More on Brother Joseph and ancient documents

[_Philo Sofee]

Between you and Symmachus, we are all getting a delicious education. THANK YOU!

[_Kishkumen]

I would like to thank Prof. Johannes for really moving the ball forward in Mormon Johannine and Book of Abraham Studies. It is not often that one person can accomplish such feats of scholarship in a single thread. My worry is that in the flotsam and jetsam of MDB discussion such contributions may get drowned out. The recent suggestion of a new journal is timely.

[_Johannes]

I would like to thank Prof. Johannes for really moving the ball forward in Mormon Johannine and Book of Abraham Studies. It is not often that one person can accomplish such feats of scholarship in a single thread. My worry is that in the flotsam and jetsam of MormonDiscussions.com discussion such contributions may get drowned out. The recent suggestion of a new journal is timely.

Thank you, Reverend Kishkumen. It is always an honour to receive a compliment from a brother in the sacred ministry. Don't worry, if I ever want to ensure that a thread gets noticed by everybody, I will be sure to entitle it "DCP: 'My Torrid Affair With John Dehlin'". I know what sells around here.

[_Kishkumen]

Thank you, Reverend Kishkumen. It is always an honour to receive a compliment from a brother in the sacred ministry. Don't worry, if I ever want to ensure that a thread gets noticed by everybody, I will be sure to entitle it "DCP: 'My Torrid Affair With John Dehlin'". I know what sells around here.

Sadly you may be right about that, Frater. We need to think of ways of getting our scholarship into the right venues, where it will be noticed by those who seek to understand more deeply the mysteries of Mormonism.

[_Symmachus]

I would like to thank Prof. Johannes for really moving the ball forward in Mormon Johannine and Book of Abraham Studies. It is not often that one person can accomplish such feats of scholarship in a single thread. My worry is that in the flotsam and jetsam of MDB discussion such contributions may get drowned out. The recent suggestion of a new journal is timely.

I want to add my admiration to Kishkumen's here: Johannes, you have opened up new vistas for understanding the Book of Abraham. The idea that the Book of Abraham is a genuine pseudepigraphon (nudge nudge, wink wink) of the sort we find in Second Temple Judaism has been argued before but the real insight is the dissection of the text according to its narrative and non-narrative elements. This makes it possible to isolate each strand of the Book of Abraham, and in that sense I think we might find strands that are even earlier—perhaps to the time, and even the hand, of Abraham himself.

I wish I were more adept at Abrahamiana, but my attention has been so preoccupied with Jaredite and Nephite linguistics that it will take some time to really digest your arguments and respond with the thoughtfulness and critical eye they so obviously deserve. One thing I would say in the meantime, however, is that I have been wrestling with the Egyptian material in the Book of Mormon: how did it get there? I find the standard explanation, that Nephi was educated in Egyptian culture, to be insufficient for the sheer longevity of the various strains that extend throughout the long history of Nephite civilization. Onomastic evidence alone (Korihor, Pahoran, and so on) suggests to me that part of Nephite scribal culture was imbued with Egyptian language and thought—a kind of Meso-American Egyptomania, if you will permit the analogy—and I have come to the conclusion that there are episodes missing or at least absent from Nephi's account that would explain this (perhaps they are in the Book of Lehi, which I think is hidden somewhere in Watertown, New York, probably near the local Wendy's).

It is my belief, which I have yet to flesh out fully, that Lehites and their cousins the Ishmaelites did not travel down the Arabian peninsula but rather down the eastern desert of Egypt to the land of Punt, possibly all sailing from there south to Comoros (which they named Cumorah, and where some of their party, refusing to continue, founded a settlement called Moroni), caught the western part of the Indian ocean gyre, rounded the Cape of Good hope (which is where they encountered the storm), and reached the Americas from the west after riding the Benguela current to the North atlantic gyre.

