Maxwell Institute: Book Of Mormon Could Be "modern" And "fictional" (?)

[sethpayne]

 

Anyway, this is besides the original topic at hand. Apologies for contributing to the derail.  

 

Apologies from me as well.

[Scott Lloyd]

You see no value in pragmatism?  If you had a young wife and family that needed your support perhaps you would feel differently.

 

Courage is taking care of your family responsibilities.  Posting on message boards or blogs, discussing controversial topics or subjects that most others would find very odd, is just plain dumb if it puts your livelihood at risk.

Whether it's "just plain dumb" or not depends to a great degree on what is being posted (or said or published).

 

At what point do you cease running scared and determine that some things are worth the risk because they are inherently good and truthful and that sustaining and defending them is worthwhile just because doing so stands to make the world a better place?

 

Every moment that Joseph Smith stayed true to his divine calling, he was putting himself and, by extension, his wife, family and beloved associates at risk.

[LifeOnaPlate]

Joseph also saw the occasional need for using another name, as when on Zion's Camp the brethren took fake names and identities and pretended to preach a variety of different messages so as to avoid letting the crowds know they were Mormon. (One suspects they were also just having a little fun, or so the reporting afterward had it appear.)

 

 

I don't think pseudonyms are always simply a sign of "running scared," either. I don't use them (other than this message board, since that's who I've always been on here, and I think most people know that anyway, or people who care to know, anyway).

[Robert F. Smith]

You might want to let the editors of the chapter headings know that. Such a shame that you scholars are still being ignored and that fiction is still being perpetuated as fact. [/sarcasm]

Quote

Moroni abridges the writings of Ether—Ether’s genealogy is set forth—The language of the Jaredites is not confounded at the Tower of Babel—The Lord promises to lead them to a choice land and make them a great nation.

 

 

 

Out of interest, of all the Mesopotamian towers being built, which of them lead to the confounding of languages?

Reminds me of the chapter heading at Alma 11 which suggests that "coinage" is being discussed.  Such mistaken headings are not at all unusual in such contexts.  Ordinary people bring their apriori assumptions to the task, and certainly do not realize the anachronisms they produce.  However, since these are mere headings, they are not part of the Canon, and can be disregarded.  Sarcasm is fun for those who think that innocent ignorance is worthy of ridicule.

 

As to when the ziggurat being built at the time of Jared and his brother, I'd say sometime around 3100 B.C., but that is my shot in the dark.  The main point being made in the story is the hubris of humans as their nemesis.  A lesson we all need to learn, whether meant to be taken as a parable or not.

[canard78]

Reminds me of the chapter heading at Alma 11 which suggests that "coinage" is being discussed. Such mistaken headings are not at all unusual in such contexts. Ordinary people bring their apriori assumptions to the task, and certainly do not realize the anachronisms they produce. However, since these are mere headings, they are not part of the Canon, and can be disregarded. Sarcasm is fun for those who think that innocent ignorance is worthy of ridicule.

As to when the ziggurat being built at the time of Jared and his brother, I'd say sometime around 3100 B.C., but that is my shot in the dark. The main point being made in the story is the hubris of humans as their nemesis. A lesson we all need to learn, whether meant to be taken as a parable or not.

And the confounding of the languages? What about that? Did that never happen either? We have Jared expressing concern about it, his brother praying to be spared from it and a divine agreement to make then exempt from it. Fact or fiction? If you're arguing it wasn't the Tower of Babel, are you also saying the biblical confounding of the languages is also a myth.

If so, is this whole conversation and sequence of events a myth:

33 Which Jared came forth with his brother and their families, with some others and their families, from the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth; and according to the word of the Lord the people were scattered.

34 And the brother of Jared being a large and mighty man, and a man highly favored of the Lord, Jared, his brother, said unto him: Cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words.

35 And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion upon Jared; therefore he did not confound the language of Jared; and Jared and his brother were not confounded.

36 Then Jared said unto his brother: Cry again unto the Lord, and it may be that he will turn away his anger from them who are our friends, that he confound not their language.

37 And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion upon their friends and their families also, that they were not confounded.

Ether 1:33-37

http://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/ether/1?lang=eng

[canard78]

As to when the ziggurat being built at the time of Jared and his brother, I'd say sometime around 3100 B.C., but that is my shot in the dark. The main point being made in the story is the hubris of humans as their nemesis. A lesson we all need to learn, whether meant to be taken as a parable or not.

