Brant Gardner

I debated adding details, but decided it was too private for a message board. I had a conversation with a woman who had died and come back to life. She mentioned that it was a friend who came for her (for reasons that were relevant to her circumstances). We spoke a little of the reading I had done on near death experiences. After a while she asked if I knew that someone also accompanies us here. She then told me of the very clear experience she had with a personage who had brought a new child. I cannot help but believe her experience, and it gives me hope.

I am hearing that. So far, I checked about 10 chapters of Isaiah and didn't find anything. I confess I got bored and stopped. Since I haven't seen the evidence, there is really nothing to say. I suppose I could go through the rest of it--but did I mention boredom? I hate to admit it, but right now I am having a hard time to get motivated to work hard on a project that I know I need to do (and want to, at least on some level).

I was one of perhaps five who were asked to do a pre-review. I should note that the others unanimously disagreed with me.

As I remember, it was limited to the examples given. The analysis comes from looking at the changes and comparing them to the commentary. For example, in the KJV there is a verse mentioning unicorns. Joseph changed it to re-em. This was prior to the time he took Hebrew. Clarke notes that unicorns probably came from reemim, which (according to Wayment) is usually transliterated differently. Thus, the best explanation for the presence of re-em is that it is modeled on Clarke's suggestion. There are others that were dependent upon Clarke's discussion of the language (and in one case, a mi

There are two important aspects to this discussion, and to this point, both seem to be ignored. First, what is the nature of the evidence that Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon found? In the article in Producing Ancient Scripture they necessarily provide a few examples (16?). Wayment indicates that there are over 100. So we have a sample, not the full extend of the influence of Clarke. Second, the types of changes really aren't momentous, but the very nature strongly suggests that it cannot be coincidental. Second, we have to wonder what Jackson's arguments are, since the article hasn't been

Merismus is a literary technique where two words are paired in a way that creates a meaning that is more expansive than the words themselves. An example might be "he described the root and branch of the problem," where "root and branch" suggest the whole tree (of course implying something extensive). From the Maya we have "the fathers, the mothers" which includes all ancestors. The least obvious is the Aztec "flowers and song" which means war.

You must have missed the post where I agreed that in the list of measure equivalents, they terms are not used as merismus. They are still possibly translation issues, but not cases of merismus.

Honestly, I suspect that it is a translation issue using modern expectations of units of value as translation for units we wouldn't value. As you can tell, I don't think there is a word for word correspondence in the translation. There are any number of places where the modern equivalent was clearly used (such as the metaphor of threshing/chaff and a ship's rudder).

I apologize for not being clear. In the listing of values, it is a separate unit and therefore not part of a merismus. It is in the other texts where we typically see them as a set.

I reviewed Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon's paper In Producing Ancient Scripture. I looked for the type of evidence they saw, and looked at the changes in the Isaiah chapters to find anything similar to those changes that were attributed to Clarke's commentary. I confess I tired of it after 10 or so chapters. I didn't see anything. I checked one of the obvious possibilities, "or out of the waters of baptism" in I Nephi 20:1 (added in 1837), but there is nothing to support in in Clarke. I will be interested to see what Colby finds, as I'm sure he is more dedicated to the project than I. If he

I don't know of any systems using gold. One means of standardized exchange was cacao beans. Frankly, I suspect that we have some translation issues that place gold and silver in prominent positions in the Book of Mormon due to the translation of concepts rather than nouns. Gold and silver seem to function as a literary pair and may be a merismus for all valuable things. On a slightly different note, unworked gold was a tribute item sent to the Aztec rulers in the Codex Mendoza, along with multitudes of other items. It appears, to me, from the unworked nature and the other goods, that it

This is a place where the difference of location could create an important addition. Writing on metal plates was known in the Old World, but wasn't all that common. Possessing any metal that could be used for writing is an indication of some wealth. There are small examples of silver and brass and gold. The Old World portion of the Book of Mormon only speaks of brass plates (which could have been bronze, as the Bible uses brass for bronze). The question is then the New World. The same concept of rarity and wealth is logical, hence we would expect that only the elite would have written on

I wouldn't be either. It also is not at all what I have suggested. Of course we should have evidence. We need to understand the nature of the available evidence, and be able to construct a case according to demonstrable processes that can be examined. My problem has always been with the "one piece of evidence" request because it fundamentally misunderstands archaeological evidence as it relates to a text.

Understood. At this point we have a parallel account to the Book of Mormon, but nothing yet that links it to the Book of Mormon.

That tells us that a migration of people at this time is unsurprising, which would be relatively obvious from the conditions of the Babylonian invasion. That tells us that we have a reasonable comparative beginning. That suggests that it is worth continuing. Of course, that leaves the problem of non-Middle Easter geography, and cultural connections, so we are still a long way off. I'm sure you have more.