Features Of A Northern Text

[Benjamin McGuire]

So that I don't continue derailing another thread, I thought I would start a new one. There, Cobalt-70 made the following comments:

With due respect to Sorensen, I think his hypothesis that the Brass Plates is, or is related to, the Elohist source is something he just threw out there without much critical thought, and without any real substantive support. I can't imagine that he didn't realize that an Elohist source would certainly not describe itself as a "record of the Jews." He also pretty much ignores the J and P elements of the Book of Mormon, such as reference to the brazen serpent, the story of Cain and Abel, use of the term "Sinai" rather than "Horeb," etc. Plus, surely Sorenson was aware that the Book of Mormon claimed that the brass plates contained all five books of the Torah, including Deuteronomy and Leviticus, which were D and P sources, not E (we'll set aside the problem that Leviticus was not composed until well after 600 BC).

Here is a list of eight arguments to serve as a counterpoint:

1: The Book of Mormon is dismissive of kings in general, but more particularly of David and Solomon. The Book of Mormon also favors the early kingship code, and doesn't have any of the later more favorable material from Chronicles. The view towards kingship in the Book of Mormon clearly seems northern.

2: When dealing with the David and Goliath story, the Book of Mormon uses the shorter (northern) version of Samuel.

3: In following E as opposed to J, the Book of Mormon seems to have a definable theology of the presence, and tends to show God working through intermediaries (like angels). Where we see discussion of the immediate and physical presence of God, we generally seem to be speaking of the incarnation.

4: While the Book of Mormon doesn't have the Northern suggestion (Hosea) of God returning Israel to Egypt, it does have the suggestion that Israel/Judah had become Egypt (this is the often discussed idea that First Nephi is a long allusion to the Exodus narrative) from which Lehi must depart into the wilderness towards a promised land.

5: Let's not forget the most obvious issue - the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim (i.e. the two tribes of Joseph) are both northern tribes. The only major figure and line of ancestry which is from a southern tribe is the Zarahemla/Mulek line. When the two groups meet, the smaller Lehite group becomes the dominant political force (there is no return to a Davidic king despite Zarahemla's claim to being a direct descendant of David).

6: It is true that the Book of Mormon does not use the name Horeb instead of Sinai. And it is also true that it speaks of Sinai in connection with the decalogue. But the decalogue we find in the Book of Mormon (from Abinadi) doesn't really relate well to the J source in Exodus 34 - rather, it comes from the E source in Exodus 20 (the so called ethical decalogue as opposed to the ritual decalogue).

7: The Book of Mormon adopts E's style of discussing man's relationship with God. The proper approach in both is to recognize that God tests men, and that man is to fear God.

8: The elevation of Moses in the Book of Mormon follows more closely the E source. It uses Deuteronomy a fair amount to do this, but, the portion of Deuteronomy that gets used is identified as part of proto-Deuteronomy (and not the parts added to or redacted by the Deteronomist).

Perhaps we can discuss the relative value of these two sets of positions?

Ben M.

[Bill Hamblin]

So that I don't continue derailing another thread, I thought I would start a new one. There, Cobalt-70 made the following comments:

Here is a list of eight arguments to serve as a counterpoint:

1: The Book of Mormon is dismissive of kings in general, but more particularly of David and Solomon. The Book of Mormon also favors the early kingship code, and doesn't have any of the later more favorable material from Chronicles. The view towards kingship in the Book of Mormon clearly seems northern.

2: When dealing with the David and Goliath story, the Book of Mormon uses the shorter (northern) version of Samuel.

3: In following E as opposed to J, the Book of Mormon seems to have a definable theology of the presence, and tends to show God working through intermediaries (like angels). Where we see discussion of the immediate and physical presence of God, we generally seem to be speaking of the incarnation.

4: While the Book of Mormon doesn't have the Northern suggestion (Hosea) of God returning Israel to Egypt, it does have the suggestion that Israel/Judah had become Egypt (this is the often discussed idea that First Nephi is a long allusion to the Exodus narrative) from which Lehi must depart into the wilderness towards a promised land.

5: Let's not forget the most obvious issue - the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim (i.e. the two tribes of Joseph) are both northern tribes. The only major figure and line of ancestry which is from a southern tribe is the Zarahemla/Mulek line. When the two groups meet, the smaller Lehite group becomes the dominant political force (there is no return to a Davidic king despite Zarahemla's claim to being a direct descendant of David).

6: It is true that the Book of Mormon does not use the name Horeb instead of Sinai. And it is also true that it speaks of Sinai in connection with the decalogue. But the decalogue we find in the Book of Mormon (from Abinadi) doesn't really relate well to the J source in Exodus 34 - rather, it comes from the E source in Exodus 20 (the so called ethical decalogue as opposed to the ritual decalogue).

