Year of Maroni

[ZealouslyStriving]

Just now, Calm said:

Welcome back….

Thank you 😊

[Zosimus]

13 hours ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

Where does Mahonri Moriancumr fit into all this? 🤔 J/k

We've already covered how Cumr comes from Arabic accounts of the Kumr, sons of Japheth sailing east in boats modeled after the ark. So I'll skip that.

Morian also comes from the Bible, and like Kumr, refers to the people of Ethiopia and India. Just four chapters after the Rechabites are promised they'll be delivered from Babylonian captivity, we learn that Ebed-melech, the Morian, will also be delivered.

Jeremiah 39: 15-18 says:

"Nowe when Ieremie lay yet bounde in the fore entrie of the prison, the worde of the Lorde came vnto hym, saying: Go and tell Abedmelech the Morian, thus saith the Lorde of hoastes the God of Israel: Beholde, the cruell and sharpe plague that I haue deuised for this citie wyll I bring vpon them, that thou shalt see it: But I wyll deliuer thee in that day saith the Lorde, & thou shalt not come in the handes of those men whom thou fearest:"

Those that were promised to be delivered from Babylonian captivity, were delivered to the same place, a land across the sea peopled by the descendants of Moriancumr

Edited February 27, 2024 by Zosimus

[Zosimus]

I couldn't immediately find this in my notes yesterday, but wanted to add a source to support my comment above. From Ronit Nikolsky's "The Provenance of The Journey of Zosimos":

"In an article written in the late 1980s, Hannelis Schulte points out. a phenomenon that exists in the Book of Jeremiah, which he calls "personlische Heilsorakel" (personal salvation oracle) Schulte shows that certain persons from the biblical book of Jeremiah are promised to be saved from the upcoming destruction of the city; thus is the promise given to the Ebed-Melech the Cushite: "but I will preserve you on that day" (Jer. 39:15 18) and to Baruch the Scribe: "and I will let you live wherever you go" (Jer. 45:1-5). According to these promises, neither Ebed-Melech nor Baruch would view the destruction of Jerusalem. David Flusser claims, independently of Schulte, that such a promise was given to Jeremiah as well "They will make war on you but shall not overcome you, for I am with you and will keep you safe" (Jer. 1:19). In my opinion the Rechabites are also given such a promise: "Jonadab son of Rechab shall not want a descendant to stand before me for all time" (Jer. 3:19). Baruch the Scribe, Jeremiah and Ebed-Melech the Cushite appear in Paralepomena Ieremia. The Rechabites in the apocryphal work also belong to this literature, which deals with figures in the Book of Jeremiah who escaped the destruction. This conclusion is further supported by similarities between Jeremiah's customs in the Paralepomena and in The History of the Rechabites." (source)

Of course, I don't have anything to support my speculation that there's a relationship between Mulek (son of Zedekiah) and Ebed-Melech (Morian servant of Zedekiah) simply because there's no evidence that a son of Zedekiah named Mulek ever existed. But I do find it interesting that Ebed-Melech and the Rechabites were all promised to be saved from the destruction of Jerusalem. Not unlike Mulek and the Lehites.

[Benjamin McGuire]

On 2/24/2024 at 11:58 PM, Zosimus said:

But I'm not arguing for historical events. I'm arguing for a historical setting. This must be why we are talking past each other. I pick up where Paul Owen stepped away from the discussion: “What I am suggesting, in essence, is that the Book of Mormon could be taken as a genuinely restored ancient text with a fictional narrative that originated in the Old World, an account that bore some connection to the mysterious (and probably later) History of the Rechabites.”

If you aren't arguing for historical events, then why even have this discussion? You suggest then that you aren't interested in historical events (historicity) and are only focused on versimilitude. The Book of Mormon then becomes a work of fiction. And somehow Joseph Smith is allowed to translate this work of fiction into modern scripture. I am not sure where you go after that.

On 2/24/2024 at 11:58 PM, Zosimus said:

I already responded to this, its not really a problem. In many texts, especially those describing the isles of the blessed or the land of promise across a river, the river was the ocean. Or the ocean is a River Ocean. From the Apocalypse of Paul:

And this means what? It is a serious question - because you are trying to establish relationships - and yet you aren't letting the relationships speak for themselves - you are finding everything that could possible support your claim. It is (to use a tired simile) like throwing the plate of spaghetti at the wall to see how many noodles stick.

There are lots of rivers, and there are lots of oceans - and they have, since earliest times - been connected to voyages to other places. Sometimes, we even connect them to non-existent places. This same sort of story can be seen in Peter Pan, where Wendy and the boys fly out to an island in the middle of a vast ocean (Neverland). And yet, I don't think you will even understand the problem with your justification.

On 2/24/2024 at 11:58 PM, Zosimus said:

You'd have to read the material already out there on the River Eumeles described in some versions of the Narrative of Zosimus before arriving at your conclusion that the Rechabites didn't cross a great sea, or that the text doesn't say this. (source)

and

On 2/24/2024 at 11:58 PM, Zosimus said:

You say the river in the Narrative of Zosimus was not a great sea. It doesn't seem to be exactly correct. There's even a Syriac version that is titled "The History of the Sons of Jonadab, the Son of Rechab, who are in the Midst of the Ocean, the Great Sea". Again, it appears you're doing the things you accuse me of: drawing a conclusion, without looking closely at the sources, and without offering evidence to back it up. I'll stand corrected if you can provide a source to support your argument that the river in the text is just a river, instead of a River Ocean, great sea, or a symbolic passage to Paradise.

No. I'm not doing what I am accusing you of doing. I am not creating this complicated argument and using parallels as evidence. I am pointing out the problems with your methodology. As your source points out this theme of the river ocean that surrounds all of the known world, and is inhabited by all sorts of imaginary and mystical beings is a nearly universal theme in ancient literature. So why don't you use the Apocalypse of Paul? Or Homer's Odyssey? Or even The Book of the Watchers? Your source uses all of these. The challenge is that you aren't doing what your source is doing. Of course, we also have more closely related stories in the Old Testament. One of the most important of these is Joshua 3-5, where we get a repeat of the Moses parting of the red sea so that the people can enter their promised land.

The methodology problem - the thing that makes this the wrong way to do it - is that you are using what you see as the similarities as the core elements that drive the comparison. You use google to come up with things that help you (I don't really believe, for example, that you actually read Bremmer's book). I can come up with equally strong parallels by looking for similarities like this to other traditions - they just wouldn't necessarily be the same parallels that you are using. It's not as hard to do as you might think it is.

The challenge that I face is that your parallels are all contrived. You want to make the specific points of comparison seem so important. And yet, you cannot get past the problem of coincidence. Why can these similarities not be complete coincidence?

[Zosimus]

On 3/1/2024 at 11:33 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

If you aren't arguing for historical events, then why even have this discussion?

To identify the intended setting, if any, of the book

On 3/1/2024 at 11:33 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

You suggest then that you aren't interested in historical events (historicity) and are only focused on versimilitude. The Book of Mormon then becomes a work of fiction. And somehow Joseph Smith is allowed to translate this work of fiction into modern scripture. I am not sure where you go after that.

If it becomes possible to read the Book of Mormon all the way through without encountering an anachronism, that'd be a good start. 

On 3/1/2024 at 11:33 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

And this means what? It is a serious question - because you are trying to establish relationships - and yet you aren't letting the relationships speak for themselves - you are finding everything that could possible support your claim. It is (to use a tired simile) like throwing the plate of spaghetti at the wall to see how many noodles stick.

There are lots of rivers, and there are lots of oceans - and they have, since earliest times - been connected to voyages to other places. Sometimes, we even connect them to non-existent places. This same sort of story can be seen in Peter Pan, where Wendy and the boys fly out to an island in the middle of a vast ocean (Neverland). And yet, I don't think you will even understand the problem with your justification.

Its more like I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what doesn’t stick. If a model has a pile of anachronisms underneath, its not very useful. Reading with that model in mind, like you say, could do more harm than good. I know the suggestion to read the book with no real-world setting in mind, like a fiction, but I can't help but see the characters like Peter Pans in Neverland when I do it that way. In other words, nothing sticks.

On 3/1/2024 at 11:33 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

No. I'm not doing what I am accusing you of doing. I am not creating this complicated argument and using parallels as evidence. I am pointing out the problems with your methodology.

But this thread doesn't represent my methodology. It was a side discussion from the geography thread, because it wasn't relevant over there. You can check that thread for the methodology. I start with the assumption that the text is what it claims to be and that the author(s) intended a specific historical setting. I begin with 1st Nephi and go forward until I hit a geographical/topographical reference. I then look at different geography models that have been proposed to determine, through a ranking system, which model aligns best with the internal geography described in the text, what Sorenson called Mormon’s Map and John Clark called Nephite Geography.

On 3/1/2024 at 11:33 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

As your source points out this theme of the river ocean that surrounds all of the known world, and is inhabited by all sorts of imaginary and mystical beings is a nearly universal theme in ancient literature. So why don't you use the Apocalypse of Paul? Or Homer's Odyssey? Or even The Book of the Watchers? Your source uses all of these. The challenge is that you aren't doing what your source is doing. Of course, we also have more closely related stories in the Old Testament. One of the most important of these is Joshua 3-5, where we get a repeat of the Moses parting of the red sea so that the people can enter their promised land.

Because we don’t have enough data to compare with the land of promise described in the Apocalypse of Paul or a geography in the Book of the Watchers. If there was a real-world setting associated with those texts, I might include them in the analysis. FWIW what we know about the geography of Homer's Odyssey doesn't fit.

However, since Book of Mormon scholars like Jack Welch and Blake Ostler have compared the Book of Mormon narrative with the Narrative of Zosimus, we might compare the Book of Mormon setting to the lands described in the various versions of the Alexander Romance that influenced the Narrative of Zosimus. We do have some idea about where the intended setting of these texts might be. It's probably not worth getting into here, but there is some agreement that the eastern lands described in variations of the Alexander Romance and the Land of the Blessed described in the Narrative of Zosimus is referring to what 5th century authors understood about India beyond the Ganges, or Southeast Asia. So we have a historical setting for the groups Alexander supposedly visited in legend, and they appear to be historical groups.

For example, the Hebrew version of the Alexander Romance refers to the makarioi or "the blessed", as Rechabites, while other Greek texts refer to the makarioi as the Camarini, or the Kumr/Khmer in Arabic texts. That's something we can compare. Is there a relationship between the seemingly fictional/mythical "Blessed" and what was known about the Kumr/Khmer in the 5th century AD? I don't have the skills to do such a comparison, so I have to rely on those that do. I've shared some of that in this thread above, eg Braginsky in Images of Nusantara in Russian Literature. 

On 3/1/2024 at 11:33 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

The methodology problem - the thing that makes this the wrong way to do it - is that you are using what you see as the similarities as the core elements that drive the comparison. You use google to come up with things that help you (I don't really believe, for example, that you actually read Bremmer's book).

I don’t need to read the entire book. I only needed to read Kirsti Copeland’s essay within it, to provide a source for you. I can provide others sources, but felt one would be enough. I suppose you imagine I’m sitting here madly Googling keyword phrases to cherry pick supporting material, but this reference along with almost everything referenced in this thread since the OP, is taken from my notes. I’d done the research on what 5th century Christians meant by "river" years ago, 2019 to be exact, outside the context of our discussion here.

Besides, this isn’t something only Copeland has discussed. Its evident by looking at 5th century AD Christian maps of the world. There’s a river surrounding the known world, and to the east - across the river - Paradise.

On 3/1/2024 at 11:33 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

I can come up with equally strong parallels by looking for similarities like this to other traditions - they just wouldn't necessarily be the same parallels that you are using. It's not as hard to do as you might think it is.

Meh. If it was so easy to find strong parallels, we would have a model that at least appears to work. Instead, we have dozens that fall apart as soon as Nephi sets foot in the Promised Land. I won’t disagree that its easy to come up with parallels, but what isn’t easy is coming up with parallels in a location that fits the internal geography of the Book of Mormon in a convincing way. Nobody has done it yet (including me) so maybe it's not as easy as you think

On 3/1/2024 at 11:33 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

The challenge that I face is that your parallels are all contrived. You want to make the specific points of comparison seem so important. And yet, you cannot get past the problem of coincidence. Why can these similarities not be complete coincidence?

Good question, I don't have the answer. But Blake Ostler again:

"When does a parallel entail dependence? Similar ideas presented in identical order and expressed in similar phraseology may suggest dependence, but chronology is also important. For example, the extensive parallels between 1 Nephi and the Narrative of Zosimus, a Jewish work written during the intertestamental period, include some uncommon ideas about writing upon tablets and a vision in which Zosimus is led by an angel through a dark and dreary wasteland to the bank of a river obscured by a mist of darkness. He crosses the river to a tree with surpassingly sweet fruit, of which he partakes. It is clear, however, that the Narrative of Zosimus as we know it was composed (circa first to fourth century A.D. ) after Lehi's family reached the New World and discovered too late to be a source for Joseph Smith. Hence, these parallels must be explained in another way, perhaps, as some scholars hypothesize, by an earlier tradition whose roots cannot specifically be traced (Charlesworth 1983, 2:444; Welch 1982)."

He uses the Narrative of Zosimus as an example of a text that has parallels with the Book of Mormon that must be explained in ways other than complete coincidence.

Edited March 4, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

To identify the intended setting, if any, of the book

What do you mean by "intended setting" - and more to the point, what do you mean by "intended"?

This is a really problematic claim - because the moment that we start talking about intentions - especially the intentions of an author - we have trouble. The only way to begin to deal with the problems this raises is to recognize that you cannot reference anything that is external to the text. To do so means to engage the intentional fallacy. I have argued in several of my published efforts that we can in fact discuss the intentionality of a text - but only through the text itself - using the rhetorical devices in the text that provide clues to the intentions of the author. But, to try and locate the author in a setting external to the text is to fabricate meaning.

I note in passing that the Book of Mormon itself discourages this sort of reading when it tells us to liken scripture unto ourselves - as opposed to asking us to look at the intentions of the author. I discuss this in some detail in my essay here. And one thing that is of interest, when we talk about First and Second Nephi in particular is that the intentions of the author are discussed within the text itself. So the question is, how do you identify the intended setting of the book without starting with an interpretation already that is based on something external to the text?

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

If it becomes possible to read the Book of Mormon all the way through without encountering an anachronism, that'd be a good start. 

The Book of Mormon is a text written in the early 19th century. It claims to be a translation of an older text. If I start from that position, do we really have any anachronisms that require trying to place it into a specific context? This is one of the problems with the Book of Mormon and all of these theories that tend to try and locate them temporally and spatially - they all involve already an interpretation of the text that creates the sorts of anachronisms that you want to answer (like, for example, elephants). But those interpretations are based on certain assumptions about the text - about what it means to be a translation, and how it should be read. I don't see these kinds of things as anachronistic when I read the text. My discussion here was about how our sense of translation changes the way that we read the text. My discussion in the earlier link is about how our intuited understanding of the author of the text alters the way that we read the text. These things have already occurred before we start to look at parallels the way that you do - and they alter how we understand those parallels. This leads me to assert that these discussions have to occur prior to our looking for parallels. Which of the anachronistic ideas should we make artifacts of translation instead of artifacts connecting to a specific model of place and time for authorship of the urtext that we are hypothesizing about?

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Its more like I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what doesn’t stick.

That's fine - it still doesn't provide us with enough certainty to take it anywhere ...

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

If a model has a pile of anachronisms underneath, its not very useful. Reading with that model in mind, like you say, could do more harm than good. I know the suggestion to read the book with no real-world setting in mind, like a fiction, but I can't help but see the characters like Peter Pans in Neverland when I do it that way. In other words, nothing sticks.

And strangely enough, this reading with no real-world setting in mind is exactly how Nephi tells us to read. Rather than copying and pasting it all here, the section heading Nephi Reading in my essay that I linked earlier describes this process. This is the main idea:

Quote

If Nephi has invited his audience to read without the special knowledge needed to understand the texts as their authors intended, he does explain that they can re-contextualize them within their own communities.

If you want to suggest that we have to have this special knowledge to understand the text, that's fine - but you won't get that special knowledge because you are looking in all the wrong ways at the text. Throwing pasta at the wall isn't somehow going to create that special knowledge - especially when you start by making assumptions about the text - about what should be understood as anachronistic and what should be understood as the essential parts of the narrative.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

But this thread doesn't represent my methodology.

It does represent your methodology. I know this because if your methodology were something that was recognized as useful in tackling literary questions of this sort, you would be making entirely different arguments.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I start with the assumption that the text is what it claims to be and that the author(s) intended a specific historical setting.

I believe you completely when you say this. However, I will point to the fact that you have no access to the author's intention. And you don't seem to be doing anything to build an argument for that intention from the text itself. The text becomes a series of anachronistic puzzles that need to be solved in a way that supports what you have intuited (and not demonstrated).

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I begin with 1st Nephi and go forward until I hit a geographical/topographical reference.

One of the earliest and most interesting topographical references in the Book of Mormon is the three day journey into the wilderness. Why? Because it is put in there in imitation of the three day journey made by Israel under the direction of Moses - when they left Egypt. And this tells us something about the text and it's narrative. It tells us that the intentions aren't really about creating a useful map, but about providing us with a specific sort of narrative that involves all sorts of other things. The problem with the sorts of reconstructions that you offer, that are offered by Clark and Sorenson is that they are pulled together from the text in ways that tell us that the author wasn't at all worried about providing us with some sort of temporal-spatial context for the narrative. The sorts of things you are pulling out aren't really a part of the authors intentions at all. And, of course, this is what we would expect for an author that has no sense of their audience or their specialized knowledge (or lack thereof).

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Because we don’t have enough data to compare with the land of promise described in the Apocalypse of Paul or a geography in the Book of the Watchers. If there was a real-world setting associated with those texts, I might include them in the analysis. FWIW what we know about the geography of Homer's Odyssey doesn't fit.

What I find humorous is what this tells us about you and your reading of your sources. The author of your source is the one that discusses Homer's Odyssey. And of course the geography doesn't fit because it doesn't recognize the world that we know that we live in today. It was written without that specialized knowledge that we have. And yet, the geography from the Apocalypse of Paul or the Book of the Watchers don't have real world settings either. That's the entire point of the text you were quoting. Here is a bit from page 100:

Quote

Ephrem, the fourth-century Syrian saint, offers another late antique portrayal of the lands beyond the River Ocean. Ephrem describes paradise as a mountain that encircles the Great Sea, the Syrian equivalent of the River Ocean, which in turn encircles the entire inhabited world: 'Resembling the halo which surrounds the moon we should look upon Paradise as being circular too, having both sea and dry land encompassed within it.' Ephrem's Paradis is, like the Land of Promise in the ApocPl and the home of the Blessed Ones in NarrZos, clearly separated from the inhabited world by the Great Sea.