I'm guessing you also reject traditional biblical chronology then, because 3100BC is about 800 years before the flood is supposed to have happened.

http://web.stanford.edu/~meehan/donnelly/bibchron.html

https://answersingenesis.org/bible-timeline/timeline-for-the-flood/

Not only that, but doesn't 3100BC also mess up you BoM timeline? Don't you end up having to find an extra 1000 years up to the point the Jaredites die out?

As for the BoM as a parable. Well I'm fine with that. I suppose that's the point of the thread. The question is where does the parable end and the history start?

[Kevin Christensen]

Regarding timelines, from Nibley, The World of the Jaredites:

The first chapter of our Ether text gives us warning not to be dogmatic about chronology. In the genealogical list of thirty names running back to "the great tower" the word "descendant" occurs, once where several generations may be spanned (Ether 1:23; 10:9), and twice interchangeably with the word "son" (Ether 1:6, 16; cf. 2; 3). As you know, in Hebrew and other languages "son" and "descendant" are both rendered by one very common word. One and the same word describes a modern Jew and Father Isaac as "sons" of Abraham—the word is understood differently in each case, but is not written differently. A person confined to a written text would have no means of knowing when ben should be taken to mean "son" in a literal sense and when it means merely "descendant." The ancient Hebrews knew perfectly well when to make the distinction: like the Arabs and Maoris they kept their records in their heads, and in mentioning a particular patriarch, it was assumed that the hearer was familiar with his line down to his next important descendant, the written lists being a mere outline to establish connections between particular lines—the name of a patriarch was enough to indicate his line, which did not have to be written out in full. Sir Leonard Woolley has some interesting things to say on this subject in his book Abraham. Now Ether proves, at least to Latter-day Saints, that "son" and "descendant" were both used in the ancient genealogies, which thus do not present an unbroken father-to-son relationship.

http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1106&index=10

Regarding the Tower in Ether, Nibely has this:

Think back, my good man, to the first act of recorded history. What meets our gaze as the curtain rises? People everywhere building towers. And why are they building towers? To get to heaven. The tower was, to use the Babylonian formula, the markas shame u irsitim, the "binding-place of heaven and earth," where alone one could establish contact with the upper and lower worlds.14 That goes not only for Babylonia but also for the whole ancient world, as I have pointed out at merciless length in my recent study on the "Hierocentric State."15 The towers were artificial mountains, as any textbook will tell you, and no temple-complex could be without one. The labors of Dombart, Jeremias, Andrae, Burrows, and others will spare us the pains of showing you these towers scattered everywhere throughout the old world as a means of helping men get to heaven.16 The legends concerning them are legion, but they all fall into the same pattern: In the beginning an ambitious race of men tried to get to heaven by climbing a mountain or tower; they failed and then set out to conquer the world. A thoroughly typical version of the story is a variant found in Jewish and Christian apocryphal writers in which the sons of Seth (the angels, in some versions), eager to regain the paradise Adam had lost, went up on to Mount Hermon, and there lived lives of religious asceticism, calling themselves "the Watchers" and "the Sons of Elohim." It was an attempt to establish the heavenly order, and it failed, the embittered colony descending the mountain to break the covenant, marry the daughters of Cain, and beget a race of "men notorious for murders and robberies." Determined to possess the earth if they could not possess heaven, the men of the mountain denied that they had failed, faked the priesthood, and forced the inhabitants of the earth to accept the kings they put over them.17 This story you will recognize as an obvious variant of the extremely ancient and widespread Mad Hunter cycle, which I treated in an article on the origin of the state.18 The Mad Hunter, you will recall, claimed to be the rightful ruler of the universe, challenged God to an archery contest, and built a great tower from which he hoped to shoot his arrows into heaven. Sir James Frazer has collected a large number of American Indian versions of the story to illustrate Old World parallels, for the tale is met with among primitive hunters throughout the world.