7: The Book of Mormon adopts E's style of discussing man's relationship with God. The proper approach in both is to recognize that God tests men, and that man is to fear God.

8: The elevation of Moses in the Book of Mormon follows more closely the E source. It uses Deuteronomy a fair amount to do this, but, the portion of Deuteronomy that gets used is identified as part of proto-Deuteronomy (and not the parts added to or redacted by the Deteronomist).

Perhaps we can discuss the relative value of these two sets of positions?

Ben M.

You should work this up into a short note for Interpreter.

[Kevin Christensen]

There is also Steve St. Clair, "The Stick of Joseph: The Book of Mormon and the Literary Tradition of Northern Israel", which used to be online. I've saved a copy at home, but don't have the footnotes.

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

[Joseph Antley]

I'm not sure how this explains away Cobalt-50's points, namely that the Book of Mormon contains clear J material and that Nephi himself says that the Brass Plates contained "the five books of Moses." It seems that to argue that the Brass Plates excluded material from either kingdom would require ignoring large parts of the BoM text or selectively explaining away certain things as translation issues or Joseph Smith-isms.

That said, if one is accepting the documentary hypothesis and applying it to the Book of Mormon, that creates several additional problems, not the least of which is also mentioned by Cobalt-50: there shouldn't BE any "five books of Moses" when Nephi leaves Jerusalem c. 600 B.C., much less "five books" that have already been redacted together and previously inscribed on a permanent metal record.

[Kevin Christensen]

The DH comes in several flavors, which means Kevin Barney can say things like this:

In the case of the Book of Mormon, I see no necessary conflict between

that book's essential historicity and the Documentary Hypothesis.

The dating of the sources raises a potential conflict, if one accepts a late date

for P65 or the growing trend, described by Dozeman, of a late date for J.66

But in the model of the theory I accept, the sources are all pre-Exilic,67 and,

as I have indicated, I tend somewhat towards a certain agnosticism on the

dating of the sources anyway.68

According to 1 Nephi 5:11, the brass plates contained the "five books of

Moses." The reader will recall that Sjodahl rejected the Documentary Hypothesis

outright based on that passage alone. But if the basic sources were

all pre-Exilic, we do not know in what form those sources existed prior to

the redaction of R. It may well be that there were "five books" of Moses,

only in a somewhat different configuration than the five books we know

today.69 Although I admit this as a possibility, personally I think it is simpler

to assume that the text referred to "books of Moses," taking the number

"five" as a translator's gloss. 1 Nephi 19:23 refers to the "books of

Moses" on the brass plates without the number "five," which supports this

possibility. In fact, the first edition (1830) has "the Book of Moses," which

suggests that even the plural "books" in 1 Nephi 5:11 may be a gloss based

on the Prophet Joseph's assumptions and expectations.70 1 Nephi 22:20 and

Helaman 8:13 refer simply and ambiguously to the "words" of Moses.

See

https://dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V33N01_79.pdf

And of course, if Nephi is a scribe trained in the Northern Tradition, he'd approach any Brass Plates sources mostly from that perspective. But not necessarily exclusively.

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

[Joseph Antley]

I have seen the argument--if you can call it that--that "five" may be considered a "translator's gloss" and not part of the actual ancient text. But once one begins doing that, it seems to undermine any discussion regarding the Book of Mormon as an ancient text, since we can simply dismiss anything in the text that contradicts our argument as a "translator's gloss."

[Benjamin McGuire]

Ok, so let me point out something that might be obvious to some of us here, but doesn't seem to be obvious to many.

First of all, none of the five books of Moses, as they are today, were written as original works. They were all redacted. Something came before them. This is true of all five books of Moses. So while we can talk about a late date for a work like Leviticus, it becomes something of a problem to posit a late date for it in light of the other evidence. Consider for a moment this from the wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Leviticus

and scholars are practically unanimous that the book had a long period of growth, that it includes some material of considerable antiquity, and that it reached its present form in the Persian period (538-332 BC).[5]

Now, a bit further on they add this:

The majority of scholars agree that the Pentateuch probably received its final form during the Persian period (538-332 BC).[14] Nevertheless, they also agree that Leviticus had a long period of growth, with many additions and editings, before reaching that form.[5]

So its not just Leviticus reaching its final form at the end of the Persian period, its the whole Pentateuch. Why the end of the Persian period? That should be easy enough to clarify. In the third century we find a translation into Greek of the Old Testament complete with five books of Moses. That doesn't leave a lot of time for the creation of a text, its adoption into what constituted a canon (and its role as the production of the definitive prophetic figure in Israelite and Jewish tradition: Moses).

This is obviously a very problematic position to take. So, sometime in the distant past we have an authoritative collection which included five books of Moses. They almost certainly existed as a collection (even if they were different from what we have today) quite some time before the end of the Persian period. We can't say a whole lot about what they originally looked like other than the theoretical reconstructions that we can make. And for the most part we have a hard time going back more than an iteration or two through a history of textual changes.

