Ryan Thomas and the BOM Gold Plates

[aussieguy55]

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V52N02_2.pdf

 

Interesting article on whether gold plates  were ever used for long accounts. His conclusion  "  Although metal was undoubtedly used as an epigraphic medium in Israel-Judah from early times, there is no evidence to support the assumption that it figured in an established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."    Has anyone even calculated how many gold plates would be necessary to hold the contents of the Book of Mormon such that Moroni was able to carry and deposit in New York?

[USU78]

5 hours ago, aussieguy55 said:

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V52N02_2.pdf

 

Interesting article on whether gold plates  were ever used for long accounts. His conclusion  "  Although metal was undoubtedly used as an epigraphic medium in Israel-Judah from early times, there is no evidence to support the assumption that it figured in an established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."    Has anyone even calculated how many gold plates would be necessary to hold the contents of the Book of Mormon such that Moroni was able to carry and deposit in New York?

It was certainly a "thing" around the Mediterranean. The ancient Romans had their bronze tables of the law. I don't see how that's a smidge different.

[PacMan]

I was not impressed. The explanation falls grossly short of any useful information.  For example, the Pyrgi plates in the museum where some are held note some 10,000 Etruscan texts.   So how many metal plates have been discovered, where, and what is the content of each?

What makes this article fairly useless is how the author picks a few characteristics to compare with the golden plates and then simply assumes those characteristics are dispositive when there’s no reason to believe they are. In fact, most of the records he uses as a baseline are themselves inconsistent with one another.

Ultimately, the issue for the Nephites is twofold: (1) does the history support that they knew about writing on metal plates? The answer is an obvious yes. (2) why metal? Well, what other means did they have to write? I remember no account of Nephi being a paper maker. In fact, the earliest amate paper came on the scene 500 years after Lehi left Jersusalem. So if the region (let alone they) didn’t have papyrus or some form of paper, then it wasn’t an option. Stone isn’t a better option (try two-sided printing).  While metal work would be difficult, it’s an easy choice if that’s all you’ve got to work with...particularly if the early tradition started by Nephi was simply perpetuated.

This article can not be taken seriously. It doesn’t even analyze the dates of the modern discoveries to determine what Joseph did or did not know (because Jospeh didn’t know a whole lot).  It’s a hodgepodge amalgamation of others’research with a stunted analysis built to reach a biased conclusion. 

Edited July 19, 2019 by PacMan

[Kevin Christensen]

There are all sorts of examples around the Middle East of Royal documents on metal and stone boxes, the thing about the Book of Mormon is that it need not represent an "established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."  Wilfred Griggs has an important essay that puts not only the medium but the themes and content in context:

https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/book-mormon-authorship-new-light-ancient-origins/4-book-mormon-ancient-book

My personal theory is that the Brass Plates was a special project, launched during Jehoiakim's 11 year reign, after the death of Josiah during the period of Egyptian dominance (hence the language).  (After all, the Septuagint itself was an Egyptian project, sponsored by the Pharoh, not a home grown notion.)  I think Laban's Brass plates were organized as a way to provide a tributary gift for both prestige for an Egyptian Pharoh's library, and as a resource for Egyptian bureaucrats.   It need not be either a widespread practice nor a document handed down over many hundreds of years, accumulating authors over time.  It could be a snapshot of the Jewish writings of the time, gathered, and prepared for particular time and purpose, and then, left stranded in Laban's treasury after the Egyptian defeat and the installation of Zedekiah by Babylon.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[PacMan]

8 hours ago, aussieguy55 said:

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V52N02_2.pdf

 

Interesting article on whether gold plates  were ever used for long accounts. His conclusion  "  Although metal was undoubtedly used as an epigraphic medium in Israel-Judah from early times, there is no evidence to support the assumption that it figured in an established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."    Has anyone even calculated how many gold plates would be necessary to hold the contents of the Book of Mormon such that Moroni was able to carry and deposit in New York?

