David Bokovoy's explanation of OT

[stemelbow]

What 2 years ago (?) I recall buying then quickly gobbling up Authoring the Old Testament:Genesis-Deuteronomy http://gregkofford.com/products/authoring-the-old-testament-1.  I've been hoping to see the next part in this series pretty much ever since.  I notice David seemed to disappear, take a break, or whatever from his blog ( http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidbokovoy) some time last year, as it seemed for a while he offered some fairly regular tasty morsels. 

But recently I remember reading his piece about his daughter, in the wake of Tyler Glenn's recent stuff, which was awesome.  http://rationalfaiths.com/tyler-glenn-and-the-need-to-comfort-2/

Then yesterday I read the two pieces he did at rational faiths again

http://rationalfaiths.com/truthfulness-deutero-isaiah-response-kent-jackson/

http://rationalfaiths.com/truthfulness-deutero-isaiah-response-kent-jackson-part-2/

Which I gobbled up.  My take is at some point the Church is going to have to learn to accept his views or something similar on the OT.  I'm recommending the two pieces.  I think he does a great job in explaining the seemingly unexplainable. 

But I'm really eager to know if anyone thinks maybe this is a lead into his next part in his OT series is coming out.  if so, I'm getting excited about it again.  I'll give the first one a quick re-read in preparation, as it speaks my language. 

Any thoughts are welcome, of course.

[jkwilliams]

Just now, stemelbow said:

What 2 years ago (?) I recall buying then quickly gobbling up Authoring the Old Testament:Genesis-Deuteronomy http://gregkofford.com/products/authoring-the-old-testament-1.  I've been hoping to see the next part in this series pretty much ever since.  I notice David seemed to disappear, take a break, or whatever from his blog ( http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidbokovoy) some time last year, as it seemed for a while he offered some fairly regular tasty morsels. 

But recently I remember reading his piece about his daughter, in the wake of Tyler Glenn's recent stuff, which was awesome.  http://rationalfaiths.com/tyler-glenn-and-the-need-to-comfort-2/

Then yesterday I read the two pieces he did at rational faiths again

http://rationalfaiths.com/truthfulness-deutero-isaiah-response-kent-jackson/

http://rationalfaiths.com/truthfulness-deutero-isaiah-response-kent-jackson-part-2/

Which I gobbled up.  My take is at some point the Church is going to have to learn to accept his views or something similar on the OT.  I'm recommending the two pieces.  I think he does a great job in explaining the seemingly unexplainable. 

But I'm really eager to know if anyone thinks maybe this is a lead into his next part in his OT series is coming out.  if so, I'm getting excited about it again.  I'll give the first one a quick re-read in preparation, as it speaks my language. 

Any thoughts are welcome, of course.

Not much to add. Loved David's two pieces. He's a great guy and a credit to the LDS church.

[hope_for_things]

28 minutes ago, stemelbow said:

What 2 years ago (?) I recall buying then quickly gobbling up Authoring the Old Testament:Genesis-Deuteronomy http://gregkofford.com/products/authoring-the-old-testament-1.  I've been hoping to see the next part in this series pretty much ever since.  I notice David seemed to disappear, take a break, or whatever from his blog ( http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidbokovoy) some time last year, as it seemed for a while he offered some fairly regular tasty morsels. 

But recently I remember reading his piece about his daughter, in the wake of Tyler Glenn's recent stuff, which was awesome.  http://rationalfaiths.com/tyler-glenn-and-the-need-to-comfort-2/

Then yesterday I read the two pieces he did at rational faiths again

http://rationalfaiths.com/truthfulness-deutero-isaiah-response-kent-jackson/

http://rationalfaiths.com/truthfulness-deutero-isaiah-response-kent-jackson-part-2/

Which I gobbled up.  My take is at some point the Church is going to have to learn to accept his views or something similar on the OT.  I'm recommending the two pieces.  I think he does a great job in explaining the seemingly unexplainable. 

But I'm really eager to know if anyone thinks maybe this is a lead into his next part in his OT series is coming out.  if so, I'm getting excited about it again.  I'll give the first one a quick re-read in preparation, as it speaks my language. 

Any thoughts are welcome, of course.

I loved his most recent two pieces on deutero Isaiah that you linked to above.  I still haven't read Authoring the OT, although its on my wish list.  Question for you on the book, did you feel like it was super scholarly, or similar to the way he writes on his blog and the RF blog posts?  Reason I'm asking is I'm slogging through a couple scholarly works right now, and I can only take so many at a time.  If its similar writing style to his blogs, maybe I will pick up a copy sooner than later.  

