Royal Skousen’S Lecture

[Hamba Tuhan]

Why would a tight translation of a 2000 year old mesoamerican/Hebrew text be translated into 16th/17th century English for a 19th century audience?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I read from Skousen that the BofM English contains features characteristic of the language pre-King James English.

[Kenngo1969]

No, just sloppy cut-and-paste.

Aha! I knew your post wasn't true! You're not a True Poster ... you're a fraud! Admit it!

[guerreiro9]

I think the biggest hole in this is what Skousen considers to be among his best evidence.

Why would a tight translation of a 2000 year old mesoamerican/Hebrew text be translated into 16th/17th century English for a 19th century audience?

I do not claim to know the mind of God, and I do not expect his ways to always be my ways. With that aside, I believe that the Book of Mormon was translated into "archaic" English because that literary style mostly effectively conveyed the meaning to the intended audience: Here is Scripture! Here is the word of God! Although the teachings would have been the same in another form, it wouldn't have "felt" the same to the readers, Joseph included. To the people of 19th century America (and England) the King James Version of the Bible was the word of God, spoken in his voice. I think if this new voice had been too distinct from the familiar voice, it would have been recognized by less people for what it was.

As far as "what Skousen considers to be among his best evidence", I understood this to be evidence of a "tight" translation, not evidence for the veracity of the Book. The "loose" translation theory (which Brant Gardner can speak to better than I) postulates that Joseph did not receive a word for word translation of the Book of Mormon, but was instead given impressions/thoughts/images which he then rendered into English using vocabulary familiar to him. Skousen's argument is that there are many phrases in the earliest text of the Book of Mormon that could not have been familiar to Joseph, because they had not been used in English for hundreds of years and are not used in the King James Version of the Bible. This is not evidence of the veracity of the Book of Mormon per say, but does suggest that wherever the book came from it did not originate in the mind of a 19th century American farmer.

I find his arguments compelling and the amount of work and effort put into the project astounding. I am sure we still have a long way to go until we completely understand the translation process (and we may never in this life), but I feel that Royal Skousen has brought us a great deal closer to understanding.

-guerreiro9

Edited August 14, 2013 by guerreiro9

[Calm]

the King James Version of the Bible was the word of God

I thought the English was a century or so prior to the King James Version English though?

add-on: yep, here:

http://maxwellinstit...25&num=5&id=436

Some of the words are preKJV, as in late 1500s, not the early 1600s of the KJV.

4. The original vocabulary of the Book of Mormon appears to derive from the 1500s and 1600s, not from the 1800s.

This last finding is quite remarkable. Lexical evidence suggests that the original text contained a number of expressions and words with meanings that were lost from the English language by 1700. On the other hand, I have not been able thus far to find word meanings and expressions in the text that are known to have entered the English language after the early 1700s.

In the following sampling, I list some of the clearest examples in the Book of Mormon of this archaic vocabulary from the 1500s and 1600s. (In this discussion, I exclude, of course, archaic words such as besom 'broom' that are found in direct quotations from the King James Bible.) For each word and its meaning, I provide citations from the original text of the Book of Mormon, corresponding citations from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and a range of dates for citations in the OED with that same meaning (except for citations from the King James Bible, original spellings are provided). In some instances, the word can be found with that meaning in the 1611 King James Bible. But some of these words predate 1611 by a few decades at least. The difficulty of these archaic words has sometimes resulted in accidental changes during the early transmission of the Book of Mormon text. At other times, editors and typesetters have replaced such words with more recognizable alternatives.

Also:

Some Examples Not Found in the King James Bible

To counsel, meaning 'to counsel with'

In the original text of the Book of Mormon we have two cases where the verb counsel is used without the expected preposition with: "counsel the Lord in all thy doings" (Alma 37:37) and "take it upon you to counsel your elder brothers in your undertakings" (Alma 39:10). In the first case, Alma is speaking to Helaman; in the second, to Corianton, the wayward missionary son. In no way is Alma advocating that Helaman counsel the Lord or that Corianton counsel his two righteous brothers. The editors for the 1920 LDS edition recognized that the preposition with was necessary in those two passages so that readers would not misinterpret the language; thus in both cases counsel was emended to counsel with. One could assume that somehow the preposition with was accidentally lost during the early transmission of these two passages. Yet the OED, under definition 4, lists the now obsolete meaning 'to ask counsel of; to consult' for the verb counsel. Citations date from 1382 to 1547, the last one coming from John Hooper: "Moses . . . counselled the Lord and thereupon advised his subjects what was to be done." Clearly, Moses is counseling with the Lord, not giving counsel to the Lord.