The idea is that the river-Ocean is the demarcation for the edge of the inhabited world - beyond which there is something entirely different. It's like the edge of the world (for those who believed the earth was flat). And beyond that edge is something else - how else do you keep something that is a place that is between heaven and earth? But none of these reflect real world geographies. And the idea of this river-ocean is relatively foreign to the narrative content of the Book of Mormon - and we might expect that it would be foreign either because it was authored in a modern context or because it is in fact a translation of an ancient text, which has little in connection with late antiquity's depiction of the world.

As a side note, I point here to the fact that if we take the text at face value (as you suggest), then this sort of thing adds to the anachronisms we find in the text - it doesn't reduce them. And this is in part because you seem to be flattening literary history.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

However, since Book of Mormon scholars like Jack Welch and Blake Ostler have compared the Book of Mormon narrative with the Narrative of Zosimus, we might compare the Book of Mormon setting to the lands described in the various versions of the Alexander Romance that influenced the Narrative of Zosimus.

And here we go down the rabbit hole.

I am perfectly happy contesting the similarities that you bring up - and pointing out how they invoke parallelomania. Waving Jack Welch and Blake Ostler in front of me doesn't do anything for me at all.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I don’t need to read the entire book. I only needed to read Kirsti Copeland’s essay within it, to provide a source for you.

Google is not your friend.

11 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Meh. If it was so easy to find strong parallels, we would have a model that at least appears to work. Instead, we have dozens that fall apart as soon as Nephi sets foot in the Promised Land. I won’t disagree that its easy to come up with parallels, but what isn’t easy is coming up with parallels in a location that fits the internal geography of the Book of Mormon in a convincing way. Nobody has done it yet (including me) so maybe it's not as easy as you think

Do you read what you write? I didn't say I could come up with something convincing. I said I could come up with parallels similar to yours (which aren't convincing). This is the problem. And it is worsened by the fact that because the Book of Mormon isn't intended as a geographical text, there isn't really any consensus about how the internal geography of the Book of Mormon should be understood ...

Finally -

11 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Good question, I don't have the answer. But Blake Ostler again:

"When does a parallel entail dependence? Similar ideas presented in identical order and expressed in similar phraseology may suggest dependence, but chronology is also important. For example, the extensive parallels between 1 Nephi and the Narrative of Zosimus, a Jewish work written during the intertestamental period,

We need to stop right here - because the Narrative of Zosimus isn't a Jewish work. It wasn't written in the intertestamental period. You could look here for example:

Quote

The Story of Zosimus (also called the Narration, Apocalypse or Journey of Zosimus) is a Greek text of the 5th century AD. It has sometimes been classified as among the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. In the Middle Ages, it was translated into Syriac, Arabic, Ge'ez, Armenian, Georgian and Slavonic.

But should we decide that Wikipedia isn't authoritative, let's see what Kirsti Copeland’s essay had to say about it:

Quote

The NarrZos is a Byzantine story about the Blessed Ones who live beyond the river Eumeles. ... All three demonstrate that, as opposed to Classical Antiquity, the late antique Christian default is to describe edges of the earth beyond River Ocean. (97-98)

Late antique Christiantiy (Byzantine Christianity) is not Jewish, it is not intertestamental. And when you draw these comparisons, you aren't really creating an ancient context for the Book of Mormon. You are putting the Book of Mormon into a later antique Christian context.

Ostler is demonstrably wrong on this point.

[Zosimus]

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

And strangely enough, this reading with no real-world setting in mind is exactly how Nephi tells us to read. Rather than copying and pasting it all here, the section heading Nephi Reading in my essay that I linked earlier describes this process. This is the main idea:

I'm working through this essay. Good stuff. I'll need to read through it a few times. Will respond after I've done so

But after first pass through, it stands out that we are really talking about two different books, or plates. Your essay discusses Nephi's understanding/setting. Nephi's setting was limited. He only knew, as Jacob tells us, they had “been driven out of the land of [their] inheritance” and the Lord made the sea their path to lead them “to a better land” which they understand to be an isle of the sea of which there were many, also inhabited by their brethren. Beyond being on an isle (whatever that might mean to a 6th century BC Israelite), they had no idea what the land beyond their local area looked like. In other words, Nephi's Map would be rough with few details. He knows he's crossed "the River" or is somewhere in the middle of it. If he went east, he would be getting closer to the Garden of Eden, or Paradise, or the burning hot flames of the rising Sun.

Jacob’s geographical understanding on the small plates feels more authentically ‘ancient’ to me. He has no sense of his setting or orientation because he’d never see a map of the isle he was on. These details are provided later, within the abridgment of the large plates, where Mormon interrupts the narrative to give us his detailed map/setting based on 900 years of Lamanite and Nephite explorations of the land. That 'map' is what I mean by intended setting. Special knowledge is no longer required to reconstruct an internal geography.

So one question while I go through your essay a couple more times. What might a postmodernist reading of Mormon's abridgment of the large plates look like?

Edited March 5, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

12 hours ago, Zosimus said:

But after first pass through, it stands out that we are really talking about two different books, or plates. Your essay discusses Nephi's understanding/setting. Nephi's setting was limited. He only knew, as Jacob tells us, they had “been driven out of the land of [their] inheritance” and the Lord made the sea their path to lead them “to a better land” which they understand to be an isle of the sea of which there were many, also inhabited by their brethren. Beyond being on an isle (whatever that might mean to a 6th century BC Israelite), they had no idea what the land beyond their local area looked like. In other words, Nephi's Map would be rough with few details. He knows he's crossed "the River" or is somewhere in the middle of it. If he went east, he would be getting closer to the Garden of Eden, or Paradise, or the burning hot flames of the rising Sun.

When I read this, what I see is that you are picking the things that you see parallels for and are trying to make this the quintessential substance of the text. But this part really stands out:

Quote

He knows he's crossed "the River" or is somewhere in the middle of it.

Nephi never uses the term "the River" in his text. This means that it isn't a quote (it shouldn't have quotation marks). These are your words - interpreting Nephi's text in a way that you believe highlights the parallels you are presenting. This is the substance of what we call parallelomania. From my review essay on the idea, I'll quote a list of the vices of parallels (not mine - Alexander Lindey's - the source is referenced in the link):

Quote

Any method of comparison which lists and underscores similarities and suppresses or minimizes differences is necessarily misleading.

Parallels are too readily susceptible of manipulation. Superficial resemblances may be made to appear as of the essence.

Parallel-hunters do not, as a rule, set out to be truthful and impartial. They are hell-bent on proving a point.

Parallel-hunting is predicated on the use of lowest common denominators. Virtually all literature, even the most original, can be reduced to such terms, and thereby shown to be unoriginal. So viewed, Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper plagiarizes ****ens’ David Copperfield. Both deal with England, both describe the slums of London, both see their hero exalted beyond his original station. To regard any two books in this light, however, is to ignore every factor that differentiates one man’s thoughts, reactions and literary expression from another’s.

Parallel columns operate piecemeal. They wrench phrases and passages out of context. A product of the imagination is indivisible. It depends on totality of effect. To remove details from their setting is to falsify them.

Parallels fail to indicate the proportion which the purportedly borrowed material bears to the sum total of the source, or to the whole of the new work. Without such information a just appraisal is impossible.

The practitioners of the technique resort too often to sleight of hand. They employ language, not to record facts or to describe things accurately, but as props in a rhetorical hocus-pocus which, by describing different things in identical words, appears to make them magically alike.

A double-column analysis is a dissection. An autopsy will reveal a great deal about a cadaver, but very little about the spirit of the man who once inhabited it.

Most parallels rest on the assumption that if two successive things are similar, the second one was copied from the first. This assumption disregards all the other possible causes of similarity.

I would argue that Nephi doesn't in fact seem to be aware that he has crossed "the River" or is in the middle of it - because conceptually, "the River" (whatever you mean by this term) isn't how he understands what he is doing - or better, it isn't how the author of the Book of Mormon text seems to express what is going on. There is nothing in the text that suggests a belief that by sailing east they would be getting close to the sun. There is no belief in the text that the Garden of Eden has some identifiable location that they could travel to. All of this comes from you, and not from the text. So, why should we agree with you on any of these points that you raise that aren't substantiated in the text?

Edited March 5, 2024 by Benjamin McGuire

[Zosimus]

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Nephi never uses the term "the River" in his text. This means that it isn't a quote (it shouldn't have quotation marks). These are your words - interpreting Nephi's text in a way that you believe highlights the parallels you are presenting. 

Nephi does use the term "river" in his text, in the context of "an awful gulf, which separated the wicked from the tree of life, and also from the Saints of God” (source). This is fitting, since Nephi was preparing to embark on a journey across a gulf of water that would separate his seed from those in the Old World. In the Narrative of Zosimus, a river separated those in the world of vanity from the blessed in or near Paradise. So yeah, I suppose I am using the word river in a way to highlight the parallels I see between Lehi's vision of a river/gulf and the journey that the Lehites were about to embark on. I expected you wouldn't agree, so I put it in scare quotes "quotation marks used around a word or phrase when they are not required, to elicit attention or doubts."

13 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I would argue that Nephi doesn't in fact seem to be aware that he has crossed "the River" or is in the middle of it - because conceptually, "the River" (whatever you mean by this term) isn't how he understands what he is doing - or better, it isn't how the author of the Book of Mormon text seems to express what is going on. There is nothing in the text that suggests a belief that by sailing east they would be getting close to the sun. There is no belief in the text that the Garden of Eden has some identifiable location that they could travel to. All of this comes from you, and not from the text. So, why should we agree with you on any of these points that you raise that aren't substantiated in the text?

I believe it is substantiated in the text, in Nephi's physical advance towards the promised land across the waters, and Lehi's vision of the river and the gulf that was a physical barrier between the righteous and the wicked in the advance towards the tree of life:

"Lehi’s dream in 1 Nephi 8 and Nephi’s related vision in 1 Nephi 11–14 contain many features related to the biblical garden of Eden, including most prominently the tree of life. A close reading of the features of Lehi’s dream in light of the earliest Book of Mormon text shows further similarities to the biblical garden, suggesting that the setting of Lehi’s dream is actually the garden of Eden. (source) Again, I expect you won't approve my reading of the text in this way, so let's just move on.

As I see it, we have a problem when we try and discuss the body of water Nephi encounters at Bountiful. Its frequently referred to as an ocean, a word that has a meaning, for those of us reading the book today, that would have been new to Nephi. Here's one example from hundreds: Why Would Nephi Call the Ocean "Irreantum"? Nephi certainly doesn't use the word ocean in his text and the article then goes on to suggest the closest word to Irreantum is the Egyptian name for the Orontes, a river.

It's even more problematic when the assumption is made that Nephi somehow experienced the Atlantic or Pacific in 600 BC. IMO river or sea is closer to how a 6th century BC Israelite would have understood the Erythraean Sea. But it would be far better if we all just used the term Nephi gives us, Irreantum (many waters). There's no way to know with certainty what language this is, or what the etymology is, and I don't want to open up another can of worms by pointing you to the entry for Irreantum in the Book of Mormon Onomasticon. So let me rephrase my comment above: Nephi knows he's crossed Irreantum, or is somewhere in the middle of the many waters. 

Starting the moment Nephi boards the ship, the references to the body (or bodies) of water between Bountiful and the Land of First Inheritance are the only geographical references that we can pinpoint with some confidence on a real world map. So I agree it is important to be precise. Instead of river, or sea, or ocean we could use the term Nephi gives the body of water: Irreantum or "many waters".

Edited March 6, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Nephi does use the term "river" in his text, in the context of "an awful gulf, which separated the wicked from the tree of life, and also from the Saints of God” (source).

Details matter. And your context isn't a literary context here but a textual context (the two are very different things). As far as the "awful gulf" goes - the thing that Nephi sees in his vision, he actually provides for us a very specific understanding - it is a figurative gulf and not a literal ocean of some sort. This is what we get in 1 Nephi 15:27-28 -

Quote

And I said unto them that the water which my father saw was filthiness; and so much was his mind swallowed up in other things that he beheld not the filthiness of the water. And I said unto them that it was an awful gulf, which separated the wicked from the tree of life, and also from the saints of God.

And we see from the context here that this is the same river that Lehi describes in 1 Ne. 8:13-14 (and the following verses):

Quote

And as I cast my eyes round about, that perhaps I might discover my family also, I beheld a river of water; and it ran along, and it was near the tree of which I was partaking the fruit. And I looked to behold from whence it came; and I saw the head thereof a little way off; and at the head thereof I beheld your mother Sariah, and Sam, and Nephi; and they stood as if they knew not whither they should go.

The imagery here is much closer to the imagery that we would expect if a comparison was being made to Eden, the garden with the original tree of life. So we read in Genesis 2:10 -

Quote

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

Do you see how the river-Ocean from your parallels has no head? And the rivers in the Genesis account do? And we should see here at this point that the argument to make the river in Nephi's vision the same as the river-Ocean is really unlikely. To this end, I didn't say Nephi didn't use the term "river," I said he didn't use the term "the River." The definiteness of the language that you used was aimed at guiding us away from what the text says and towards your suggested parallels. Nephi shows no familiarity with the idea of a river-Ocean surrounding the land masses of the known world on a flat earth. And this is important because this is the parallel that you are pointing to. When you use a term like "the River" and you put it in quotation marks when there is no quote like that from the Book of Mormon. And when we do get Nephi speaking of a river, it seems to come from a very different context. And this leaves me believing that you are heavily engaging in those vices of parallelomania.

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I believe it is substantiated in the text, in Nephi's physical advance towards the promised land across the waters, and Lehi's vision of the river and the gulf that was a physical barrier between the righteous and the wicked in the advance towards the tree of life:

Then you need to actually make this case before you start looking for parallels - because, frankly, I don't see the case being successfully made for your argument here. I could start with the basic reasons that Lehi brings unrighteousness with him across the ocean, the Nephites find unrighteousness when they get there, and lets not forget the outcome. The whole Rechabite narrative hinges on the idea that we have this community that because it has been taken out of the world (much like the City of Enoch to use a more familiar narrative for our LDS friends here) remains righteous. The righteous Nephites don't persist in their isolated community - they are wiped out because they become wicked. This is not an advance towards the Tree of Life. Nephi has made it clear that the journey to the Tree of Life isn't a physical journal but a figurative one. The entire book of Jacob is a lament that deals with both the figurative and real journey to a promised land - not in the context of this journey across a barrier but in terms of the wilderness that stood between Israel and Egypt. At the end of his book, Jacob, who expected the Nephites to overcome their sinful natures enough to enter the promised land as Israel did, tells us (Jacob 7:26):

Quote

I conclude this record, declaring that I have written according to the best of my knowledge, by saying that the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore, we did mourn out our days.

This is not at all what we would expect if what you are arguing for is at all accurate.

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

"Lehi’s dream in 1 Nephi 8 and Nephi’s related vision in 1 Nephi 11–14 contain many features related to the biblical garden of Eden, including most prominently the tree of life. A close reading of the features of Lehi’s dream in light of the earliest Book of Mormon text shows further similarities to the biblical garden, suggesting that the setting of Lehi’s dream is actually the garden of Eden. (source) Again, I expect you won't approve my reading of the text in this way, so let's just move on.

Actually, I think this is quite accurate. But here is the problem you face. Reading the text as incorporating material from Genesis - and idea that we expect from the text itself, since it claims to use the Old Testament text as a source, is anticipated by the text. The parallels from the Old Testament should take precedence for us over parallels to other contexts. If we want to argue for an external parallel to a bit of text that also parallels the Old Testament, then the argument has to show how such a reading should be preferred over seeing the Old Testament parallels - and not just in language but also in the way that the text uses those parallels rhetorically. We know with absolute certainty that the Book of Mormon quotes the Old Testament. What the Book of Mormon doesn't do is quote some source that references this river-Ocean that you find in texts from late antiquity.

I wouldn't, by the way, call that article a close reading. A close reading isn't generally all that interested in constructing a potential urtext. The whole discussion over the meaning of the word "straight" in the text highlights the sort of argument that is being made here. You might produce a close reading as a follow up of this article - that is, how the text as a whole could be interpreted once we understand the relationship between the Book of Mormon text and the Old Testament text. You can see how my article on Nephi writing is far more interested in the implications of the narrative in terms of interpreting meaning than your source here is.

There is a secondary problem here - one that shouldn't be underestimated, and one that I have discussed from time to time over the past several decades. The article you link uses language as a primary point of connection between the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon - but it isn't the Old Testament more broadly, it is the language of the King James text. And this means that if we accept the textual basis for the relationship between the two textual traditions, the influence is at least doubled. What do I mean by that? We have the idea that the Book of Mormon's source (the Gold Plates) borrow from the Brass Plates (a copy of the Hebrew scriptures translated into Egyptian - Mos. 1:4). But the language itself of the Book of Mormon as a translation is influenced by the King James text of the Old Testament. Because of this, we have this problem - how do we differentiate between the two influences? In some places, where the ideas are there but the language is not, it is easy enough (I'll provide an example in a moment). But in other cases, the language by itself cannot be the sole justification - there has to be a larger discussion about context and content (meaning) to show that the borrowing functions at a deeper level than just language.

So here are a couple of examples - from the Book of Jacob in the Book of Mormon. The first example concerns Psalm 95 - here is the last half of the Psalm (95:7b-11):

Quote

To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways: Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.

There are several places in Jacob where this text is used (this is itself an important recognition). The first is Jacob 1:7

Quote

Wherefore we labored diligently among our people, that we might persuade them to come unto Christ, and partake of the goodness of God, that they might enter into his rest, lest by any means he should swear in his wrath they should not enter in, as in the provocation in the days of temptation while the children of Israel were in the wilderness.

Now, I have bolded the phrases that are duplicated closely. It's been reordered a bit, and the tenses changed. The individuals/groups have been re-identified - because the original Psalm was meant to be sung to the Israelites, while the derived text is an interpretation. And we can see here that there is an interpretive overlay. The duplication of language, the explicit reference to an event, and so on, make this a relatively certain relationship. The next use comes in Jacob's interpretation of the explicitly quoted material from the Brass Plates (Zenos) in Jacob 6:6:

Quote

Yea, today, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts; for why will ye die?

These eleven words add some continuity to the entire sermon that Jacob is giving.

And this leads us to Jacob 7:26, which doesn't quote anything from Psalm 95 - but which offers a context identical to Israel's situation described in Psalm 95:

Quote

the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore, we did mourn out our days.