As far as the size of the golden plates, by any witness account, there was more than sufficient space to produce the text of the BoM.  For example, the Petelia Gold Tablet is a totenpass less than 1.5 inches long.  It is really, really small.  Yet it produces 12 lines of text of about 10 words each.  This is smaller in size but larger in content than a verse in the standard printing of the BoM.  If Mormon wanted to make it all fit, he very well could have done so--that's before taking into account that the individual sheets of the tablet were bigger (6x8) than a standard BoM print (double page print is about 5x8), that many languages use much more abbreviated writing styles than English (the whole point of the reformed Egyptian was that it took up less space than Hebrew, which is pretty close to the size of the Greek on the Petelia Gold Tablet), that the chapters did not come with chapter headings, that the footnotes post-dated Mormon by a few years, and that the difference in total thickness of the compilation is 6 inches (golden) to 3/8 (paper).  Of course, you could double, triple, octuple, or sixteen-tuple (I don't know the real word) the thickness of our paper and still have sufficient material left over for both the text and the sealed portion (about half of the whole record)--ignoring the fact that the thickness of each golden sheet (according to witness testimony) was only necessarily as thick as parchment.

What makes this all the more feasible, is that the translation of the 24 Jaredite plates (from the golden plates) equates to about 15 of the smaller-sized two-page printings of English text.  This gives plenty of room for the abridged material, less Moroni's added commentary.

Edited July 19, 2019 by PacMan

[clarkgoble]

9 hours ago, aussieguy55 said:

Has anyone even calculated how many gold plates would be necessary to hold the contents of the Book of Mormon such that Moroni was able to carry and deposit in New York?

There are various calculations although they're complicated over disagreements regarding the length of the lost 116 pages not to mention how much of the plates were the sealed portion. Complicating things further there's not a ton of agreement upon the size of the plates. Accounts range from 30 lbs to 70 lbs for the weight as well. 

An other big problem is we don't know the script. Again theories here have varied with some pushing a variant on Egyptian hieratic scripts using the standard mostly phoenetic meanings while others have suggested a more compressed perhaps more heavily ideogram based script. The script used and the method of encoding obviously determine how much data per page there was. For instance Hebrew can be encoded using hieratic as well as Egyptian. And there are extanct versions of this.

We don't know how Moroni moved or if he had any beasts of burden. But if he had a sled of some sort to carry his goods, a 50 lbs set of plates wouldn't be a huge problem - depending upon the path he took.

9 hours ago, aussieguy55 said:

His conclusion  "Although metal was undoubtedly used as an epigraphic medium in Israel-Judah from early times, there is no evidence to support the assumption that it figured in an established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."

Worth noting that this is an argument from silence. We don't have any extant long form metal plates. However the silver plates found at Qumran, while short, contain the scriptures, date to around 600 BC, and it's not exactly a leap to assume longer texts could have been preserved that way. Most ancient records didn't survive and it's worth noting that. Almost certainly all the examples of gold plates found the past few decades are just a drop in the bucket for what originally was produced.

3 hours ago, PacMan said:

I was not impressed. The explanation falls grossly short of any useful information.  For example, the Pyrgi plates in the museum where some are held note some 10,000 Etruscan texts.   So how many metal plates have been discovered, where, and what is the content of each?

Most extant metal plates have a ceremonial or magic component to them. Even the silver scrolls at Qumran were likely a kind of amulet. My understanding is that most of the Etruscan texts are akin to a book of breathings and are funerary in nature - typically found in coffins.

2 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

My personal theory is that the Brass Plates was a special project, launched during Jehoiakim's 11 year reign, after the death of Josiah during the period of Egyptian dominance (hence the language).  (After all, the Septuagint itself was an Egyptian project, sponsored by the Pharoh, not a home grown notion.)  I think Laban's Brass plates were organized as a way to provide a tributary gift for both prestige for an Egyptian Pharoh's library, and as a resource for Egyptian bureaucrats.   It need not be either a widespread practice nor a document handed down over many hundreds of years, accumulating authors over time.  It could be a snapshot of the Jewish writings of the time, gathered, and prepared for particular time and purpose, and then, left stranded in Laban's treasury after the Egyptian defeat and the installation of Zedekiah by Babylon.

The big question is whether it represented northern scriptures or scriptures out of Judah. If the former then they may still have been a special project, but one of a different tradition than the main Josiah one. But that's getting into the era where we have basically no records. It's only of late that scholars have been questioning whether Judah's representation of the northern Kingdom was accurate.

 

 

Edited July 19, 2019 by clarkgoble

[Ryan Dahle]

9 hours ago, aussieguy55 said:

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V52N02_2.pdf

 

Interesting article on whether gold plates  were ever used for long accounts. His conclusion  "  Although metal was undoubtedly used as an epigraphic medium in Israel-Judah from early times, there is no evidence to support the assumption that it figured in an established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."    Has anyone even calculated how many gold plates would be necessary to hold the contents of the Book of Mormon such that Moroni was able to carry and deposit in New York?