Now, where did they learn to do this? From the Egyptians. Just when the Lehi was leaving Jerusalem, Necho II contracted some Phoenicians (of Sidon and Tyre fame, and with whom Lehi had had business interests) to sail that very route, although they obviously they didn't turn towards the Americas, as the Lehites did (instead, they circumnavigated Africa all the way to the mouth of the Nile). Lots of Judeans were heading into Egypt just after this time (Jeremiah, for example), and Lehi and his family were merely a foreshadow. In Egypt, they went first to Heliopolis, which was an ancestral home of Lehi's because he was a descendant of Asenath, the wife of Joseph of Egypt and a daughter of a priest in Heliopolis (or On, as the Bible calls it). I believe that Lehi possibly obtained the Book of Joseph and the Book of Abraham here, but ultimately he left it in Thebes, where it came into the possession of a priestly family. It is one of the descendants of that family, Hor, who was wrapped in the portions of papyri containing the Book of Abraham, and I would call your attention to the numerous names containing a -Hor element in the Book of Mormon. It is my view, though I cannot flesh it out fully here, that Lehi's party convinced some from the House of Hor to come with them, and that they went on to become a very formidable group of opponents (at least occasionally) to the scribes from the house of Nephi who generally ruled the people. They were, at any rate, an important constituency within the clique of powerful scribal families that constituted the elite of Nephite civilization.

From Thebes, they continued south to Elephantine, where some of them stayed, built a temple, and soon welcomed their fellow refugees from Judah, as we know from papyri slightly later. At this same time (591), we know there were Greek-speaking mercenaries right there in Upper Egypt who were on campaign for Necho's son and successor, Psammetichus II. No doubt some of them joined the Lehites as well—from inscriptions, we know that they spoke Doric Greek, the Greek spoken in Sparta, which was in a region called Laconia (whence the origin of the Book of Mormon name Lachoneus, -c becoming -ch through the intervocalic fricativization of consonants that is characteristic of Canaanite dialects like Hebrew...Joseph Smith couldn't have known about this until 1835). From Elephantine, this band of Lehites speaking Hebrew, Ishmaelites speaking Arabic, Sidonians speaking Phoenician, Zoramites speaking Aramaic, and Spartans speaking Greek set out into the desert to the east and made Brian Stubb's work possible. An Egyptian sojourn is the only setting that explains the linguistic diversity of Book of Mormon names.

It was the editorial work of Mormon that excised, if not suppressed, most of the record of this link with Egypt. He had his own purposes, of course, but I think this theory answers a lot of questions, even if it raises new ones. At the very least, I bring your attention to it because I am convinced that some of the questions raised by a form-critical approach to the Book of Abraham will be answered not only by analogy to Second Temple Judaism but by an appeal to the Book of Mormon. It is, after all, the most correct of any book on earth.

[_Johannes]

Outstanding! This is what it must have felt like to be in the Kirtland Temple in April 1836.

The Lehites as the founders of the Elephantine settlement - it seems so obvious when you point it out. The presence of the extraterritorial temple there is the giveaway.

Just one tiny point. Forgive me as a non-philologist, but would not the Doric dialect have rendered "Lachoneus" as "Lachonas"? The implication is surely that the name was bestowed on someone with Laconian connections by a speaker of Ionic. It would seem to follow that there were enough Greeks around in ancient Guatemala to comprise members of two distinct dialect groups. I am starting to think that there was a separate transoceanic migration from Greece which for some reason was suppressed in the Nephite record in the recension that has come down to us. That hypothesis would also explain certain other Hellenic features of the Book of Mormon which sit uneasily with the surface narrative.

[_Symmachus]

Just one tiny point. Forgive me as a non-philologist, but would not the Doric dialect have rendered "Lachoneus" as "Lachonas"? The implication is surely that the name was bestowed on someone with Laconian connections by a speaker of Ionic. It would seem to follow that there were enough Greeks around in ancient Guatemala to comprise members of two distinct dialect groups. I am starting to think that there was a separate transoceanic migration from Greece which for some reason was suppressed in the Nephite record in the recension that has come down to us. That hypothesis would also explain certain other Hellenic features of the Book of Mormon which sit uneasily with the surface narrative.

It is certainly possible, but as to the -ā (long alpha), that is the Doric (and actually every other dialect but Attic-Ionic) equivalent to Attic-Ionic -ēs (e.g. Doric Archidāmos vs. Attic dēmos, and Doric names ending in -ās have -ēs in Attic-Ionic), so there is no reason to suspect anything phonologically problematic with Lachoneus (an obviously common Latinate rendering of Lachoneos; cf. Tyndareos, an ancient king of Sparta and so forth). Still, in the printer's manuscript, the variant Lachoneas exists, which would be either Doric or Attic-Ionic.

