A Goddess in the Book of Mormon

[Brant Gardner]

Second question: Compared to your ANE studies, Dan, how much time do you spend actually searching possible 19th century sources for parallels like these?

I am aware that you directed this question to Dan, but I thought it important to discuss. You are suggesting that Dan uses one methodology to the exclusion of another. What isn't apparent in this is any discussion of the quality of the parallels obtainable through the two methodologies.

First, the concept of any parallels-based methodology is fraught with problems. The biggest is selection bias, where the creation of the parallels is derived from the underlying assumption. Thus, you intimate that Dan may be guilty of a selection bias because he looks for ANE parallels rather than also examining 19th century parallels. Of course, it is also true that those who lean heavily on 19th century parallels can be guilty of a similar selection bias. If the methodology is simply the presentation of parallels, it is so fraught with problems that it only tends to convince those already accepting the underlying bias that creates the parallels.

Still, discovering contexts requires the examination of similar data and therefore something like parallels has to be part of the process. However, one of the more important methodological requirements has very different results when the ANE connections are compared with the 19th century parallels. That is one of consistency of influence. In the case of ANE, we have a particular culture at a particular time that informs the analysis of the text. Meaning comes from multiple parts of the text, but is consistently explained by a similar time, place, and cultural background. One explanatory context is productive for a wide range of individual textual events.

On the other hand, the 19th century parallels have little cohesiveness. A new context and parallel is required for each occasion, with little connection to any other. The proposal is that the 19th century environment provides all of the building blocks, but supposing that there was a single environment over-simplifies typical cultural complexity. The range of sources that had to be available to provide the specifics of things that are important in the Book of Mormon but innocuous in the environment defies the logic of borrowing. There is no cohesiveness in the explanation.

I would love to see discussants lay out their methodological framework from creating a hypothesis. How are data evaluated? How are some parallels to be given precedence of others?

If the answer is ever based on the initial bias, then the methodology is a tautology and really pretty useless.

[Mike Reed]

True, but the text doesn't associate a tree, least of all the Tree of Life, with the goddesses.

It doesn't? It says that the word asherah could be translated as "tree," and immediately thereafter says that idol Aserah was "dedicated to Ashtarte, or Venus."

If Clarke's text was indeed the inspiration for this part of the Book of Mormon text

I didn't say that Clarke's commentary was Smith's direct source. I merely pointed out one source--amongh others that could have been cited, such as this one--showing that the Asherah was already known (in Joseph Smith's day) to be associated with both a Tree and female deity. My point: The information was already available in Joseph Smith's 19th century New York environment. As such, it isn't a very impressive "evidence" confirming the authenticity of the BoM. But again... this is all for the sake of argument. I still am not convinced that Asherah/Tree is the appropriate way to interpret the BoM passage.

then Joseph Smith was much more intelligent and creative and the Book of Mormon text much more complex than even the most generous critic has ever contended.

Nah. All that would be needed is 1) a belief that the Bible isn't perfect, and 2) a kind of eclectic universalism that would see pagan deity as types/shadows/metaphors/prototypes.

[Daniel Peterson]

It says that the word asherah could be translated as "tree," and immediately thereafter says that idol Aserah was "dedicated to Ashtarte, or Venus."

Which is, as a matter of fact, wrong, and which, anyway, is incongruent with my thesis.

[DH]

That was fascinating, DCP. Thanks for sharing it.

[Mike Reed]

On the other hand, the 19th century parallels have little cohesiveness. A new context and parallel is required for each occasion, with little connection to any other. The proposal is that the 19th century environment provides all of the building blocks, but supposing that there was a single environment over-simplifies typical cultural complexity. The range of sources that had to be available to provide the specifics of things that are important in the Book of Mormon but innocuous in the environment defies the logic of borrowing. There is no cohesiveness in the explanation.

Not that has been presented to you yet, that is.

I would love to see discussants lay out their methodological framework from creating a hypothesis. How are data evaluated? How are some parallels to be given precedence of others?

