LDS and ancient record...

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ParkerD said:
Hi, Jerusha,

I don’t think that passage is either poorly written or hard to understand, nor that it presents “irregular quality of writing.”

I really think anyone such as Jockers who purports to examine the Book of Mormon as to its authenticity, would need to first have a very studied and knowledgeable background in Hebrew writing. It would also help if they become familiar with stream-of-consciousness writing, so that when they see what they think is a “run-on” sentence or a sentence with a lot of tangential ideas and concepts, then they may at least have a background that will help them understand the genre they are examining.

Have a nice day.
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Ok, I’m a little confused here. Was the BoM written in Hebrew? I thought it was an American English translation of something referred to as ‘Reformed Egyptian’. A language which no one can find any evidence of. If that is the case then what would Hebrew have to do with it?
 
vsedriver said:
Ok, I’m a little confused here. Was the BoM written in Hebrew? I thought it was an American English translation of something referred to as ‘Reformed Egyptian’. A language which no one can find any evidence of. If that is the case then what would Hebrew have to do with it?
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I think Mormons understand “Reformed Egyptian” to be the same as Demotic Egyptian, the last phase of the Egyptian language before Egypt was conquered by the Arabs.
 
vsedriver said:
Ok, I’m a little confused here. Was the BoM written in Hebrew? I thought it was an American English translation of something referred to as ‘Reformed Egyptian’. A language which no one can find any evidence of. If that is the case then what would Hebrew have to do with it?
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vsedriver,

The writers in the Book of Mormon refer to “Hebrew” as their sacred language of communication, and the Book of Mormon is a translation of their sacred history. They used a form of Egyptian hieroglyphics that they developed using their knowledge of commerce and interchange within those cultures of the time of 600 BC, to have a writing form that took up less space than if they had written in Hebrew.

So their spoken religious heritage language was evidently Hebrew, and they chose to create a hieroglyphic writing using Egyptian as the “example” of how they would do that within their own culture and religious history.

There would be no perfect match with Egyptian hieroglyphics, because they only used Egyptian hieroglyphics as a take-off point, but still had their Hebraic background for their verbal language.
 
ParkerD said:
vsedriver,

The writers in the Book of Mormon refer to “Hebrew” as their sacred language of communication, and the Book of Mormon is a translation of their sacred history. They used a form of Egyptian hieroglyphics that they developed using their knowledge of commerce and interchange within those cultures of the time of 600 BC, to have a writing form that took up less space than if they had written in Hebrew.

So their spoken religious heritage language was evidently Hebrew, and they chose to create a hieroglyphic writing using Egyptian as the “example” of how they would do that within their own culture and religious history.

There would be no perfect match with Egyptian hieroglyphics, because they only used Egyptian hieroglyphics as a take-off point, but still had their Hebraic background for their verbal language.
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I thought there weren’t any actual examples of “reformed Egyptian” script.
 
Jerusha said:
At this point in my research, I wish Jockers *et al *had included Ethan Smith’s writings in the study. He was a good writer, well-informed, and we have a solid connection between him and the Joseph Smith Sr. family, through Oliver Cowdery.

This book books.google.com/books?id=kTEAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=ethan+smith+key+prophecies&source=bl&ots=DvnGeoAXTL&sig=xgObcgYJI-X1zDTWB0cUvv38TL4&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false contains the same kind of virulent anti-Catholicism as found in the Book of Mormon, and of course, his fantasies of deporting Native Americans to Palestine, found in View of the Hebrews, matches well with the Book of Mormon. I think that this is at the core of BH Roberts’ findings.

I need to do some more work on the passage which Parker highlighted.
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Whenever View of the Hebrews is touted, it always begs the question of where one might turn in order to obtain a copy of this smoking gun that proves beyond doubt to have been the source of the BOM. After all, it ranks as probably the most cited source by the book’s critics in their efforts to offer an alternate explanation for the Nephite scripture. And an alternative is indeed warranted if we are to reject the tale of its coming forth as told by rustic Joe Smith, who certainly couldn’t have produced the thing himself.

Surely the attitude of the Mormons would be to suppress View of the Hebrews (even though that concept is seldom expressed on this site :D). It hadn’t been published since 1825 and copies were very hard to come by. If the book is all the critics claim it to be, it would seem to me that the best course for the LDS would be to let it crumble to the dust, leaving it with no referential integrity.

