Brian Hales latest BOM presentation -- dictation vs loose translation

[cinepro]

41 minutes ago, churchistrue said:

Your answer is D&C 9:8.

Okay, what do you think the Lord was telling Oliver to do?  He was supposed to look at a page of foreign characters and do what?  "Study" it?  How long would he have to look at it before he started to figure it out?

He's supposed to figure something out, and only then ask the Lord if it is right.

So he does...what?  He looks at the page and thinks...hmmmm...is this about a guy named "Jose"?

"No."

"Bill?"

"No."

"Zedekiah?"

"No"

"Mohammed?"

"No."

(Thinks: Okay, I'll make something up...)

"Jerumummum?"

"Yes, my son, you guessed correctly."

(Thinks: Okay, what is Jerumummum doing?"

"Is he walking in a forest?"

"No."

"Is he swimming in a lake?"

"No."

....and so on.

 

Yeah, D&C 9:8 makes perfect sense for how you would translate something with the help of the Lord.

[clarkgoble]

14 minutes ago, cinepro said:

So he does...what?  He looks at the page and thinks...hmmmm...is this about a guy named "Jose"?

[...]

Yeah, D&C 9:8 makes perfect sense for how you would translate something with the help of the Lord.

That'd be an extremely inefficient way of doing it. A better way would be to think of a taxonomy. So you might ask, "object or action." You feel object is right. You narrow it down further. "person, animal or other." You get person. You then keep narrowing it down until you get a pronoun, a name, or a category (like man). 

Again, not suggesting that's how it happened. The few descriptions we have don't suggest a long enough time between words for that to be going on. 

Maybe I just play 20 questions while driving with my kids too much but that's how I'd approach it if I had to studying it out in my head and converge on sentences. Now it'd probably be easier for you and I since we are educated enough to know the structure of language a fair bit. If Joseph did it in that manner and was relatively uneducated about grammar and taxonomies then I'm sure it'd still be extremely difficult. 

It's worth noting that the process for the early part of the 116 pages may have been quite different from what happens by the time he gets to Mosiah. You'd imagine that if it is a conceptual translation that he'd get much faster. So one obvious test that might get at certain elements is simply to ask how much was translated originally. Unfortunately since he lost the 116 pages we really can't say that for sure. It'd be a fascinating question to ask though and might give us some information had we Harris' original sheets what was going on. Probably not enough to fully decide between tight control and loose control, but at least some info.

My guess of "study it out in your mind" relative to the Spectacles or seer stone is some mental effort required to get the reception working, not that it's akin to 20 questions.

Edited August 22, 2019 by clarkgoble

[cinepro]

36 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Say he's given vague ideas (not words) like: "Continuance" "new event" "self/reflective" "Nephi" "created/birthed" "out of" "parents" "support". Joseph then, because of his familiarity with other texts interprets that as "and it came to pass I Nephi being born of goodly parents..." Note how the ordering can change as Joseph makes more concrete the ideas and paraphrases it to create a sentence. Now do I think that happened? Not particularly but I suppose we have to acknowledge it as possible.

I'm not sure that gets us too far (and is why I'm sympathetic to Cowdery here). How do you get started? Do you just start picking random words or broad but vague concepts and asking God if they're right? That said, I agree with you that I think any discussion of the translation process has to explain D&C 9. The assumption that it was true for Cowdery but not Joseph seems problematic. Of course there's the added issue of what Cowdery was using to do the translation. Was he using a seer stone? Was he using a dowsing rod? Was he just praying about it in his head? That's a bit unclear. With Joseph at least his early statements about the seer stone suggest it just worked. (Although some of those are late and with his mother's treatment, highly stylized and refined after numerous tellings)

That said, the main argument against tight control is D&C 9 although it doesn't totally resolve the issue. After all D&C 9 could be followed in a manner akin to 20 questions where you keep asking until you narrow it down to the correct English word.

Thank you for being the first person to actually try to suggest a workable scenario (and my other post illustrates my agreement with your D&C 9 observations).

One interesting thing to do would be to see if there is any discernible progression in precision and complexity in the text as the book progresses.