[Johnnie Cake]

42 minutes ago, stemelbow said:

What 2 years ago (?) I recall buying then quickly gobbling up Authoring the Old Testament:Genesis-Deuteronomy http://gregkofford.com/products/authoring-the-old-testament-1.  I've been hoping to see the next part in this series pretty much ever since.  I notice David seemed to disappear, take a break, or whatever from his blog ( http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidbokovoy) some time last year, as it seemed for a while he offered some fairly regular tasty morsels. 

But recently I remember reading his piece about his daughter, in the wake of Tyler Glenn's recent stuff, which was awesome.  http://rationalfaiths.com/tyler-glenn-and-the-need-to-comfort-2/

Then yesterday I read the two pieces he did at rational faiths again

http://rationalfaiths.com/truthfulness-deutero-isaiah-response-kent-jackson/

http://rationalfaiths.com/truthfulness-deutero-isaiah-response-kent-jackson-part-2/

Which I gobbled up.  My take is at some point the Church is going to have to learn to accept his views or something similar on the OT.  I'm recommending the two pieces.  I think he does a great job in explaining the seemingly unexplainable. 

But I'm really eager to know if anyone thinks maybe this is a lead into his next part in his OT series is coming out.  if so, I'm getting excited about it again.  I'll give the first one a quick re-read in preparation, as it speaks my language. 

Any thoughts are welcome, of course.

For me...Deutro-Isaiah was a major death nail to the Book of Mormon's claim, just out of curiosity, does Bokovoy salvage the Book of Momon or lend further damage by giving further support for Deutro-Isaiah

Edited May 24, 2016 by Johnnie Cake

[Gray]

3 minutes ago, Johnnie Cake said:

For me...Deutro-Isaiah was a major death nail to the Book of Mormon's claim, just out of curiosity, does Bokovoy salvage the Book of Momon or lend further damage by giving further support for Deutro-Isaiah

Here's his takeaway on that topic:

 

Quote

So what is a believing Latter-day Saint to do? Is there an effective apologetic approach given the weight of this evidence? I believe that there is (maybe are).   I believe that an effective apologetic argument would state, “I do not know why there is postexilic material in the Book of Mormon, but I do know that I feel connected with God through the book. I therefore believe, even though I do not have an answer. “

Another way of approaching this topic would be for Latter-day Saints to recognize that the Book of Mormon is a revelatory work that comes to us through Joseph Smith. The prophet didn’t sit down and work his way through ancient script line upon line. Shouldn’t Latter-day Saints therefore expect that the work would contain inspired prophetic, midrashic use of material known to Joseph Smith, including the material in Isaiah 40-66?

 

[Johnnie Cake]

18 minutes ago, Gray said:

Here's his takeaway on that topic:

 

 

Ok I'll stick with my death-nail viewpoint....Bokovoy's approach requires too much nebulous nuance...

Edited May 24, 2016 by Johnnie Cake

[Gray]

11 minutes ago, Johnnie Cake said:

Ok I'll stick with my death-nail viewpoint....Bokovoy's approach requires too much nebulous nuance...

Or a third approach - scripture and history are two separate genres. Scripture does not have to be historical to be scripture - in fact most of it is historically inaccurate, whether ancient or modern.  

[Robert F. Smith]

31 minutes ago, Gray said:

Here's his takeaway on that topic:

Quote

So what is a believing Latter-day Saint to do? Is there an effective apologetic approach given the weight of this evidence? I believe that there is (maybe are).   I believe that an effective apologetic argument would state, “I do not know why there is postexilic material in the Book of Mormon, but I do know that I feel connected with God through the book. I therefore believe, even though I do not have an answer. “

Another way of approaching this topic would be for Latter-day Saints to recognize that the Book of Mormon is a revelatory work that comes to us through Joseph Smith. The prophet didn’t sit down and work his way through ancient script line upon line. Shouldn’t Latter-day Saints therefore expect that the work would contain inspired prophetic, midrashic use of material known to Joseph Smith, including the material in Isaiah 40-66?

 

David Bokovoy is an excellent scholar and writes very clearly and simply.  However, all scholarship is a group or community effort and no particular work can be taken in isolation.  I highly recommend his Authoring the OT series as a good introduction to the subject, with the proviso that he makes mistakes here and there (as we all do in scholarship), and everything is subject to revision and clarification.

The problem here with his speculation on Joseph's possible midrashic used of post-exilic parts of Isaiah is that Joseph did not translate the BofM, but merely read it to his scribes.  The translation was done centuries before by some unknown person. 

Edited May 24, 2016 by Robert F. Smith

[Robert F. Smith]

15 minutes ago, Johnnie Cake said:

Ok I'll stick with my death-nail viewpoint....Bokovoy's approach requires too much nebulous nuance...

He was trying to be nice, Johnnie.  At least give him credit for that.