So when Cobalt-70 says that we shouldn't have five Books of Moses (and names in particular Leviticus as having a very late date), he isn't making a very coherent argument. We don't believe that the five books of Moses that Nephi had in the Brass Plates always looked like the five books of Moses that we have now. And this brings up the beginning of methodological discussions.

There are two sorts of primary issues that we look at. And one sort of gaping problem. The problem is this - and we can use Leviticus as the example. Some of the material in Leviticus is far older than the current text of Leviticus. We don't know a lot about what that material looked like (other than some minor published speculation on what a potential proto-Leviticus might have contained). The problem is that the Book of Mormon might be quoting, alluding to, or interpreting a Leviticus from the Brass Plates all over the place. If it was substantially different from what we have today, we wouldn't ever be able to tell. And what we do know is that apart from suggesting he had five books of Moses, the Book of Mormon doesn't use Leviticus in any meaningful way as it does the other four texts. So, its inclusion as one of the five books is problematic only if we assume that the collection of the books of Moses came together as a late creation. But, this idea itself isn't without its own set of problems.

Other than that, the first issue involves the text giving us information we would expect. In other words, we can talk about what we believe the history of the text looked like, and what we assume was the state of the text at around the time Nephi leaves Jerusalem with the Brass Plates. Now, of course, we can only talk about what we presume was there based on our reconstructed history which gives us only what remains after the redaction process. We don't really have many places that we can try to fill the void. This is a problem in some cases because it leaves us with incomplete accounts. In some places, multiple sources are used and placed side by side in a sort of harmonization of primary accounts. In other places, we assume, one or the other was given preferential treatment. Sorting them out gives us one coherent (if shorter version) and one fragmentary and incomplete source. If the Brass Plates existed, then it will in some places contain content that was potentially removed - making identification difficult and very highly speculative. The second kind of detail is where it contains details that we don't think it should. The Sinai/Horeb issue is a good example. There may be other examples.

Now this is one side. The same should be said of the other side as well. If the view is that the Book of Mormon is created largely from a modern version of the text (the KJV), then we need to look at what we see there that we expect to see, and what we don't expect. These are two sides often of the same coin. My detailed analysis of the Nephi-Laban narrative as an allusion to the David-Goliath story is one of these issues. That it contains only one strand of information is a plus for early source, and a minus for modern source. So when Cobalt-70 presents a list of what he feels are pointers away from an early source and towards a modern source (and by modern source, we can also include those who think that the text as it is is the same as the text as it always has been), his theory also has to accommodate the other side as well.

Where is all of this going? To say that because Nephi mentions five books of Moses, that we suddenly have an insurmountable problem is simply not a good argument. It doesn't work because it isn't demonstratable or really falsifiable. Our earliest texts recognize five books of Moses. We don't have textual traditions that are earlier that don't. This only gives us a potentially latest date at which such a thing could have developed, but it cannot comment on the earliest.

What does makes good arguments are discussions about where the Book of Mormon uses its sources, and how it uses them. And then we can take that list of places where it does, and map them on to various theories of the textual history of the Old Testament and see how they line up. And if, generally speaking, we find that they do line up in some way (even if they end up lining up more with a modern text than with an ancient one) we can be more confident that we have learned something about the text.

And of course, it is the larger issues that are far more interesting than the details of a Sinai/Horeb distinction (both, by the way, refer to exactly the same place - just with different names). It is the theological positions of the text which are far more interesting because they tell us more about the ways that the authors read their texts and understood them. A distinction between Sinai and Horeb tells us very little.

Ben M.

[volgadon]

I have seen the argument--if you can call it that--that "five" may be considered a "translator's gloss" and not part of the actual ancient text. But once one begins doing that, it seems to undermine any discussion regarding the Book of Mormon as an ancient text, since we can simply dismiss anything in the text that contradicts our argument as a "translator's gloss."

I hate ascribing things to a "translator's gloss" unless the evidence points strongly in that direction, as I agree that they can be used as a cop-out.

[robuchan]

Would it be common in that time period to have all these writings together in one source, hard coded in Brass?

[Danite3459]

Jacob Milgrom puts Leviticus much earlier in I think the eighth Century or so.

[Joseph Antley]

Would it be common in that time period to have all these writings together in one source, hard coded in Brass?

This seems to be one of the potential problems here. The assumption has usually been -- in my experience, at least -- that the Brass Plates were considerably older than Nephi himself. Now, if they were a more recent production, that might help things along. Clearly they were still being added to, since they contained parts of Jeremiah, but one has to wonder whether Jewish scribes would be inclined to ADD "books of Moses" that weren't already on them.