And if I were actually providing an alternative theory in a published article or conference presentation, I would do just that. Instead, I am simply posting brief comments here to debunk Dan

[Brant Gardner]

And if I were actually providing an alternative theory in a published article or conference presentation, I would do just that. Instead, I am simply posting brief comments here to debunk Dan

[Daniel Peterson]

Dan

[Brennin]

I don't think they were always living trees, but it's clear they made use of living trees where it was possible.

Clear from what? Much later sources such as the LXX and the Mishnah?

[Sevenbak]

Some might find this of interest:

http://www.mormontimes.com/article/17828/Daniel-Peterson-How-Nephi-understood-the-Tree-of-Life-and-why-the-Book-of-Mormon-is-an-ancient-record?s_cid=voices&utm_source=voices

Very interesting.

I've wondered if there is more to Mary's statement to Gabriel than meets the eye.

"Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word."

Handmaid, in biblical terms among the ancient prophets was also used to describe a wife or mother of their child.

[Brennin]

What I actually said, of course, was that a New York farm boy could scarcely have derived what I claim to have noticed in 1 Nephi 11 from his Bible.

I regard Joseph Smith as a rural New York farm boy living within very limited information horizons, not as a cultural sponge who was aware, in detail, of virtually every periodical published in the early republic and accessible today via Google and/or modern library searches.

I have no reason, for example, to suspect that The Christian Observer and The Correspondent were part of Joseph's immediate environment. Moreover, his mother characterized him as not much of a reader. Not even much of a Bible reader, in his early years. (Did he perhaps forgo study of the Bible in order to devote himself to Clarke's commentary on it instead?)

Was he a subscriber to The Christian Observer and/or The Correspondent? Did the Manchester library (of which the Smiths were not members anyhow) subscribe? Did anybody in the Palmyra area subscribe? If so, was that person close in any way to the Smiths? (I understand that the Smiths and the local clergy had some issues.) Are you alleging that some unevidenced third person or some historically unidentified group of persons channeled this information to Joseph? (Solomon Spalding was dead by the time of your Christian Observer and Correspondent articles.)

Do you really think that your trio of quotations are enough to explain that portion of the Book of Mormon in any event? I don't. (For example, I share Brant's reservations about your apparent thesis.)

By contrast, I've attempted to make the case -- and I think it's a reasonably good one -- that Asherah-as-tree-and-as-divine-mother was current and in fact would have been widely recognized by an Israelite of specifically Nephi's time, and that this fits in very well with the book's claimed origin.

I also think that, methodologically, it's sound to look first at the claimed environment of a document before assuming it to be a forgery and setting out to identify parallels to it from another environment. I think that one could choose a translation of a text by Cicero, if one wanted, and, concentrating solely (and generously) on seeming parellels in its translator's time and place, create a plausible argument that it was modern. But that, of course, would be transparently misguided.

Is there simply no limit to my meanness of spirit?

First, John Larsen has me attacking somebody, and, now, you have me "presuming" that most if not all of the "scholars" who reject my ideas are "ill-informed or in denial."

I'm wondering if, perhaps, there is somebody else, somewhere, posting under my name. I make no such assumption, and I made no such attack.

I've seen you advance this objection before ("How exhaustive do critics image the Smith family library was?") but it does not hold water. There is nothing arcane or conceptually difficult about associating Mary with a living tree/the tree of life. (It's not like some feature of the Book of Mormon requires Smith to have known Euler's formula.) What Mike Reed has demonstrated is that the idea was then current and that is all he needs to show because, as I wrote, it is an easy idea to pick up. (Although, I don't think he needed to dig those sources up since there is a tree of life in the Bible.)

[Brennin]

In my opinion, this misses the point entirely. First, it would have been unusual for Nephi to not understand the complex of symbols surrounding a tree of life. In addition, the connection between Asherah and the tree/tree substitute should have been part of his cultural inheritance (I recently recognized what I believe to be evidence that Nephi was trained as a scribe, which would further underscore his cultural understanding of these symbols). Because of what he knew, and what he could see that was different in the vision, he needed an explanation--precisely because it was slightly different from his expectation.