There is also the view that many of the supposed post-exilic features are merely part of a long-lived Isaianic School -- of the sort which we find among religious and scholarly groups today.  There is also the assumption that prophets cannot actually foretell the future, so that any such predictions in Isaiah must be later than the actual event.

[ttribe]

8 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

David Bokovoy is an excellent scholar and writes very clearly and simply.  However, all scholarship is a group or community effort and no particular work can be taken in isolation.  I highly recommend his Authoring the OT series as a good introduction to the subject, with the proviso that he makes mistakes here and there (as we all do in scholarship), and everything is subject to revision and clarification.

The problem here with his speculation on Joseph's possible midrashic used of post-exilic parts of Isaiah is that Joseph did not translate the BofM, but merely read it to his scribes.  The translation was done centuries before by some unknown person. 

Uhhh, what?

[Johnnie Cake]

17 minutes ago, Gray said:

Or a third approach - scripture and history are two separate genres. Scripture does not have to be historical to be scripture - in fact most of it is historically inaccurate, whether ancient or modern.  

I think this is the only way one can approach scripture

[Johnnie Cake]

10 minutes ago, ttribe said:

Uhhh, what?

Robert believes in the Skousen Elizabethan Ghost translation theory

Edited May 24, 2016 by Johnnie Cake

[Robert F. Smith]

10 minutes ago, ttribe said:

Uhhh, what?

See the long series of articles by Stanford Carmack in the Interpreter, along with some similar comments from Royal Skousen.

[ttribe]

1 minute ago, Johnnie Cake said:

Robert believes in the Skousen Elizabethan Ghost translation theory

 

Just now, Robert F. Smith said:

See the long series of articles by Stanford Carmack in the Interpreter, along with some similar comments from Royal Skousen.

That's what I suspected.  Okay, well, I guess I would say that it's one thing to espouse a theory (and present it as such) and quite another to make the affirmative, definitive, statement that "Joseph did not translate the BoM"; a position that doesn't quite reconcile with the Church's official teachings and cannot be proven to be true.

[canard78]

7 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

David Bokovoy is an excellent scholar and writes very clearly and simply.  However, all scholarship is a group or community effort and no particular work can be taken in isolation.  I highly recommend his Authoring the OT series as a good introduction to the subject, with the proviso that he makes mistakes here and there (as we all do in scholarship), and everything is subject to revision and clarification.

The problem here with his speculation on Joseph's possible midrashic used of post-exilic parts of Isaiah is that Joseph did not translate the BofM, but merely read it to his scribes.  The translation was done centuries before by some unknown person. 

I'm interested to see that your language on this proposal has evolved over the last couple of years. When Skousen and other proposed the idea of Joseph dictating a book that used language that could not be his, you were reserving judgement. Now it sounds like you've bought in completely to the proposal.

Are you saying, with as much certainty as is available to you, that the translation of the plates from reformed egyptian was done by "persons unknown" in the 14/15th (?) century?

If so, how can people translating "centuries before" the 19thC also produce content and wording that "has a 19th century ring to it." Richard Bushman (and, I think, @Brant Gardner) both suggest that there is strong evidence of phrasing and content that comes from 19thC.

This means we need to consider two possible approaches for the translations process

1. That unknown people translated a set of gold plates in an unknown location and managed to do it while also including "a lot of nineteenth-century Protestant material in it, both in terms of theology and of wording" (Bushman). This translation was then transmitted, word-for-word to Joseph. Despite the fact that he needed other people to translate the Book of Mormon for him, he went on to translate/dictate the D&C, Book of Moses, Abraham etc using very similar language and building from similar theological concepts
2. That Joseph dictated the Book of Mormon (by inspiration or otherwise) using his own language as either a translation in his own words or an inspired modern scripture, still in his own words. The presence of potentially anachronistic biblical passages in the Book of Mormon is simply because they were articulations of ideas and principles that Joseph was drawn to and dictated. He "studied it out in his mind" then "felt it was right" and spoke it.

In order for "1" to be the preferred approach, it would need Skousen and others to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the words and phrases used by Joseph couldn't possibly have come from a 19thC mind. I don't think they've done that. I've read their examples and I think it's plausible that all of those phrases could have come from a 19thC mind. There were several examples proposed early on that I debunked on this board (you might remember a conversation we had about it when you were, at the time, undecided about the proposal).

[jkwilliams]

2 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

See the long series of articles by Stanford Carmack in the Interpreter, along with some similar comments from Royal Skousen.

I like Stan but after spending way too much time tracking down these supposedly anomalous word usages (Stan's word), I can say there is no there there. 

[Robert F. Smith]

16 minutes ago, ttribe said:

That's what I suspected.  Okay, well, I guess I would say that it's one thing to espouse a theory (and present it as such) and quite another to make the affirmative, definitive, statement that "Joseph did not translate the BoM"; a position that doesn't quite reconcile with the Church's official teachings and cannot be proven to be true.