I'm not sure we have to assume that the name was given to him by someone else; a name like it is attested in Laconia, since the last king of Sparta was named Laconicus, and he certainly didn't adopt that name from outsiders. Drop the second "c," filter it through Hebrew phonology, and you've got Lachoneus (i/e is a common enough variation even within Greek). Lachoneus II, I hasten to add, was the very last Chief Judge among the Nephites, in fact the last Nephite ruler mentioned at all.

I do have to say, though, that I find it an extremely attractive proposition that the name was bestowed on him by other Greek speakers who recognized his dialect as Laconian Doric (and thus we don't know his original name). And I certainly agree with you that there were other Greek-speakers in Guatemala contemporary with the Nephites, at least the earliest Nephites: the Jaredites. As I have demonstrated here before, they spoke a language closely akin to the Greek we find on the Linear B tablets from Mycenae and Pylos and elsewhere, and they belong to the same wave of migration that brought proto-Greek-speakers from the Indo-European heartland to Greece. If Kish is right that the Jaredites were still around the whole time, then their Greek would have sounded an awful lot like Doric, which was more archaic phonologically than Attic-Ionic. Perhaps we may speculate that the Ionic Greek speakers called the Jaredites "Laconians," because Doric was there nearest frame of reference, and thus Lachoneus was himself may have been of Jaredite descent, which might explain the political tension that surrounded both Lachoneus I and Lachoneus II.

[_Johannes]

It is certainly possible, but as to the -ā (long alpha), that is the Doric (and actually every other dialect but Attic-Ionic) equivalent to Attic-Ionic -ēs (e.g. Doric Archidāmos vs. Attic dēmos, and Doric names ending in -ās have -ēs in Attic-Ionic)

Ah yes, my mistake, I was treating it as if it was "Lachonēs".

I'm not sure we have to assume that the name was given to him by someone else; a name like it is attested in Laconia, since the last king of Sparta was named Laconicus, and he certainly didn't adopt that name from outsiders. Drop the second "c," filter it through Hebrew phonology, and you've got Lachoneus (i/e is a common enough variation even within Greek). Lachoneus II, I hasten to add, was the very last Chief Judge among the Nephites, in fact the last Nephite ruler mentioned at all.

There is something odd going on here. A brief internet search suggests that the Greek names in the Book of Mormon onomasticon are all relatively late. The earliest reasonably plausible Greek name (leaving aside the problematic "Zenos") seems to be "Antipus" in the 1st century BC. Lachoneus and the others are later than that.

Why do Greek names start showing up at this point in Nephite history? Something is going on that the narrative is not apprising us of.

And I certainly agree with you that there were other Greek-speakers in Guatemala contemporary with the Nephites, at least the earliest Nephites: the Jaredites. As I have demonstrated here before, they spoke a language closely akin to the Greek we find on the Linear B tablets from Mycenae and Pylos and elsewhere, and they belong to the same wave of migration that brought proto-Greek-speakers from the Indo-European heartland to Greece. If Kish is right that the Jaredites were still around the whole time, then their Greek would have sounded an awful lot like Doric, which was more archaic phonologically than Attic-Ionic.

Of course! How foolish of me not to have joined the dots. But I continue to suspect that there must be some sort of political reason why Greek names suddenly start showing up in the 1st century BC.

[_Johannes]

There's another piece of evidence which suggests that the Greek content of Nephite culture has been deiberately suppressed in the Book of Mormon.

Prof. Charles Anthon certified that the gold plates contained "Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic" characters. This is no doubt because the scribes were demonstrating the range of their accomplishments - but then why no Greek? Greek characters seem to have been conspicuous by their absence.

[_Symmachus]

There's another piece of evidence which suggests that the Greek content of Nephite culture has been deiberately suppressed in the Book of Mormon.

Prof. Charles Anthon certified that the gold plates contained "Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic" characters. This is no doubt because the scribes were demonstrating the range of their accomplishments - but then why no Greek? Greek characters seem to have been conspicuous by their absence.

It might be because the only script of those listed that Anthon actually could recognize were Greek. I for one would like him to explain when we meet on the other side, just what the difference is between Chaldaic and Assyriac characters.

I think you've really hit on something here, though, with the Greek names suddenly appearing. The first century BCE is when the Nephites first made contact with the Greek-speaking Jaredites (see the Book of Omni).