But if, meaning 'unless'

In the original text, Mosiah 3:19 reads "for the natural man is an enemy to God and has been from the fall of Adam and will be forever and everbut if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit." This strange use of but if was replaced in the 1920 LDS edition with unless since the latter seems to be the appropriate meaning. And indeed it is: the OED gives the following definition for the now obsolete but if (under definition 10b for the conjunction but): 'if not, unless, except.' Citations of this usage in the OED date from about 1200 to 1596, including this one from Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1580): "He did not like that maides should once stir out of their fathers houses, but if it were to milke a cow." The OED also states that this meaning of but if was "very common" from the 1300s through the 1500s.

To depart, meaning 'to part, divide, separate'

In the printer's manuscript for Helaman 8:11, the text reads "God gave power unto one man even Moses to smite upon the waters of the Red Sea and they departed hither and thither." The 1830 typesetter thought departed must be an error, so he replaced it with the expected parted. Yet the OED explains that the verb depart once had the now obsolete meaning of 'to put asunder, sunder, separate, part' (see definitions 3a—3d), with citations from 1297 through 1677. Many of the citations in the OED for this meaning are religious ones. For instance, John Wycliffe's 1388 translation of Isaiah 59:2 reads "ʒoure wickednesses han departid bitwixe ʒou and ʒoure God" (which the King James Bible translates as "But your iniquities have separated between you and your God"). There is John Maundeville's reference (about 1400) to Moses's rod: "þe ʒerde of Moyses, with þe whilk he departid þe Reed See," meaning 'the rod [yard] of Moses with which he parted the Red Sea.' When the King James Bible refers to Moses using his rod to part the Red Sea, the verb is divide: "But lift thou up thy rod and stretch out thine hand over the sea and divide it" (Exodus 14:16). William Tyndale, in his 1526 translation of Romans 8:39, uses depart: "To departe us from Goddes love." The King James Bible, on the other hand, uses the verb separate: "to separate us from the love of God." The 1557 Geneva Bible translates John 19:24 as "Theydeparted my rayment among them." But the King James Bible once more circumvents this use of depart, in this instance by selecting the verbpart: "They parted my raiment among them." Finally, there is this example from the 1548—49 Book of Common Prayer: "Till death vs departe." In 1662 this reading was changed to "Till death us do part" because by then the meaning of 'to part' for depart was obsolete. Note, however, that the change in the very familiar phraseology was minimal: the de- was replaced with the helping verb do, thus maintaining the cadence and sound of the original language.

Extinct, referring to an individual's death

Alma 44:7 reads "and I will command my men that they shall fall upon you and inflict the wounds of death in your bodies that ye may becomeextinct." Such usage seems very odd today since, as the OED explains under definition 4 for this past participial adjective, we now use extinct to refer to a family, race, or species as having died out or come to an end. But in Early Modern English, extinct could refer to a person's death. The OED, under definition 3, lists citations from 1483 through 1675, the last one from an English translation of Machiavelli's The Prince: "The Pope being dead and Valentine extinct."