It also doesn't account for the theory that there are different styles to the writing by the different authors of the book, and things like Hebraisms that were preserved.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again.  Apologists need both the "loose" and "tight" theories to be valid, with the ability for them to wear them on their sides like guns in a holster that they can use to shoot down all the anachronisms in the book.  Neither theory on its own is useful, because it doesn't explain too much of the other stuff in the book (and therefore quickly leads to more temporal explanations which sometimes can explain that stuff).

So "loose" or "tight"?  Both, as needed.  Sometimes in the same chapter, as if Joseph were at one moment reading the precise words in a chiastic pattern and then the next moment being given vague thoughts and images that he describes using 16th century English as filtered through his early 19th century culture and life experiences.

Isn't it marvelous?

[clarkgoble]

19 minutes ago, cinepro said:

It also doesn't account for the theory that there are different styles to the writing by the different authors of the book, and things like Hebraisms that were preserved.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again.  Apologists need both the "loose" and "tight" theories to be valid, with the ability for them to wear them on their sides like guns in a holster that they can use to shoot down all the anachronisms in the book.  Neither theory on its own is useful, because it doesn't explain too much of the other stuff in the book (and therefore quickly leads to more temporal explanations which sometimes can explain that stuff).

I'm skeptical of a lot of Hebraisms. I suspect some are linguistic artifacts (perhaps of EModE if that pans out) while others can be explained by the KJV. Even ones not in the KJV. An anology would be a neural network trained on the relationship between Hebrew texts and the KJV. It'd learn patterns that would be broader than what actually appear in the KJV text since it's extrapolating patterns. On the other hand a more statistical styled translation like the old Google translation model most likely wouldn't produce as many. Although I should note that back in the 90's Royal Skousen produced this extremely fascinating set of texts on statistical modeling of linguistic evolution. He could show how language pronunciation would change as foreign words entered the language. I don't think it caught on too well but I had the opportunity of seeing him demo his code back in the 90's and it was really interesting. So depending upon the type of model you make you could actually have hebraisms that are artifacts of the translation method.

To your later point, again I'd distinguish between tight control and tight translation. I think the question of control is, for the most part, irrelevant for apologetic defenses except to the degree it eliminates Joseph as author. Even if you have tight control that at best pushes the question back a level to whomever or whatever does the translation. I think the reason some are interested in the question is more for curiosity over what can be discerned for the available evidence not because it's apologetically useful. The question of textual fidelity or what I call loose translation is important primarily because we have to explain the presence of the KJV text where it is extremely unlikely to be on the original text. Whether that means it's always that loose seems a more difficult question. I think apologists can simply differ on that. So some might favor a combination of loose and tight textual fidenlity while others more skeptical of Hebraisms might simply favor it being mostly loose. 

(Sorry -- written way too much this afternoon. I'll shutup for a day and let others talk for a while)

Edited August 22, 2019 by clarkgoble

[champatsch]

42 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

7 hours ago, champatsch said:

Maybe cultural and dynamic are better descriptors of the translation. Dynamic captures that the translation is probably a mixture of literal and conceptual. Cultural captures that the translation could have shifted some ancient cultural terms to different modern terms.

I'm not sure that ends up being that helpful. I think what you mean by cultural is semantic drift. i.e. a Spaniard using "bow" to describe an "atlatl." It seems to me that more just acknowledges that both connotation and denotation can change in different environments even when doing a relatively strict word level translation. Typically by finding a nearest neighbor fit in terms of resemblance between the properties of what is referenced. i.e. deer and cow have many similar properties - more than say cow and table.

What I'm calling loose is more about textual variance above the word level. That could be the sentence fragment level, the sentence level, or even larger levels. I think that whoever or however the translation was done, that in terms of word level fidelity it's a loose translation. There's really no other way to explain post-exilic quotations or paraphrases except by postulating that Moroni had read and was deeply familiar with the greek and hebrew texts of the post-Christian era. While possible and something apologists have postulated, it seems dubious and at minimum is a huge assumption. 

