From: kck+@cs.cmu.edu (Karl Kluge)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: LDS: Book of Abraham pt. 1
Date: 23 Aug 92 04:55:44 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

> Subject: Re: LDS: Book of Abraham pt. 1
> From: <HISWJH@BYUVM.BITNET>
> Date: Friday, 21 Aug 1992 15:01:36 MDT
> 
> 1.  There are two mutually exclusive theories which attempt to explain
> the origin of the Book of Abraham:
> 
> 1.1  Joseph Smith (JS) was a conscious fraud (or a sincere lunatic), and
> as such, invented the BOA and his interpretations of the three
> facsimiles.  If this is the case we can expect JS's Egyptological
               ----------------------------------------------------
> interpretations to bear only a random chance relationship to the
  ----------------------------------------------------------------
> realities of ancient Egypt.  This is the standard non-Mormon and anti-
  --------------------------
> Mormon position.

We would expect JS's interpretations to reflect information available at the
time, with the occasional lucky guess (and, off course, things he gets
wrong). The strawman you set up here runs through your 4 BoA posts and
seriously mars what is an otherwise fairly informative set of posts.

>    2.2  Religious non-Mormon (NM) and anti-Mormon (AM) interpretations 
> (note I am not here implying that all NM are AM):  JS is clearly a false 
> prophet, since he disagrees with basic doctrines of ... (fill
> in the correct denominational interpretation).  Therefore, it is an a
> priori assumption that JS could not be a prophet; he must either be a
> conscious fraud or a sincere lunatic.

This is as bad a strawman as 1.1 above. The theistic non-Mormon
interpretation assumes that there is no reason to invoke revelation to
explain the contents of the BoA. 

> 3.3  THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM AS AN ANCIENT DOCUMENT.  The contents of the BOA
> need to be compared with their possible relationship to antiquity.  Do the
> names, events, ideas, practices, etc.  described in the BOA reflect
> authentic ancient Near Eastern names, events, ideas, practices, etc? 

More importantly, do they reflect significant information ***unavailable to
Smith via mundane means***? That is the real test. Along, of course, with
"what things does he get wrong?"

> 1.  Karl:  "If he [Nibley] acknowledges the identification of those items
> [fac.  1, items 5-8] as canopic jars, then how does he justify Smith's
> identification of (from left to right) Imseti, Hapy, Duamutef, and
> Kebehsenuf as the idolatrous gods of Korash, Mahmackrah, Libnah, and
> Elkenah?"
> 
> Thus, at precisely the period of Abraham, we have a syncretism mixing the
> worship of Egyptian and Semitic gods.  And, indeed, each of the four names
> given by JS (Korash, Mahmackrah, Libnah, and Elkenah (Fac. 1, #4-8, Ab.
> 1:6)) have been recently identified as Semitic god names in the Ebla
> archives (Syro- Canaanite documents from c. 2500-2300 B.C) by Prof. John
> Lundquist ("Was Abraham at Ebla?" in Studies in Scripture, vol. 2: the Pearl
> of Great Price, (Salt Lake City: Randall Book, 1985), p. 323).  Thus, they
> are indeed idolatrous gods of the Semitic Syro-Canaanite pantheon, and as
> such could have been worshiped by Hyksos Egyptian pharaohs who ruled the
> delta (and parts of Canaan and Syria) in the time of Abraham.  Score four
> direct hits for JS.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. These are only "direct hits" if you then go on to show that

1) These names were not known at the time JS composed the BoA, and

2) These gods are identified in other Egyptian documents with the Sons of
Horus.

(2) is the real test here. Proving that an author did not have access to a
particular piece of information is difficult at best, although it would be
possible to show sources of the correct period which do list those gods if
such exist. 

>     1.5  However, the four names are not the only interpretation which JS
> give to the Sons of Horus.  In fac. 2 #6 the same four Sons of Horus appear.
> Here JS believes they "Represent this earth in its four quarters."  Once
> again, a direct hit!  The four sons of Horus do indeed represent the four
> quarters of the earth (Gee, p. 29, note 175, and fig. 5).

Yes, but do the gods of Korash, Mahmackrah, Libnah, and Elkenah also
represent the four quarters?

In addition, this strikes me as more of a lucky guess than evidence of
inspiration given the analogous figures of the angels around the throne
which you point out.

>      1.6  But there is more.  Karl failed to mention fac. 1 fig. 9, which is
> quite obviously a crocodile.  JS interprets it as "The idolatrous god of
> Pharaoh." Who, in the 1830s (or in the 1990s for that matter) would
> interpret an such an obvious drawing of a crocodile as a god of Pharaoh?

My Herodotus is in Michigan and all the local libraries are closed, but I
suspect the information that the croc was sacred and worshipped as a god was
available in Smith's time via translations of classical texts.