We should note that the text does not consistently use the archaic meaning for every instance of these words. For example, the verb require has its expected meaning in Alma 34:12: "but the law requireth the life of him who hath murdered." One can shoot as well as cast arrows: "and they cast stones at him upon the wall and also many shot arrows at him" (Helaman 16:2). There is also one case of "to counsel with someone" in the earliest text, in Mosiah 17:6: "having counseled with his priests"; and there are two instances that refer to counseling the Lord: "seek not to counsel the Lord" (Jacob 4:10) and "counsel me not" (Jacob 5:22). The conjunctive but if occurs only once in the text with the meaning 'unless.' In seven other places, the text uses unless, as in Mosiah 17:8: "for this cause thou shalt be put to death unless thou wilt recall all the words which thou hast spoken evil concerning me and my people." Similarly, departotherwise means 'to leave' in the Book of Mormon rather than 'to part.' There are two other references to Moses's parting of the Red Sea (1 Nephi 4:2 and 1 Nephi 17:26), and they have the verb divide, just as the King James Bible does. Four instances of extinct refer to the death of individuals in a single military engagement (Alma 45:14, Helaman 11:10, and 3 Nephi 3:8 as well as Alma 44:7), but there is one that refers to the permanent extinction of an entire race of people: "even until the people of Nephi shall become extinct" (Alma 45:11). Yet even with all these examples where the words take on their more familiar uses, we find that those meanings are also found in Early Modern English. In any event, examples of variant meaning are not unexpected in a text of this size since language itself is inherently variant. We cannot expect the text to have no variation at all. The critical text will accept these earliest readings as the original text, despite their archaic meanings and their inconsistent usage.

One could argue that all these examples are actually errors that entered the Book of Mormon text in the early transmission of the text: for example, requirelooks like request, the preposition with after counsel could have been accidentally omitted, and part could have been miswritten as depart. But the other examples seem fully intended: arrows are cast along with stones, the highly unusual but if cannot be an error for unless, and the word extinct refers to the death of individuals in four out of five cases in the Book of Mormon.

Another argument against this analysis would be that all these archaic meanings might have still existed in Joseph Smith's upstate New York dialect. Thus far there is no evidence to support such a hypothesis. Lexical studies consistently show that the archaic meanings for these words did indeed become obsolete in England prior to 1700. Nor have any vestiges of their use in the American colonies been found as of yet.

Edited August 14, 2013 by calmoriah

[strappinglad]

Having read( and I use that term loosely ) Chaucer in the original English from 200 years before the King James version, I am hard pressed to see much similarity with the BoM English.

[canard78]

Skousen has a very short list of "dead phrases"

None of the words are dead, just Skousen's presumed dead meaning that he's projecting onto the language. His evidence for it being dead is also based on dictionaries. He doesn't know how people spoke.

Also, some of his examples could just as well be unfinished sentences. Those who insist on a tight translation present other problems. These are sometimes solved by flip-flopping between tight and loose.

If it was tight why does it have pronoun errors? Eg:

1Nep 11:7 And behold this thing shall be given unto thee for a sign, that after thou hast beheld the tree which bore the fruit which thy father tasted, thou shalt also behold a man descending out of heaven, and him shall ye witness; and after ye have witnessed him ye shall bear record that it is the Son of God.

[Robert F. Smith]

canard78, on 13 August 2013 - 05:48 PM, said:

I think the biggest hole in this is what Skousen considers to be among his best evidence.

Why would a tight translation of a 2000 year old mesoamerican/Hebrew text be translated into 16th/17th century English for a 19th century audience?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I read from Skousen that the BofM English contains features characteristic of the language pre-King James English.

Canard made the same mistake Richard Dawkins made in this "learned" tirade:

In fact virtually all translations of ancient documents done in the 19th century and into the early 20th century were done in KJV English (Elizabethan & Jacobian English). Joseph is in good company there, and a yokel like Dawkins cannot be expected to know anything about it.

Royal Skousen is making an entirely different point: He is saying that the Book of Mormon contains 15th & 16th century phrases and meanings which had gone out of usage in the meantime, and so were not available to Joseph Smith. His conclusion: That someone (perhaps God?) rendered the translation into that form of archaic English long before Joseph got hold of the plates and read the translation from a stone (solid state device with LED display?) in his hat. For Royal, that is good evidence that no mortal man actually made the translation.

My speculative remarks in parantheses are mine, not Royal's.

Edited August 14, 2013 by Robert F. Smith

[Robert F. Smith]

Skousen has a very short list of "dead phrases"

None of the words are dead, just Skousen's presumed dead meaning that he's projecting onto the language. His evidence for it being dead is also based on dictionaries. He doesn't know how people spoke.

CFR that any of his "dead phrases" are not dead. What evidence do you have that people used such spoken language (dialect, vernacular, or palaver) anywhere in the region where Joseph Smith lived?