I was thinking about "bar of God", which I've heard wasn't an ancient term, yet there it is in the Book of Mormon six times. If it wasn't an ancient term, then "God's bar" wasn't part of the ancient text.

And yes, some biblical quotations and blendings appear to be the result of conceptual or creative renderings.

 

[champatsch]

19 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I'm skeptical of a lot of Hebraisms. I suspect some are linguistic artifacts (perhaps of EModE if that pans out) while others can be explained by the KJV. Even ones not in the KJV. An anology would be a neural network trained on the relationship between Hebrew texts and the KJV. It'd learn patterns that would be broader than what actually appear in the KJV text since it's extrapolating patterns. On the other hand a more statistical styled translation like the old Google translation model most likely wouldn't produce as many. Although I should note that back in the 90's Royal Skousen produced this extremely fascinating set of texts on statistical modeling of linguistic evolution. He could show how language pronunciation would change as foreign words entered the language. I don't think it caught on too well but I had the opportunity of seeing him demo his code back in the 90's and it was really interesting. So depending upon the type of model you make you could actually have hebraisms that are artifacts of the translation method.

Yes, even the odd use of and in the text turns out to be distinguishable from strict Hebrew usage since it only occurs in the Book of Mormon after complex subordinate clauses, not after simple clauses.

Notice that this is the bad grammar, par excellence, that Joseph Smith would not have generated from his own grammar, whether he was making the text up or wording it from revealed ideas. This then leads the grammarian to question what other bad grammar might not have been his, and it turns out that there are plenty of good candidates.

[Brant Gardner]

6 hours ago, champatsch said:

it turns out that there are plenty of good candidates.

Please name some.

[churchistrue]

14 hours ago, cinepro said:

Okay, what do you think the Lord was telling Oliver to do?  He was supposed to look at a page of foreign characters and do what?  "Study" it?  How long would he have to look at it before he started to figure it out?

He's supposed to figure something out, and only then ask the Lord if it is right.

So he does...what?  He looks at the page and thinks...hmmmm...is this about a guy named "Jose"?

"No."

"Bill?"

"No."

"Zedekiah?"

"No"

"Mohammed?"

"No."

(Thinks: Okay, I'll make something up...)

"Jerumummum?"

"Yes, my son, you guessed correctly."

(Thinks: Okay, what is Jerumummum doing?"

"Is he walking in a forest?"

"No."

"Is he swimming in a lake?"

"No."

....and so on.

 

Yeah, D&C 9:8 makes perfect sense for how you would translate something with the help of the Lord.

What if it was something like that? I'm trying to think of a model that would allow for all anachronisms yet still be inspired. What if the "translation" process was something like that and started in 1823. What if during this time Joseph simply received vague impressions, sort of like a non-linear dream, or flashbacks piecing things together from old memories. 

Then, the dictation process came in the 85 days while Joseph was locked on with the seer stone, pulling all the translation from his own brain he had been working on, and refined by the Holy Ghost in the moment to know what to include and exclude and maybe even at times the Holy Ghost completely overrode him and put words on the seer stone he hadn't even though of previously.

 

 

[mfbukowski]

On 8/21/2019 at 2:47 PM, champatsch said:

As a revelation of words, Joseph’s translation was a conveyance of the book’s words from one condition to another—in this case, from the divine to the temporal. The general sense of ‘conveyance’ is set forth as the first definition of the noun translation and the verb translate in the OED. Thus, even though ‘conveyance’ is not the default meaning for us today, it is nevertheless a primary meaning of the term translation. In addition, Joseph acted as a retransmitter of revealed words, and retransmitter is another relevant definition of translator found in dictionaries, including the OED

Bravo.

This was precisely my view when I joined the church 40 years ago, and so it remains. And I believe this also applies to the book of Abraham. 

In my view it doesn't even need to be historical but an extended parable.

Of course at this time we cannot "prove" if it was a historical or not, however, I believe that what Joseph thought he was doing was more translation than revelation.

In my opinion this view sweeps away all of the alleged problems with both books.

[stemelbow]

19 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Bravo.

This was precisely my view when I joined the church 40 years ago, and so it remains. And I believe this also applies to the book of Abraham. 