When he comes to the meaning, without any other explanation, he comes to Mary as the Mother of God. Why was that the reason? He certainly would have understood the Asherah connection, and the information about the mortal birth of Yahweh was the shift in meaning that added to his expectations.

Therefore, there is no reason for Asherah to be a virgin, because the connection to Asherah was the springboard to more specific information, not the information itself.

I am reminded of that old spice commercial where the guy says, "Look here! Now look over there! Now look back here again! Look up! Now look down! I'm riding a (pre-Columbian) horse! I don't think you are trying to mislead anyone (you seem like a nice enough guy) but I think you are misleading yourself in seeing something that isn't there. Not only is Asherah not a virgin but from what I've read the totality of evidence from the Hebrew Scriptures militates against the idea that she was associated with living trees until long after the alleged existence of Nephi.

[Daniel Peterson]

Just curious, Brennin. Have you read the lengthier article to which I refer at the end of the column? I provide evidence (admittedly, as I recall, it's not quite direct) for some notions of Asherah as virginal, and for her equation with a tree. Do you have superior counterevidence, or are you simply brushing mine off?

I've seen you advance this objection before ("How exhaustive do critics image the Smith family library was?") but it does not hold water.

We disagree.

I don't think it's nearly enough, in order to demonstrate that a relatively illiterate rural farmer in early frontier America got an idea from his environment, to show that a rather small-circulation periodical that once mentioned a part of the idea existed in, say, Philadelphia.

I'm reminded of a favorite passage in Bill Hamblin's 1994 FARMS Review article "An Apologist for the Critics: Brent Lee Metcalfe's Assumptions and Methodologies":

(frequently implausible) attempts to find nineteenth-century parallels to Joseph's ideas. For example, Metcalfe and Dan Vogel would have us believe that Joseph's cosmology is somehow related to ideas found in Benjamin Franklin's private unpublished papers of 1728, composed a century before Joseph wrote.91

Going a step further, they seem to maintain that Joseph may have had a predilection for reading Kant in the original German. "Immanuel Kant claimed that the moral perfection of each planet's inhabitants increased 'according to the proportion of [its] distance from the sun.' Certainly in such an intellectual climate, Joseph Smith's ideas about pluralism and astronomical hierarchy were not unusual."92 The passage they cite as illustrative of Joseph's "intellectual climate" is from Kant's 1755 work, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, oder Versuch von der Verfassung und dem mechanischen Ursprunge des ganzen Weltgeb

[Brant Gardner]

. . . as I wrote, it is an easy idea to pick up. (Although, I don't think he needed to dig those sources up since there is a tree of life in the Bible.)

So easy that this very obvious connection managed to be missed by everyone who read the text for over 150 years, and didn't become "obvious" until it was pointed out and 19th century theorists scrambled to find that literary connection (which needs only be asserted and never demonstrated). Sorry, that just doesn't feel like a solid argument.

[Brant Gardner]

I don't think you are trying to mislead anyone (you seem like a nice enough guy) but I think you are misleading yourself in seeing something that isn't there.

I appreciate your concern for my intellectual well-being. However, I have a hard time reconciling your statement with my experience with the evidence.

Just for fun, please let us know what steps your are taking to remove selection bias from your analyses. I would like to assume that a fundamental beginning point of any examination would be the possibility that the beginning hypothesis controls the conclusions, and there must be some control to make sure that the conclusions are as free of that bias as possible. I have no reason to believe that you would have read mine, but I have them in print and they have been around the Internet for a while. What are yours? How do you know if it is not you who are seeing something that isn't there?

[Mike Reed]

What I actually said, of course, was that a New York farm boy could scarcely have derived what I claim to have noticed in 1 Nephi 11 from his Bible.