Also, some of his examples could just as well be unfinished sentences. Those who insist on a tight translation present other problems. These are sometimes solved by flip-flopping between tight and loose.

If it was tight why does it have pronoun errors? Eg:

Quote

1Nep 11:7 And behold this thing shall be given unto thee for a sign, that after thou hast beheld the tree which bore the fruit which thy father tasted, thou shalt also behold a man descending out of heaven, and him shall ye witness; and after ye have witnessed him ye shall bear record that it is the Son of God.

I see no error here, canard, although there are plenty of errors in the Book of Mormon from a strict grammatical point of view. You should have found a better example. Some may be attributed to Joseph's own lack of education, others to modern scribal errors, others to ancient scribal errors, and finally to the difficulty for a hayseed in rendering an ancient language (Egyptian) into English, seerstone or no.

[omni]

If it was tight why does it have pronoun errors? Eg:

Me don't get it, what is you talking about?

[Nevo]

.

Edited October 1, 2014 by Nevo

[canard78]

canard78, on 13 August 2013 - 05:48 PM, said:

I think the biggest hole in this is what Skousen considers to be among his best evidence.

Why would a tight translation of a 2000 year old mesoamerican/Hebrew text be translated into 16th/17th century English for a 19th century audience?

Canard made the same mistake Richard Dawkins made in this "learned" tirade:

In fact virtually all translations of ancient documents done in the 19th century and into the early 20th century were done in KJV English (Elizabethan & Jacobian English). Joseph is in good company there, and a yokel like Dawkins cannot be expected to know anything about it.

Royal Skousen is making an entirely different point: He is saying that the Book of Mormon contains 15th & 16th century phrases and meanings which had gone out of usage in the meantime, and so were not available to Joseph Smith. His conclusion: That someone (perhaps God?) rendered the translation into that form of archaic English long before Joseph got hold of the plates and read the translation from a stone (solid state device with LED display?) in his hat. For Royal, that is good evidence that no mortal man actually made the translation.

My speculative remarks in parantheses are mine, not Royal's.

Comparison to Richard Dawkins and, by inference, called a yokel.

I've made it! I can now retire in peace

[canard78]

duplicate. It was marginally funny the first time. It didn't merit repeating.

Edited August 14, 2013 by canard78

[phaedrus ut]

I was first exposed to the Priority of Mosiah theory with Brent Metcalf's Chapter in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon. Chris Smith recently wrote on the same subject matter with Book of Mormon Vocabulary and the Priority of Mosiah.

Phaedrus

[canard78]

CFR that any of his "dead phrases" are not dead.

I said nothing of "dead phrases" - I said the words are not dead.

All of the words used in Skousen's "dead phrases" are living words. There are no dead words. The sentence structure and the choice of words used is what Skousen calls dead.

What evidence do you have that people used such spoken language (dialect, vernacular, or palaver) anywhere in the region where Joseph Smith lived?

None. But Nevo has found an example at least one phrase still being used in 2011. So that one's not very dead after all.

It's such a short list and many could be simple dictation/transcription errors:

- Unless/But if. First off, the phrase 'unless' is correctly used elsewhere. Why would the modern rendition "unless" be used in one place and the dead phrase "but if" be used in another? There are several BOM scriptures that use "unless." Did the original of every occasion switch from "but if?"

- But if could also just be Joseph losing train of thought half way through a long sentence:

"For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, but if he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father... (THE CONSEQUENCE OF MAKING THIS CHANGE WILL HAPPEN)"

I see no error here, canard, although there are plenty of errors in the Book of Mormon from a strict grammatical point of view. You should have found a better example. Some may be attributed to Joseph's own lack of education, others to modern scribal errors, others to ancient scribal errors, and finally to the difficulty for a hayseed in rendering an ancient language (Egyptian) into English, seerstone or no.

How is there no error? "Ye" is plural. "Thee" is singular. The same verse, both speaking to Nephi says:

"after thou hast beheld... after ye have witnessed." If it was done tight, why switch pronouns half way through the verse?

I'm not saying Joseph made it up. By I do think the revelation of the Book of Mormon was done 'loose' - not 'tight.'