One must observe that "translation" also means "transmission," as Royal Skousen is fond of pointing out.  See http://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/translation , and the OED.

[ttribe]

3 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

One must observe that "translation" also means "transmission," as Royal Skousen is fond of pointing out.  See http://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/translation , and the OED.

So?  What does that have to do with affirmatively declaring the theory to be fact when it's clearly only a theory?

[Robert F. Smith]

21 minutes ago, canard78 said:

I'm interested to see that your language on this proposal has evolved over the last couple of years. When Skousen and other proposed the idea of Joseph dictating a book that used language that could not be his, you were reserving judgement. Now it sounds like you've bought in completely to the proposal.

Are you saying, with as much certainty as is available to you, that the translation of the plates from reformed egyptian was done by "persons unknown" in the 14/15th (?) century?

"Certainty" would be going too far, but I have adopted as a working hypothesis that someone like Dr. John Dee did the actual translation, and that it is that which Joseph read off the stone in his hat.

If so, how can people translating "centuries before" the 19thC also produce content and wording that "has a 19th century ring to it." Richard Bushman (and, I think, @Brant Gardner) both suggest that there is strong evidence of phrasing and content that comes from 19thC.

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

In order for "1" to be the preferred approach, it would need Skousen and others to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the words and phrases used by Joseph couldn't possibly have come from a 19thC mind. I don't think they've done that. I've read their examples and I think it's plausible that all of those phrases could have come from a 19thC mind.

Naturally there would be some carryover of certain expressions and grammar from previous centuries on into the 19th century.  After all, we have that in the Book of Common Prayer, and in the various versions of the Bible (KJV, Geneva, etc.) then in circulation.  However, Carmack is employing items which were not carried over, and are characteristic of a much earlier time.

There were several examples proposed early on that I debunked on this board (you might remember a conversation we had about it when you were, at the time, undecided about the proposal).

I well recall that time, oh so long ago, when I took careful notes on your objections, and I even had several of my own.  I had not yet been exposed to Carmack's systematic examination of the syntax and grammar of the earliest form of the BofM.

 

[Robert F. Smith]

31 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

I like Stan but after spending way too much time tracking down these supposedly anomalous word usages (Stan's word), I can say there is no there there. 

Only time and careful scholarship will tell whether Carmack and Skousen have gotten it right, or have been chasing a chimaera.

[jkwilliams]

1 minute ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Only time and careful scholarship will tell whether Carmack and Skousen have gotten it right, or have been chasing a chimaera.

I corresponded with him for several months and tracked down every anomaly he gave me. It didn't pan out. Stan is a smart guy and I like him, but this is a dead end. 

[Robert F. Smith]

11 minutes ago, ttribe said:

So?  What does that have to do with affirmatively declaring the theory to be fact when it's clearly only a theory?

Someone suggested that LDS dogma is that Joseph "translated" the BofM, and that this new theory falsifies that.  Since translation also means transmission, it is not in fact falsified, but accommodates Joseph merely reading the text off his stone.

As to the theory-fact question, even though it is a non sequitur here, in ordinary conversation, theories are typically called facts and vice-versa.  However, if one wants to get very persnickity, there are no facts, but only theories.  For a human to know a fact would require objectivity, and that is something beyond human capacity.

[Robert F. Smith]

5 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

I corresponded with him for several months and tracked down every anomaly he gave me. It didn't pan out. Stan is a smart guy and I like him, but this is a dead end. 

Sounds like an informative paper should be written and published in Interpreter.  You are an excellent writer, John.  Why not write it up, even if only for the Interpreter Blog?  Help the rest of us see the light.

[canard78]

2 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Sounds like an informative paper should be written and published in Interpreter.  You are an excellent writer, John.  Why not write it up, even if only for the Interpreter Blog?  Help the rest of us see the light.

Do you think Interpreter would publish it? They seem quite sold on this 16thC idea. 

John, if you ever do, let me know, I don't have the same writing acumen as yourself, but I did research this theory quite extensively early on. I found several 19thC examples of the language Skousen et al claim to be dead. 

[jkwilliams]

1 minute ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Sounds like an informative paper should be written and published in Interpreter.  You are an excellent writer, John.  Why not write it up, even if only for the Interpreter Blog?  Help the rest of us see the light.

Nah, what would be the point? All I did was check Stan's n-gram results and report what I found: no evidence of anomalous usage that pointed to an Elizabethan-Jacobean translator. I suppose I could review all my correspondence and write something up, but I would have to be way more interested than I am. 

It isn't that difficult to check his results. Someone with more time and interest could do it easily.