There is a lot of interesting ways to understand this in a text which uses Psalm 95 to frame the entire Book of Jacob. I hinted at this earlier, but I should probably add a couple of comments here. Much like Israel who get a glimpse of their promised land and then spend 40 years wandering in the wilderness, when the Nephites arrive at their promised land, they are almost immediately forced out of it (the family split) and they move into the wilderness. It is this wilderness that Jacob is describing here. It takes a long time for this view to disappear (consider, for example, Omni verse 27). Jacob's text focuses then on the spiritual issues that he believes are the barriers to the Nephites obtaining the land of their inheritance - which is why the issues he raises: polygamy, pride, the apostasy caused by Sherem, and so on, are the concerns of his text. These are the things that Jacob understands as the problems that are keeping them in the wilderness (and I note in passing that by the time we get to Omni 27, the place where the Nephites live is no longer the wilderness - the wilderness has shrunk to that space between the Nephite lands and the land of Nephi).

So there is one set in Jacob. While we could argue that the language is clearly influenced by the King James text, the text of the Book of Mormon uses the language in a way (as revealed by a close reading - my short discussion here doesn't do it a lot of justice) that requires the reliance to be more than simply cosmetic - it isn't just the words that are engaged in a superficial construct but the original text is engaged, reinterpreted (remember Nephi's likening) and used to try and understand the condition of the Nephites and their failure to obtain the land of their inheritance. This deeper argument also points to all sorts of things about the limited scope of the Promised land of the Nephites, the potential for outsiders (in Sherem), and so on. And what it doesn't do is point to an idea of a Rechabite sort of paradise, or even an Edenic paradise as being an island in the middle of an ocean ....

The second set of parallels that is interesting to discuss here in close proximity to that first one comes in the context of polygamy - a set of parallels I have discussed here in this forum several times. The primary source is called the kingship code in Deuteronomy 17. Here are verses 14, 16-17, and 20:

Quote

When thou art come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me; … But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the Lord hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. … That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.

We can see the appeal of this text right from the start. "When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee ..." seems tailor made for use by the Nephites. Jacob 1:15-16 offers us a premonition of the use of these passages:

Quote

And now it came to pass that the people of Nephi, under the reign of the second king, began to grow hard in their hearts, and indulge themselves somewhat in wicked practices, such as like unto David of old desiring many wives and concubines, and also Solomon, his son. Yea, and they also began to search much gold and silver, and began to be lifted up somewhat in pride.

This passage is really interesting because here the language is updated. Consider the relevant material from the NIV translation of Deuteronomy 17:17, 20:

Quote

He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.. ... and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites …

The language of the King James - of "multiply wives to himself" has lost a bit of its meaning in modern English, so the language gets an overhaul. I include that NIV translation of Deut. 17:20 because of what we read in Jacob 2:12-13 -

Quote

And now behold, my brethren, this is the word which I declare unto you, that many of you have begun to search for gold, and for silver, and for all manner of precious ores, in the which this land, which is a land of promise unto you and to your seed, doth abound most plentifully. And the hand of providence hath smiled upon you most pleasingly, that you have obtained many riches; and because some of you have obtained more abundantly than that of your brethren ye are lifted up in the pride of your hearts, and wear stiff necks and high heads because of the costliness of your apparel, and persecute your brethren because ye suppose that ye are better than they.

Some of the main concepts from the Kingship code are here. And here again we see this sort of updated language in Jacob. It isn't that their 'hearts are lifted up above their brethren' but that they "suppose that ye are better than they". But where things really come together is in the discussion of the many wives in Jacob 2:24

Quote

Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord.

This is a violation of that kingship code - but again, it is the updated language - closer to what we find in the NIV. Now for the priestly code, our first encounter is with the idea of the abomination - eight times, Jacob describes the actions of the Nephites as abominations (Jacob 2:5, 2:10, 2:16, 2:21, 2:24, 2:28, and 2:31). And then Jacob uses more language from Deut. 18 in Jacob 2:26 and 2:32:

Quote

Wherefore, I the Lord God will not suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old. ... And I will not suffer, saith the Lord of Hosts, that the cries of the fair daughters of this people, which I have led out of the land of Jerusalem, shall come up unto me against the men of my people, saith the Lord of Hosts.

Deuteronomy 18 (which has a similar code for priests) is one of the most frequently referenced Old Testament texts in the Book of Mormon (esp. v 15, but Jacob alludes to it a dozen times or more).

What we see here is that these sorts of discussions go way beyond language. Language itself is the weakest sort of indicator of parallels. And this is why I see a reference to "the River" and don't get much out of it. The language in the Book of Mormon is definitely influenced. I can find those sources of influence confirmed in the text itself - the alleged Brass Plates along with its Old Testament contents. But this is an entirely different animal than the narrative of Zosimus, the Greek Christian text from late antiquity. There isn't this sort of close relationship there. And the only way that we start to get to that relationship is by speaking of one text in terms used by the other. And this is parallelomania. It was easy to see the apologetic interest in the piece back when people still thought it was an intertestamental work. Its place as Greek Christian text nearly a thousand years later makes it far less interesting (apologetically). The similarities we find can be attributed to other explanations very easily. It stops having any sort of explanatory power.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

As I see it, we have a problem when we try and discuss the body of water Nephi encounters at Bountiful. Its frequently referred to as an ocean, a word that has a meaning, for those of us reading the book today, that would have been new to Nephi. Here's one example from hundreds: Why Would Nephi Call the Ocean "Irreantum"? Nephi certainly doesn't use the word ocean in his text and the article then goes on to suggest the closest word to Irreantum is the Egyptian name for the Orontes, a river.

Actually, let's be really clear on this point. The Book of Mormon NEVER uses the word "ocean". Not once. So when you say that "its frequently referred to as an ocean", I don't have a point of reference - any reference to ocean comes from commentary. As I noted before, details matter.

[Zosimus]

21 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Details matter. And your context isn't a literary context here but a textual context (the two are very different things). As far as the "awful gulf" goes - the thing that Nephi sees in his vision, he actually provides for us a very specific understanding - it is a figurative gulf and not a literal ocean of some sort.

Can we know if Nephi understood the difference between literary context and textual context? When Lehi has a vision of a river leading to the tree of life, and he tells Nephi, can we know that Nephi doesn't take it literally? Would there be any reason he doesn't interpret it as a sort of directive to physically go towards the garden? I imagine it’s not out of the question, since we Mormons even today like to imagine converging and gathering at the physical location we identify as the Garden. We have the figurative journey in the temple and also the directive to stage a literal gathering in Adam Ondi Ahman, as close as we can get to the tree of life. Somewhat related, Rev. 22 tells us a river will flow through the New Jerusalem and the tree of life along the bank. Is it figurative or literal?

Is there anything in the text that tells us Nephi interprets the river and tree in the vision as figurative? 1 Nephi 15:27-28 doesn't tell me enough. You may have answered this lower in your comment and I just need some time to read through.

21 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Do you see how the river-Ocean from your parallels has no head? And the rivers in the Genesis account do? And we should see here at this point that the argument to make the river in Nephi's vision the same as the river-Ocean is really unlikely. 

I can see that the river-ocean has no head, but would Nephi? We can't really know if Nephi understood Irreantum (many waters) as a waterway with a head, or otherwise. But Jacob does tell us the sea was their path, which makes me think they viewed Irreantum like some sort of course to the promised land, or perhaps the coast/bank of the waters as their path. This, as an aside, works well with some of the proposed etymologies of Irreantum. It also aligns well with what we know about the waters in the History of the Rechabites. The Blessed were told by the angel to follow the water until the reached their destination.

21 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Nephi shows no familiarity with the idea of a river-Ocean surrounding the land masses of the known world on a flat earth. And this is important because this is the parallel that you are pointing to. When you use a term like "the River" and you put it in quotation marks when there is no quote like that from the Book of Mormon. And when we do get Nephi speaking of a river, it seems to come from a very different context. And this leaves me believing that you are heavily engaging in those vices of parallelomania.

We really don't know how Nephi understood the body of water he called Irreantum. But if we try to understand how someone in his timeline might have understood it, we do have a map dating to his time and place.

No way to know if Nephi saw a physical representation of the world like this, or if he even heard anyone describe the river and surrounding islands. But this map is much closer to Nephi's setting than the one we might impose on his account, knowing what we know about the world. Our reading of 1st and 2nd Nephi will benefit from understanding the author's setting as best we can. The Akkadian word for "bitter river" that is on that tablet would be as close as we could get to Nephi's understanding of Irreantum, and what he might experience there. I don't feel I'm committing the vice of parallelomania by reading Irreantum as a river. I'd feel comfortable using whatever word is the best translation of the word for the body of water on the tablet.

21 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I could start with the basic reasons that Lehi brings unrighteousness with him across the ocean, the Nephites find unrighteousness when they get there, and lets not forget the outcome. 

Lehi brought his family with him across the, as you call it, ocean. Although this word is not in the text. What unrighteousness do they find when they get there? Lehi died before they had time to bring, or find unrighteousness, in the land. The Lamanites receive their curse and are cut off shortly after Lehi dies, but the blessing Lehi gives Laman and Lemuel is that the curse will be answered upon the heads of the parents. He also says "wherefore, because of my blessing the Lord God will not suffer that ye shall perish; wherefore, he will be merciful unto you and unto your seed forever" and "wherefore, thou shalt not utterly be destroyed; but in the end thy seed shall be blessed." This sounds a lot like the promise made to the Rechabites in Jeremiah 35, in that there's no condition dependent upon righteousness or unrighteousness. "Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Jonadab the son of Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever."

Significant unrighteousness certainly happens later in the Book of Mormon, but outside their visions, Lehi and Nephi wouldn't know the outcome. In any case, righteous or not, the seed of Laman and Lemuel would be blessed forever. A similar promise was given to the Blessed.

Note: I'm using Blessed to refer to the Rechabites because like you say, details matter, and there is some confusion across the different manuscripts for their ethnonym. Some versions of the Narrative of Zosimus make no mention of Rechabites. Some versions of the Alexander Romance refer to the Rechabites but also call them makarioi (blessed). In any case, the term "blessed" (μάκαριοι in the greek or מקרי in the Hebrew) seems to be the most common ethnonym across the texts to describe the people we are discussing. 

21 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

The whole Rechabite narrative hinges on the idea that we have this community that because it has been taken out of the world (much like the City of Enoch to use a more familiar narrative for our LDS friends here) remains righteous.

I don't think we can say that they were taken out of the world. On the contrary, they seem to be in the world, just separated from it. They die, so they aren't translated immortals in Paradise or the City of Enoch. What's unusual is that they know the exact age they will be when they die, but we also find this in 3rd Nephi 28 when the 9 disciples are made aware that they will enter the kingdom/paradise when they turn 72 years old. That feels very specific to me. Is there anything in the Old or New Testament where the author of the Book of Mormon might have pulled that?

But you do raise a valid problem. The Rechabites are known for their extreme piety and the Lehites aren't. The resolution, in my reading, is that all we know about the inhabitants of the Land of the Blessed is what Zosimus experienced in his brief time there. The Blessed also give him their history on tablets that he takes back to Palestine. But, we don't know when this event, if not fiction, happened. Its nothing more than a snapshot of Rechabite history.

Let's say that a Christian trader is shipwrecked on a Nephite shore during the 4th Nephi period. What does he find? 

"The people were all converted unto the Lord, upon all the face of the land...there were no contentions and disputations among them, and every man did deal justly one with another. And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift....And they were married, and given in marriage, and were blessed according to the multitude of the promises which the Lord had made unto them....And it came to pass that there was no contention among all the people, in all the land; but there were mighty miracles wrought among the disciples of Jesus...And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God...There were no robbers, nor murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites; but they were in aone, the children of Christ, and heirs to the kingdom of God....And how blessed were they!" - 4 Nephi

Let's say the trader then returns to Palestine and tells the story of his encounter with the sons of Lehi. How similar would his account be to the one Zosimus gives us of his time in the Land of the Blessed? There are some interesting similarities, and differences, between the 200 years of peace in 4 Nephi (1st century to 3rd century AD) and the Narrative of Zosimus. The first western accounts we receive of the Makarioi/Camarini (Blessed) living in their Edenic state in the farthest lands to the East fall seemingly come from a single lost account that dates to about 350 AD. One example is The Itineraries From the Paradise of Eden to the Land of Romans and the Early Byzantine Silk Roads. This would be during Mormon's lifetime, or roughly 120 years after the two centuries of peace. But we don't know when the author collected the info or if he traveled to Kamara or was compiling old traveler's tales in circulation along the silk road.

Just to be clear, I'm not necessarily arguing that the blessed Camarini in Kamara in the first centuries AD are the Nephites in Camorah (the spelling of Cumorah in the 1830 BoM) during the 200 years of peace. But I am saying there's verisimiltude between the two. I'd propose that a reading of the Book of Mormon with this historical/geographical setting in mind is beneficial in ways that we don't get when reading with a Mesoamerican setting in mind. That said, could you point me to your post on verisimilitude? I've been wanting to reread it, but I can't find it.

I'm going to have to stop here. I find the rest of your response above super useful, but its going to take some time to think through.

Edited March 7, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Can we know if Nephi understood the difference between literary context and textual context?

No - and I would tend to believe that it wasn't something he would be inclined to worry about. That's the whole point of likening scripture unto himself - he no longer has to be all that concerned with the idea of translation as a means of trying to get to original meaning. It is the original meaning that he suggests isn't all that important. When we try to argue about the urtext (the language of the gold plates, the language of the brass plates, and so on) - that's when these differences become important. If all we did was liken the text unto ourselves, we wouldn't be concerned over these kinds of distinction either - and in fact the sorts of questions that trigger these discussions wouldn't be of interest to us. But since we are dealing with these questions, we do have to deal with this problem of the translation of the Book of Mormon (assuming it is an authentic translation) being influenced by the King James version of the Bible.

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

When Lehi has a vision of a river leading to the tree of life, and he tells Nephi, can we know that Nephi doesn't take it literally?

No. And, I think, this is part of the intention of the text (and its discussion). Because, when Nephi has the same vision, and it is curated by an angel, he becomes very aware that the elements in the vision are figurative and not literal. So we can know with certainty that by the end of the discussion Nephi has with Laman and Lemuel that Nephi's understanding of the river leading to the tree of life is not a literal understanding - he tells us this. So, for example, in 1 Nephi 11:25 we read:

Quote

And it came to pass that I beheld that the rod of iron, which my father had seen, was the word of God, which led to the fountain of living waters, or to the tree of life; which waters are a representation of the love of God; and I also beheld that the tree of life was a representation of the love of God.

Do you see what I mean here? The rod of iron was something else - it was the "word of God." The tree of life is a representation "of the love of God." This is not a literal understanding, but a figurative one.

When we talk about the river in particular though, there is something else that is really fascinating in the discussion - because the river features in the discussion with the brothers. Here is 1 Nephi 15:26-28

Quote

And they said unto me: What meaneth the river of water which our father saw? And I said unto them that the water which my father saw was filthiness; and so much was his mind swallowed up in other things that he beheld not the filthiness of the water. And I said unto them that it was an awful gulf, which separated the wicked from the tree of life, and also from the saints of God.

There are a couple of important points we can take from this discussion. First, Nephi has already helped his brothers understand that the elements in the vision are figurative. So at this point, they are asking about what the meanings of the elements in the vision are. That is, they accept the idea that this isn't literal and they want to understand how the elements work together to create a non-literal meaning. Second, they don't understand the reference to the river. This is important in the context of your claims of parallels - because they don't seem to recognize any parallel to it. They aren't placing it in their own context as they are the earlier discussions about the olive tree. So there is a recognition from both Nephi and Laman and Lemuel that the river should be understood figuratively - and a recognition that there was something missing from what their father told them to help them really understand what it means. Nephi is able to supply that information because his experience of the vision was different from his father's experience (I spend a bit of time in my published material discussing the significance of this).

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Would there be any reason he doesn't interpret it as a sort of directive to physically go towards the garden? I imagine it’s not out of the question, since we Mormons even today like to imagine converging and gathering at the physical location we identify as the Garden. We have the figurative journey in the temple and also the directive to stage a literal gathering in Adam Ondi Ahman, as close as we can get to the tree of life. Somewhat related, Rev. 22 tells us a river will flow through the New Jerusalem and the tree of life along the bank. Is it figurative or literal?

Yes, there is a real reason why he wouldn't interpet it as a directive to physically go towards the garden. Nephi portrays two opposing bodies of water. The river, as we see in the verses quoted above, is filthiness, while the other water - 'the fountain of living waters' are a representation of "the love of God," - those two are not at all similar - you cannot substitute one for the other.

On a separate note, my Father moved to Missouri for a couple of years after he joined the Church - in part to participate in the gathering of Zion, which, of course, didn't happen. So he left. We have this mythology in the Church of Adam Ondi Ahman - but I think that you are misrepresenting it here. Why would I suggest that? D&C 107:53 reads:

Quote

Three years previous to the death of Adam, he called Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, and Methuselah, who were all high priests, with the residue of his posterity who were righteous, into the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman, and there bestowed upon them his last blessing.

Adam-ondi-Ahman isn't the Garden of Eden. It isn't where the trees were planted by God. It is a place that Adam finds himself after his expulsion from the garden. Section 116 reads:

Quote

Spring Hill is named by the Lord Adam-ondi-Ahman, because, said he, it is the place where Adam shall come to visit his people, or the Ancient of Days shall sit, as spoken of by Daniel the prophet.

This is a future event - a repeat in some ways perhaps of the event described in D&C 107. But again, this doesn't make it the site of the trees. And then we have the issue of the trees. Adam was booted from the Garden. Then what happens to the garden? Does it become just an ordinary part of the world? Does the who thing about the fiery sword from Genesis 3 simply disappear? We can all see that there is a lot of room for speculation and interpretation here. But, what we don't see in the Book of Mormon or in any Old World context is the idea that in the middle of Missouri is the place where the Garden of Eden was. If you look at contemporary literature (i.e. ancient sources), we have the Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia - somewhere in modern day Iraq or Iran. The rivers would be the Tigris or the Euphrates. And we can turn to a text more contemporary with when Lehi was supposed to live in Ezekiel 28 where we get a description (vss 11-16):

Quote

Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.

Eden is in the mountains there perhaps in Lebanon. But in any case, you don't find a tradition contemporary with Lehi's departure that is anything like Joseph Smith's claims. Your argument that people can believe in a literal interpretation or a literal place that can be traveled to is fine. I tend to think that whatever the historical reality was (assuming that there was one), it has all become mythical now, with those historical details simply lost. But none of this gets to the point that Nephi doesn't undestand his vision literally. There is no need to see him understanding his journey as a path to Eden. It isn't Eden when he gets there. And there are lots of reasons to understand that he instead saw his journey as following a more Moses-like journey through the wilderness to his land of inheritance - a new Israel so to speak.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Lehi brought his family with him across the, as you call it, ocean. Although this word is not in the text. What unrighteousness do they find when they get there? Lehi died before they had time to bring, or find unrighteousness, in the land. The Lamanites receive their curse and are cut off shortly after Lehi dies, but the blessing Lehi gives Laman and Lemuel is that the curse will be answered upon the heads of the parents. He also says "wherefore, because of my blessing the Lord God will not suffer that ye shall perish; wherefore, he will be merciful unto you and unto your seed forever" and "wherefore, thou shalt not utterly be destroyed; but in the end thy seed shall be blessed." This sounds a lot like the promise made to the Rechabites in Jeremiah 35, in that there's no condition dependent upon righteousness or unrighteousness. "Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Jonadab the son of Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever."