[canard78]

CFR that any of his "dead phrases" are not dead. What evidence do you have that people used such spoken language (dialect, vernacular, or palaver) anywhere in the region where Joseph Smith lived?

Extinct. Skousen says:

Extinct, referring to an individual's death

Alma 44:7 reads "and I will command my men that they shall fall upon you and inflict the wounds of death in your bodies that ye may become extinct." Such usage seems very odd today since, as the OED explains under definition 4 for this past participial adjective, we now use extinct to refer to a family, race, or species as having died out or come to an end. But in Early Modern English, extinct could refer to a person's death. The OED, under definition 3, lists citations from 1483 through 1675, the last one from an English translation of Machiavelli's The Prince: "The Pope being dead and Valentine extinct."

But:

The sentence does make sense in the 1828 definition of the word:

"and I will command my men that they shall fall upon you and inflict the wounds of death in your bodies that ye may become extinct."

"Ye" is talking about a group (it's plural), not an individual as Skousen presumes. So he warns a group of people that they will become extinct.

In other words:

"and I will command my men that they shall fall upon you and inflict the wounds of death in your bodies that ye may..."

(be out of force)

(be abolished)

(be at a stop)

Dictionary of the English language by Samuel Johnson & John Walker (1828 edition)

http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=z3kKAAAAIAAJ&pg=PP5&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=extinct&f=false

Or:

(be at an end)

(have no survivor)

Webster (1828 edition)

http://1828.mshaffer.com/d/word/extinct

So "extinct" is another one off Skousen's list.

[canard78]

CFR that any of his "dead phrases" are not dead. What evidence do you have that people used such spoken language (dialect, vernacular, or palaver) anywhere in the region where Joseph Smith lived?

Skousen also decides that "pleasing bar" is not a logical phrase and must be a dictation/transcription error. Instead he says it must mean "pleading bar" and that "there is clear evidence that the legal term pleading bar was used in the 1600s. And as might be expected, no instances of pleading bar have thus far been found during the 1800s, in either England or the United States."

But there are examples of it still being in use this century in USA:

Third, the court addressed the plaintiffs’ claims of respondeat superior liability against Crosspoint, which the court dismissed because they fell short of the pleading bar. Likewise, the court was not persuaded by the plaintiffs’ disclosure claims under the doctrine of laches and the remaining disclosure claims, dismissing them for failure to state a claim.

2007, http://texbuslit.org/35179-TxBusLitSpring07.pdf

[Robert F. Smith]

Skousen also decides that "pleasing bar" is not a logical phrase and must be a dictation/transcription error. Instead he says it must mean "pleading bar" and that "there is clear evidence that the legal term pleading bar was used in the 1600s. And as might be expected, no instances of pleading bar have thus far been found during the 1800s, in either England or the United States."

But there are examples of it still being in use this century in USA:

2007, http://texbuslit.org...LitSpring07.pdf

Thanks, canard, and if you find any more, please let me know.

Bob

[Robert F. Smith]

I said nothing of "dead phrases" - I said the words are not dead.

Here are your own words, Canard:

canard78, on 14 August 2013 - 01:03 AM, said:

Skousen has a very short list of "dead phrases"

None of the words are dead, just Skousen's presumed dead meaning that he's projecting onto the language. His evidence for it being dead is also based on dictionaries. He doesn't know how people spoke.

............................................

How is there no error? "Ye" is plural. "Thee" is singular. The same verse, both speaking to Nephi says:

"after thou hast beheld... after ye have witnessed." If it was done tight, why switch pronouns half way through the verse?

I'm not saying Joseph made it up. By I do think the revelation of the Book of Mormon was done 'loose' - not 'tight.'

As pointed out in my Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, “ye” can correctly be used as second person plural or singular. You could level a charge of inconsistency on Joseph, but I have no dog in the fight to claim that the Book of Mormon is a “tight” translation.

Another problem is that “thee” is the dative and accusative form of “thou,” but in Middle and Old English it was spelled “the,” the orthography of which was then “ye, Þe,” which was pronounced “the,” as in “Ye Olde Grog Shoppe,” meaning “The Old Grog Shop,” an orthographic feature still used in Joseph Smith’s day. A scribe might get confused.