Also, as others have pointed out, there are several different brands of the Documentary Hypothesis, with different scholars going back and forth over the dates of some sources, especially P and apparently now J. The question for Mormons who try to fit the Documentary Hypothesis into the Book of Mormon, is your belief regarding the dates of the sources BASED on you wanting to fit them into the Book of Mormon? Because that seems like shaky methodology.

[Nevo]

[The five books of Moses] almost certainly existed as a collection (even if they were different from what we have today) quite some time before the end of the Persian period.

Yet David Carr writes in his latest book, "Though there were potential early cores behind separate Pentateuchal traditions, such as the ancestral or Exodus-Moses traditions, most specialists in the study of the Pentateuch now think that the first proto-Pentateuchal narrative, one extending from creation to Moses, dated to the exile at the earliest" (David M. Carr, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction [New York: Oxford University Press, 2011], 359).

[Benjamin McGuire]

I am curious, Nevo, have you read Carr?

He argues that there is a textual tradition that starts in the 10th and 9th centuries in part because of the formation of the two separate states - the northern kingdoms and Judah. And, once more, I think that this is simply the wrong argument. We can all present opinions and speculation (even that from specialists and experts). But, this is just trying to argue about relevance isn't it? If we can examine the text of the Book of Mormon and look at the way it uses sources, this tells us something, it informs us, in ways that endless debates over speculation of the nature of the text in 600 BC cannot. And it tells us things independent of whether or not it is in some way a historical record. It is examining the text of the Book of Mormon that lets us ask intelligent questions about it.

No one is going to argue that there weren't some core "texts" behind each of the five books of Moses. We don't know when these came into existence (perhaps they started as oral traditions - that seems to be Carr's point of view). At some point, these five different traditions became texts, and at some point they are associated with each other, and at many points, they are redacted (both in the oral stage and as texts). To suggest that the latest possible date (given as evidence of the earliest known copy of such a collection) is the date at which these texts first became a collection is unreasonable by any standard (Joseph's position). We have a composite history (the proto-pentateuchal narrative) argued as a prelude to the work of DH. But then we also have a Deuteronomy and a proto-Deuteronomy. To suggest that there was a tradition of five distinct works by Moses prior to the exile is not an extreme view. And I think its important to recognize with reference to Carr's comments that you quote, that speaking of a pentateuch and even a proto-pentateuch isn't the same as speaking of the proto-pentateuchal narrative.

Ben M.

[robuchan]

Would it be common in that time period to have all these writings together in one source, hard coded in Brass?

So I assume there are no other brass plates from that time period that had all those writings together in one source. Would it be expected that the existence of these brass plates and the robbery of them would be something noted anywhere in a historical record?

[USU78]

So . . . the Southern Kingdom (led by Rehoboam) have the Ark in their Temple, including the manna in the gold pot and the two stone tablets of the Law.

Just what does the Northern Kingdom (led by Jeroboam) have? How does Jeroboam legitimize his right to rule without the Ark sitting down at Shiloh in the Tabernacle, it having been removed by David to Jerusalem?

Maybe he commissions brass/bronze plates and a sword . . . which plates and sword later come to Lehi, having been secreted out and saved by leading Josephite families around Jerusalem after the fall of Samaria.

A speculation, to be sure, but why not?

Edited August 14, 2012 by USU78

[ANACO]

1 So all Israel were reckoned by genealogies; and, behold, they were written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah, who were carried away to Babylon for their transgression.

2 Now the first inhabitants that dwelt in their possessions in their cities were, the Israelites, the priests, Levites, and the Nethinims.

3 And in Jerusalem dwelt of the children of Judah, and of the children of Benjamin, and of the children of Ephraim, and Manasseh;

Would the above indicate why the Mulekites (Mulek son of King Zed.) had no records with them, versus Lehi's Plates of Brass from Laban?

It appears each tribe kept a record of their genealogies - one of which was on the Plates of Brass - thus we read:

And Laban also was a descendant of Joseph, wherefore he and his fathers had kept the records.

Thus potentially there could have been 12 records of the Five Books of Moses?

Edited August 15, 2012 by ANACO

[MormonMason]

While a possible derail, I also wanted to mention something in a similar vein. I also think it quite telling in the way the Book of Mormon uses Isaiah sources. Even though there are several opportunities for it to arise the Book of Mormon never quotes from or references the "strict monotheistic" passages of Isaiah like chapters 41, 43, 46, and others like them.

Of course, that is where the style differs so drastically from the earlier chapters and reads more like courtroom drama than religious poetry, in a lot of it. Although it does quote from chapters that have been named by scholars over the years alternatively "Deutero-Isaiah" and "Trito-Isaiah," and so forth, in every case where writers and those speaking have ample opportunity to make use of more strictly monotheistic passages to support what people commonly understand to be their positions, they don't make use of any of them at all. I have always found that interesting.

Edited September 8, 2012 by MormonMason