And here we have the same problem again. The story of the Rechabites in Jeremiah 35 is very short and to the point. There is no river, no ocean, no traveling to a promised land. All of those things that you want to point to parallels here come from a romantic fable written a thousand years after Jeremiah. And this part that you want to highlight here? "But in the end thy seed shall be blessed" - that is the common theme to the Old Testament. Just look at Genesis 22. Given that Lehi associates his family with the tribes of Israel (the children of Jacob), why do we need to look to Jeremiah to find this connection when we can look to the other Old Testament texts that would be far more relevant.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

But you do raise a valid problem. The Rechabites are known for their extreme piety and the Lehites aren't. The resolution, in my reading, is that all we know about the inhabitants of the Land of the Blessed is what Zosimus experienced in his brief time there. The Blessed also give him their history on tablets that he takes back to Palestine. But, we don't know when this event, if not fiction, happened. Its nothing more than a snapshot of Rechabite history.

And here you again are applying that interpretive overlay to the text. We go right back to the narrative of Zosimus which is a thousand years too late to be relevant. It isn't a snapshot of Rechabite history. We know this at least in part because of the mythological nature of the text. We also know this because it isn't a Palestinian text - it is a Greek text written by Christians in late antiquity. It isn't a translation of some older text. It's content doesn't match up to a context a millennia earlier. It isn't useful to compare these texts given what we know today. Yet you keep returning to this because it is the source of your intuited connection.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I don't think we can say that they were taken out of the world. On the contrary, they seem to be in the world, just separated from it.

It's a distinction with no meaning in the ancient world - which saw heaven as a physical place in the heavens above the earth, and hell as a physical place within the earth. All of which we understand to be incorrect today. Enoch, at least according to early LDS tradition, is still out there someplace, and those people will rejoin the rest of humanity at some point. Zosimus doesn't actually travel to the Rechabites in any traditional sense of traveling. He doesn't get on a boat like Nephi does. His journey is entirely spiritual, much like the earlier and later stories of ascents and descents to heaven and hell.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

They die, so they aren't translated immortals in Paradise or the City of Enoch. What's unusual is that they know the exact age they will be when they die, but we also find this in 3rd Nephi 28 when the 9 disciples are made aware that they will enter the kingdom/paradise when they turn 72 years old. That feels very specific to me. Is there anything in the Old or New Testament where the author of the Book of Mormon might have pulled that?

Enoch is the main example - Gen. 5:24. There is also Elijah, but we don't have an age for him in the texts that we have. Those are the two Old Testament figures who never die. We use the word 'translation' in Mormonism, but this comes out of interpretive traditions of these Old Testament narratives - it isn't original to LDS, it comes from Jewish commentaries about Elijah and Enoch. If there is a difference (as you suggest) between the Rechabites in the narrative of Zosimus and Enoch/Elijah traditions, the Book of Mormon tends to follow the Enoch/Elijah narratives and not the other.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

That said, could you point me to your post on verisimilitude? I've been wanting to reread it, but I can't find it.

I am not quite sure what you are referring to. I looked and nothing jumped out at me. I know I have made a bunch of scattered comments on the topic - but usually it is embedded in another discussion. My issues with verisimilitude involve only a handful of principles, and if you want, I am happy to engage that on a different thread. If you want to look over the list of potential matches, this search might be helpful to you.

[Zosimus]

On 3/4/2024 at 9:27 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

We need to stop right here - because ...

I'd like to respond to some of your more recent comments but agree we should stop here and discuss. We'll be going in circles if we have no agreement on composition and dating of the text

On 3/4/2024 at 9:27 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

... because the Narrative of Zosimus isn't a Jewish work. It wasn't written in the intertestamental period. You could look here for example:

That is true for the Narrative of Zosimus, it appears to be a 4th century (or later) work of Christian propaganda as Haelewyck put it. But there are elements, standalone textual blocks, that appear to date to an earlier period, and appear to have Jewish elements. Even the link you provide as an example says:

"There is a history of debate over whether the text is Jewish or Christian in origin, and over its textual history." 

Here's a review:

"HZos is the account by a monk Zosimus about his journey to the Isle of the Blessed. The inhabitants of the island live a paradisiacal life and claim to be the descendants of the Rechabites (who are mentioned in Jeremiah 35). Scholars agree that the HZos constitutes a conflation of two independent narratives, one containing the travel account of Zosimus (chapters 1-7) and the other narrating the story of the Rechabites (chapters 8 – 10). As far as the date of the composition is concerned, Haelewyck provides an accurate summary of earlier scholarship: M. R. James argued that the work was composed in the 5th or 6th century; McNeil suggested that behind the HZos lies a source related to the Qumran community; and J. H. Charlesworth distinguished between the travel account of Zosimus and the story of the Rechabites, considering the latter as an Old Testament apocryphon around which the HZos evolved. However, it is the studies of C. H. Knights and M. Philonenko that concur with the results of the Louvain-la-Neuve project, namely that the
HZos appeared in the first half of the 4th century at the latest, having by then integrated the classical myth about the Isle of the Blessed with the aim to popularize it in the broader context of the triumph of Christianity."

It is the older core found in chapters 8-10 (History of the Rechabites) that are of particular interest to me as this is the part that tells us about the river that the Rechabites followed to the Isle of the Blessed. From the Greek:

"And behold a light shone in the building, and an angel uncovered the prison and laid hold of the crowns of our heads, and took us out of the prison, and set us beside the water of the river, and said to us, Whithersoever the water goes, go ye also. And we travelled with the water and with the angel. When therefore he had brought us to this place, the river was dried up and the water was swallowed up by the abyss, and he made a wall round this country, and there came a wall of cloud, and shadowed above the water; and he did not scatter us over all the earth, but gave to us this country."

The river here looks less like the river we find in the Garden of Eden and more like the river we find in Lehi's vision with a gulf/abyss that separates the blessed from the world of vanity. It also resembles Revelations 22, which by the way seems to have also influenced NZos as it describes two trees on opposing banks of a single river. We could go into how the river and tree(s) described in the Alexander Romance also appear less like the river described in the garden and more like those said to be found in the New Jerusalem. There's also a lot that could be discussed about the similarities between the river in the History of the Rechabites and the Sambation. But none of this is immediately important.

So before continuing, I want to make it clear, although I would not be surprised if some day we are able to place a variation of the Narrative of Zosimus in New York in the 1820s, I'm not arguing that the Book of Mormon translation is somehow dependent on NZos. However, I do propose that the Book of Mormon author and/or the 19th century translators were familiar with and borrowed from the same material that the many variations of NZos pulled from. The Book of Mormon author had a specific setting in mind for the narrative. The setting of the Book of Mormon narrative is the same setting that can be found in the Narrative of Zosimus, the History of the Rechabites, the Abode of the Blessed, and the countless variations and fan fictions inspired by the Alexander Romance. The setting was the Isle of the Blessed, inhabited by the Makarioi (blessed) or, the Camarini.

Edited March 10, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

20 hours ago, Zosimus said:

We'll be going in circles if we have no agreement on composition and dating of the text

Your argument there isn't with me - I am just going with current scholarship on the issue. But if the dating of the text is central to your argument, and the dates you use are at best strongly contested (and at worst, completely wrong), then it is really problematic for you to use this in your main argument.

20 hours ago, Zosimus said:

That is true for the Narrative of Zosimus, it appears to be a 4th century (or later) work of Christian propaganda as Haelewyck put it. But there are elements, standalone textual blocks, that appear to date to an earlier period, and appear to have Jewish elements.

Generalities aren't going to help you here. The Narrative of Zosimus is entirely dependent on the LXX for its scriptural references. Even if there are Jewish elements, they aren't early enough to matter in the question of the verisimilitude of the Book of Mormon narrative. Further, your use of the narrative isn't centered on what might be originally Jewish (that is, your argument doesn't attempt to distinguish what is much later from what is earlier). Your primary argument is based on later interpretations that you believe coincides with other (non-ancient) texts like the Kedah Annals.

I use wikipedia as an easy thing to look at, I wouldn't call it my source. And, if you look up the reference used by the wikipedia article, it says something quite different from the wikipedia article. The reference is to

Knights, Chris (2014). "The Rechabites Revisited: The History of the Rechabites Twenty-Five Years On". Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha. 23 (4): 307–320, specifically to pages 308-309.

Here is what Chris Knights writes on page 309:

Quote

Defining the ‘History of the Rechabites’ and the ‘Story of Zosimus’ and their Sources

I must immediately make clear how the terms, Story/Narration/Apocalypse of Zosimus and History of the Rechabites are being used. The earliest editors and translators of, and commentators on, the whole text, referred to it as the Story/Narration/Apocalypse of Zosimus (James 1893; Craigie n.d.; Picard 1967; Nikiprowetzky 1969; McNeil 1978). One of Charlesworth’s research students, E.G. Martin, followed by Charlesworth himself, retitled the whole text as the History of the Rechabites (Martin 1979; Charlesworth 1982, 1985), on the grounds that they believed that the chapters about the Rechabites (chs. 8–10 in
Martin and Charlesworth’s divisions) were the core and the origin of the whole document, and a translation of the Syriac version of the text appeared in OTP under this title (Charlesworth 1985). My own
researches, however, came to the conclusion that chs. 8–10, far from being the earliest stratum of the whole text, are a later insertion into a pre-existing document that makes up much or even most of chs. 1–7, 11–18,4 and that, therefore, the whole text should be termed the Story of Zosimus (StorZos) and the term History of the Rechabites (HistRech) should be used of chs. 8–10 alone, which can be seen as a
self-contained entity. Both Nikolsky and Davila have agreed with this assessment, and they use the terms StorZos and HistRech in the same way as I do.5 I have further argued that, within StorZos as a whole, another selfcontained document, that can be called the Abode of the Blessed (AbBles), can be found in chs. 11–16, which is a proper source of the rest of the document, not a late insertion (Knights 1998). Davila has agreed with me on this assessment.

Jewish or Christian Texts?

Where Nikolsky and Davila have disagreed with me is over whether AbBles and HistRech are clearly and definitely Jewish in composition. I have hitherto always argued that there is good reason to think that they are both Jewish in origin. However, I have to say that, now rereading my article on the AbBles as a source of StorZos (Knights 1998), it seems to me that my efforts to secure a Jewish authorship for AbBles on the basis of excising ch. 13 (an account of the ‘Resurrection of the Lord’) as an interpolation and of arguing that the seemingly Christian language (‘Church’, ‘son of God himself’, and so on) in ch. 16 was in fact possibly Jewish, as all these ‘Christian’ terms are attested in the LXX, rest on an unwarranted presupposition of mine that that text had to be Jewish. Fifteen years down the line my arguments on pages 85-87 of that article seem to me to be little more than special pleading. AbBles is surely much more easily and plausibly read as a Christian text!

To put it simply, the author of this article has abandoned this earlier view and believes that it is not of Jewish origins at all but is entirely a Christian text of relatively late origins. And this is the position of current scholarship on the age and origins of the text.

20 hours ago, Zosimus said:

However, it is the studies of C. H. Knights and M. Philonenko that concur with the results of the Louvain-la-Neuve project, namely that the HZos appeared in the first half of the 4th century at the latest, having by then integrated the classical myth about the Isle of the Blessed with the aim to popularize it in the broader context of the triumph of Christianity."

That you use this tells me that you don't understand the argument. The reference in the quote you provided mentions C.H. Knights. This is the author that I quote above, whose position is that the story is entirely Christian in origin. So when you write this:

20 hours ago, Zosimus said:

It is the older core found in chapters 8-10 (History of the Rechabites) that are of particular interest to me as this is the part that tells us about the river that the Rechabites followed to the Isle of the Blessed. From the Greek:

You are still stuck with the problem that even if it is the oldest part of the narrative, it is still Christian in origin. It does not have roots that go back to around 600 BCE. It is this core that is dated to around the 4th century. And of course, the manuscript evidence doesn't help you either. As the review article that you quote from shows, the oldest manuscripts are all from the 12th century CE.

21 hours ago, Zosimus said:

So before continuing, I want to make it clear, although I would not be surprised if some day we are able to place a variation of the Narrative of Zosimus in New York in the 1820s, I'm not arguing that the Book of Mormon translation is somehow dependent on NZos. However, I do propose that the Book of Mormon author and/or the 19th century translators were familiar with and borrowed from the same material that the many variations of NZos pulled from.

And the problem that you have is that this still puts it a thousand years after Lehi allegedly leaves Jerusalem.

Finally, I want to clue you in to something from the quote that you pull from that review essay - here is the statement again:

"... appeared in the first half of the 4th century at the latest, having by then integrated the classical myth about the Isle of the Blessed ..."

You will notice the capital letters for the Isle of the Blessed. This is not accidental. The classical myth of the Isle of the Blessed isn't Jewish in origin. It is Greek. And what this review author is saying is that the Christian author's of the Narrative of Zosimus "integrated the classical myth about the Isle of the Blessed with the aim to popularize it in the broader context of the triumph of Christianity."

In other words, they were trying to make the story more appealing to the Greek and Roman audience that made up most of contemporary Christianity. So when you go on to say:

21 hours ago, Zosimus said:

The setting of the Book of Mormon narrative is the same setting that can be found in the Narrative of Zosimus, the History of the Rechabites, the Abode of the Blessed, and the countless variations and fan fictions inspired by the Alexander Romance. The setting was the Isle of the Blessed, inhabited by the Makarioi (blessed) or, the Camarini.

I am going to respond by saying that this is just wrong.

[Zosimus]

Quote

Your argument there isn't with me - I am just going with current scholarship on the issue. But if the dating of the text is central to your argument, and the dates you use are at best strongly contested (and at worst, completely wrong), then it is really problematic for you to use this in your main argument.

Its certainly not my main argument. But to clarify, you’d said (following Copeland who follows James I’d guess) NZos originates within the 5th century. I’m nitpicking because the difference of a century is the difference between placing NZos within the timeframe of the Book of Mormon and within the timeline of Mormon and Moroni, the authors/abridgers. Most importantly, it places the material NZos pulls from (eg Palladius on The Races of India and the Brahmans, Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Alexander Romance etc.) within a believable chronological distance from the people described in 4th Nephi. This is where the verisimilitude is. Mormon and Moroni give us an account in 4th Nephi that is believable, if we read the land inhabited by the makarioi (historically known as the Camarini or the Kumr) as the setting. For example, there is verisimilitude between the happiest people ever created by God (4 Nephi 16) land the Makarioi/Camarini described in texts that were written during the 3rd/4th Nephi period, like “Itineraries from the Paradise of Eden to the land of Romans”.

I disagree with your assertion that the account in the Book of Mormon is less like the Blessed of NZos and more like the City of Enoch. The happy/blessed people described in 4 Nephi are mortals that lived and died in the promised land. They weren't translated beings like Enoch or Elijah. The people of Enoch were translated, the people of 4th Nephi and the Blessed in the History of the Rechabites were not.

Quote

Generalities aren't going to help you here. The Narrative of Zosimus is entirely dependent on the LXX for its scriptural references.

When discussing Greek or Syriac priority, Knights brings up something worth discussing, although its not immediately critical to our discussion here. Aminadab/Abinadab is used interchangeably in LXX, while Aminadam (not Jonadab) is given as the name of the father of the Rechabites in manuscript R of the LXX. There has been discussion about whether this is the result of copyist error or intentional. This is interesting because Aminadab, and Abinadom, are characters in the Book of Mormon, as well as Abinadi and Aminadi. Considering the narrative of the sons of Aminadab/Aminadam/Abinadam (Rechabites) being carried from prison by an angel and led to a land blocked by a dark cloud, Aminadab is an interesting choice of name for the Nephite dissenter in Helaman 5. The Book of Mormon Aminadab can see the imprisoned Nephi and Lehi in a pillar of fire through a dark cloud that blocks their view from the Lamanites. Aminadab calls on the Lamanites to repent so as to be able to see the angels ministering within or through the dark cloud. Is the Book of Mormon following something other than KJV here? afaik the -adam/-adom ending for Abin-/Amin- doesn’t occur in KJV.

Quote

Even if there are Jewish elements, they aren't early enough to matter in the question of the verisimilitude of the Book of Mormon narrative. Further, your use of the narrative isn't centered on what might be originally Jewish (that is, your argument doesn't attempt to distinguish what is much later from what is earlier). Your primary argument is based on later interpretations that you believe coincides with other (non-ancient) texts like the Kedah Annals.

It doesn’t matter to my model whether the Blessed are discussed in Jewish (Jeremiah 35), Greek (Alexander Romance), Christian (NZos), Roman (Itineraries from the Paradise of Eden to the land of Romans) or Chinese (I’ll get into this in the geography thread) texts. I’m interested in all pre-Moroni accounts describing the lands in the farthest east inhabited by a blessed people from the Mediterranean region.

Even though it is late, I am intrigued by the Kedah Annals, not only because the protagonist was named Marong/Maroni, but because the text is heavily dependent on the Alexander Romance.

I’ll touch briefly on the OP and why I’m interested in Maroni as a symbol for the dragon/serpent in the Siamese zodiac. Charles Anthon gave us a description of the transcript that Harris carried to New York. Among other things, Anthon said the transcript ended with a “rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Aztec calendar given by Humboldt”. He also described it as “a rude representation of the Mexican zodiac”. Anthon is referring to the famous sketch in Humboldt’s account of his travels through Central and South America. If you go and read Humboldt, he includes his sketch of the ‘Mexican zodiac’ (as Anthon called it) within a longer discussion about how the Aztec calendar is closely related to the zodiacs of East Asia. Humboldt’s hypothesis was that the Americas were populated by a rogue sect of Buddhists from Asia, and he references Kæmpfer’s travel account to Siam and Japan in support of his hypothesis. Of course, this is the same account wherein Kæmpfer informs us that the dragon/serpent in the Siamese zodiac is called Maroni. Humboldt also explains how Quetzalcoatl (translated by Humboldt as something like serpent dressed in green feathers) was a Christian apostle or missionary bringing a hybrid form of Christian Buddhism to the New World. He calls this figure the Mexican Buddha.

IMO Maroni is a fitting name for the prophet/messenger that brings a restored Christian Gospel to America. Yes there are differences as well, but not as many as you might think when considering how people in the early 19th century understood Buddhism. Another topic for another day

Quote

I am going to respond by saying that this is just wrong.