[canard78]

Here are your own words, Canard:

canard78, on 14 August 2013 - 01:03 AM, said:

Skousen has a very short list of "dead phrases"

None of the words are dead, just Skousen's presumed dead meaning that he's projecting onto the language. His evidence for it being dead is also based on dictionaries. He doesn't know how people spoke.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking at here. I meant (in case it was unclear) that non of the words are dead that are used in the phrases that Skousen describes as dead. While the linguistic structure (the phrase) may be arguably out of use, the individual words in those phrases were and are still living.

As pointed out in my Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, “ye” can correctly be used as second person plural or singular. You could level a charge of inconsistency on Joseph, but I have no dog in the fight to claim that the Book of Mormon is a “tight” translation.

Another problem is that “thee” is the dative and accusative form of “thou,” but in Middle and Old English it was spelled “the,” the orthography of which was then “ye, Þe,” which was pronounced “the,” as in “Ye Olde Grog Shoppe,” meaning “The Old Grog Shop,” an orthographic feature still used in Joseph Smith’s day. A scribe might get confused.

The 1828 Webster version says:

ye

YE, pron. The nominative plural of the second person, of which thou is the singular. But the two words have no radical connection. Ye is now used only in the sacred and solemn style. In common discourse and writing, you is exclusively used.

But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified. 1 Corinthians 6.

I suppose a loose translation makes the whole thing a lot easier to get my head around.

[canard78]

Thanks, canard, and if you find any more, please let me know.

Bob

There were a lot like that.

On the other hand...

They are all very modern references and all in the context of "raising the pleading bar." So maybe not the same meaning.

"Extinct" on the other hand seems to be on very thin ice and could still work as a logical "living phrase" in the 1800s.

[Alan]

Oh, that's interesting. Thanks

I bought his "The Book of Mormon, The earliest Text". It's easy reading, I like the way he has separated the passages.

I find the Restored Covenant Edition of the Book of Mormon very good for the same reason. It follows the RLDS chapter and verse divisions but apart from that is an excellent read. Skousen was extremely complimentary of it.

Edited August 15, 2013 by Alan

[Tacenda]

While listening to a podcast about Mark Hoffman, someone mentioned a gold foil BoM in the 1980's. I never saw it before and looked it up. It's listed for sale on EBAY here. I'm not remembering well, is the Anthon transcript no longer valid or was it? Does anyone remember this foil BoM?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1980-Gold-Foil-Book-of-Mormon-with-Egyptian-Hieroglyphics-/251319824441?pt=Antiquarian_Collectible&hash=item3a83d43039

[cinepro]

While listening to a podcast about Mark Hoffman, someone mentioned a gold foil BoM in the 1980's. I never saw it before and looked it up. It's listed for sale on EBAY here. I'm not remembering well, is the Anthon transcript no longer valid or was it? Does anyone remember this foil BoM?

http://www.ebay.com/...=item3a83d43039

I had one of those growing up. And as far as I know, the Anthon transcript is still "valid", but the less we think about it, the better.

[Robert F. Smith]

canard78, on 15 Aug 2013 - 02:01 AM, said:

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking at here. I meant (in case it was unclear) that non of the words are dead that are used in the phrases that Skousen describes as dead. While the linguistic structure (the phrase) may be arguably out of use, the individual words in those phrases were and are still living.

I understood very well what you meant.  However, you claimed not to use a phrase, which you had in fact used, and I demonstrated that fact.

 

The 1828 Webster version says:

The 1828 is useful, but not exhaustive.  I recommend the OED.

Edited August 16, 2013 by Robert F. Smith

[J Green]

Bob,

Does Royal flesh out this idea more completely elsewhere? The one article I've read (linked by Cal) gives a mere three or four examples of this idea and only uses the OED as the research tool. You would think based on the nature of the sweeping conclusion he draws about when the BoM was actually translated that a) there would be more samples and b) there would be research data from the specific time and place in addition to the OED entries. I'm with the others who think that the bulk of the text reads like KJV English and not several hundred years prior to that. It would probably take more examples and more focused evidence from New England at the right time to change my opinion.

I'm a huge fan of Royal's work on the critical text, but I don't always agree with how he tries to make the data fit his larger theory about when and how the text was originally translated into English.

Cheers