah. Freedman is a strong advocate of the documentary hypothesis, who has published books for Harper SanFrancisco, the same company that put out Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, and the outragious media propaganda book, The Jesus Family Tomb. Needless to say, this work is not an overly conservative work. In it, Freedman says the following:

1:2 The earth had been. Here is a case in which a tiny point of grammar makes a difference for theology. In the Hebrew of this verse, the noun comes before the verb (in the perfect form). This is now known to be the way of conveying the past perfect in Biblical Hebrew. This point of grammar means that this verse does not mean "The earth was shapeless and formless"-referring to the condition of the earth starting the instant after it was created. This verse rather means that "The earth had been shapeless and formless"-that is, it had already existed in this shapeless condition prior to the creation. Creation of matter in the Torah is not out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), as many have claimed. And the Torah is not claiming to be telling events from the beginning of time.

It is very difficult to know why Freedman holds this position. What he is referring to is the fact that the construction of the beginning of 1:2 is noun+suffix tense verb. What he seems to be saying is that, you would use this construction in Biblical Hebrew, if you wanted to convey the idea of the past perfect as we have it in English. In essence, if you have this construction, the prefix tense will always have the perfective aspect.

The strange thing is that this view has numerious problems. First of all, to say that it is "known to be a way of conveying the past perfect" is an overstatement. I have looked in several grammars [Gesenius, Waltke, Jouon-Markoa, Chisholm, etc.] and not only did I not find such a rule, but worse than that, I found that it was translated as "the earth was" in virtually every citation.

Not only that, but I have done my own grammatical study of the construction. Here are some counter examplesory:

1 Samuel 3:1 Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the LORD before Eli. And word from the LORD was rare [rq'y" hy"Üh' hw"©hy>-rb;d>W] in those days, visions were infrequent.

It would simply be untrue to say that the word of the Lord had been rare. Given the fact that the author of 1 Samuel acknowledges the Exodus from Egypt [1 Samuel 12:6, 8], it would be odd for him to say that there had been infrequent revelations in those days, as there were visions all throughout the pentatuch and the books of Joshua through Ruth.

1 Kings 16:21 Then the people of Israel were divided into two parts: half of the people followed Tibni [ynIÜb.ti yrE’x]a; hy"h'û ~['øh' yci’x]] the son of Ginath, to make him king; the other half followed Omri.

You would have to translate the text "Then the people of Israel were divided into two parts: half of the people had followed Tibni...the other half had followed Omri." if you followed what Freedman said. The embarrassing thing about this text is that you would then be caught caught believing that they text says the people were divided before they were divided. Imagine if I said:

I went out to Pizza Hut, and purchased a Pizza. Then, I divided the pizza into two parts. I had given half of the pizza to my friend, and half of the pizza to my parents.

That is utter nonsense because it means that the division of the Pizza took place before the division of the pizza. There is no way I could give half of the pizza to my parents, and half of the pizza to my friend unless It had already been divided. Thus, I am saying that I divided the pizza before I divided it. Likewise, Freedman is trying to say that the above text is saying that the people were divided before they were actually divided.

Another thing that makes this position so controversial is the fact that he does not lay out a theory for other verbal forms. We need to understand that many times the correctness of this theory depends upon how you take the other verbs in the context. For instance, take Genesis 25:3:

Genesis 25:3 Jokshan fathered [dl;êy"] Sheba and Dedan. The sons of Dedan were Asshurim, Letushim, and Leummim [~yMi(aul.W ~yviÞWjl.W ~rIïWVa; Wy°h' !d"êd> ynEåb.W].

Notice, that, in order to take the phrase Wy°h' !d"êd> ynEåb.W as a past perfect, you must also take dl;êy" as a past perfect. If dl;êy" is a simple past, then the text becomes utter nonsense, because it would read "Jokshan fathered Sheba and Dedan. The sons of Dedan had been Assurim..." That would make the text mean that Dedan had sons before he was ever born which would be a ludicrious meaning.

Of course, the perfect tense can also be translated as the past perfect, and I think Freedman would probably want to argue that dl;êy" is a past perfect. However, it begs the question as to how he knows that the dl;êy" should be taken as a past perfect. He cannot answer "because of the rule," or he begs the question. In essence, because of the fact that so many of these instances depend upon having a full understanding of the temporal aspects of the Hebrew verbal system, one would already have to have a full knowledge of the temporal aspects of the Hebrew verbal system before one could even make such a statement. The problem is that no such knowledge exists. The theories are legion, but they are just that...theories.

Also, I think it is worth noting that the Septuagint translates ht'îy>h' with the imperfect verb h=n, and the Latin Vulgate follows suit translating it with the imperfect "erat."

Also, I think Dr. White did an excellent job of dismantling the man's use of the term ~yhi_l{a/. He was certainly right, that it is something you learn in first year Hebrew. Also, something Dr. White didn't mention is that, while ~yhi_l{a/ does have a plural ending, the verb ar"äB' is singular. If it was more than one God that was being talked about, one would expect a plural [not a singular] verb.

Edit: I actually stopped listening a little early to the phone call [I got a little annoyed that a Mormon would use this kind of liberal scholarship, and stopped a little early]. Dr. White *did* mention what I did about the fact that ar"äB' is a singular verb. Just a correction.