Please. And we all know what you meant by that. You say this kind of thing often. At the recent FAIR conference you said, "[Theosis/Deification] turns out it is an ancient Christian doctrine. And how do you account for the fact that Joseph Smith came up with that out of nowhere, with no great access to patristic literature or anything like that?" http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/59708/Be-Ready-to-Defend-Faith.html You see? You point out that some ancient parallel exists, and then you insinuate that similar parallels do not exist in his immediate environment. And you do this, by your own admission, without bothering to explore natural explanations.

I regard Joseph Smith as a rural New York farm boy living within very limited information horizons, not as a cultural sponge who was aware, in detail, of virtually every periodical published in the early republic and accessible today via Google and/or modern library searches.

Ah yes. Joseph getting these ideas from a ROCK is a much better explanation. I imagine this is the sort of time that the unNamed scholar walked away from his conversation with you--or rather, started "plugging his ears." I imagine you will say the same as I walk away now. So be it.

[maklelan]

Clear from what? Much later sources such as the LXX and the Mishnah?

Several things make this clear, although you may be conflating my argument that ashera was often worshipped via a live tree with Day's argument that the Hebrew term asherim should be understood to refer to a cultic pole. These are two different discussions. Now, 1 Kgs 14:23 and 2 Kgs 17:10 state that high places, images, and groves were built on every hill and under every green tree. There's only one manner of worship associated with a tree. Temples were built usually built on hills because the temple was representative of the primeval hillock. Where mountains weren't available, they recognized that the temple itself served to represent the mountain (Micah 4:2 puts "mountain of Yhwh" and "house of the God of Jacob" in parallel, for instance). Green trees were used because Asherah was represented in iconography with a live tree (oak, terebinth, tamarisk, or date palm), not just a wooden pole. See, for instance, the Tanaach cult stand, which shows two iconographic representations of Asherah. One is the female deity herself holding two lions (bottom register), and the other is the date palm (third from bottom), being eaten by two ibexes (also flanked by lions):

Obviously this is not a cultic pole.

Cultic objects of worship were almost always representations of the plant or animal kingdom. In Hosea 14:9 we see Yhwh calling himself "a luxuriant cypress; from me comes your fruit." Here Yhwh's appropriation of the cultic symbol, and explicitly not a fake tree, is easily seen. Cultic iconography from the Bible and the wider Near East is rich with representations of trees, animals, and other plants. They didn't use artificial representations because thy felt like it. They used them when they didn't have access to the real thing, and most of the time, they didn't (especially in an area where they could build a wall around it and a ceiling over it). Originally, pretty much all temple worship took place in nature. Many of the oldest temples in Syria-Palestine are found in or near oases, where living (running) water and trees were available. Where live trees were available, as Kings makes clear, they were used (and according to Kings they were widely used, even if not as widely as the hyperbole suggests). Pretty much every time it mentions "groves" in the Hebrew Bible it's talking about worship of the fertility goddess. When Abraham stopped at the Groves of Mamre (Gen 13:18; 14:13; 18:1) he wasn't stopping at an elaborate artificial representation of a grove, he was stopping at a real grove. Those groves (or sometimes a single tree) are the locations of significant theophanies and prophetic oracles in the Hebrew Bible (Gen 12:6-7; 21:33; Josh 24:26 (N.B.: the Hebrew is correctly translated "in the sanctuary of Yhwh," not "by the sanctuary of Yhwh"); Judg 4:5; 6:11). This is not merely a coincidence.

For more academic treatments of Asherah as frequently represented by living trees, see Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel, and the Old Testament, 141; Judith Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (she frequently references the fact that Asherah could refer to living trees or sacred poles, but her rhetorical priority is showing Asherah can and often does refer to the goddess herself); Baruch Margalit, "Some Observations on the Inscription and Drawing from Khirbet el-Q

[maklelan]

Not only is Asherah not a virgin

I distinctly remember pointing out why you were underinformed in asserting this previously. You did not respond to my concerns. Please do so before reasserting your assumption.

but from what I've read the totality of evidence from the Hebrew Scriptures militates against the idea that she was associated with living trees until long after the alleged existence of Nephi.