The myth of the blessed isles goes way back. I follow Braginsky with his proposal that as the east opened up to European exploration, the Garden also had to shift east. Braginsky traces the path of the lsles of the Blessed in literature from India to the Malay Archipelago. I’d go further and propose that once America was established, the Garden also had to shift across the Pacific. Remember Columbus thought he'd discovered the rivers of Paradise when he first spotted the Orinoco? He thought he had approached the Garden, which he placed somewhere in Southeast Asia, from the east side. Samuel Mitchell was among the first to intentionally place the Garden of Eden in the New World, around Onondaga, New York (source). Mormonism was the first tradition to establish the Garden in the New World, but I suggest the authors of the Book of Mormon didn’t jump over 2000 years of literature placing the Garden in Asia. This is why we find steel, chariots, elephants, silk, horses and cimiters in the text. The author is establishing verisimilitude.

Edited March 14, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

Its certainly not my main argument. But to clarify, you’d said (following Copeland who follows James I’d guess) NZos originates within the 5th century. I’m nitpicking because the difference of a century is the difference between placing NZos within the timeframe of the Book of Mormon and within the timeline of Mormon and Moroni, the authors/abridgers.

You can suggest this, but, I think you will find that it doesn't help your argument in the slightest bit. According to the text, the writings of Lehi and Nephi (where you are finding your strongest similarities) were not redacted, abridged, or translated within the gold plates. When we start dealing with the nitpicking sorts of details, this is a problem.

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

Most importantly, it places the material NZos pulls from (eg Palladius on The Races of India and the Brahmans, Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Alexander Romance etc.) within a believable chronological distance from the people described in 4th Nephi.

But this isn't meaningful. It's why I keep pointing to the problem of an absence of any sort of formal critieria or method in your efforts. To put is simply, you have intuited a connection between texts (well not just you of course). Then you (specifically you) are looking for ways to make that intuited connection work in terms of the necessary external problems - chronologies, history, and all that. But, without that intuited connection, there isn't any need to go this route. You need to start by actually creating a real justification for the comparison that isn't built purely on textual similarities. When you build from the similarities, you inevitably end up with parallelomania. You don't have evidence - because you do nothing to explain why these things that are similar couldn't come from some other place and time. You work within assumptions of the text - your intuited connection drives your assumptions about the text, its authorship, the way that we should understand it - but without that intuited presumptive position, we don't actually have any real reason to see any of this.

The Book of Mormon text remains much closer to the biblical text on all of these issues that you raise. And since the Book of Mormon text claims to be using the Old Testament texts as sources - and the fact that we can see the Book of Mormon text quoting the Old Testament extensively (just look at the chapter after chapter of Isaiah), we should prefer that text as a source over any alleged parallel to Palladius pr Pseudo-Callisthenes. To use a source like one of those, you would first have to show fairly conclusively that the Book of Mormon texts that you point to for the similarities cannot be understood as taking material from sources that we know are being used. This is a much harder task than you seem to think it is.

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

This is where the verisimilitude is.

No, it isn't. I think that maybe you really don't understand what verisimilitude is ...

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

Mormon and Moroni give us an account in 4th Nephi that is believable, if we read the land inhabited by the makarioi (historically known as the Camarini or the Kumr) as the setting.

No it isn't. And you haven't given me any reason to accept this point of view. There are a number of reasons for this - but finding similar words (which seems to be a part of your parallelomania) is the weakest sort of argument that you can front here. There is a sort of strange transfer that you are making - from literary connections to history. You are redefining the text - re-reading it in this context that you have imagined - and because you have reinterpreted the text in that way, you believe that it conforms to a history (but let's not forget that this is a history that isn't contemporary in its own right - that has to be interpreted). I'll try to illustrate what I mean here in just a minute.

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

It doesn’t matter to my model whether the Blessed are discussed in Jewish (Jeremiah 35), Greek (Alexander Romance), Christian (NZos), Roman (Itineraries from the Paradise of Eden to the land of Romans) or Chinese (I’ll get into this in the geography thread) texts. I’m interested in all pre-Moroni accounts describing the lands in the farthest east inhabited by a blessed people from the Mediterranean region.

I don't doubt you in this at all. But this illustrates my point - you have already decided what you think happened - and all you are doing is looking for the "evidence" that you are right. It doesn't really seem to matter how much effort you have to engage in to make your parallels work - and you certainly don't seem to be looking for anything that would contradict your theory. This is why I continue to label what you do as parallelomania. Unless I accept your intuited position, it doesn't actually seem that reasonable or logical at all.

In fact it does matter. Why? Because all of these things are very different traditions. But when you (as I noted in that list of vices) reduce each of these traditions to a few points that enhance their similarity, you make everything the same and make difference impossible to identify. And yet it is the differences that matter far more than the similarities. You have already reduced the entire Book of Mormon narrative to a few points that you believe are the most important (this is the "blessed people from the Mediterranean region"). But to reduce the Book of Mormon to this is to alter its meaning to the point of unrecognizability. The Book of Mormon doesn't understand itself in these terms. The Book of Mormon understands itself in the context of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. It does so quite clearly - repeatedly. It compares its prophets to Moses. It deals with the wilderness in a way that matches the Old Testament. It is only by ignoring this that you get to this point where you can find these similarities. Again - this is parallelomania. The Book of Mormon really doesn't have a "land in the farthest east inhabited by a blessed people from the Mediterranean region".

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

This is interesting because Aminadab, and Abinadom, are characters in the Book of Mormon, as well as Abinadi and Aminadi. Considering the narrative of the sons of Aminadab/Aminadam/Abinadam (Rechabites) being carried from prison by an angel and led to a land blocked by a dark cloud, Aminadab is an interesting choice of name for the Nephite dissenter in Helaman 5. The Book of Mormon Aminadab can see the imprisoned Nephi and Lehi in a pillar of fire through a dark cloud that blocks their view from the Lamanites. Aminadab calls on the Lamanites to repent so as to be able to see the angels ministering within or through the dark cloud. Is the Book of Mormon following something other than KJV here? afaik the -adam/-adom ending for Abin-/Amin- doesn’t occur in KJV.

There is nothing "interesting" about this. This is absolutely the weakest sort of parallel in terms of evidence. These things are meaningless on their own - because we can find similarities between words (and names) in all sorts of contexts in which we don't believe there is any real connection. I do think that the issue of the KJV is telling though. The first question it raises for me is this - why would it be important to see something like this in the KJV? What possible value would that have for any sort of evidence? You want to make this evidence so narrow - and yet Abinadab is in the KJV. But really, why does this matter? The King James translation is relative modern, right? According to the Book of Mormon, their version of the Old Testament (a translation in Egyptian and not a Hebrew text) was dated to around 600 BC. The Aminadab of the Book of Mormon shows up some six centuries later. We don't actually have a Nephite etymology for names (especially since the Book of Mormon isn't an original language text but represents an ostensibly anglicized transliteration). So given all of this, how is any of this supposed to remotely be evidence of anything? It only means something when you place it into that framework that you have intuited. It is these kinds of challenges that good methodology and good working criteria would help deal with - but I believe that you would never engage those kinds of things because they would decimate your argument.

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

Even though it is late, I am intrigued by the Kedah Annals, not only because the protagonist was named Marong/Maroni, but because the text is heavily dependent on the Alexander Romance.

But the Alexander Romance is irrelevant. There is no evidence that the Alexander Romance has anything to do with the Book of Mormon. There is no reason to connect a protagonist named Marong/Maroni to the Moroni of the Book of Mormon. It is a far better argument to suggest that you are stringing together coincidences. The argument that a string of coincidences becomes significant by sheer number isn't a real argument and it doesn't actually work.

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

I’ll touch briefly on the OP and why I’m interested in Maroni as a symbol for the dragon/serpent in the Siamese zodiac. Charles Anthon gave us a description of the transcript that Harris carried to New York. Among other things, Anthon said the transcript ended with a “rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Aztec calendar given by Humboldt”. He also described it as “a rude representation of the Mexican zodiac”. Anthon is referring to the famous sketch in Humboldt’s account of his travels through Central and South America. If you go and read Humboldt, he includes his sketch of the ‘Mexican zodiac’ (as Anthon called it) within a longer discussion about how the Aztec calendar is closely related to the zodiacs of East Asia. Humboldt’s hypothesis was that the Americas were populated by a rogue sect of Buddhists from Asia, and he references Kæmpfer’s travel account to Siam and Japan in support of his hypothesis. Of course, this is the same account wherein Kæmpfer informs us that the dragon/serpent in the Siamese zodiac is called Maroni. Humboldt also explains how Quetzalcoatl is the serpent, and speculates that Quetzalcoatl was a Christian apostle or missionary bringing Christianity to the New World. He calls this figure the Mexican Buddha.

And all of this is completely meaningless. Really. I mean this with complete conviction. There is nothing in the Book of Mormon (not a single hint) that would connect the name Moroni to the idea of a dragon or a serpent. So let me sort of list the thinking that you make here -

1: Humboldt published a drawing of the Aztec Calendar stone in 1814.

2: Anthon was familiar with this image, and thought it was similar to a circular device on the manuscript that Harris showed Anthon.

3: Humboldt believed that the Aztec zodiac had similarities to East Asian zodiacs, and for this (and other reasons) believed that Mexico had been colonized by east Asians.

Now, we are going to get back to the thing I was going to discuss. Here is a question I would like you to answer. Do you believe that there was a group of people called the Rechabites, who traveled to the edge of the world, where they were taken up into a city in the sky protected from the rest of world by an impenetrable barrier? Do you believe that there was an individual named Zosimus who was taken to see the descendants of these people in a vision? The problem that we run into here is the sort of strange transference you are doing between literature and history. So I return to the Book of Esther, which is a fictional tale. Why is it fictional? Because the events it describes could not have happened. We have historical records that show enough differences between what really happened and what the book describes as happening, that we know that it is fictional. It is similar to the idea that we can create contemporary fiction today that describe real places, may even involve real people, but which clearly didn't happen. An example I found that I could use (after a 30 second search) is in movie White House Down. The basic plot of the film involves a threat towards the President of the United States James Sawyer. And of course, such a person never existed - but the story fits a certain time and place. The fact that it fits that time and place (as does the Book of Esther) creates a sense of verisimilitude. That is, something that could happen (a film of this sort or a story like the Book of Esther both become something different if they don't have some sense of believability created by this verisimilitude). But, they are still fictional.

So we get back to your statements. Whatever Humboldt believed about the Aztecs, he was wrong. Mexico was not colonized by a Buddhist monks from eastern Asia. And in fact, the Aztec Zodiac has nothing to do with eastern Asian zodiacs. There are some profound differences. The east Asian Zodiacs, for example, present a sequence of years - each zodiac sign was for an entire year. The Aztec zodiac was one of a month-like period - 13 months of 20 years, so that a cycle is completed every 260 days. There is some advantage to having a competent understanding of the language. We can understand the Aztec calendar stone today in ways that Humboldt could not.

So this leaves us with an interesting question - what value is Humboldt's incorrect speculations? This is that funny crossover between literature and history. Humboldt's version of history is clearly fictional. It didn't happen. It's relevance to the Book of Mormon is only possible if we assume that the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction. If we saw much later history of the Jewish people that incorporated the fictional characters from the Book of Esther as if they were real people, then that much later history would be fictional (at least in those places).

This brings up the issue - while the Book of Esther (as realistic fiction) has verisimilitude (it appears to come from the right place and time - but as fiction instead of some sort of historical record). If we deal with a later record that treats Esther as historically accurate, instead of fictional, we know that those records represent a fiction as well. And this brings us to a problem. Being verisimilar means only that we put something into an appropriate place or time - it doesn't mean that something has historicity. And when we say something is verisimilar, it means that we are connecting it to a particular context. The Book of Esther is verisimilar to a particular context. The narrative of Zosimus is a fictional account. It is verisimilar to a context of the 5th century CE in a particular place. It isn't verisimilar to a 600 BCE Palestinian context. This is part of the reason why the text is dated to that 5th century CE context, and why it isn't dated to earlier or later contexts. Because it is fictional, the narrative has no historicity.

So when we get to Humboldt's theory (which we know is fictional, even if Humboldt didn't know this), we end up with a realization that his views do not represent historicity in any sense. Any account which relies on Humboldt's ideas is likewise ahistorical - they cannot have historicity (because they rely on a fiction). So when we have any theory that relates the Book of Mormon to Humboldt's fictional theories, we are building a case for the verisimilitude of the Book of Mormon that builds around the time and place of Humboldt's theory - or, in other words, we are building a case for a fictional Book of Mormon written in the early 19th century.

Generally, arguments for verisimilitude for an authentic Book of Mormon are used because they are engaging two ideas simultaneously. The first is that the Book of Mormon can be shown to have verisimilitude to an ancient context (in particular, the earliest chronological parts can be connected to a 5th century BCE context in the ancient near east).  The second is the assumption that there is no way to explain the verisimilitude of the Book of Mormon as a translation of an authentic ancient text without the acceptance of the divine elements in the narrative Joseph Smith provided for the Book of Mormon's production. Put together, the argument is that evidence that the Book of Mormon is verisimilar in that early ANE context is evidence that the Book of Mormon also has historicity. There is space for a different conclusion - that is, that the Book of Mormon is an authentic translation of an ancient work of fiction (like the Book of Esther) but that particular conclusion is generally of interest to no one at all.

So there is one thing left to address. And that is the question of whether or not you think that Humboldt was right. If you think that Humboldt's theories are fictional but reflect a historical reality, and that with this understanding, you can provide an alternate ancient context in which the Book of Mormon becomes verisimilar - then, at this point, we can simply end the discussion. I don't know of a single modern authority in any field who would accept Humboldt's theories. And, since I have no reason to accept them, I will simply throw your approach out as being impossible to justify. If you agree that Humboldt was wrong, then the clear implication is that you believe that the Book of Mormon is entirely a modern production, and that Joseph Smith was writing a fiction based on this idea of Humboldt. And if this is the case, then we can start to really have a discussion about whether or not the Book of Mormon builds on that theory.

There isn't really a third option here I don't think. And so when we get to your last paragraph, and you write this -

On 3/14/2024 at 2:04 AM, Zosimus said:

The myth of the blessed isles goes way back. I follow Braginsky with his proposal that as the east opened up to European exploration, the Garden also had to shift east. Braginsky traces the path of the lsles of the Blessed in literature from India to the Malay Archipelago. I’d go further and propose that once America was established, the Garden also had to shift across the Pacific. Remember Columbus thought he'd discovered the rivers of Paradise when he first spotted the Orinoco? He thought he had approached the Garden, which he placed somewhere in Southeast Asia, from the east side. Samuel Mitchell was among the first to intentionally place the Garden of Eden in the New World, around Onondaga, New York (source). Mormonism was the first tradition to establish the Garden in the New World, but I suggest the authors of the Book of Mormon didn’t jump over 2000 years of literature placing the Garden in Asia. This is why we find steel, chariots, elephants, silk, horses and cimiters in the text. The author is establishing verisimilitude.

It doesn't matter what people think - what people think doesn't have much to do with historicity (except perhaps the history of what people think). Author's don't establish verisimilitude as any sort of deliberate act. Verisimilitude simply exists because authors write in specific times and in specific places - and so their works identify in those times and places. Elaborate hoaxes inevitably contain problematic elements that can help identify the correct time and place in which the forgery was produced.

The myth of the blessed isles may go way back (and it does) - but only in particular contexts and with particular understandings. But what we can say with some certainty is that the blessed isles weren't ever a real place. They didn't actually exist. And when you speak of "tracing the path" of the blessed isles, all you are doing is creating a history of the idea - that can be used to date accounts that include that fictional element of the blessed isles. According to wikipedia (because it is an easy place to link for you):

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In the time of Hesiod, the Fortunate Isles were associated with the concept of Elysium, a utopian location in the Greek underworld thought to be found in the Western ocean on the margin of the known world. The number of the islands would later be reduced to one by the poet Pindar.

Hesiod is a useful point of context because he wrote in the period between 750 and 650 BCE (not that long before Lehi). This means that for us to understand Lehi's journey in the Book of Mormon as a journey to the blessed isles we would also have to see it as a trip to the underworld. If you could make this case (and I don't believe you can), then this would give the Book of Mormon potential verisimilitude in that historical context - but it would also mean that the Book of Mormon is as much fiction as those same kinds of elements are in Hesiod - a literary fiction. No one actually journeys to the fictional mythical location of the blessed isles - and we know this because we have a much greater understanding of geography and the nature of planet earth than people did who lived thousands of years ago.

Samuel Mitchell may have placed the Garden of Eden in the New World, and he may have even believed that the Garden of Eden was a real place there at some point in history. And while this is interesting, in 600 BCE, everyone was firmly convinced that the Garden of Eden was in Mesopotamia. So a Book of Mormon that believed that the Garden of Eden was in the Americas would have no verisimilitude with an ancient historical context. It would only have verisimilitude in a modern context - and as a fictional work with no historicity.

This is the problem that your arguments bring forward. And it is the problem that is always present when we try to argue that verisimilitude and historicity are interchangable (even when we get the concepts right).

[Zosimus]

This is long stream without much proofing, but I want to get out a response 

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You can suggest this, but, I think you will find that it doesn't help your argument in the slightest bit. According to the text, the writings of Lehi and Nephi (where you are finding your strongest similarities) were not redacted, abridged, or translated within the gold plates. When we start dealing with the nitpicking sorts of details, this is a problem.

As said above, I’m most interested in the similarities between History of the Rechabites and 4 Nephi, the 200 years of peace. This is roughly the same time frame for the first western historical accounts of the "isles of the sea" beyond the Arabian Peninsula.

We're branching off into multiple topics. Let me explain again my approach to hopefully help pull things together.

Setting aside for now any discussion of the identity of the author and dating of the text, I believe the Book of Mormon has a believable narrative, within a specific setting (time and place). Jacob gives us our first indication of the setting of the Book of Mormon narrative.

“We have been driven out of the land of our inheritance; but we have been led to a better land, for the Lord has made the sea our path, and we are upon an isle of the sea. But great are the promises of the Lord unto them who are upon the isles of the sea; wherefore as it says isles, there must needs be more than this, and they are inhabited also by our brethren.”

This is important. Jacob is not only telling us they have left Israel, and we can assume the Arabian Peninsula, and have been led to a better land upon an isle in the sea. We know of course that the original word Jacob used was not isle or island. Assuming the term he used was Hebrew, he would understand the term he used for isle to mean something more equivalent to country, peninsula, coast, or land washed by water etc. The important part of his statement is he knew that there were other "isles", and they were already inhabited by Israelites at some point before ~545 BC. What is Jacob referring to? This question is where I start.

Do we know of any place beyond the Arabian Sea that was inhabited by Israelites at the time Jacob tells us about his Israelite brothers in the isles of the sea? Do we have any accounts that confirm there were Israelites upon the isles of the sea before 545 BC? Is this something Jacob learned about in Jerusalem, or along his journey to the "isle" they had been led to?

Here we get closer to my methodology. Is there any evidence of 1st temple Israelites inhabiting places that were at a distance great enough to isolate them from their origins in Israel? If yes, do any of those locations align with the internal geography of the Book of Mormon? If yes, then that is the geography I propose as the most accurate geography model for the Book of Mormon narrative.

Disclaimer: I’m not saying that the model I propose is with certainty the real-world location of the Book of Mormon because I'm not yet concerned about whether or not the Book of Mormon is fiction or history. I'll deal with that question later. As such, I admit the model I propose is probably wrong, but if my approach is solid, it will be less wrong than present models simply because this model will be supported by data instead of assumptions about where the Nephite narrative unfolds. IMO we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion, without any data to back it up, that the Book of Mormon setting is in a place that would have been unknown, and inaccessible, to the authors of the Book of Mormon. All present models are set in locations that have no evidence of Israelite migrations in the 6th century BC.

So next step. After researching this question for some time, I believe there is evidence of 1st temple Israelites inhabiting an “isle in the sea” beyond the Arabian Peninsula. The locations are Egypt and Ethiopia. After comparing the geographies of these locations to the internal geography of the Book of Mormon, I concluded neither is a match. I'll be adding the process I took to reach this conclusion to the geography thread. In particular, there's no narrow neck of land that can be traversed in 1 to 1.5 days in Egypt or Ethiopia. Also, it's unlikely that if Ethiopia or Egypt were their destination that Nephi wouldn't just say they were going to Egypt or Cush (Ethiopia) since these places were known to them and are referenced frequently in the Old Testament.

Next, I expand the range of the analysis. There is some evidence for early contact with the Mediterranean in places such as Zimbabwe, India, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Although there is no physical evidence of Israelites in these locations dating to the 6th century BC, we do have evidence of Mediterranean trade and genetic evidence of that could support claims of ANE or West Asian admixture.

Zimbabwe/Mozambique. I was most curious about the Lemba/Remba Jews in Southern Africa because their tradition states they are 1st Temple Jews, and a migration to escape the Babylonian invasion is implied in their oral accounts. Most importantly, genetic testing has revealed that a good percentage (upwards of 70% in some cases) of Lemba have West Asian genetic origins. This data would seem to support the narrative we find in 1st and 2nd Nephi. But there's a problem, the geography does not appear to align with the geography described in the Book of Mormon. However, in looking closer at their origins, the Lemba don't claim to have traveled directly from Jerusalem. The Lemba/Remba say they first went to a place called Sena, this is probably Sanna in Yemen (which incidentally isn't far off the path of the Lehites). Then then went to another Sena. After some time they sailed to Zimbabwe. Another twist is that Lemba DNA more closely matches the DNA of Comoran populations in nearby Comoro and it is likely that the Lemba reached Zimbabwe through the same demographic migration event that brought the Semitic Comorans to the Comoros (source). Another problem is that the admixture seems to be late, and Arab-mediated instead of Jewish. So we don't know where the Lemba would have been situated during the Book of Mormon timeline. I will provide more details about the genetic origins of the Lemba and Comoran people in the geography thread. So, with Zimbabwe not being a fit with the Book of Mormon geography, I go back to the original question. Is there any data to support a migration of a group of 1st Temple Jews from Yemen or Oman to a location beyond the Arabian Sea?

India. We have lots of claims in India. The Cochin Jews claim to have migrated to the west coast of India in the 6th century BC. This was mostly unfounded, until a recent DNA study determined that there was West Asian admixture in the port city of Pattanam as early as the 4th century BC, within a range of plausibility for a migration in the 6th century BC. In India there are also claims that Thomas the Apostle (or Bartholomew in some accounts) traveled to India to convert the Cochin Jews. This story is also found in the 3rd century Acts of Thomas. We find similar claims, without much evidence across Asia and even into America, like we see with Humboldt's Mexican Buddha (Quetzalcoatl). I agree, these sort of accounts are mostly meaningless, if not contrary data. We don't have anything in the Book of Mormon describing one of the 12 apostles or Christian missionaries arriving in the promised land. There are some Greek names like Timothy and Lachoneus that turn up in the Book of Mormon, so I suppose its possible, but it would seem that something like that would get a mention in the story. There's a lot of interesting material related to the Jews and Nazarene Christians in India. For example, they kept records on metal plates. Sourcing ore for metal plates is the first thing Nephi tells us he does when he reaches the promised land Also, an old text called the Words of Gad the Seer was discovered there. I wrote about it earlier on this forum, and then Jeff Lindsey wrote up an article on MI. You may have reviewed it. But all this is irrelevant to my method. There's no narrow neck that would take 1 to 1.5 days to walks cross near Cochin, India. 

Malay Peninsula. There's a narrow neck that takes 1 to 1.5 days to walk across. Other geographical features line up. Most importantly, there's evidence that there was interaction between the Malay Peninsula and the Jewish settlements in India. There's also genetic evidence that some of the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula went west to the Comoros/Zimbabwe and also east into Polynesia (source). Maternal Southeast Asian Haplogroup B4a1a1 has been found from the Comoros all the way to Hawaii (source). There's even an unusual (and controversial) case of B4a1a1 in Brazil. You've probably figured out that I've found this location fits the geography of the Book of Mormon. I'll be laying it out in the geography thread. 

I hope this helps explain what I am doing. Because what I am not doing is comparing texts like NZos to the Book of Mormon to establish dependence in either direction. I'm using this material to establish the believability of my model. These 4th century texts are data related to historical events that establish some verisimilitude between the narrative in the Book of Mormon and a real world time and place. Even though 4th century texts like NZos describing some land beyond the Ganges are unrelated to the Book of Mormon, I believe that they help to demonstrate that the Book of Mormon narrative is believable.

But I don't want to get back into a circular discussion about NZos because we haven't had the geography discussion yet. 

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But this isn't meaningful. It's why I keep pointing to the problem of an absence of any sort of formal critieria or method in your efforts. To put is simply, you have intuited a connection between texts (well not just you of course). Then you (specifically you) are looking for ways to make that intuited connection work in terms of the necessary external problems - chronologies, history, and all that.

To restate my comment above, I have intuited a connection between the geography of the Book of Mormon and the land inhabited in the first centuries AD by a people known as the Camarini, an ethnonym that comes to us through a 3rd/4th century account recorded by a Roman trader. Arabic historians like Ibn Sa'id later refer to the Camarini as the Qimar or Kumr, the Malayo-Polynesian group distributed from the Comoros (Comoros is etymologically related to Kumr) to Polynesia. I agree discussion about chronologies, history etc. is meaningless until I can establish whether or not the setting of the geography described in the Book of Mormon aligns with the real-world geographical homeland of the historical Kumr.

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No, it isn't. I think that maybe you really don't understand what verisimilitude is ...

I believe I do understand verisimilitude. What I’m saying is that there is very little verisimilitude between the Book of Mormon and 4th century AD Mesoamerica, or the Heartland of North America. But there is verisimilitude between the Book of Mormon and lands that were inhabited by Israelites within the Book of Mormon timeframe. I’m not saying the Book of Mormon events literally took place on the Malay Peninsula, because I haven't done the work to validate or invalidate this yet, but I am saying if one were to read the Book of Mormon with this setting (time and place) in mind, the text is more believable. Silk, steel, horses, elephants, pigs, etc etc don’t have to be explained as translation quirks. The setting fits the text, there’s no conflict between the text as we have it and believability.

Do you believe the Book of Mormon has verisimilitude with a specific time and place?

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I don't doubt you in this at all. But this illustrates my point - you have already decided what you think happened - and all you are doing is looking for the "evidence" that you are right. It doesn't really seem to matter how much effort you have to engage in to make your parallels work - and you certainly don't seem to be looking for anything that would contradict your theory. This is why I continue to label what you do as parallelomania. Unless I accept your intuited position, it doesn't actually seem that reasonable or logical at all.

I hope what I've said above makes it clear that I'm not just looking for evidence where I want it to be found. I've rejected a number of geographies that I'd expected would be more correct than the one I'm now proposing. I've intuited and subsequently rejected at least a dozen authorship hypotheses that I found just don't work, as much as I wanted them to. I’m not arguing the Book of Mormon is dependent on any of these texts we've discussed. I’d guess the authors were not even familiar with them.* These texts give us contemporary accounts of the setting I propose. Just like West Wing and White House Down describe the same time and place, in different ways through the eyes of different authors. They aren’t related or co-dependent, but they are similar in a way that establishes the genre of fictional dramas about Washington DC in the early 21st century as believable. NZos is to the Book of Mormon what West Wing is to White House Down

* I exclude Humboldt and his sources from this group, until I look closer at it. Humboldt wrote about the term Komr and I find that significant

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The Book of Mormon doesn't understand itself in these terms. The Book of Mormon understands itself in the context of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. It does so quite clearly - repeatedly. It compares its prophets to Moses. It deals with the wilderness in a way that matches the Old Testament. It is only by ignoring this that you get to this point where you can find these similarities. Again - this is parallelomania. The Book of Mormon really doesn't have a "land in the farthest east inhabited by a blessed people from the Mediterranean region".

My reading of NZos is that it also understands itself in the context of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. Zosimus dwelled in the wilderness for 40 years before he was lead to a pillar of a cloud and the Land of the Blessed. Anyway, feels like we’ll never reach agreement here. Suppose we can simply leave it to personal interpretation. Gotta say I’d enjoy reading a published response you might have for Welch.

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but I believe that you would never engage those kinds of things because they would decimate your argument.

I always approach the text assuming that it is what it claims to be, but I acknowledge that I have no idea when it was written or who wrote it. I don’t have data to back up a 5th century AD author or a 19th century AD author. I’m more than happy to have my assumptions decimated. I’m willing to follow the data. Like I said above. I originally intuited India as the setting of the Book of Mormon. Primarily because Claudius Buchanan wrote about his experience with Cochin Jews (which he claimed were exiles from the 1st temple period) and their metal plates in 1809. But the data doesn't support southern India and the Cochin Jews as a model for the Book of Mormon. To be honest, the closer I look at it, the more convincing becomes the case for a 19th century author. I have no problem following that but it doesn’t matter much to my model.

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But the Alexander Romance is irrelevant. There is no evidence that the Alexander Romance has anything to do with the Book of Mormon. There is no reason to connect a protagonist named Marong/Maroni to the Moroni of the Book of Mormon. It is a far better argument to suggest that you are stringing together coincidences. The argument that a string of coincidences becomes significant by sheer number isn't a real argument and it doesn't actually work.

Brant Gardner and William Dever call them convergences. But I tend to agree with you. What I’m doing is forming a model that works better than the ones we have presently. I am proposing a reading of the Book of Mormon that may be wrong, but I suggest it is less wrong than those that require that Nephi sailed across the ocean 1800 years before Columbus. There's no data beyond the Indian Ocean. These models are broken from the start. So as much as I have enjoyed our discussion, every single point you have made here does damage my reading of the text as historical, but ultimately it decimates the status quo, that the Book of Mormon author was telling us something about Guatemala or the Heartland. I endorse your hyper-critical approach to these questions because everything to date has been unsupportable. I find the apologetic arguments for NHM and Bountiful somewhat convincing, but beyond Bountiful, there's nothing. Refer to the Hamblin-Jenkins debate.

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And all of this is completely meaningless. Really. I mean this with complete conviction. There is nothing in the Book of Mormon (not a single hint) that would connect the name Moroni to the idea of a dragon or a serpent.

But you know already that dragons are mentioned in the Book of Mormon in the context of both the Nephite and Lamanite militaries. You’re right, there’s nothing in the Book of Mormon connecting Captain Moroni to a dragon, and the Old Testament has dragons too. But that’s not what I was claiming. From the OP:

[Maroni as a symbol in the Siamese zodiac and a title given to a Malay/Siamese warrior chief] could be:

1. A coincidence
2. More data to support the claim that Joseph Smith was the world's greatest guesser,
3. Another thing to suggest that the author of the Book of Mormon was riffing off things being discussed only in very tight academic circles in the 1820s
4. Evidence that the Book of Mormon is a historical text or pseudo-historical text set on the Malay Peninsula.

I get it, you choose #1 and you suppose I choose #4. But I’m probably closer to a combination of #2 and #3 that led to #4. I’ve never claimed to have the answer. Maybe it is #1, a coincidence. lMO coincidence is the least likely explanation, for the reasons below.

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Now, we are going to get back to the thing I was going to discuss. Here is a question I would like you to answer. Do you believe that there was a group of people called the Rechabites, who traveled to the edge of the world, where they were taken up into a city in the sky protected from the rest of world by an impenetrable barrier?

No, there wasn’t a group of people called the Rechabites. There was a group identifying themselves as the sons or the family/tribe of Rechab/Jonadab in Jeremiah 35. Later on, Jews, Arabs and Christians expanded this account and identified them as Makarioi or Blessed. Later on, we get some accounts, including Joseph Wolff’s account in the 1820s, of encounters with Rechabites. But there's no real consistency to the accounts of the Sons of Rechab after they are discussed in Jeremiah 35.

I don’t know if this group identifying themselves as the sons of Rechab migrated to the edge of the known world or not, but I do know they have been associated with a people described in various Greek/Roman travel accounts as those living at the edge of the world. They were also associated with a group in the east described in the Hebrew version of the Alexander Romance. They were also associated with the Kumr of Arabic geographies and the Rahmans in Slavonic/Russian literature.

Allow me to here be as hypercritical and precise as you usually are. The text doesn’t mention a city, let alone a city in the sky. Where do you get that? Seems you are reading the text in a Mormon City of Enoch way, the meaning you want to give the text, which as we discussed before doesn’t work. No, I don’t believe they were taken up into a city in the sky.

In short, I don’t believe there is any evidence that the account in NZos is literal or historical. But I do think they were long associated, across multiple traditions, with a specific historical group.

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Do you believe that there was an individual named Zosimus who was taken to see the descendants of these people in a vision?

No, but I do believe there were Christian monks in Egypt and Palestine that read the accounts of the Camarini, and understood the Camarini to be the Rechabites. The 3rd/4th century account of the Camarini was embedded in Biblical terms. They lived near Eden. They subsisted on manna from the sky. It’d be surprising if a monk reading the accounts of the Camarini didn’t see them as the sons of Rechab.

Zosimus is probably a Christian attempt at an Alexander Romance. There’s even an version where Zosimus travels to Athens before his adventure to the Land of the Blessed where he announces he’s going to retrace Alexander’s path. So no, even though the Zosimus in NZos represents a historical figure, I don’t believe the Zosimus in NZos was a historical individual.

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The problem that we run into here is the sort of strange transference you are doing between literature and history.

Oh it isn’t me doing that. This is what the Christian monks were doing when they wrote NZos. They were transferring their (mis)interpretation of Jeremiah 35 to historical accounts of the Camarini.

This is also what Arabic geographers were doing when they wrote that the Camarini (they called them Kumr) were the sons of Japheth that sailed in boats to Komr.

I can’t escape what these texts are, so I approach them as such. For example, the Roman accounts of the Camarini are intended to describe a historical group in the east, the Khmer, or more precisely the Mon-Khmer, on the Malay Peninsula. But these accounts of historical people and historical lands aren’t believable in our modern context. The Camarini don’t really subsist on bread that rained on them from the sky, but this doesn’t mean the account isn’t describing a historical people. I understand this is confusing, but its no different than the problems we have when the Hebrew Bible tells us the Israelites subsisted on bread that rained down from the sky. This doesn’t mean the Israelites aren’t a historical people. Its just that our accounts from that time period are inaccurate. In a similar way, I believe the Camarini are a historical people that were associated with the Sons of Japheth by Arab historians and later the Rechabites. This in no way is evidence that Sons of Japheth sailed to Komr or that the Rechabites were carried by an angel to a river leading to the Isle of the Blessed.

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The basic plot of the film involves a threat towards the President of the United States James Sawyer. And of course, such a person never existed - but the story fits a certain time and place. The fact that it fits that time and place (as does the Book of Esther) creates a sense of verisimilitude. That is, something that could happen (a film of this sort or a story like the Book of Esther both become something different if they don't have some sense of believability created by this verisimilitude). But, they are still fictional.

That’s right. A story like the Book of Mormon becomes something different if it doesn’t have some sense of believability. This is the core of my argument. The Book of Mormon has no believability when we read it as a fiction or history set in Mesoamerica or the Heartland (the place) between 600 BC and 420 AD (the time).

Here’s another example. I’ve been reading a book about two Christian saints: Barlaam and Josaphat. Josephat was a prince in an unidentified land in Ethiopia or India, there’s confusion about the setting. Josephat’s father, King Avenir, was an idolater and a persecutor of a Christianity. A Christian missionary from a place called Senaar travels to Ethiopia/India and succeeds in converting Josephat to Christianity. The king divides his kingdom up and gives half to Josephat. Josephat later decides he’d rather be a mendicant Christian monk like Barlam, so he gives his kingdom to someone named Barachius and he departs to join Barlam in a monastery.

This whole story is Christian fiction written by a Christian monk probably in Palestine or Damascus. The whole story is believable. It claims a real world setting, both time and place. The story had enough ‘truthiness’ to it that Josephat and Barlam were canonized as saints. For centuries, Christians had debated where the kingdom of King Avenir was, and where the Christian monk Barlam had come from. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that scholars figured it out. Turns out Josephat wasn’t a Christian convert at all, the whole story was taken from 2nd century Sanskrit texts containing accounts of the life of Buddha. Barlam wasn’t originally a Christian missionary from Ethiopia, he was a brahman monk/priest from Serendip (Sri Lanka). Because the original setting (time and place) of the text had been lost, or more likely redacted by Islamic historians, we have the incredibly hilarious outcome of the Pope canonizing the historical Buddha. Josephat is etymologically related to the sanskrit Buddhist term bodhisatva. Manichean missionaries were probably the first to hear the story of the Buddha, but they removed the references to brahmanism to suit their purposes. Then Arabic historians further redacted the story and mistranslated the toponyms to remove the pagan influences. Then Christian monks decided to make the protagonist (originally the Buddha) a Christian prince.

My point in recounting this is, if there is a setting (time and place) of a text, then that setting is critical to understanding the text. We can’t by default believe what the translator tells us about the text because the translator is reworking the original text. When Joseph Smith tells us that the angel Moroni told him that the plates contained a history of the former inhabitants of the American continent and the source from whence they sprang, do we simply accept it? What if the translator is wrong? What if the translator doesn’t know? What if the translator is shifting the setting to fit his context or purposes? Given what we know about Joseph Smith and the hypocephalus, we aren't wrong to be critical.

You know what I’m getting at. If we consult the text, and only the text, the Book of Mormon has a very clear time and place. Its somewhere beyond the Arabian Peninsula, in a place with elephants, silk, chariots, horses, pigs, steel, etc. You can disagree about how I’m the one engaging in parallelomania, but the fact is that the Book of Mormon has nothing American in it. I’d counter-argue that any attempt to situate the Book of Mormon in America is parallelomania. It is not reasonable to explain Nephi making swords out of steel or metal in the New World by arguing that the 19th century translator just didn’t have a word for a wooden macuahuitl. IMO that's does damage to the text in the same way, although less severe, a 10th century Christian monk damages the Lalitavistara Sutra by shifting the Buddha to Cochin India and baptizing him.

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So we get back to your statements. Whatever Humboldt believed about the Aztecs, he was wrong. Mexico was not colonized by a Buddhist monks from eastern Asia. And in fact, the Aztec Zodiac has nothing to do with eastern Asian zodiacs. There are some profound differences. The east Asian Zodiacs, for example, present a sequence of years - each zodiac sign was for an entire year. The Aztec zodiac was one of a month-like period - 13 months of 20 years, so that a cycle is completed every 260 days. There is some advantage to having a competent understanding of the language. We can understand the Aztec calendar stone today in ways that Humboldt could not. So this leaves us with an interesting question - what value is Humboldt's incorrect speculations? This is that funny crossover between literature and history. Humboldt's version of history is clearly fictional. It didn't happen. It's relevance to the Book of Mormon is only possible if we assume that the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction....or, in other words, we are building a case for a fictional Book of Mormon written in the early 19th century.

I'm willing to accept the Book of Mormon as a work of fiction. I just haven't got to that question yet. I want to establish setting first, as best I can. But yes, I agree, the Humboldt material seems to support the case for a 19th century fiction.

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Generally, arguments for verisimilitude for an authentic Book of Mormon are used because they are engaging two ideas simultaneously. The first is that the Book of Mormon can be shown to have verisimilitude to an ancient context (in particular, the earliest chronological parts can be connected to a 5th century BCE context in the ancient near east).  The second is the assumption that there is no way to explain the verisimilitude of the Book of Mormon as a translation of an authentic ancient text without the acceptance of the divine elements in the narrative Joseph Smith provided for the Book of Mormon's production. Put together, the argument is that evidence that the Book of Mormon is verisimilar in that early ANE context is evidence that the Book of Mormon also has historicity.

This is helpful, along with all the helpful stuff you've said above I'm going to have to think through it more

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So there is one thing left to address. And that is the question of whether or not you think that Humboldt was right. If you think that Humboldt's theories are fictional but reflect a historical reality, and that with this understanding, you can provide an alternate ancient context in which the Book of Mormon becomes verisimilar - then, at this point, we can simply end the discussion.

Humboldt was for sure, wrong. But there's irony in your question because Humboldt was less wrong than Joseph Smith. Humboldt was one of the first to add definition to the Bering Strait theory, which is far more right than the Jews in America theory. Humboldt was wrong about which Asian group migrated to the Americas, but I'll forgive him since he had very little information to work with. You also mentioned that Mitchell's theory that Australasians were the first to arrive in the Americas was wrong. Yes, the details are wrong. But it turns out, Mitchell was also less wrong than we might think (source). Note that the Onge are the original inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, presently found in the Andaman Islands between India and Thailand.

The full video here is interesting, but the most relevant to our discussion about Mitchell's hypothesis that Australasians people the Americas starts at 17:21. Turns out Mitchell was right about Australasians as a founding population in America. While he wasn't right about Australasians in NY, you'll find the video discusses why the Onge signal hasn't been found in North America. The first answer provided at 12:50 is that it has been obscured or erased by European contact and the subsequent genocide. Which is pretty close to what Mitchell had hypothesized. Mitchell had said there was a great battle of extinction in NY, and populations from Tartary and populations from Europe wiped out the Australasians. Although I accept Humboldt and Mitchell were wrong about the details, they were more right than you give them credit for. 

So let me ask you, while we're here discussing the evidence for the peopling of the Americas, do you think Joseph Smith was right? Do you think that Smith's theories are fictional? Or maybe fictional but reflect a historical reality?

Edited March 21, 2024 by Zosimus

[Zosimus]

I wanted to make this a separate comment. With regards to your comment on the hypothesis proposed by Mitchell, and then by Joseph Smith, that the New World was actually an Old World, they may have been less wrong there also. This is from Razib Khan, far from a pseudo-history crank, just last month. The latest findings in the Americas have the experts recalibrating, a lot.

The Native Americans Before the Native Americans

"The world we thought we knew in the 1990s turns out not to be anything close to the world that might have been. Over the last 25 years, there has been a revolution in our understanding of how the first humans arrived in the Americas and who they were. But these revelations have not illuminated the totality of the past; there still are dragons in the blank spots in our map of this surprisingly ancient New World…

Looking at hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across hundreds of individuals, the researchers noticed a subtle but clear signal of affinity between the Amazonian tribes and their Australasian samples, which included Onge from the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, Papuans, and indigenous Australians. The results were so surprising that the researchers repeated the analysis over and over, and in the last decade, others have also found the same result, even more broadly in modern South America...

A speculative model then beckons that an early branch of humanity distantly related to Melanesians crossed from Asia to North America just as Ancient North Eurasians were pushing east into Siberia. In all likelihood, these people were coastal foragers and may have had some primitive vessels. If they arrived before the Last Glacial Maximum, they would have had the New World for tens of thousands of years to themselves. But this presents a conundrum: where are their human remains? 

The genetic and archaeological data now point to the tentative but plausible possibility that humans were present before the Last Glacial Maximum, though very sparse on the ground and highly mobile. These people were likely very distantly related to the people of Australasia rather than the main line of East Asians or the western-related ANE. The presence of Y chromosomal haplogroup D among the Japanese, derived from the indigenous Jomon who were resident in the islands for more than 10,000 years, shared with Andamanese and Tibetans, presents a scenario where beach-combing foragers drift upward from Southeast Asia and eventually across the north Pacific littoral...

Perhaps the New World, in the end, is the greatest anthropological experiment of all, recording a society of modern Homo sapiens that doesn’t drive megafauna to extinction—Mother Nature’s mostly independent and newer trial run of the human species, distinct from the earlier and separate creation of the Old World of Afro-Eurasia and Near Oceania. Far Oceania is, however, known to have experienced a genetic imprint of Amerindians, perhaps through captives brought back from the South American mainland and the transmission of the South American sweet potato to the Pacific peoples...

But with Christopher Columbus’ navigation across the Atlantic, entire continents of races and civilizations were discovered, with immediate cultural consequences like Thomas More setting his Utopia in the New World and Shakespeare’s play The Tempest clearly influenced by English contact with North America. The Western understanding of what they had discovered, or perhaps more accurately made contact with, unfolded over centuries. When it comes to Western understanding of the ancient history of this New World, it unfolds still. 

The world that the Greeks and Romans had known was not the entire world; there were deep mysteries in the universe hidden even from the ancients. Early Americans in the decades after U.S. independence still hadn’t come to terms with the native peoples of the continent, whether it be their political and social role in the young republic as citizens or not or their origins as a race. The religion founded by Joseph Smith, Mormonism, was bathed with cutting-edge scientific and historical theories from the 1820s, like that Native Americans descended from ancient Hebrew tribes. Today, we might laugh at Mormons. Yet do we really know the truth either? There are mysteries in the world still, even in 2024...The New World became just as the Old was to be, both worlds born in blood and conquest."

Now why on earth would Razib Khan, last month, bring up Joseph Smith's theories on the peopling of the Americas in the context of a major paradigm shift happening wrt the peopling of the Americas? There's a flood of new information out there and Mormon scholars aren't keeping up. When you get Razib Khan making comments like this about the setting described in the Book of Mormon, it’s' time we also shift our perspectives to account for the new data. 

This touches on the conclusion I'm starting to put together. Joseph Smith was inspired by the latest theories of the experts of his day, Humboldt, Rafinesque. and Mitchell. Without understanding the "cutting-edge scientific and historical theories" behind it all, he translated a history of the former inhabitants of the American continent (Mitchell’’s Australasians/Polynesians) and the source from whence they sprang. Only now are we starting to see what that really means.

Edited March 21, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

20 hours ago, Zosimus said:

To restate my comment above, I have intuited a connection

You lose me right here. Every time you talk about having intuited something, you lose me. I don't want intuition. I want evidence - and I want evidence drawn from the text.

I'll give you one point (I don't have a lot of time tonight). You mention the 'isles of the sea' in 2 Nephi. It is a phrase that comes from Isaiah in the Old Testament (see for example, Isaiah 24). It is bundled in a section of the Book of Mormon that unquestionably quotes from Isaiah - small phrases, and nearly entire chapters. Why shouldn't we start there when trying to understand what Jacob is saying? That you don't start there tells me that you are simply making every effort to prove your intuition - and aren't really all that interested in what the text has to tell us.

One other note - you write this:

20 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Setting aside for now any discussion of the identity of the author and dating of the text, I believe the Book of Mormon has a believable narrative, within a specific setting (time and place). Jacob gives us our first indication of the setting of the Book of Mormon narrative.

There is a certain level of strangeness for me in this. The Book of Mormon was largely written in 1829. There should be no question about this. There is no Hebrew in the Book of Mormon. There is only English. It doesn't just quote Isaiah, it also contains language lifted from the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8), and from the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790. We can place the Book of Mormon in a specific context with absolute certainty. The problem that occurs with a lot of what you are doing is that you (and you aren't alone in this issue - you share this with many LDS writers) are claiming that the Book of Mormon text is in some way equivalent to the Gold Plates. And this isn't the case. If you actually understood the arguments about the narrative of Zosimus and its dating, and why it is believed to belong to a specific place and point in time (and not some other specific place and point in time) you would understand that to discuss the potential sources for a text you first have to peel away the translation layer, with its interpretive content to reveal what is older. There is a lot of discussions out there about how to do this sort of thing - what constitutes an appropriate methodology, what makes good criteria. This is how you could approach your ideas. Instead, all I get are intuitions. None of what you provide is evidence. You note this -

20 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I admit the model I propose is probably wrong, but if my approach is solid, it will be less wrong than present models

Is 1+1=3 any less wrong than 1+1=4? Without any real criteria - without any basis for judgment, you can't really tell me that you are less wrong, because you don't know what is right, and you cannot tell me which is less wrong because you cannot measure the wrongness of either your own case or anyone else's. This is all a fiction that you are producing.

[Zosimus]

On 3/22/2024 at 7:51 AM, Benjamin McGuire said:

I want evidence - and I want evidence drawn from the text.

Yeah me too

I’ve said a couple times already, I admit I have zero evidence for a historical Book of Mormon and I have no evidence that the geography described in the Book of Mormon is a physical location. What I do have is evidence of Israelites that had migrated to lands at some distance from Jerusalem in the 6th century BC. That's where I start, with evidence. Above, I summarize some of the evidence for Israelite migrations within the Indian Ocean.

Another way to put it. If you were to ask me for evidence that White House Down was an account of historical events, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I couldn’t give you evidence. I couldn’t prove that there was a President James Sawyer who lived in the White House around 2013. But I could give you evidence that the United States had a representative government in 2013 and that there were American males in 2013 named James Sawyer. I could provide evidence that Sawyer was a common family name in America in the 21st century. I could provide evidence that the elected leaders of America in 2013 were given the title President. That’s all I’m doing. I’m not creating a fiction, I’m establishing whether there’s any evidence that the Book of Mormon fits believably within a time and place.

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You mention the 'isles of the sea' in 2 Nephi. It is a phrase that comes from Isaiah in the Old Testament (see for example, Isaiah 24). It is bundled in a section of the Book of Mormon that unquestionably quotes from Isaiah - small phrases, and nearly entire chapters. Why shouldn't we start there when trying to understand what Jacob is saying?

I have no problem starting there. I attempted to provide some positioning to understand the phrase “isles of the sea” as it comes to us from the Old Testament within my comment: “assuming the term [Jacob] used was Hebrew, he would understand the term he used for isle to mean something more equivalent to country, peninsula, coast, or land washed by water etc.”

Do you have some understanding of the phrase that could help me understand how Jacob understood the term “isles of the sea”? I’m not asking in a snarky rhetorical way. I’d guess you’ve looked closely at it given your article on Nephi’s response to Laman and Lemuel in 1 Nephi 22

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If you actually understood the arguments about the narrative of Zosimus and its dating, and why it is believed to belong to a specific place and point in time (and not some other specific place and point in time) you would understand that to discuss the potential sources for a text you first have to peel away the translation layer, with its interpretive content to reveal what is older.

Not sure how many times I’ll need to say this. I’m not trying to prove that anything is a potential source for the Book of Mormon. I’m certainly not attempting to provide evidence that the Book of Mormon is dependent on NZos. NZos is an example of a text from the 4th century AD that was translated into English in the 19th century that claims to be a story of a people being led by God (or angels) from Jerusalem to an island in the sea. Many people, like John Welch, have proposed similarities between the two texts. I think you have valid criticism of this comparison, but a formal response to Welch would go much farther than me just taking your word for it here in the forum.

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Is 1+1=3 any less wrong than 1+1=4? Without any real criteria - without any basis for judgment, you can't really tell me that you are less wrong, because you don't know what is right, and you cannot tell me which is less wrong because you cannot measure the wrongness of either your own case or anyone else's.

We have no basis if you believe the Book of Mormon has a fictional setting. If you believe the Book of Mormon has a historical setting, then 1+1=3 can be less wrong than 1+1=4. Example, we do have real objective criteria for some things. We have, for example, the number of days it took a Nephite to walk the across the defensive line at the narrow neck 1 to 1.5 days. In this case, we can say that some models are closer to the truth than others. A model that supports a narrow neck that is 2 or 2.5 days to walk across is less wrong than a model with a narrow neck that takes 4 days or 4.5 days to walk across. This is just a single example. We could apply this same objective judgement to other geographic and topographic criteria described in the book

Edited March 25, 2024 by Zosimus

[Benjamin McGuire]

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I attempted to provide some positioning to understand the phrase “isles of the sea” as it comes to us from the Old Testament within my comment: “assuming the term [Jacob] used was Hebrew, he would understand the term he used for isle to mean something more equivalent to country, peninsula, coast, or land washed by water etc.”

And my answer to this is ... No, he wouldn't necessarily have understood it this way at all.  Isaiah uses the terms "isles of the sea" to refer to everything that isn't Jerusalem. The context in Isaiah 24, for example, refers to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the destruction of all the people living there. Those that have fled - those that have left Jerusalem - regardless of where they went (or in what direction) become the 'Isles of the Sea'. And we can see why this would be an appealing designation for the Nephites - who see themselves as one such group. It isn't provided in a geographical sense - which means it isn't very helpful in discussing locations or mapping the text onto a globe. The Jews in Egypt would be considered a part of the Isles of the Sea as would any other group that had left the center of the world.

Side issue: Jacob's teachings weren't written in Hebrew (1 Nephi 1:2).

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Another way to put it. If you were to ask me for evidence that White House Down was an account of historical events, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I couldn’t give you evidence. I couldn’t prove that there was a President James Sawyer who lived in the White House around 2013. But I could give you evidence that the United States had a representative government in 2013 and that there were American males in 2013 named James Sawyer. I could provide evidence that Sawyer was a common family name in America in the 21st century. I could provide evidence that the elected leaders of America in 2013 were given the title President. That’s all I’m doing. I’m not creating a fiction, I’m establishing whether there’s any evidence that the Book of Mormon fits believably within a time and place.

Except that this isn't what you are doing. And part of the reason why I say this is because of the way you are flattening history. Here, we can talk about a very specific point in time (2013). And we have a lot of detailed information about that point in time. This is a very big difference, for example, in using very late sources to relate to much earlier events. The whole issue with the narrative of Zosimus is just such an issue. The narrative of Lehi's departure from Jerusalem allegedly happens in the 6th century BCE. The narrative of Zosimus is written in the 5th century CE. The connection was first suggested back when Zosimus was believed to possibly much older. Since our views have changed, the relationship between the stories has become much less interesting (or much more problematic I suppose depending on your point of view). This is part of the problem of using literary parallels. I have already beat this horse to death, but it keeps coming back.

Perhaps, instead of continuing to go in circles, you could simply start by listing out the criteria that you believe constitutes evidence, and we can get into a better discussion of what is and isn't evidence (and what it is or isn't evidence of).

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Not sure how many times I’ll need to say this. I’m not trying to prove that anything is a potential source for the Book of Mormon. I’m certainly not attempting to provide evidence that the Book of Mormon is dependent on NZos. NZos is an example of a text from the 4th century AD that was translated into English in the 19th century that claims to be a story of a people being led by God (or angels) from Jerusalem to an island in the sea. Many people, like John Welch, have proposed similarities between the two texts. I think you have valid criticism of this comparison, but a formal response to Welch would go much farther than me just taking your word for it here in the forum.

And as I have pointed out - these arguments were based on early assessments of NZos that argued for a much earlier date and a completely different context of origin (intertestamental Palestinian origin instead of a late antiquity Christian origin). I don't have a lot of interested in challenging Jack on this - considering how long its been since those arguments were raised (and without any of the more recent understandings). You run into this problem from time to time in these kinds of areas of study.

10 hours ago, Zosimus said:

We have no basis if you believe the Book of Mormon has a fictional setting. If you believe the Book of Mormon has a historical setting, then 1+1=3 can be less wrong than 1+1=4.

Except that it isn't. There's an old saying, right, about being more or less pregnant. We could narrowly define being more pregnant as having been pregnant longer - and in such a context we could argue that someone is more pregnant (or less pregnant) than someone else. Just as we could say that (like most engineers) that being closer to the right answer means that we are less wrong. But we run into the problem here (with the Book of Mormon) that we don't have with math or with pregnancy - we don't have anything to compare it to within our knowledge base. We can't say which is a closer theory to the truth because we don't actually have anything to compare it to. You cannot provide two theories and explain in a meaningful way which one is closer. It doesn't even work (as you seem to suggest in places) that we can compare how well a theory responds to features of the text - because none of the feature sets that are used are themselves free from bias to begin with. So we are stuck out there with nothing.

[Zosimus]

On 3/25/2024 at 9:50 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

And my answer to this is ... No, he wouldn't necessarily have understood it this way at all.  Isaiah uses the terms "isles of the sea" to refer to everything that isn't Jerusalem. The context in Isaiah 24, for example, refers to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the destruction of all the people living there. Those that have fled - those that have left Jerusalem - regardless of where they went (or in what direction) become the 'Isles of the Sea'.

There are instances in Isaiah and Nephi of specific identifiable lands, including Egypt, Cush and Pathros, identified within the context of a discussion about those that had fled Jerusalem. The isles of the sea are mentioned separately: 

“And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.” - 2 Nephi 21:11. More on this below

On 3/25/2024 at 9:50 PM, Benjamin McGuire said:

And we can see why this would be an appealing designation for the Nephites - who see themselves as one such group. It isn't provided in a geographical sense - which means it isn't very helpful in discussing locations or mapping the text onto a globe. The Jews in Egypt would be considered a part of the Isles of the Sea as would any other group that had left the center of the world.

Its an interesting question. Are we able to establish from the text that “the Jews in Egypt would be included under the term “Isles of the Sea”? This would mean that the Lehites themselves, even before leaving Jerusalem, would have identified themselves as a group from the isles of the sea. Like you pointed out (1 Nephi 1:2), they were familiar with Egyptian and I assume Egypt. I can understand Nephi while in the promised land might identify as being on an isle in the sea, but as far as I know Nephi never says anything suggesting he believed Egypt and the language/script of his father was associated with the isles of the sea. Did the Lehites already see themselves as a group among the scattered Israelites from the isles of the sea (Egypt) before they even left for the promised land? Knowing that Nephi included the term “islands of the sea” independent of Egypt, Cush and Pathros, it seems more correct to assume Nephi didn’t include Egypt, Cush, Pathros, or Aswan, as an isle of the sea.

Which leads me to:

“Thus saith the Lord: In an acceptable time have I heard thee, O isles of the sea, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee; and I will preserve thee, and give thee my servant for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages; That thou mayest say to the prisoners: Go forth; to them that sit in darkness: Show yourselves. They shall feed in the ways, and their pastures shall be in all high places. They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall the heat nor the sun smite them; for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of water shall he guide them. And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall be exalted. And then, O house of Israel, behold, these shall come from far; and lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.” - Isaiah 49:12

My reading is that Sinim does refer to a specific location among the isles of the sea, either to the south or east of Jerusalem. South, in the region of Syene or Aswan, doesn’t seem likely to me in the context of Nephi’s account because Nephi was closely connected, even possibly related, to Egypt and the south. He had also already listed Pathros (which in Nephi's time likely included Elephantine and Syene) Cush, the land south of Syene, independent of the term isles of the sea. It doesn’t seem like Nephi considered Cush or Pathros to be an isle of the sea, so why would he consider Syene, which was within the Pathros region and closer to Jerusalem than Cush, to be an isle in the sea? I’m more convinced by the arguments for Sinae (east Asia), or somewhere between modern China and modern Iran as the Septuagint suggests. Traditionally, LDS have considered China as the most likely reading for Sinim. At least that’s what I remember from Sunday School and the BOM footnotes. It’s relevant to my model because the setting I propose is, roughly, Sinae.

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Jacob's teachings weren't written in Hebrew (1 Nephi 1:2). 

Of course, but as you recommended, we’re starting with the term *isles of the sea* in the context of Isaiah, Hebrew. Jacob spoke Hebrew, and probably originally knew the term from Isaiah, in Hebrew. Even if Jacob only understood the term from its reformed Egyptian equivalent, it is highly unlikely, for the reasons I’ve given above, that he would have understood the term differently from Isaiah.

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Except that this isn't what you are doing. And part of the reason why I say this is because of the way you are flattening history. Here, we can talk about a very specific point in time (2013). And we have a lot of detailed information about that point in time. This is a very big difference, for example, in using very late sources to relate to much earlier events. The whole issue with the narrative of Zosimus is just such an issue. The narrative of Lehi's departure from Jerusalem allegedly happens in the 6th century BCE. The narrative of Zosimus is written in the 5th century CE.

No. I’m not flattening history to fit NZos within the timeframe of the Book of Mormon. Again, NZos comes from early 4th century. We’ve been over this. I’m not so concerned about the similarities between NZos and 1/2 Nephi, I’m more concerned with similarities with 4 Nephi. If we follow the most recent scholarship, NZos was written at the same time Mormon was abridging the account of the happiest people ever created by God in 4 Nephi. I’m talking about a very specific point in time, the 4th century AD. “Mormon abridged [4 Nephi] sometime between A.D. 345 and A.D. 385” (source)

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And as I have pointed out - these arguments were based on early assessments of NZos that argued for a much earlier date and a completely different context of origin (intertestamental Palestinian origin instead of a late antiquity Christian origin).

NZos authorship still falls within the timeline of the Book of Mormon abridgment, the 4th century AD. I suppose there’s another reason altogether why LDS scholars no longer discuss the Narrative of Zosimus. It had a much wider (and later) distribution than our earlier assessments 

That said, I'd like to get your thoughts on this paper:

A Marvelous Work and a Possession: Book of Mormon Historicity as Postcolonialism

In a way, I'm approaching the question of historicity in the same way Willams does, and I assume its close to how @mfbukowski approaches historicity:

"In this sense, I suggest that a description of Book of Mormon historicity that takes into account the various social and cultural consequences of such a concept will be more productive than one that remains caught up in simply "proving" the relative "truth" of the book. Inasmuch as the question of evidence in Book of Mormon historicity is a philosophical or literary question rather than scientific one, I agree with Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism: "A fully humanist culture, of the sort I envisage, will emerge only when we discard the question 'Do I know the real object, or only one of its appearances?' and replace it with the question 'Am I using the best possible description of the situation in which I find myself, or can I cobble together a better one?'"

Edited March 27, 2024 by Zosimus

[mfbukowski]

16 hours ago, Zosimus said:

There are instances in Isaiah and Nephi of specific identifiable lands, including Egypt, Cush and Pathros, identified within the context of a discussion about those that had fled Jerusalem. The isles of the sea are mentioned separately: 

“And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.” - 2 Nephi 21:11. More on this below

Its an interesting question. Are we able to establish from the text that “the Jews in Egypt would be included under the term “Isles of the Sea”? This would mean that the Lehites themselves, even before leaving Jerusalem, would have identified themselves as a group from the isles of the sea. Like you pointed out (1 Nephi 1:2), they were familiar with Egyptian and I assume Egypt. I can understand Nephi while in the promised land might identify as being on an isle in the sea, but as far as I know Nephi never says anything suggesting he believed Egypt and the language/script of his father was associated with the isles of the sea. Did the Lehites already see themselves as a group among the scattered Israelites from the isles of the sea (Egypt) before they even left for the promised land? Knowing that Nephi included the term “islands of the sea” independent of Egypt, Cush and Pathros, it seems more correct to assume Nephi didn’t include Egypt, Cush, Pathros, or Aswan, as an isle of the sea.

Which leads me to:

“Thus saith the Lord: In an acceptable time have I heard thee, O isles of the sea, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee; and I will preserve thee, and give thee my servant for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages; That thou mayest say to the prisoners: Go forth; to them that sit in darkness: Show yourselves. They shall feed in the ways, and their pastures shall be in all high places. They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall the heat nor the sun smite them; for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of water shall he guide them. And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall be exalted. And then, O house of Israel, behold, these shall come from far; and lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.” - Isaiah 49:12

My reading is that Sinim does refer to a specific location among the isles of the sea, either to the south or east of Jerusalem. South, in the region of Syene or Aswan, doesn’t seem likely to me in the context of Nephi’s account because Nephi was closely connected, even possibly related, to Egypt and the south. He had also already listed Pathros (which in Nephi's time likely included Elephantine and Syene) Cush, the land south of Syene, independent of the term isles of the sea. It doesn’t seem like Nephi considered Cush or Pathros to be an isle of the sea, so why would he consider Syene, which was within the Pathros region and closer to Jerusalem than Cush, to be an isle in the sea? I’m more convinced by the arguments for Sinae (east Asia), or somewhere between modern China and modern Iran as the Septuagint suggests. Traditionally, LDS have considered China as the most likely reading for Sinim. At least that’s what I remember from Sunday School and the BOM footnotes. It’s relevant to my model because the setting I propose is, roughly, Sinae.

Of course, but as you recommended, we’re starting with the term *isles of the sea* in the context of Isaiah, Hebrew. Jacob spoke Hebrew, and probably originally knew the term from Isaiah, in Hebrew. Even if Jacob only understood the term from its reformed Egyptian equivalent, it is highly unlikely, for the reasons I’ve given above, that he would have understood the term differently from Isaiah.

No. I’m not flattening history to fit NZos within the timeframe of the Book of Mormon. Again, NZos comes from early 4th century. We’ve been over this. I’m not so concerned about the similarities between NZos and 1/2 Nephi, I’m more concerned with similarities with 4 Nephi. If we follow the most recent scholarship, NZos was written at the same time Mormon was abridging the account of the happiest people ever created by God in 4 Nephi. I’m talking about a very specific point in time, the 4th century AD. “Mormon abridged [4 Nephi] sometime between A.D. 345 and A.D. 385” (source)

NZos authorship still falls within the timeline of the Book of Mormon abridgment, the 4th century AD. I suppose there’s another reason altogether why LDS scholars no longer discuss the Narrative of Zosimus. It had a much wider (and later) distribution than our earlier assessments 

That said, I'd like to get your thoughts on this paper:

A Marvelous Work and a Possession: Book of Mormon Historicity as Postcolonialism

In a way, I'm approaching the question of historicity in the same way Willams does, and I assume its close to how @mfbukowski approaches historicity:

"In this sense, I suggest that a description of Book of Mormon historicity that takes into account the various social and cultural consequences of such a concept will be more productive than one that remains caught up in simply "proving" the relative "truth" of the book. Inasmuch as the question of evidence in Book of Mormon historicity is a philosophical or literary question rather than scientific one, I agree with Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism: "A fully humanist culture, of the sort I envisage, will emerge only when we discard the question 'Do I know the real object, or only one of its appearances?' and replace it with the question 'Am I using the best possible description of the situation in which I find myself, or can I cobble together a better one?'"

My position is simple.

It simply is that the events and stories in the BOM are irrelevant to the theology being presented.

Maybe they all literally happened, maybe none of them literally happened.  It's all about the theology being taught in the stories, and not about history at all.

Worrying about history seems to me to be like worrying about the alleged literal truth of any parable. 

All we have to do is SEE THE BOM AS a parable, and all of that goes away, and we can now talk about theology, which is all that is important in finding a belief system which changes lives, most importantly our own life.

BUT was Joseph a scoundrel?

No "prophets" are perfect, and in this case in the "argument from authority" is also irrelevant.

It's like calling the bible the "word of God" because the bible itself makes that claim.

I know he was a prophet from my own testimony, not others pretending to be his judge.

Does Mozart's personal life matter when we listen to his music?

All I care about is the music and the theology.

Yet again, rabbit or duck?

Edited March 27, 2024 by mfbukowski

[Benjamin McGuire]

On 3/26/2024 at 9:52 PM, Zosimus said:

There are instances in Isaiah and Nephi of specific identifiable lands, including Egypt, Cush and Pathros, identified within the context of a discussion about those that had fled Jerusalem. The isles of the sea are mentioned separately: 

“And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.” - 2 Nephi 21:11.

I don't dispute this. But you are getting back into the weeds. The term "islands of the sea" here is an expression that isn't tied to a particular place or geographical feature. It could be used to refer to all sorts of places that were outside the experienced world.

On 3/26/2024 at 9:52 PM, Zosimus said:

Its an interesting question. Are we able to establish from the text that “the Jews in Egypt would be included under the term “Isles of the Sea”? This would mean that the Lehites themselves, even before leaving Jerusalem, would have identified themselves as a group from the isles of the sea.

No - certainly not before leaving Jerusalem. Why would they? The phrase is used in these contexts in Isaiah (as the quote above shows) about the gathering of Israel not its dispersal. The establishment of the country of Israel in modern times is regularly described collectively as a gathering of Israel from the islands of the sea. This idea wasn't unfamiliar thousands of years ago - the imagery has lasted. But we also shouldn't forget that when 2 Nephi is written, we are decades after the Nephites have left Jerusalem. They had previously entered the land of their first inheritance, and even had subsequently been forced out - so that Jacob claims that they were living in the wilderness (in overtones of the 40 years that Israel spent in the wilderness after first seeing their promised land under Moses).

On 3/26/2024 at 9:52 PM, Zosimus said:

Knowing that Nephi included the term “islands of the sea” independent of Egypt, Cush and Pathros, it seems more correct to assume Nephi didn’t include Egypt, Cush, Pathros, or Aswan, as an isle of the sea.

Why? We need to recognize two things here. The Book of Mormon has Nephi using unoriginal language here taken verbatim from Isaiah 11:11 - here it is from the KJV:

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And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.

This is where we start running into the problems I keep bringing up about the literary nature of the Book of Mormon. We don't really know what was in Nephi's text here because it hasn't been translated in any strict sense, it has been replaced with the King James text. You bold the name Aswan. But this isn't in our text - so you start by interpreting the text in a way that supports your intuited belief. But this isn't necessarily how it would have been understood by Nephi. It isn't at all how it could have been understood by Jacob and later Nephites - none of whom would have any idea at all about the places. And what Nephi tells us about this is very interesting (so I'll repeat it):

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Now I, Nephi, do speak somewhat concerning the words which I have written, which have been spoken by the mouth of Isaiah. For behold, Isaiah spake many things which were hard for many of my people to understand; for they know not concerning the manner of prophesying among the Jews. (2 Nephi 25:1) ... I know that the Jews do understand the things of the prophets, and there is none other people that understand the things which were spoken unto the Jews like unto them, save it be that they are taught after the manner of the things of the Jews. … but behold, I, of myself, have dwelt at Jerusalem, wherefore I know concerning the regions round about. (2 Nephi 25:6–7)

Nephi doesn't include this information to provide some sort of geography lesson for his people. He includes it because he is reinterpreting the text in the context of their current experience. So for us to go back and identify these places as having a meaningful real-world geographical context in the light of Nephi's discussion is to invite misinterpretation of the text. However, the Isaiah passage you refer to in Isaiah 11 is of real interest to Nephi and his prophecies. Not because of the places it mentions, but because of the context of that discussion: "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people." Nephi believes that Jerusalem has been (or will be) destroyed. Well, in theory, it has been destroyed, but the Nephites won't find out about this until they encounter the Mulekites. And he sees the children of Lehi as one of these remnants of Israel that will be recovered. And since the Nephites are in any of these other places that are listed, that means that they are in the "islands of the sea" - that catch-all phrase that really means "everywhere else" in Isaiah. When we get to the discussions of this in Jeremiah, we see that in prophecying the return, Jeremiah doesn't mention any of these other nations - he prophesied their destruction (Jer. 25), so in the prophecy of return (Jer. 31) which draws on the language of Isaiah, it is just the isles of the sea:

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Hear the word of the Lord, O ye nations, and declare it in the isles afar off, and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock. For the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and ransomed him from the hand of him that was stronger than he. Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all.

At any rate, now I am getting into the weeds, right? The challenge is that you want to make this text about geography - and there isn't any reason to do so. To read the text in that way seems to me to read the text in a way that runs against what the text's author intended (whether ancient or modern, it really doesn't matter). You want to argue that Nephi would have understood the text in a certain way when he wrote it, but it seems clear - from the language that Nephi uses, that he would not have intended this reading. Further, we have the problem in the translational layer. The specific language of the Book of Mormon here is determined by another relatively modern text - the King James bible. To ignore that - to pretend that the text of the Book of Mormon accurately reflects in some way the alleged original source from the Gold Plates is really problematic.

Each of these things adds to the problems associated with what you seem to be trying to do. Collectively, this isn't a minor problem - it is a really huge problem. All you are doing is interpreting the text in a way that corresponds to your intuition. None of what you are suggesting here is a natural reading of the text absent that intuition.

On 3/26/2024 at 9:52 PM, Zosimus said:

Of course, but as you recommended, we’re starting with the term *isles of the sea* in the context of Isaiah, Hebrew. Jacob spoke Hebrew, and probably originally knew the term from Isaiah, in Hebrew. Even if Jacob only understood the term from its reformed Egyptian equivalent, it is highly unlikely, for the reasons I’ve given above, that he would have understood the term differently from Isaiah.

Jacob had never been to Jerusalem. He was a young child when he arrived in the 'promised land'. And your reasoning is faulty. We have no reason to believe that he understood how Isaiah used the language. Nephi tells us that to understand Isaiah requires a specific knowledge set. I am not convinced that you understand what Isaiah intended ...

Quote

No. I’m not flattening history to fit NZos within the timeframe of the Book of Mormon. Again, NZos comes from early 4th century. We’ve been over this. I’m not so concerned about the similarities between NZos and 1/2 Nephi, I’m more concerned with similarities with 4 Nephi. If we follow the most recent scholarship, NZos was written at the same time Mormon was abridging the account of the happiest people ever created by God in 4 Nephi. I’m talking about a very specific point in time, the 4th century AD. “Mormon abridged [4 Nephi] sometime between A.D. 345 and A.D. 385” (source)

You aren't being honest here - and if you actually believe this, then you are forgetting all of the things you wrote. There is no journey in 4th Nephi. There is no river. There is no ocean crossing. There is no Liahona. There is no angelic guidance for the journey. None of this is in 4th Nephi. You have reduced the similarity to such a generalization. This is the 4th of the vices of parallel hunting that I offered earlier - here it is again:

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Parallel-hunting is predicated on the use of lowest common denominators. Virtually all literature, even the most original, can be reduced to such terms, and thereby shown to be unoriginal. So viewed, Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper plagiarizes ****ens’ David Copperfield. Both deal with England, both describe the slums of London, both see their hero exalted beyond his original station. To regard any two books in this light, however, is to ignore every factor that differentiates one man’s thoughts, reactions and literary expression from another’s.

This idea - that there is a "happiest people ever created by God" is there in 4 Nephi 1:16, and yet, it lasts for all of 8 verses. By 4 Nephi 1:24 the happiness is gone, right? This is not the story of Zosimus in any way at all. And let's not forget the slight of hand you are using here. You point to the idea of "the same time Mormon was abridging the account of the happiest ..." - yes, Mormon was abridging (allegedly) around 345 and 385 AD. But the happiest people existed in a historical moment hundreds of years earlier. And this adds all sorts of complexity to your claim. Has Mormon rewritten history to match that 5th century literary standard? Is Mormon recording some sort of accurate literary history? It gets very confusing really quickly the moment we start to flatten all of this (as you are doing - whether you want to admit it or not).

On 3/26/2024 at 9:52 PM, Zosimus said:

NZos authorship still falls within the timeline of the Book of Mormon abridgment, the 4th century AD. I suppose there’s another reason altogether why LDS scholars no longer discuss the Narrative of Zosimus. It had a much wider (and later) distribution than our earlier assessments 

No. They stopped worrying about it the moment that it became clear that it didn't have much to tell us about Lehi. Because, as I point out, it really has nothing at all to tell a believer about Mormon.

On 3/26/2024 at 9:52 PM, Zosimus said:

That said, I'd like to get your thoughts on this paper:

I'll start a new thread for this.