This provides a helpful overview from a different perspective:

https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/is-the-book-of-mormon-like-other-ancient-metal-documents

I think Thomas's biggest problem is in the loaded assumptions in his concluding statements:

Quote

But while the narrative’s world-making ability is real enough, its status as a translation of an ancient document is most unlikely, which is perhaps nowhere better seen than in its claims regarding gold and other metal plates as the original sources from which the document was produced. 

 First of all, the bolded text is a much broader issue than his article addresses. Evaluating the Book of Mormon's "status as a translation of an ancient document" is a topic that requires exhaustive investigation into numerous lines of evidence (i.e. anthropology, linguistics, literary studies, etc.) that goes well beyond the scope of Thomas's article. His statement merely serves to demonstrate his general assumption about the text. In other words, he is saying that the findings in his article support what he already assumes (rather than what has already been demonstrated) about the text's historicity. 

And then he attempts to justify his claim with the following:

Quote

Comparison of documented practices of metal epigraphy from throughout the ancient Near East/eastern Mediterranean show that the Book of Mormon tradition of writing extensive literary compositions on metal for archival purposes was conspicuously outside the norm, without historical precedent or parallel. In addition, biblical and archaeological evidence do not support the notion that Israel-Judah was exceptional or distinctive with regard to its use of metal as epigraphic support. Metal was not employed for the writing of continuous literary text, which was reserved for papyrus, leather, wax tablet, and wood, all perishable materials

Thomas is essentially saying that the Book of Mormon is "most unlikely" to be an ancient document because it doesn't have a perfect match with known metal documents from the ancient Near East/Mediterranean, and with Israel-Judah in particular. Yet he never explains why his criteria for evaluation is valid. Does the Book of Mormon have to have a perfect match from the same place, time, script, and genre for it to be a plausible ancient metal document? Most of the essential ingredients for creating the Book of Mormon or a document like the Brass Plates are attested from the ancient Near East/Mediterranean. These include:

• numerous ancient metal documents
• fairly lengthy ancient metal document
• ancient metal documents written in Hebrew and adapted forms of Egyptian
• ancient metal documents buried in stone boxes
• ancient metal documents bound with D-shaped rings
• ancient metal documents that were doubled and sealed
• and ancient metal documents that for the most part contain the genres described on the Brass Plates.

Thomas capitalizes on the fact that we don't have a lengthy "literary text" written on metal plates. But he doesn't say why that feature alone should be dispositive. I find his conclusion especially faulty because lengthier metal documents naturally would have required much more time and resources to create than shorter ones, making them inherently less likely to turn up in the archaeological record. Moreover,  there are ancient metal documents that are more comparable in length to the Book of Mormon. They just don't happen to fit the right time, place, and genre simultaneously. From the KnoWhy cited at the beginning:

Quote

Lengthier ancient metal documents, however, are not completely unheard of. In South Korea, a prophetic record of wisdom teachings was found on a set of 19 gold plates that date to the 8th century AD.18 Even more notable, a gold document, which records “a significant portion of the Quran” was found in the tomb of a Chinese emperor. Its “120 gold gilded plates” were “hinged together” in “6 separate sets of 20 ‘pages.’”19

An eastern philosophical work called The Perfection of Wisdom Sutra is also said to have been written on gold plates. According to David B. Honey and Michael P. Lyon, the text’s “6,400,000 Chinese characters” occupy “three full Western-style volumes in its modern critical edition.”20 Assuming the report of its ancient existence is accurate, “copying it on gold plates must have necessitated an extraordinary amount of gold as well as a huge investment in human and monetary resources.”21

There is an ancient eyewitness report that a Greek poem from around the 8th century BC, called Works and Days, was recorded in a lead book.22 Wright described the poem as a “literary opus of some thirty Oxford pages.”23 An ancient Hittite account, called the Deeds of Suppiluliuma, dating to the 14th century BC, was likely written on bronze tablets.24 Although many sections of the document are poorly preserved, the remaining portions suggest it would have been quite long.