>      1.8  One more example, however, I can't resist.  The BOA says that the
> idolatrous altar was on the "plain of Olishem" (Ab. 1:10).  Once again,
> ancient Near Eastern documents mention the place name "Ulishum" as being
> near Ebla (Lundquist, p. 233-235).  Another direct hit: total = seven.

I take it that the Egyptians controlled Olishem at the necessary period? I
take it there are no known references to the place name available prior to
the composition of the BoA?

> Let's pause for a moment, and ponder the implications of these examples.
> The NM theory maintains that JS simply invented the contents of the BOA and
> interpretations of the facsimiles.  How, then, do they explain the fact that
> JS provided half a dozen perfectly good ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern
> names and interpretations?
> 
> Simply appealing to chance is not sufficient.  Maybe he could have gotten
> one or two authentic ancient names and identifications by pure luck, but
> four out of four Semitic god names, the crocodile as the God of Pharaoh at
> the time of Abraham, and the authentic ancient Syrian place name Olishem?

And DRACULA mentions Vlad the Impaler and places him in Transylvania and
refers to incidents in the historical Vlad's life. I'm not about to run off
and buy garlic.

That NMists are naive enough to suppose that JS "simply invented" the
contents of the BoA is your strawman, and defeating it is not very
impressive. In addition, you have yet to show that the interpretations are
perfectly good unless your sources document the correctness of the
identification of those particular Semitic gods with the Sons of Horus.

> Now all of JS's interpretations of all of the elements on the facsimiles can
> not be accounted for in terms of Egyptology or ancient Near Eastern
> cultures.  However, based on the LDS understanding of non-infallible
> prophets, this can be explained.  If JS makes some mistakes in interpreting
> Egyptian, this is only to be expected.  But that he can get half a dozen
> interpretations correct requires a significant explanation, which the NM
> have never provided.

I see. The things he gets right (which you haven't proven were unavailable
to him via mundane means) get credited as "direct hits" and the things he
gets wrong are written off as "expected mistakes." 

> 3.  The issue of the damaged or undamaged state of JS pap. I (fac. 1) cannot
> be resolved, since the decisive evidence (the missing parts) is gone.  JS's
> reconstruction of fac. 1 does not match what most Egyptologist think it
> should be, however:
>    3.3  The parts which remain are absolutely unique, indicating that it is 
> not just an ordinary funerary scene as most Egyptologists claim.  Nibley 
> explores the absolutely unique nature of fac. 1 in his series of articles 
> in the Improvement Era, mentioned above.

There is nothing unique in Egyptian funerary scenes about lion-headed biers
with canopic jars under them, a man bending over the deceased, and a bird
hovering nearby.  The *only* element in the undamaged portion which I
haven't seen is the raised leg, and I've really only been consciously
looking in museum collections for about a year now. In fact, there's a mummy
case in the Toledo museum with a scene which is almost identical to the
undamaged portion except for the croc and the raised leg. (The canopic jars
face the other direction, and the bird is at the head rather than the foot
of the bier, but those don't strike me as major iconographic differences.)

>     5.1  JS had at least two, and probably three or more scrolls.  If God 
> simply revealed to JS the text of the BOA, without showing him exactly which
> scroll the text came from, JS would not have known, and would therefore have
> have had to guess which papyrus the original text was on.  This may be
> stretching matters a bit.

Agreed, however any such theory is going to have to provide an explanation
of why the author(s) of the Alphabet and Grammar *thought* they had the
correct text. 

> 5.2  The original papyrus scrolls, of which only a few fragments survive
> (J S pap. I-XI), were very long.  Thus, it is possible God revealed to JS
> the contents of the BOA, but did not reveal it to him character by
> character, but conceptually.  JS knew that the BOA was found in a particular
> scroll, but did not know which specific part of the scroll contained the
> text; in other words, he knew the book, but not the page number.  Thus, JS
> or his scribes turned to that scroll, and began to attempt to figure out the
> meaning of Egyptian based on the English text of the BOA which had been
> previously revealed to JS. 

This is easy to test. Are there other examples of the Book of Breathings
being on the same scroll as another text? I know this does happen with some
ancient texts, I am not sure if this happens in the specific context of
funerary docs. like the Book of the Dead and the Book of Breathings.

> There are two possible explanations for these anomalies.  First, JS might
> have been lying, making up different stories as he went along.  In that
> case, however, why would he have attempted to "translate" the documents at
> all?  If he knew he was a fraud, he would have no reason to think that the
> BOA had anything whatsoever to do with the papyri, and he could only get
> himself in trouble by trying to associate his English forgery with the
> papyri.  His behavior becomes very mystifying under this theory. 

As you yourself point out, the BoA was produced before anyone could read
hieroglyphics via mundane techniques, so there was no one to gainsay any
claims he chose to make. If someone able to translate the hieroglyphics did
come along later, the papyrus could always be "taken up to Heaven" and made
inaccessible to later examination like the metal plates.

Karl Kluge (kck@cs.cmu.edu)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc