Explanation for "Nephi and His Asherah"

[Alf O'Mega]

Sorry, but I don't really see any serious argument in Addictio's post that I need to engage.

There is nothing in Addictio's claims that merits further response.

Synchronized sniffing: soon to be an Olympic event!

[Bill Hamblin]

Synchronized sniffing: soon to be an Olympic event!

And I don't see anything in this claim that merits a response either.

PS I don't sniff. I scowl.

[Zakuska]

Dr. Petersen,

Just an observation:

Nor does it seem particularly important to me, for this question -- though it does for others -- to bear in mind that Nephi was, ex hypothesi, writing his account many years after the events it narrates.

I think why this is important to some people is the fact that the very thing is used in discounting some things by Apologetics.

eg.

"Moon Quakers"

Rigdons interpretation of what Joseph said re. "Christ second coming in 1891."

etc.

[Daniel Peterson]

That would be an interesting argument. I don't think that I've actually seen anybody make it, though.

[Gervin]

For those interested in this topic, Shmuel Ahituv, professor of Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, has a review of Willaim Dever's 2005 book, "Did God Have a Wife?" in this month's Biblical Archeology Review (Sept/Oct). Professor Ahituv considers many of the elements described in the Peterson article. He's not too impressed with Dever's work and believes the scales "tip toward the negative" with regard to there being a wife of YHWH. Sorry if this has already been mentioned in this thread.

[USU78]

For those interested in this topic, Shmuel Ahituv, professor of Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, has a review of Willaim Dever's 2005 book, "Did God Have a Wife?" in this month's Biblical Archeology Review (Sept/Oct). Professor Ahituv considers many of the elements described in the Peterson article. He's not too impressed with Dever's work and believes the scales "tip toward the negative" with regard to there being a wife of YHWH. Sorry if this has already been mentioned in this thread.

It hasn't, and dang it, Gervin, you stole my thunder. I got mine in the mail 2 days ago and just finished reading it. It is a must read, especially for those who find FARMS- and FAIR-esque reviews overly personal and meanspirited.

Ahituv is far nastier than most of what I've read in, for example, the FARMS reviews. He snipes at Dever's limited facility with the ancient languages, scoffs at his reading of Isaiah and 1 Kings, and guffaws at Dever's quite offhanded (but quite embarrassing) mistake about Passover's relationship to the Full Moon.

And he's quite determined that every time asherah/ot appears in the Tanakh it refers to the cult symbol and not the name of a diety. He never explains why this must be, although he admits that the spelling is the same no matter whether we're talking about a maypole or the Semitic goddess.

He also thunders that the evidence from the ground (the feminine figurines Dever insists are to be associated with Asherah veneration) must be for the Phoenician goddess Astarte and not Asherah. Again, he doesn't really explain why, he just takes as an article of faith that Asherah veneration had died out by the time of production of the figurines. Does anybody besides me wonder if we're making a nitpicking distinction of the kind that makes Heracles and Hercules two different guys?

Anyway, it's a great read and serves as a reminder that all of this stuff is necessarily provisional. I doubt any of us will see a final word on anything in our lifetimes.

[gtaggart]

I doubt any of us will see a final word on anything in our lifetimes.

Which brings to mind the SNL routine where an overweight Elizabeth Taylor stands impatiently in front of her microwave, shouting, "Hurry! I'm hungry!!!"

[David Waltz]

Hello Gervin and USU78,

I finally got my copy of the new BA in the mail and just finished reading Shmuel Ahituv

[Olavarria]

It's a long-dead ancient tongue once spoken by the rulers of the civilized world, a forgotten language known as Latin.

Ah, yes. The real latinos

I find Dr. Petersen's Asherah argument to be very convincing. The BoM imagery is ancient and jewish, Nephi's interpretation thereof is the same as the ancients would have understood it.

It may not "prove" the BoM an ancient book; BUT it is something that should not be in a book written by a "19th centuary farmboy". It is the kind of imagery that should be found in a religious work from First Temple Israelism.

What this all means is open to interpretation.

[Addictio]

DCP responded to my last post in part as follows:

Addictio's pejorative reference to the purportedly "Sunday School" approach to the Asherah passage taken by my article is little more than rhetorical posturing and an attempt at intellectual-status one-up-manship. Not every serious scholarly reading of a text needs to be source-critical, or redaction-critical, or whatever. Exegesis of other sorts is also academically legitimate. A recent type of biblical criticism, for example, is now called "canonical criticism." It places greater emphasis than many other methods (which are more akin to dissection) on the final form of the canonical text. It is far less interested in the stages of development that led up to the writing of the text.

Actually, my critical assessment of the Asherah article's "approach to the BoM text" is based upon a number of clear-and-present substantive flaws in its analysis and approach. Applied to an article that presents itself as a scholarly, academic piece of work, of course the term "Sunday-school" is pejorative. Use of the term is amply justified, though. It describes and expresses quite well the contrast between the article's patent disregard of scholarly methods, and other textual analyses whose viability and value depend fundamentally upon adherence, attentiveness to them. Look, the empirical basis for the comparison isn't elusive; I could provide dozens of examples of the informal, pre-critical discourse and assumptions that typify the Sunday-school approach to scriptural texts. And each would exhibit exactly the same inattention, oblivious disregard of text-critical issues displayed in the Asherah article's analysis and use of the BoM text. Neither DCP nor Hamblin, on the other hand, can provide a single example in which a scholarly/academic textual analysis adopts or argues in favor of the approach to the BoM text exhibited by the DCP article.

Instead, like DCP's generalized invocation of "canonical criticism," Hamblin conclusorily appeals to the scholarly enterprise of "contextualizing symbols." Hmm, as though all text-reliant arguments alleging the existence of symbol-connected parallels, allusions, textual dependencies or other "intertextual" connections were all essentially identical, and sound. Hamblin declares:

Dan contextualizes the symbols in Nephi

[The Dude]

In sum, if the Asherah article's approach to the I Nephi 11 text were indeed "standard academic practice," as Hamblin and DCP maintain, somewhere there should be at least one example of a scholarly/academic analysis of such a text that actually adopts or argues in favor of the following position:

(1) that textual statements about what the visionary subject saw, heard, said or did are literal and reliable event reports, based on which a text-reader can make reasonable inferences or arguments about "what actually happened" within the visionary subject's (unreported) thought processes or cognitive states, during the vision; or, more specifically,

(2) that a text-reader can make such reasonable inferences or arguments about when and how the experiencer of the vision "grasped," "realized," "came to believe" or "understood" something, while the vision was occurring.

So how about it DCP, or Bill H., or anyone else? Any examples?

I was led to believe that stuff was only in the longer version of the article.

[Addictio]

I was led to believe that stuff was only in the longer version of the article.

Hi Dude:

Well, if there are any articles cited in either version of the Asherah article that DCP (or Hamblin) believes adopt that position, or argue in favor of it, then it should be fairly easy to provide a cite to them here.

[Confidential Informant]

It describes and expresses quite well the contrast between the article's patent disregard of scholarly methods, and other textual analyses whose viability and value depend fundamentally upon adherence, attentiveness to them.

That's funny. I wonder why a trained scholar like Margaret Barket didn't pick up on any of this but addictio, with no training whatsover, rifts on and on like he actually knows what he's talking about.

C.I.

[Bill Hamblin]

Addictio,

You are simply fantasizing about what you think is Dan's approach. I really don

[Bill Hamblin]

It imagines that Nephi "thought of" an Asherah symbol during his vision. This would explain its pre-critical, unscholarly approach to the text, and the wholly "authorless" analysis it provides.

It does not. It provides an explanation for Nephi's linking of the symbolism tree-virgin-god etc. It demonstrates why such links would make sense to a seventh century Jew. No counter explanation with any evidentiary support from the modern perspective has been provided.

[Addictio]

Hey, CI:

Nice to see those cute cheerleader pom-poms of yours waving about again, contributing color, if not substance, to another thread. (The jumpsiut, though, is a bad idea. I suggest you re-think the fashion concept. Those big "DCP" letters on the front are plenty legible, but they clash with the rest of the outfit. Especially the purple shoes.)

Play nice everyone. -mod

Seriously, though, if you ever decide you might want to form an opinion of your own, rather than demeaning your intelligence with cheerleading, I suggest the following. If and when you read the Barker article, you might want to pay attention to page 70, and footnote 2. Then ask yourself who has got a better handle on whether First Nephi can be characterized as an anti-Deuteronomist text? Do you think it's Barker, who acknowledges up front that she is "not a scholar of Mormon texts and traditions" and is still "very much an amateur in this area"? Or, after you've read his articles, Noel Reynolds?

Also, you might want to consider why Barker, as an OT scholar, would observe that "Jeremiah, a contemporary of King Josiah, has many passages that seem to criticize what has just happened in the city"? In the footnote, she then cites a "Private communication with Kevin Christenson, about his work in progress." Is she implying that the Book of Jeremiah -- not the historical person she references, who would have no "passages" -- is also an anti-Deuteronomist text?

If Nevo or Ben McGuire stops by this thread, btw, I'd be interested in either's comments on the idea that the Book of Jeremiah can be characterized as an anti-Deuteronomist work.

[William Schryver]

Addictio:

So far as I can tell, Hamblin has yet to grasp the fundamental, conceptual difference between a visionary experience on the one hand, and a first-person religious text that "recounts" or "depicts" one, on the other. See, when scholars trace the "use of symbols" in visionary texts, they don't claim to have achieved access to the content or sequence of the visionary subject's thoughts, as they occurred during the vision. My hunch is that most scholars would find the very idea of "achieving" such access odd; rather like obtaining access to a person's recounted dream, in order to check the accuracy of what she really "said" or "was thinking," while dreaming it. Similarly, scholarly approaches to the symbols in the Book of Revelation don't "contextualize" or do anything else with the "symbols in John's vision." Why not? Because when scholars read the text, they understand they're not "seeing" the actual symbolic representations "shown" or "presented" to John (or "John") in his vision. If I'm mistaken, and there's some group, maybe a whole slew of esteemed, scholarly books or articles that claim such thought-access is possible, and also provides viable, useful data for textual interpretation or analysis, fine. Cite to them. If so, I'll be happy to have been proven wrong, and learned something new and unexpected in the process.

Ironically, I

[Bill Hamblin]

I should note that the claim that DCP is mind reading Nephi is preposterous. The text itself provides the narrative in which Nephi asks a question, is given a vision of something that does not directly answer the question, but at the end, he understands the answer to the question.

This is not mind reading. It is a straightforward analysis of what the text describes.

I should also note that, even if one were to assume that Nephi's narrative is pure fiction, it would still make more sense as ancient fiction than as modern 19th century American fiction.

[Daniel Peterson]

I'm unable to respond, Addictio.

Your objection makes little or no sense to me.

[Benjamin McGuire]

Addictio writes:

If Nevo or Ben McGuire stops by this thread, btw, I'd be interested in either's comments on the idea that the Book of Jeremiah can be characterized as an anti-Deuteronomist work.

Jeremiah is a funny text, and perhaps this is the most debated and disputed issue relative to these kinds of historical reconstructions that we see currently.

The problem is this - just like we can talk about a Deuteronomy and a proto-Deuteronomy, we can also talk about a Jeremiah and a proto-Jeremiah. Deuteronomy quotes Jeremiah, and Jermiah quotes Deuteronomy. The question of an editing of Jeremiah is much more widely contested perhaps than the notion of a later redaction or editing of Deuteronomy.

At any rate, there is a rather lengthy bibliography on the subject of a redaction of Jeremiah, and those who favor it generally fall into four separate camps (I can provide details if you want - but this literature is quite technical for the most part, and probably not very helpful to most of the readers of this forum). Two of these can be read in the AB commentary - Bright's in the 1965 edition, and Lundbom in the more recent one from 1999.