Even closer to Jerusalem, the famous Copper Scroll (part of the Dead Sea Scrolls) is a substantial Hebrew document that dates to the 1st or 2nd century AD. It was inscribed onto separate copper plates that were riveted together into two continuous scrolls.25 These and other examples demonstrate that lengthy metal documents, while rare, are certainly attested in the ancient world.26

One important question that Thomas never addressed is whether the length of any of these known metal documents is typical or usual for their literary milieus? The answer, I believe, is clearly not. Thus, by Thomas's rationale, these documents should all be "most unlikely" to exist, and yet there they are. In essence, his evaluation that the Book of Mormon is a "most unlikely" document relies far too heavily on an absence of evidence for a "perfect match" and upon unnecessarily minimizing the many similarities that the Book of Mormon does have with a variety of ancient metal documents.

Some of these similarities, like the Book of Mormon's affinity with doubled, sealed documents and its use of D-Shaped rings, aren't things that Joseph would likely have known from the information available in his day, even though a number of other features of metal documents were known. It should also be remembered that even though all these features of ancient metal documents are known today, the vast majority of people don't know about most of them. I assume the same was generally true in Joseph Smith's day. Potential accessibility doesn't equate to likely derivation. 

Overall, I think Thomas's article is interesting and informative, but that his conclusion is clearly flawed. 

 

Edited July 19, 2019 by Ryan Dahle

[CA Steve]

44 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

We don't know how Moroni moved or if he had any beasts of burden. But if he had a sled of some sort to carry his goods, a 50 lbs set of plates wouldn't be a huge problem - depending upon the path he took.

It was my understanding that he transported them on the backs of tapirs.

[USU78]

2 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

There are all sorts of examples around the Middle East of Royal documents on metal and stone boxes, the thing about the Book of Mormon is that it need not represent an "established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."  Wilfred Griggs has an important essay that puts not only the medium but the themes and content in context:

https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/book-mormon-authorship-new-light-ancient-origins/4-book-mormon-ancient-book

My personal theory is that the Brass Plates was a special project, launched during Jehoiakim's 11 year reign, after the death of Josiah during the period of Egyptian dominance (hence the language).  (After all, the Septuagint itself was an Egyptian project, sponsored by the Pharoh, not a home grown notion.)  I think Laban's Brass plates were organized as a way to provide a tributary gift for both prestige for an Egyptian Pharoh's library, and as a resource for Egyptian bureaucrats.   It need not be either a widespread practice nor a document handed down over many hundreds of years, accumulating authors over time.  It could be a snapshot of the Jewish writings of the time, gathered, and prepared for particular time and purpose, and then, left stranded in Laban's treasury after the Egyptian defeat and the installation of Zedekiah by Babylon.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

The romantic in me wants them to be an artifact from Israel's ruling house, but this makes a whole lot more sense.

[champatsch]

1 hour ago, clarkgoble said:

We don't know how Moroni moved or if he had any beasts of burden. But if he had a sled of some sort to carry his goods, a 50 lbs set of plates wouldn't be a huge problem - depending upon the path he took.

We don't even know that Moroni moved them. They could have been moved very late.

[clarkgoble]

28 minutes ago, CA Steve said:

It was my understanding that he transported them on the backs of tapirs.

I don't think there's anything indicating that. Dogs were sometimes used in the Americas to pull sleds and of course there's still some dispute about horses (although I'm skeptical there). Dog sleds were primarily used in the plains as I understand it.  Reindeer (caribou) were semi-domesticated in northern Europe to pull sleds (thus the Santa Claus myth) but I don't think there's evidence of that in the Americas. Even in Europe the domestication is usually dated to the medieval period. We of course have no clue about Moroni's path to New York so it's hard to say much. We're not even sure he was alone.

11 minutes ago, champatsch said:

We don't even know that Moroni moved them. They could have been moved very late.

That's a possibility, although Joseph appears to think Moroni buried them there. There's that mysterious map at Church headquarters with a purported path from central America to New York. I'm skeptical of its authenticity but it is interesting.

Edited July 19, 2019 by clarkgoble

[champatsch]

I guess the takeaway of this article is that the Book of Mormon was a product of Joseph Smith's imagination.

The obvious problem, of course, is that the author used weak evidence to reach this conclusion when much stronger evidence says otherwise.

As a rule, an author doesn't accept that weak evidence trumps strong evidence without being an ideologue. And so we have a paper fueled by ideology.

[PacMan]

1 hour ago, clarkgoble said:

Most extant metal plates have a ceremonial or magic component to them. Even the silver scrolls at Qumran were likely a kind of amulet. My understanding is that most of the Etruscan texts are akin to a book of breathings and are funerary in nature - typically found in coffins.

Sort of.  Sometimes they include genealogy, a record of gifts given, and recounting deceased life's events.  They also include dedications and prayers of gratitude.  So while there are funerary elements, they are quite different than the book of breathings.

Edited July 19, 2019 by PacMan

[mapman]

9 hours ago, aussieguy55 said:

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V52N02_2.pdf

 

Interesting article on whether gold plates  were ever used for long accounts. His conclusion  "  Although metal was undoubtedly used as an epigraphic medium in Israel-Judah from early times, there is no evidence to support the assumption that it figured in an established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."    Has anyone even calculated how many gold plates would be necessary to hold the contents of the Book of Mormon such that Moroni was able to carry and deposit in New York?

As others have mentioned, if you were to write the symbols small enough there would be enough room to fit the Book of Mormon in Hebrew on the golden plates based off of the witnesses descriptions. Obviously no one knows how all of this worked for sure, but I think there is another possibility: that the BoM wasn't a literal translation of the plates, and that it is longer than what was actually written on the ancient record.

Consider Mormon 9:32-33: "And now, behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record." The meaning of this passage is ambiguous, but it implies that Reformed Egyptian was significantly more compact than Hebrew. I'm not positive what was meant that writing in Hebrew would make it perfect, but I think it could mean that the literal meaning of the words would have been written down in Hebrew, allowing for direct translation instead of translating through revelation in a seer stone.

Before knowledge of the translation of the Rosetta Stone became widespread, it was commonly believed (especially among those of an esoteric or mystical bent) to regard hieroglyphics as emblems that contained ancient wisdom hidden within them. Their meanings were discerned through revelation, intuition, or mystical methods, and then formulated into common language. Thus one symbol was taken to represent a whole set of ideas. For example, Athanasius Kircher translated the symbols that modern Egyptologists read as dd Wsr, "Osiris says," as "The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis, the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis."

This understanding of hieroglyphics is demonstrated in the Kirtland Egyptian papers, where individual symbols are sometimes interpreted as whole paragraphs of text. The symbols are interpreted in different ways in different "degrees", and not in the way that Egyptologists have discovered they mean, suggesting that these interpretations were received by inspiration and are not literal translations.

I don't know that this is actually how the Book of Mormon was revealed to Joseph Smith (and the doctrines of the book are more important anyways), but it is an interesting idea to me. It does leave us with the question of what was actually written on the golden plates.

[mfbukowski]

6 hours ago, champatsch said:

We don't even know that Moroni moved them. They could have been moved very late.

Now THAT is a VERY interesting idea I had not considered....  but why not?

[churchistrue]

8 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Worth noting that this is an argument from silence. We don't have any extant long form metal plates. However the silver plates found at Qumran, while short, contain the scriptures, date to around 600 BC, and it's not exactly a leap to assume longer texts could have been preserved that way. 

 

 

Link? I've never heard this.

[churchistrue]

7 hours ago, champatsch said:

I guess the takeaway of this article is that the Book of Mormon was a product of Joseph Smith's imagination.

The obvious problem, of course, is that the author used weak evidence to reach this conclusion when much stronger evidence says otherwise.

As a rule, an author doesn't accept that weak evidence trumps strong evidence without being an ideologue. And so we have a paper fueled by ideology.

I don't think that's fair. Someone could say the same thing about your work. The paper should be judged on its own merits. 

[mfbukowski]

2 minutes ago, churchistrue said:

I don't think that's fair. Someone could say the same thing about your work. The paper should be judged on its own merits. 

I think you missed his point totally.  He weighed it in the scales and found it wanting because his evidence is stronger.  Of course it was judged on "its own merits".  That was the problem

[Burnside]

11 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

We don't know how Moroni moved or if he had any beasts of burden. But if he had a sled of some sort to carry his goods, a 50 lbs set of plates wouldn't be a huge problem - depending upon the path he took.

Moroni had a sled and what, dragged the plates from Central America/ Southern Mexico? I can only imagine he had to repeatedly bury them when he got hungry and had to go a-hunting and run down his prey, during his travels to upstate New York. ha ha!

Are you a member of the Community of Christ Church or of the Restoration Branch?

Maybe you can pick up some extra income and be a tour guide for these RLDS/CofC/Restoration Branch youth for their Internship:

https://www.bomf.org/internship.html

Since you believe in the Two-Cumorah geography theory which originated with the RLDS Church: Page 150 of this 1924 book, published in Independence, MO:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89058377359;view=2up;seq=154;skin=mobile

Moroni had a sled.  

 

Edited July 20, 2019 by Burnside

[Kevin Christensen]

11 hours ago, churchistrue said:

Link? I've never heard this.

Clark is probably referring to the two pre-exilic silver scrolls from near Jerusalem, rather than Qumran, which provided a copper scroll.  Jeff Lindsay quotes Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay in "The Riches of Ketef Hinnom," Biblical Archaeology Review, 35:4 (July/August September/October 2009):

Quote

[Each of the] texts of the two inscriptions ... contains slight variations of parts of the three blessings that appear in the famous priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24–26:

The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

These are the words with which observant Jews still bless their children before the Sabbath meal on Friday night and that are also used in prayers in synagogues....

The amulets can be securely dated on a combination of three grounds. Paleographically they can be dated by the shape and form of the letters to the late seventh century B.C.E., before the Babylonian conquest. Stratigraphically the first amulet was found only about 7 centimeters (less than 3 in.) above the repository floor, which testifies to its relative antiquity within the repository assemblages, which rose to about 2 feet total. The second plaque was found in the innermost part of the repository, far from the entrance, among the earliest deposits. Finally, the date suggested paleographically corresponds to the chronological horizon of the late Iron Age pottery found in the repository. The silver plaques thus come from the late seventh century B.C.E., or the time of the prophet Jeremiah and King Josiah.

The implications of this dating are startling. First of all, it means that these texts on our silver plaques are the oldest composition of words similar to Biblical verses in existence. The earliest Biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls date to about 250 B.C.E. at the earliest. That means that our texts are older than the next oldest Biblical texts by nearly 400 years.

 

Hamblin talks about them, among other finds, here.

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1695&context=msr

Jeff Lindsay pulls together some more recent discussions here for how they relate to the Book of Mormon, including some new insights me and from Robert Boylan.

https://mormanity.blogspot.com/2019/01/further-notes-on-one-of-earliest-hebrew.html

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[churchistrue]

59 minutes ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Clark is probably referring to the two pre-exilic silver scrolls from near Jerusalem, rather than Qumran, which provided a copper scroll.  Jeff Lindsay quotes Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay in "The Riches of Ketef Hinnom," Biblical Archaeology Review, 35:4 (July/August September/October 2009):

 

Hamblin talks about them, among other finds, here.

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1695&context=msr

Jeff Lindsay pulls together some more recent discussions here for how they relate to the Book of Mormon, including some new insights me and from Robert Boylan.

https://mormanity.blogspot.com/2019/01/further-notes-on-one-of-earliest-hebrew.html

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

OK. I thought that might might have been what he was referring to. That feels a little bit of an overreach to claim they "contain the scriptures". 

[Robert F. Smith]

On 7/19/2019 at 1:14 AM, aussieguy55 said:

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V52N02_2.pdf .

See my answer to “What is the oldest archaeological evidence of scripture in the form of a bound book as we recognise it today as opposed to a scroll?” Quora, Feb 21, 2019, online at https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-oldest-archaeological-evidence-of-scripture-in-the-form-of-a-bound-book-as-we-recognise-it-today-as-opposed-to-a-scroll/answer/Bob-Smith-3106 . 

And my “Metalsmithing: If there were a book of 268,000 words written on plates of brass or gold, how much would it weigh?” Quora, July 18, 2018, online at https://www.quora.com/Metalsmithing-If-there-were-a-book-of-268-000-words-written-on-plates-of-brass-or-gold-how-much-would-it-weigh/answer/Bob-Smith-3106 .  

And my “Despite there being heavy evidence that the golden plates couldn’t have existed in the way Joseph Smith claims them to have been, why do Mormons still follow Mormonism?” Quora, May 11, 2019, online at https://www.quora.com/Despite-there-being-heavy-evidence-that-the-golden-plates-couldn-t-have-existed-in-the-way-Joseph-Smith-claims-them-to-have-been-why-do-Mormons-still-follow-Mormonism/answer/Bob-Smith-3106 . 