You would be mistaken in that conclusion.

[Matthew J. Tandy]

but from what I've read the totality of evidence from the Hebrew Scriptures militates against the idea that she was associated with living trees until long after the alleged existence of Nephi.

I think we have already established that those most familiar with the topic see it otherwise.

[Brennin]

For more academic treatments of Asherah as frequently represented by living trees, see Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel, and the Old Testament,

Her book, excerpts of which are available online, is one of the first items I encountered. I did not return to it after I saw Dennis Pardee's scathing review of it, however.

This article goes on to provide the evidence from Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom. On the movement in iconography in the late Iron Age away from the tree as a symbol of Asherah and toward a symbol of fertility and femininity subsumed in Yhwh, see Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God, 234-37.

LOL. Have you read J. A. Emerton's "YAHWEH AND HIS ASHERAH": THE GODDESS OR HER SYMBOL?

[Brennin]

I think we have already established that those most familiar with the topic see it otherwise.

You've established that some people on a Mormon apologetics board whom I take at their word know Hebrew and the Hebrew Sciptures see it otherwise. I, however, will stick to established, recognized experts in relevant fields.

[Brennin]

I distinctly remember pointing out why you were underinformed in asserting this previously. You did not respond to my concerns. Please do so before reasserting your assumption.

You wrote:

Anat was a virgin goddess? I've always viewed her as a war-goddess, and, although she is sometimes referred to as btlt 'nt, she is also represented as one of Baal's lovers. She even conceives a steer with Baal in KTU 10. In an Egyptian text, Astarte and Anat are referred to as the goddesses who "conceive but do not bear." btlt in this culture did not have the exact semantic range that "virgin" does today. It was usually used to refer to one who is ready for, or desirable for, marriage. Most fertility goddesses in the ancient Near East were also considered virgins, although not necessarily in the same sense we understand the word today.

Even if you are correct about the Egyptian text, from what I've read Asherah != Astarte.

[frankenstein]

Does this mean then that Nephi and company revered Asherah?

[ttribe]

You've established that some people on a Mormon apologetics board whom I take at their word know Hebrew and the Hebrew Sciptures see it otherwise. I, however, will stick to established, recognized experts in relevant fields.

You mean like this guy? Oh wait....

[maklelan]

Her book, excerpts of which are available online, is one of the first items I encountered. I did not return to it after I saw Dennis Pardee's scathing review of it, however.

Then that's your loss. Not reading a book simply because someone wrote a scathing review only means you miss out on another perspective and lots of data. John Van Seters published three consecutive review articles in Brill's Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions utterly eviscerating Van der Toorn's Scribal Culture, Carr's Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, and Schniedewind's How the Bible Became a Book. Van Seters had some good points in some areas, and missed some spots in others. Overall, however, I learned much, much more about scribal culture from each of those three books than from all of Van Seters' articles, even taking Van Seter's criticisms into account. Pardee is much the same in that he likes to nitpick. His review of Tropper's Ugaritic Grammar is over 400 pages. He quite literally bullet points every single problem he found in the book and comments on them, but even Pardee explains that Tropper's grammar is an important contribution. Judging the single comment I provided based on a broad and general review, however, is an incredibly fallacious way to try to undermine the single comment, by the way.

LOL. Have you read J. A. Emerton's "YAHWEH AND HIS ASHERAH": THE GODDESS OR HER SYMBOL?

Yes. Emerton's discussion fits just fine into the trajectory I described, and he does not once make reference to Keel and Uehlinger. Nor does he directly address the notion that Asherah was often worshipped in connection with a live tree. What's your point?

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

Does this mean then that Nephi and company revered Asherah?

Apparently JS just copied this idea into the BoM. I guess he just went down to the local library and read a few books. I think that now makes 100,000 books he had to have read.