In my view it doesn't even need to be historical but an extended parable.

Of course at this time we cannot "prove" if it was a historical or not, however, I believe that what Joseph thought he was doing was more translation than revelation.

In my opinion this view sweeps away all of the alleged problems with both books.

it can't possible sweep away all the problems.  I think you mean to say it sweeps away the problems associated with was it composed anciently.  Of course we still have the problem of things like racism, sexism, and simplistic black and white propositions.  

[clarkgoble]

16 hours ago, champatsch said:

I was thinking about "bar of God", which I've heard wasn't an ancient term, yet there it is in the Book of Mormon six times. If it wasn't an ancient term, then "God's bar" wasn't part of the ancient text.

And yes, some biblical quotations and blendings appear to be the result of conceptual or creative renderings.

I've not really followed all the Hebrewism debates, but unless I'm mistaken isn't there a debate between Skousen and others over whether it's a pleading bar or a pleasing bar? I confess this is one I wasn't that familiar with. So forgive my relative ignorance here. I know that the modern notion of a judgment bar came out of medieval juris history where there was a literal divider in a courtroom. Those on one side are the officials in the trial, the jury and lawyers. The area behind the bar is the public. Yet maybe I'm missing something but despite it's metaphoric use in statements about justice in the modern and contemporary era, it doesn't make much sense to me like that in the Book of Mormon. It's certainly plausible that this is an artifact of a loose translation using a 19th (or 16th) century metonym for the legal officiers simply because that's how people spoke. Doing a quick google there's a lot of use relative to justice both secular legal but also as a theological term.

I'll confess that the way I've always read the variants of this was more in terms of the rod and staff of ancient rulers. So to me rod, staff, and bar are all loosely synonymous in the Book of Mormon. I don't read the iron rod as a bannister leading the way to the tree of life but rather a shepherd's rod that people grab onto in order to be led through rough terrain. Likewise whether one is pleading to the bar or seeing it as pleasing (because one is just) the idea is more of divine justice. If one allies oneself to the divine king the rod/bar leads one through danger. If one opposes the divine king then it is a weapon of judgment against them. So I confess that to me the iron rod and the bar of God are synonyms.

In this interpretation the bar of God and all it's BoM variants seems pretty standard pre-Hellenistic ANE stuff. But I can also see it as a loose translation of something like judgment seat in terms of 19th century court practice. Except that the Book of Mormon regularly uses judgement seat so that would seem an odd choice.

The question is how to distiguish between the two. Further, even if there is a loose translation, could a phrase meaning this ANE sense get corrupted by semantic drift into the 19th century courtroom sense. Again to be clear, in terms of court and judgment drama, both senses work. It's just that one originates in the medieval era while one is tied to divine kingship. For various reasons I think the divine kingship metaphor is more apt to be what Nephi intended.

Edited August 23, 2019 by clarkgoble

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, stemelbow said:

Of course we still have the problem of things like racism, sexism, and simplistic black and white propositions.  

In the BOM and BOA?

Where?

[cinepro]

6 hours ago, churchistrue said:

What if it was something like that? I'm trying to think of a model that would allow for all anachronisms yet still be inspired. What if the "translation" process was something like that and started in 1823. What if during this time Joseph simply received vague impressions, sort of like a non-linear dream, or flashbacks piecing things together from old memories. 

Then, the dictation process came in the 85 days while Joseph was locked on with the seer stone, pulling all the translation from his own brain he had been working on, and refined by the Holy Ghost in the moment to know what to include and exclude and maybe even at times the Holy Ghost completely overrode him and put words on the seer stone he hadn't even though of previously.

Whatever works for you, I guess.

Of course, one could wonder why you're limiting yourself to models that are "still inspired"?  What would happen if you opened up your search to look at models that includes those that aren't "inspired"?

[champatsch]

3 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

I've not really followed all the Hebrewism debates, but unless I'm mistaken isn't there a debate between Skousen and others over whether it's a pleading bar or a pleasing bar? I confess this is one I wasn't that familiar with. So forgive my relative ignorance here. I know that the modern notion of a judgment bar came out of medieval juris history where there was a literal divider in a courtroom. Those on one side are the officials in the trial, the jury and lawyers. The area behind the bar is the public. Yet maybe I'm missing something but despite it's metaphoric use in statements about justice in the modern and contemporary era, it doesn't make much sense to me like that in the Book of Mormon. It's certainly plausible that this is an artifact of a loose translation using a 19th (or 16th) century metonym for the legal officiers simply because that's how people spoke. Doing a quick google there's a lot of use relative to justice both secular legal but also as a theological term.

I'll confess that the way I've always read the variants of this was more in terms of the rod and staff of ancient rulers. So to me rod, staff, and bar are all loosely synonymous in the Book of Mormon. I don't read the iron rod as a bannister leading the way to the tree of life but rather a shepherd's rod that people grab onto in order to be led through rough terrain. Likewise whether one is pleading to the bar or seeing it as pleasing (because one is just) the idea is more of divine justice. If one allies oneself to the divine king the rod/bar leads one through danger. If one opposes the divine king then it is a weapon of judgment against them. So I confess that to me the iron rod and the bar of God are synonyms.

In this interpretation the bar of God and all it's BoM variants seems pretty standard pre-Hellenistic ANE stuff. But I can also see it as a loose translation of something like judgment seat in terms of 19th century court practice. Except that the Book of Mormon regularly uses judgement seat so that would seem an odd choice.

The question is how to distiguish between the two. Further, even if there is a loose translation, could a phrase meaning this ANE sense get corrupted by semantic drift into the 19th century courtroom sense. Again to be clear, in terms of court and judgment drama, both senses work. It's just that one originates in the medieval era while one is tied to divine kingship. For various reasons I think the divine kingship metaphor is more apt to be what Nephi intended.

Not thinking about pleading versus pleasing, but "bar of God" usually comes across as a courtroom metaphor in the Book of Mormon:

Mosiah 16:10
  and shall be brought to stand before the bar of God
  to be judged of him according to their works,
 

[clarkgoble]

48 minutes ago, champatsch said:

Not thinking about pleading versus pleasing, but "bar of God" usually comes across as a courtroom metaphor in the Book of Mormon:

Mosiah 16:10
  and shall be brought to stand before the bar of God
  to be judged of him according to their works,
 

Right. But my point is there's two "courtroom" contexts. There's the 19th century contemporary one that arose in the medieval era based upon a central metaphor of railing/fencing separating the court actors from the public. So to talk about a lawyer being disbarred means their being cast to the other side of that bar. Taking the bar exam is the test to go to the other side of the bar. The other context is the ANE setting in which the court is the royal court and the bar are the tokens of judgment held by the king.

i.e. there's a certain undecidability between these two images: 

Both work. If it's the medieval to contemporary bar then it's a very loose interpretive sense that's anachronistic to the purported setting of the text. If it's the ANE bar then it fits. How do we tell which is which? I don't think we can.

 

[champatsch]

14 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

20 hours ago, champatsch said:

it turns out that there are plenty of good candidates.

Please name some.

Beyond the and usage, most object they usage, most multiple negation, “things which/that is” usage, shifts in verb complementation (finite to infinitival), more part usage, plural was used with personal which (e.g "there was but few which," "there was many which"), -th inflectional usage with non-3sg pronouns, etc.

Generally speaking, these kinds of things must not be found in pseudo-biblical texts or Joseph's early writings; otherwise they could be attributed to pseudo-biblical usage or his own native preferences.

And although the King James Bible has two instances of "the more part", Book of Mormon usage is distinct, and it has two rare variants. Early critics questioned the usage. At this point I've looked at more than 20 pseudo-biblical texts that have no examples of it.

[champatsch]

53 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Both work. If it's the medieval to contemporary bar then it's a very loose interpretive sense that's anachronistic to the purported setting of the text. If it's the ANE bar then it fits. How do we tell which is which? I don't think we can.

Do you really think that an ANE interpretation is as likely as an early modern interpretation?  It's a location here, which isn't like a ruler holding a symbolic bar:

Moroni 10:27: for ye shall see me at the bar of God.

And rod would have been a more likely usage to represent an ANE interpretation.

[churchistrue]

1 hour ago, clarkgoble said:

 

Both work. If it's the medieval to contemporary bar then it's a very loose interpretive sense that's anachronistic to the purported setting of the text. If it's the ANE bar then it fits. How do we tell which is which? I don't think we can.

 

Ancient Near East?

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

Do you really think that an ANE interpretation is as likely as an early modern interpretation?  It's a location here, which isn't like a ruler holding a symbolic bar:

Moroni 10:27: for ye shall see me at the bar of God.

And rod would have been a more likely usage to represent an ANE interpretation.

The rod vs. bar is the biggest problem with it. The fact it fits the purported context is the strongest element of it. In both cases though you're dealing with metonomy with it being either the divider in a modern court representing the court or the implement of the king representing the king. As I said the rod criticism is the strongest counterargument particular given the KJV use in places like Ezekiel 20:37 "I will make you pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant." However note how similar conceptually that is to the use in the Book of Mormon.

A more interesting alternative, also ANE, is the bar in the tabernacle in places like Ex 36. But I don't know of any examples using that as metonomy. (Which may just be due to my ignorance)

Of course it could be a combination of the two. Maybe the underlying text was using the ANE rod but the popularity of "judgment bar" for God's judgment in Joseph's environment meant that the word bar was chosen rather than rod.

58 minutes ago, churchistrue said:

Ancient Near East?

Yup. Sorry, should have spelled that out.

Edited August 23, 2019 by clarkgoble

[Brant Gardner]

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

Beyond the and usage, most object they usage, most multiple negation, “things which/that is” usage, shifts in verb complementation (finite to infinitival), more part usage, plural was used with personal which (e.g "there was but few which," "there was many which"), -th inflectional usage with non-3sg pronouns, etc.

Generally speaking, these kinds of things must not be found in pseudo-biblical texts or Joseph's early writings; otherwise they could be attributed to pseudo-biblical usage or his own native preferences.

And although the King James Bible has two instances of "the more part", Book of Mormon usage is distinct, and it has two rare variants. Early critics questioned the usage. At this point I've looked at more than 20 pseudo-biblical texts that have no examples of it.

Thank you.

[CA Steve]

On 8/19/2019 at 9:37 PM, Ryan Dahle said:

I didn't say that. And, sorry, I don't have a link. 

My apologies, sometime the quote function can be one's own worst enemy.

[champatsch]

On 8/22/2019 at 5:42 PM, Brant Gardner said:

On 8/22/2019 at 5:13 PM, clarkgoble said:

There are the accounts that new words were spelled out and that he couldn't continue until he got words right. That suggests that the unit given him was at some times the letter level and some times the word level. The question then becomes whether that was always the case or whether he had more flexibility at times.

It is really difficult to suggest that Skousen and Carmack haven't looked at enough data. What they have done is massive. However, there are some important situations that are missed. Here is an example of where the translator misunderstood older forms of English:

1 Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
2 Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.
(Isaiah 55:1–2)

50 Come, my brethren, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; and he that hath no money, come buy and eat; yea, come buy wine and milk without money and without price.
51 Wherefore, do not spend money for that which is of no worth, nor your labor for that which cannot satisfy. Hearken diligently unto me, and remember the words which I have spoken; and come unto the Holy One of Israel, and feast upon that which perisheth not, neither can be corrupted, and let your soul delight in fatness.
(2 Nephi 9:50–51)

2 Nephi 9:51 begins with what might be a quotation from Isaiah 55:2, but it veers off. It keeps a similar meaning, but with different words. Without worrying about that divergence, we have the interesting negation in 2 Nephi 9:51 of a phrase that has no negation in Isaiah 55:2. The reason is that the Isaiah "wherefore" is read in the older sense of "why," and the 2 Nephi 9: 51 uses it as a synonym for "therefore." That change in the understanding of the word required a shift in the meaning. 

We can't make the case that the interrogative is the older sense, unless we make a fine distinction over obscure 13c usage, which is irrelevant for the year 1829.

Wherefore we can't make the case from this that Joseph was more likely to make this kind of change than the Lord. And the whole verse is largely paraphrastic.

On the contrary, the large number of differences in dozens of biblical quotations, some of them complex, make an excellent case for Joseph not making these changes.

If you want to say Joseph produced 700+ constituent differences in the biblical quotation, then he (and perhaps others) must have heavily edited and carefully prepared a King James Bible beforehand that he dictated from. (Manuscript spelling errors indicate that Oliver Cowdery was not copying from an edited Bible; careful preparation would have been required because biblical quoting in the Book of Mormon is complex; Joseph opening a Bible during the dictation when he recognized biblical content without any prior preparation wouldn’t have produced many of the unexpected or complex differences.)

_______________________

Adding to this to note that I wrongly interpreted what you meant by older sense of 'why'. You mean that it was the more archaic of the two general meanings of wherefore, although both general meanings persisted into late modern English. But the Book of Mormon has wherefore = 'why' in nonbiblical sections, and I don't know that the 'why' meaning was obscure in the 1820s. You'd need to investigate that and show it. And the OED has three meanings for wherefore under relative uses, as well as two meanings under interrogative uses.

But the bigger picture is that the overall biblical quotation in the Book of Mormon is problematic for your view, whatever that might be. The few possibilities for biblical quotation that there are have real problems.

I see from your previous post that you now advocate a hybrid view of Book of Mormon revelation at times, where the revealed ideas were so clear that they basically dictated non-native English word choice, which is of course equivalent to revealed words.

Edited August 25, 2019 by champatsch

[Brant Gardner]

16 hours ago, champatsch said:

We can't make the case that the interrogative is the older sense, unless we make a fine distinction over obscure 13c usage, which is irrelevant for the year 1829.

Wherefore we can't make the case from this that Joseph was more likely to make this kind of change than the Lord. And the whole verse is largely paraphrastic.

On the contrary, the large number of differences in dozens of biblical quotations, some of them complex, make an excellent case for Joseph not making these changes.

If you want to say Joseph produced 700+ constituent differences in the biblical quotation, then he (and perhaps others) must have heavily edited and carefully prepared a King James Bible beforehand that he dictated from. (Manuscript spelling errors indicate that Oliver Cowdery was not copying from an edited Bible; careful preparation would have been required because biblical quoting in the Book of Mormon is complex; Joseph opening a Bible during the dictation when he recognized biblical content without any prior preparation wouldn’t have produced many of the unexpected or complex differences.)

_______________________

Adding to this to note that I wrongly interpreted what you meant by older sense of 'why'. You mean that it was the more archaic of the two general meanings of wherefore, although both general meanings persisted into late modern English. But the Book of Mormon has wherefore = 'why' in nonbiblical sections, and I don't know that the 'why' meaning was obscure in the 1820s. You'd need to investigate that and show it. And the OED has three meanings for wherefore under relative uses, as well as two meanings under interrogative uses.

But the bigger picture is that the overall biblical quotation in the Book of Mormon is problematic for your view, whatever that might be. The few possibilities for biblical quotation that there are have real problems.

I see from your previous post that you now advocate a hybrid view of Book of Mormon revelation at times, where the revealed ideas were so clear that they basically dictated non-native English word choice, which is of course equivalent to revealed words.

This makes an interesting test case for your assumptions and methodology. One is the assumption that since you can't see any other way Joseph could have done it, that means that he didn't do it. That is possible, but it isn't a strong argument. For example, if we look at most of the changes in the biblical quotations, we find those same changes in the work on the Bible later. Thus, at a time when we have other evidence that there wasn't a lot of revelatory assistance going on, we find exactly the same changes. That suggests that the "Joseph couldn't" argument is inherently weak. It is precisely in the changes to the biblical passages where we have the strongest evidence of an interaction with the text. In the case of the emphasis on italicized words, the changes often make more difficult readings (without any theological impetus). Whoever made those changes, they did not fully understand the reason for the italicized words, and the ways in which they were changed often make for a more confused reading. Even in other places, the changes are often narrowly focused, and are based on the interpretation of the verse separate from the larger context. 