On 7/19/2019 at 1:14 AM, aussieguy55 said:

Interesting article on whether gold plates  were ever used for long accounts. His conclusion  "  Although metal was undoubtedly used as an epigraphic medium in Israel-Judah from early times, there is no evidence to support the assumption that it figured in an established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."

The Book of Mormon does not suggest that the Bronze Plates of Laban were a normal or established part of any regular scribal tradition.  They appear to be sui generis, unprecedented.  Some scholars have suggested that they may have been a single copy in bronze of records kept for centuries by royal court scribes in Samaria (the Northern Kingdom of Israel), that the ancestors of Lehi & Nephi were among those trained scribes, and that they were brought south to Jerusalem with other refugees from the Assyrian conquest of the North circa 722 B.C.

On 7/19/2019 at 1:14 AM, aussieguy55 said:

    Has anyone even calculated how many gold plates would be necessary to hold the contents of the Book of Mormon such that Moroni was able to carry and deposit in New York?

We have plenty of testimony on their weight (about 50-60 lbs), and that would provide many leaves on which to engrave the Book of Mormon and any sealed portion.  See my “The ‘Golden’ Plates,” FARMS Update, October 1984, reprinted in John W. Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon: The F.A.R.M.S. Updates (Provo: FARMS/SLC: Deseret Book, 1992), 275-278.  Online at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mi/66/  , and at https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/node/228 .

[Hestia]

Burnside is taking a break. 

[Robert F. Smith]

On 7/19/2019 at 7:32 AM, PacMan said:

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

Ultimately, the issue for the Nephites is twofold: (1) does the history support that they knew about writing on metal plates? The answer is an obvious yes. (2) why metal? Well, what other means did they have to write? I remember no account of Nephi being a paper maker. In fact, the earliest amate paper came on the scene 500 years after Lehi left Jersusalem. So if the region (let alone they) didn’t have papyrus or some form of paper, then it wasn’t an option..............................

The rationale for engraving a record on plates is provided in Jacob 4:2, "whatsoever things we write upon any thing save it be upon plates must perish and vanish away."  Howev er, they would certainly have used other media, vellum (animal skin) and papyrus.  Beaten and treated fig tree-bark in the New World: Mayan huun, and Aztec amatl.

[Robert F. Smith]

On 7/19/2019 at 7:43 AM, Kevin Christensen said:

There are all sorts of examples around the Middle East of Royal documents on metal and stone boxes, the thing about the Book of Mormon is that it need not represent an "established scribal tradition of lengthy literary composition or archival storage."  Wilfred Griggs has an important essay that puts not only the medium but the themes and content in context:

https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/book-mormon-authorship-new-light-ancient-origins/4-book-mormon-ancient-book

My personal theory is that the Brass Plates was a special project, launched during Jehoiakim's 11 year reign, after the death of Josiah during the period of Egyptian dominance (hence the language).  (After all, the Septuagint itself was an Egyptian project, sponsored by the Pharoh, not a home grown notion.)  I think Laban's Brass plates were organized as a way to provide a tributary gift for both prestige for an Egyptian Pharoh's library, and as a resource for Egyptian bureaucrats.   It need not be either a widespread practice nor a document handed down over many hundreds of years, accumulating authors over time.  It could be a snapshot of the Jewish writings of the time, gathered, and prepared for particular time and purpose, and then, left stranded in Laban's treasury after the Egyptian defeat and the installation of Zedekiah by Babylon...............

An interesting theory, but it doesn't really explain why Lehi and Nephi were expert scribes in ancient Egyptian.  If they came from a line of royal court scribes attached to the Northern Kingdom, that might explain it.  However, even at that, why keep the record in ancient Egyptian?  We have only recently learned that hieratic Egyptian was widely used on all Israelite & Judahite weights & measures, and that their weights & measures were keyed to the Egyptian system (and matches Alma 11).  That is remarkable, and something the Bible never hints at.  Moreover, Brant Gardner emphasizes the Nephite scribal tradition, and I agree:

Brant Gardner, “Nephi as Scribe,” FARMS Review, 23/1 (2011):45-55, available online at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/  .

Brant Gardner, “Musings on the Making of Mormon’s Book: Preliminary: Nephi as Author,” InterpreterBlog, July 4, 2013, online at http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/musings-on-the-making-of-mormons-book-preliminary-nephi-as-author/#more-3075 .

Karl van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Harvard, 2007).