And this:

How so? I said above that we find mounds, towers, and accompanying rituals throughout the whole ancient world; now I will go further and say that these mounds and towers and the great cult-complexes that go with them were not so many independent local inventions but actually imitations derived ultimately from a single original. Every great national shrine of antiquity had a founding legend of how in the beginning it was brought through the air from some mysterious faraway land. And this faraway land always turns out to have been in central Asia. Our Norse Othinn came from the giants' land to the east, the Greek national cult from the land of the Hyperboreans, far to the northeast of Greece; people of the Near East looked to a mysterious white mountain of the North as the seat of their primordial cult, the Chinese to the paradise or mountain of the West, and so forth. You may list the various founding legends and trace them back at your leisure to a single point of origin.32 I find it strange that the founding father and summus deus of each nation of antiquity is somewhere declared to be a fraud and an impostor, a wandering tramp from afar whose claims to supreme authority cannot stand a too careful examination. Think of Prometheus' challenge to Zeus, of Loki's blackmailing of Othinn, of the dubious "Justification of Osiris," of the terror of almighty Anu when Tiamat challenges his authority, and so forth.33 Run down these legends, and you will find in every case that the usurper comes from Central Asia. Even Isaiah (Isaiah 14:12—14) recalls that in the beginning the adversary himself set up his throne "upon the Mountain of the assembly in the regions of the North," and there pretended to be "like the Most High." For all this a single origin is indicated; whether historical or ritual makes little difference.

Also from http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1106&index=10

The whole point of contextualizing the Book of Mormon in the settings that it claims for itself is that only there can we get an idea of whether it actually describes an ancient world. None of the 19th Century approaches can answer that question for the same reason that no one tries to change a flat tire with a corkscrew and a teaspoon. The 19th century approach quite simply is the wrong tool for that job. That who reflexively cite the 1923 Roberts study, as though that were the last and only necessary word on the subject, make a point of avoiding any comparison with later findings, such as we get fro Welch, Soreson, and Clark. As Barker puts it, we stand where they stood in order to see whether we can then see what they saw. Trying to distinguish between parable and history, spiritual and temporal, as Nephi puts it, overlooks the important fact that the answer might be both at once.

To tell a story as representative is to liken, to make a parable. Margaret Barker has discussed the meanings of the word translated as parable:

Masal: “The Hebrew lexicon lists three apparently distinct meanings to this word:

• To rule or have dominion

• To be like, or cause to be like

• To speak in parables or poetry

“But in fact all three are the same: the one who ‘rules’ in this sense is the one who determines how and what things are, and does this by maintaining correspondences.” (Barker, Creation, 45).

Many accounts tells stories which we are to see not only as single historical events, but also as a representative event which subsequently rules our vision and provides models for our behavior.

And a parable that may not actually be a single historical event is told in order to point to the kinds of things that really do happen in history, not just once, but over and over again. What Shakespeare lacks in historicity, he makes up for in timelessness.

If it happens that I notice how neatly First Temple theology appears in the Book of Mormon, and details like Nahom, and qasida, and Bountiful, as well as all sorts of New World correspondences I see in Sorenson, and Wright, and Gardner, and Poulson, I'm seeing details that belong to a real world in the past. I may be able to get some benefit from simply "likening the scriptures to myself" as Nephi puts it. But that approach will necessarily limit what I can see in the Book of Mormon to what I can compare to my own situation.

Alma says that if we can no more than desire to believe, even a portion of the word, he says, work on that to grow something good. He leaves his readers to select which portion, and it that happens to be a parable, then fine, start with that. But don't stop the experiment and nurture there. Learn more, and let your mind expand and your understanding grow.

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Bethel Park, PA

[Robert F. Smith]

And the confounding of the languages? What about that? Did that never happen either? We have Jared expressing concern about it, his brother praying to be spared from it and a divine agreement to make then exempt from it. Fact or fiction? If you're arguing it wasn't the Tower of Babel, are you also saying the biblical confounding of the languages is also a myth.

Whether an epic or myth is beside the point, canard.  What is important (as for the Flood Story) is that the Confounding of Languages is accounted for long before it appears in the Hebrew biblical text:

 

Compare the Sumerian “Golden Age” passage in which “the whole universe, the people in unison, to Enlil in one tongue (eme-aš-àm) gave praise,” to be followed shortly by the struggle between Enlil and Enki, lord of Eridu, who “changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it, into the speech of man that (until then) had been one.”  -- S. N. Kramer, Sumerian Mythology, rev. ed. (Harper & Row, 1961/reprint Univ. of Penn. Press, 1972), xiv,107 n. 2; Kramer, “The ‘Babel of Tongues’: A Sumerian Version,” in W. W. Hallo, ed., Essays in Memory of E. A. Speiser, AOS 53 (New Haven, 1968), 108-111 = JAOS, 88 (1968).

 

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

Ether 1:33-37

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

You will note that the Jaredite account doesn't mention "Babel."  Did my explanation help you understand why?