I am quite fascinated that your explanation for the reading of "wherefore" is that there is a persistence of meaning. I don't doubt that the "why" meaning of "wherefore" persisted. That isn't the issue. It is that that the wrong meaning informed the change in the text. Without misunderstanding the archaic meaning, we wouldn't have that particular change. That runs counter to your suggestion  that the translator had particular expertise in archaic forms. In this case, the lack of that expertise created an altered reading that is unnecessary and arguably incorrect. 

If you see from my previous post that I have changed my idea of how things happen, I suggest that you might be one who missed the original idea. That explanation is precisely what I intended, but most readers have missed it. I take responsibility for not explaining it better. Nevertheless, it isn't a change. What I am suggesting is that in the normal generation of language, the brain processes meaning into syntax and vocabulary. Any translator who is not attempting a word for word, very literal (and usually difficult to read) translation, translates into a target language the meaning of the source. That process has the intermediate step of understanding, which generates the syntax and language that are available to that person. That is not the equivalent of revealed words. If I am translating a document from a source language, and the meaning is (in English, of course) "my house," I could translate that as "mi casa," "mi hogar," "nocal," --or any other set of words, depending upon the target language and the emphasis placed. If I am translating from nahuatl, I cannot have a direct term for green or blue, because nahuatl has only one term for both. In English, I am going to make a choice. There will be hints as to what I should choose, but I will also lose some possible intended ambiguity if the original used the color symbolically. Understanding can generate words, but it does not dictate specific words. The translator chooses them.

 

 

[champatsch]

You know by now that there are many syntactic systems and lexical usages that rule out Joseph as a potential author of the text, so you are wrong and leading others astray in what you wrote about assumptions.

Joseph Smith dictated continually against his own subconscious syntactic preferences, against what pseudo-biblical authors produced, against biblical modes of expression, and against late modern tendencies. This is an exceedingly strong point that rules him out as wording the text.

If you don't know the data, then you need to gather it before reaching conclusions. Otherwise you will just be giving others ill-founded conclusions, once again. I've never seen that you have systematically and thoroughly analyzed Book of Mormon language or biblical language or pseudo-biblical language or modern English.

Since you mention italics, then why don't you let us know how many italicized changes there are in biblical passages, and what percentage of the total changes they represent.

1830 errors in biblical passages show up in the JST, telling us that Joseph copied some of the 1830 biblical language into the JST even when it wasn't based on anything he was responsible for initially. So whatever point you're trying to make about Book of Mormon biblical quotation and Joseph's involvement is weak.

[champatsch]

1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

I am quite fascinated that your explanation for the reading of "wherefore" is that there is a persistence of meaning. I don't doubt that the "why" meaning of "wherefore" persisted. That isn't the issue. It is that that the wrong meaning informed the change in the text. Without misunderstanding the archaic meaning, we wouldn't have that particular change. That runs counter to your suggestion  that the translator had particular expertise in archaic forms. In this case, the lack of that expertise created an altered reading that is unnecessary and arguably incorrect. 

Persistence of meaning isn't my explanation. I mentioned persistence because you argued that Joseph changed from the more archaic to the less archaic meaning by changing interrogative wherefore to conjunction or relative wherefore. My point was simply about the difficulty of arguing for that convincingly when there was persistence of both meanings to his day.

I generally consider both possibilities in my work, and particularly in the matter of biblical quotation. The changes in the wherefore passage could have either been Joseph deciding to change it or the Lord deciding to change it (or sanctioning the change made by delegates). When we look at all the biblical evidence, however, the latter emerges as extremely likely.

I have considered your 2011 book on this matter, and find that you favor some unclear idiosyncratic version of eidetic imagery:

Quote

Therefore, what Joseph saw may have reproduced the page with the italics, but did not reproduce the chapter divisions. It is at this point that we invoke the divine. The Lord provides the stimulus of the appropriate neural nets, and the brain creates the appropriate visual image. The mechanism was available, but the impetus was external.

The reality is simple: the Lord transmitted a modified biblical text to Joseph in 1829, who then relayed that to his scribes.