But they didn’t do that. So if you need a copy of View of the Hebrews, you need look no futher than the BYU Religious Studies Center, which in 1996 republished the 1825 2nd edition of View of the Hebrews by Charles D. Tate, Jr. This of course begs another question: If View of the Hebrews is so devastating to the BOM, why did the Mormons publish Tate’s book? Answer: It’s just not the petard the critics thought. It sends no chill down Mormon spines because it’s more an unparallel of the BOM that it is a similarity, and is a poor candidate to serve as the source of Mormon’s book (kinda like Romney is a poor candidate to serve as President of the United States, if I do say so myself).
 
When looking at Egypt, it was the figure of being in exile and oppression, and how God saved them from Egypt, rather implying not seeing as a source to uphold faith in the coming Messiah.

Just as the Jewish people were in exile and destined to bring forth the Messiah from their race, Christ Himself was sent in exile as a small child in the beginning of revealed time.
 
Lefty0908 said:
Just as there aren’t any original manuscripts of any of the books of the Bible. No examples. Not one.
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But the question wasn’t about manuscripts of the BOM it was about examples of “reformed Egyptian”.
 
Lefty0908 said:
Surely the attitude of the Mormons would be to suppress View of the Hebrews.
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The book I linked to is not VotH. It is another work by Ethan Smith which also contains many similarities with the BoM. VotH is here, books.google.com/books?id=_nAWAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=view+of+the+hebrews&hl=en#v=onepage&q=view%20of%20the%20hebrews&f=false

Both books, VotH and Key to Revelation, taken together, strengthen the argument. Oliver Cowdery was one of Ethan Smith’s sheep. And Ethan Smith and Solomon Spalding both attended Dartmouth College, which taught the Jewish origins theory. I am SURE they did not agree on many things.

As for Key to Revelation, most Catholics who would read it would get the same feelings of revulsion that I did. It is such a sicko work that it is not a threat to faith, just a picture of American anti-Catholic rhetoric that was rampant in the early 1800’s.

The people at Dartmouth really struggled against the progress that the Catholic church made in their missionary activities with the Natives. They finally gave it up. The Catholic competition was just too much. The were probably quite angry and bitter.
puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/relations/
 
zaffiroborant said:
But the question wasn’t about manuscripts of the BOM it was about examples of “reformed Egyptian”.
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The only “examples” of which I’m aware were some that circulated years ago. They were supposedly characters that Joseph Smith copied from the plates and gave to Martin Harris. But as it turned out, they were Mark Hofmann forgeries (one of the brigher episodes in our history 😊).

Oh, yeah, and in keeping with my lousy proof reading, my previous post attributing View of the Hebrews to Charles Tate is a mistake. Tate was the editor of the 2nd edition of VofH published in 1825, not the author, who of course was Ethan Smith.
 
Jerusha said:
The book I linked to is not VotH. It is another work by Ethan Smith which also contains many similarities with the BoM. VotH is here, books.google.com/books?id=_nAWAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=view+of+the+hebrews&hl=en#v=onepage&q=view%20of%20the%20hebrews&f=false

Both books, VotH and Key to Revelation, taken together, strengthen the argument. Oliver Cowdery was one of Ethan Smith’s sheep. And Ethan Smith and Solomon Spalding both attended Dartmouth College, which taught the Jewish origins theory. I am SURE they did not agree on many things.

As for Key to Revelation, most Catholics who would read it would get the same feelings of revulsion that I did. It is such a sicko work that it is not a threat to faith, just a picture of American anti-Catholic rhetoric that was rampant in the early 1800’s.

The people at Dartmouth really struggled against the progress that the Catholic church made in their missionary activities with the Natives. They finally gave it up. The Catholic competition was just too much. The were probably quite angry and bitter.
puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/relations/
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I think A Key to Revelation was published in 1833, so I don’t know what impact it would have had on the Book of Mormon, which was first published in 1830. Certainly the speculation about the relationship of E. Smith and the Cowdery family in Poultney is interesting, but in my mind it remains in the realm of mere speculation.
 
He had been working on it many years. In fact, parts of it were published in his earlier books. 🙂

Go to pages 130-150 (text, not PDF) and you will find him referring to what seems to be the BoM. His discussion of Rev 10.
 
zaffiroborant said:
There aren’t.
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So let me back up (and kick myself a little for overstating things and coming off badly 😊). If I’ve finally got my head screwed on straight, it would seem (given Jerusha’s sample) that there are at least a few examples of what could be considered reformed Egyptian.
 
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