 

I hope that you understand that the Hebrew and Greek biblical texts we have today (the translations are made from them), are very late -- centuries after Lehi.  Babel = Babylon.  The Babylonian Captivity of the Jews comes after Lehi leaves.  Does that make any sense?

Edited April 5, 2015 by Robert F. Smith

[Robert F. Smith]

I'm guessing you also reject traditional biblical chronology then, because 3100BC is about 800 years before the flood is supposed to have happened.

That depends very much on which "traditional biblical chronology" you favor (MT, LXX, Samaritan, and variant readings in each), if any, because they are all different/divergent.  However, there is an even more disturbing problem confronting ordinary biblical chronolgy.

 

First off, there are the Mesopotamian parallels again:  The ten heroes of the Old Babylonian tradition and the Ante-Diluvian biblical characters from Adam to Noah are incredibly long-lived (1000-900 year range).  Early Post-Diluvians have a vastly decreased longevity (600-200), then the Patriarchs still less long-lived (200-100), and finally a normal lifetime becomes the norm (70 years, Psalm 90:10).

 

Enoch was a special case: He lived on Earth only 65 years, then “walked with God” (Gen 5:21-22), but is further listed as living 365 years (Gen 5:23) before being "translated," i.e., being taken alive by God into Heaven (Gen 5:24).  Interestingly, Enoch has a close parallel in Old Babylonian tradition: of the ten Ante-Diluvian heroes, the seventh of which, Enmeduranki/Enmeduranna (Enoch was likewise seventh in the biblical genealogy), was also taken directly by God!  In addition, as Speiser points out, “Enmeduranna’s capital city was the ancient center of the sun god of Sippar, which could explain the solar number of 365 that is recorded for Enoch.”  These are but hints of something even more disturbing.

 

The ten antediluvian patriarchs from Adam to Noah live within a period of 1,656 years according to the Massoretic Hebrew text, with Adam dying at least by the time of Lamech, father of Noah.  Counting the year of the great Deluge, that would be 1,657 years (Gen 8:13) = 600,000 days + 2 x 7 years.  Not only is the sexigesimal implication clear, but Stephanie Dalley shows the tight relationship that exists with Berossus’ version of the Mesopotamian story and chronology in his Babyloniaca:

 

. . . the survivor of the Flood (Xisuthros, Noah) is the tenth antediluvian king in both Berossus and Genesis (Priestly source), that the month in which the Flood happened is named, and that the ten antediluvian kings whom Berossus cites ruled 432,000 “years” (i.e. 86,400 x 5, five years being sixty months) and in Genesis (Priestly source) for 1,656 “years” (i.e. 86,400 weeks), so the two accounts may originally have shared a common chronological scheme.  Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, rev. ed., 6,

 

In summing up his comparison of the biblical antediluvian patriarchs and the earlier Sumerian King List, David Bokovoy concluded:

 

If the total years connected with the names in Genesis 5 are calculated, the list covers a span of 6,695 years.  Then, if we convert this number to a sexigesimal number (the form used by the Sumerians), the result is 241,200 – the exact total of the Sumerian King List.*

 

* Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament, I:108, citing John Watson, Ancient Israelite Literature in its Cultural Context (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 130; cf. Carol A. Hill, “Making Sense of the Numbers of Genesis,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 55/4 (2003):239-251, online at http://www.asa3.org/ ASA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Hill.pdf . 

 

Not only that, but doesn't 3100BC also mess up you BoM timeline? Don't you end up having to find an extra 1000 years up to the point the Jaredites die out?

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

Actually, canard, it fits rather well, aside from the fact that it also fits the beginning of the Long Count sequence begun in Mexico by the Olmec (Jaredites).

[mfbukowski]

I know an LDS guy who sells alkali water with a special filter who says that his water is the kind of water the patriarchs drank before the flood, and that's why they lived a thousand years.

That is where scriptural literalism leads.

[mfbukowski]

Duplicate

Edited April 5, 2015 by mfbukowski

[cinepro]

Does that include salvation? See Isaiah 55:1-2.

 

It's only free if you have no money.  Otherwise, 10%.

[cinepro]

FWIW, the FPR blog has a great article examining the Owens article.  Owens even adds a comment at the end:

 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithpromotingrumor/2015/04/a-recent-anti-mormon-essay-trying-to-understand-gees-response-part-ii/

[LifeOnaPlate]

I think it's very clear that in many ways Gee was off the mark on virtually all of his criticisms of the Owen article. Gee's repeatedly been invited to engage more directly in the conversation but so far has chosen not to reply.