You can find very brief discussions (not so useful) and an excellent set of bibliographic references (very useful) in William Holladay's article "Elusive Deuteronomists, Jeremiah, and Proto-Deuteronomy" in CBQ 66/1 (2004). Holladay argues against a redaction of Jeremiah. I find his discussion of Deuteronomy far more valuable than that of Jeremiah - although that is at least partly due to the focus of the article. As a side note, it is worth commenting on the fact that Holladay is attempting to restore some order to the discussion. For Holladay, if Jeremiah is not represented as a later redacted work, then its quoting of Deuteronomy is a relatively safe guarantee of what in Deuteronomy preceded the Deuteronomists - i.e. what can be seen in a proto-D. And whatever in Jeremiah is quoted in Deuteronomy becomes a part of the redacted Deuteronomy. Otherwise, you would first need to establish for any particular citation of Deuteronomy in Jeremiah whether or not it was quoting D or proto-D, and whether or not it was a part of J or a proto-J. And that is a fair amount of speculation. Now, the real issue - was Jeremiah critical of the reformers (which is probably more accurate than simply talking about whether or not Jeremiah was critical of the Deuteronomist), the answer relies on first constructing a proto-J, and then showing that this proto-J is critical of the Deuteronomists position.

Personally, I don't have any issues with a proto-J - in fact I suspect that Jeremiah was in fact redacted at some point. But it does make working with the texts more complicated, and less likely to resolve certain types of questions. We do know that there are some pro-reform themes and anti-reform themes. Just which ones represent the real Jeremiah isn't so clear.

Ben

[Kevin Christensen]

addicto comments:

Also, you might want to consider why Barker, as an OT scholar, would observe that "Jeremiah, a contemporary of King Josiah, has many passages that seem to criticize what has just happened in the city"? In the footnote, she then cites a "Private communication with Kevin Christensen, about his work in progress." Is she implying that the Book of Jeremiah -- not the historical person she references, who would have no "passages" -- is also an anti-Deuteronomist text?

Some of the "work in progress" on Jeremiah made it into my Meridian articles here:

http://www.thinlyveiled.com/kchristensen.htm

Particularly, the ones on Spiritual Blindness and the Reform (parts 2 & 3) contain the kinds of things I noticed that impressed Margaret enough to make a footnote. Eventually, I'll get round to finishing an essay called "Hath a Nation Changed Their Gods?" on Jeremiah and the Reform.

I've read recent books on Josiah, Jeremiah and the reform by Marvin Sweeney and Mark Leuchter, and several other things. The passages that I find most telling tend to ellicit no comment or notice in the recent commentaries.

Noel Reynolds, incidentally, told me in 2002 that my writing "Paradigms Regained" on the importance of Margaret Barker to LDS studies, had "saved him the trouble." He's the one who invited her to BYU in 2003.

Opinions differ on the relation of Jeremiah to Josiah's reform certainly, and that is reflected in different takes offered on the topic in the recent book Glimpses of Lehi's Jerusalem. The BYU folks in that book generally take the Bible account at face value. My essay disagrees, as does Margaret's.

My own starting point, for what it's worth, was with Richard Elliot Friedman's case in Who Wrote the Bible? He claimed that Jeremiah was the Deuteronomist. But whereas Friedman claimed that Jeremiah agreed with the Deuteronomist on every major point, I noticed that Jeremiah contradicts Deuteronomy on exactly the issues that Margaret sees as key to the reform. Just last Sunday, I noticed that Ezekiel 22 contains an interesting tirade that I see as directed against the same groups that Jeremiah was called against (Jer chapter 1), and that it was these folks who implimented the reforms.

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

[Addictio]

I've been busy doing other stuff. Thanks to Ben and Kevin for their recent comments. In the first post on this thread, Bill Hamblin stated:

Non-Mormon biblical scholar Margaret Barker has commented favorably on Dan

[Dan Vogel]

Will,

Ironically, I

[Daniel Peterson]

As I've pointed out before, Addictio's repeated derision of the supposed "Sunday school methodology" in my Asherah paper strikes me as either opaque -- perhaps I just don't get it -- or, as I myself am inclined to think, utterly devoid of serious substance.

In any event, I leave on Saturday for lectures in Australia and New Zealand, and will (I hope) be essentially without internet contact, so I will be unable to comment on any subsequent exchanges here. I probably wouldn't have anyway, though, as Addictio's posts haven't interested me. Much strutting and posturing. Not much else.

[William Schryver]

Vogel: