I'm at that point in my life when prophets and poets don't seem that far from one another, and when the "truth" of the story has less to do with the facts than with the "truths" behind those facts. I think what we do with our lives, both individual and collectively (in our marriages, our families and our communities) makes a lot more sense than any loyalty tests we might administer to one another through the stories we force one another to accept.
this part caught my attention...
I believe there's no way to go wrong by being the best person husband/wife, father/mother, neighbor, employee, friend, helpful stranger, etc.
but a question remains, if identical twins performed identical actions all their life, one an atheist the other a believer...
Bill ya aren’t the only one who has done some thinken about the Book of Abraham, we do all have brains too;
Glad to hear it.
Ya need to read some of the pro Mormon material from time to time.
I have but some of these explanations are a little like an evening with John Edward. It's amazing how well some folks can turn anything into a faith-promoting argument.
Facsimile 1 is an Egyptian vignette which were mass produced on a factory line. The buyers would then have a professional fill in their own story line.
If by "mass produced on a factory line" you mean that funeral services in ancient Egypt, particularly those involving mummification, also involved scenes from the Book of the Dead, scenes into which the deceased was place, well, yeah.
A long time ago I looked up some of these on line and the Book of Abraham one is really different. Most of them are highly stylized, with very precise lines but the BA looks like an amateur did it.
If the BA "looks like an amateur did it," maybe that's because amateurs were all over it. Chandler didn't know what he had - other than some mummies and some papyri he couldn't read. The person who copied the figures had no frame of reference. Joseph Smith had no training in Egyptian. He was studying Hebrew on the side, but that hardly made him a trained egyptologist. With nobody within three thousand miles who could critique his translation, Joseph Smith was free to offer his own opinion. It would be quite some time before anybody could prove otherwise.
There was no way for them to make it look 3d so the four jars are suppose to represent the four corners of the bed and the four corners of the earth. Just as Joseph Smith said.
That's a pretty facile leap. The four jars are four canopic jars, stylized medical waste containers designed to remove from an about-to-be-mummified carcass those ooey-gooey organs that would have hastened decomposition. The four figures are the four sons of Horus. One of the things that comes in "fours" is the four cardinal directions. Not surprisingly, those four sons are identified with - among other things - the four cardinal directions. A person with sufficient effort and resourcefulness might argue that the "four cardinal directions" is close enough to the "four corners of the earth," but to do is to grasp at straws. This is a funerary scene, involving the deceased being mummified, not a depiction of human sacrifice. There is no reason whatsoever to introduce Abraham - a Hebrew figure - into an Egyptian funeral.
I didn't get up this morning expecting to employ Occam's Razor, but c'mon. What is more likely? That papyri found in the carsophagi of several Egyptian mummies - resembling similar depictions among thousands of papyri found in the carsophagi of other Egyptian mummies - is a stylized way of injecting the deceased into a scene found within the Book of the Dead? Or that these Egyptian papyri found in these Egyptian carsophagi are actually depictions of Abraham, the father of the Hebrews, while he was in Egypt?
Unlike other vignettes in the original of facsimile 1 the priest is standing in front of the couch and then Abraham is placed in front of him. Whoever copied it for the BA placed priest behind the couch, not sure why.
The couch is a lion couch. When Joseph Smith first laid eyes on Facsimile 1, the ambiguity of the couch's use might well have baited a fertile mind, but in the years since, lots of lion's couches have been found in lots of uncovered tombs. I don't know of any evidence of a lion-shaped platform for human sacrifices, but I'd be interested if you had some to share. As for why the "priest" is depicted behind it instead of in front of it, I think the consensus is that this figure is Anubis, the god of embalming, which is why he is dressed in black. As for why he's behind the couch rather than in front of it, I think that's a practical measure. Movie critics often chuckle about how streets, in movies, are always wet - as if it had just rained - and wonder why. The obvious answer is that wet streets are more reflective and more visually appealing. For similar reasons, if you had a choice between putting somebody in front of the couch, where he would block the bed and maybe one of the jars - and where he might have to have his back turned away - as opposed to placing him behind the couch, oriented more toward the viewer, I think you'd do as the Egyptian artists did.
In the other vignettes I saw the person on the couch was all bundled up and very dead. Abraham here has some sort of robe on and ropes or shackles on his ankles. I guess that was just an incredible coincidence.
I don't see any ropes or shackles on those ankles. The cufflike pair of lines down by the person's ankles is no different than a similar set of lines around his knee. The right leg is not even parallel with the bier, nor is either leg roped to anything. If you insist on viewing these lines as straps, consider the fact that the man is wearing some kind of black footwear.
Again, going back to Occam's Razor, what's more likely? That the dead guy in an Egyptian funeral scene is wearing ceremonial clothing - with ritually symbolic black footwear, with straps of some kind - or that this is really Abraham being sacrificed on a lion couch, but with ligatures that connect to nothing and with an complete absence of ligature around his wrists?
I'll tell you what I don't guess to be "an incredible coincidence": the fact that this guy is wrapped - from neck to knees - in mummification bandages.
The bird looks rounded off with wings hanging down, the others had wings straight out with very clean lines. The reason I’m saying this is because Abraham wrote;
“….that you may have a knowledge of this altar, I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record….That you may have an understanding of these gods, I have given you the fashion of them in the figures at the beginning, which manner of figures is called by the Chaldeans Rahleenos, which signifies hieroglyphics….”
In other words he put this together himself and he was an amateur.
Well, somebody involved in making this depiction was likely an amateur, but which is more likely? The 19th-century illustrator, taking his first stab at it - without any frame of reference - or Abraham, who would have come along too late or too early to have belonged in the picture?
Bill said; Joseph Smith identifies the four figures below this action as the Egyptian gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and Pharaoh. The croc is the idolatrous god of Pharoah;
This is my opinion the scholars might disagree with me but Abraham does not say the god Elkenah but "the god of Elkenah". I don’t believe Joseph or Abraham meant to call the gods by their names.
Elkenah and the rest mentioned are not gods themselves but are either a place name or person. In the Bible there is a man named Elkenah who is the husband to Hannah.
I think you're grasping at straws. There certainly are no "gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash and Pharaoh." But place names? Seriously? Was Pharaoh also a place name?
Look at the text of Abraham 1:
6 For their ahearts were set to do bevil, and were wholly turned to the god of cElkenah, and the god of Libnah, and the god of Mahmackrah, and the god of Korash, and the god of Pharaoh, king of Egypt;
7 Therefore they turned their hearts to the sacrifice of theaheathen in offering up their children unto these dumb idols, and hearkened not unto my voice, but endeavored to take away myblife by the hand of the priest of Elkenah. The priest of Elkenah was also the priest of Pharaoh.
These were not place names. These "dumb idols." The "priest of Elkenah was also the priest of Pharaoh."
Note that in chapter 1 verse 7 it says "The priest of Elkenah was also the priest of Pharaoh", and Pharaoh was a person thus Elkenah was person who shared a priest with Pharaoh. The place where this happens is Potiphar’s hill which means ‘that which Pharaoh gave’.
Potiphar is the name of the head of Pharaoh's guard, in Genesis, whose wife attempted to seduce Joseph. It's a name Joseph would have been familiar with, as he was quite taken with his identification with the Joseph of old. I know of no place in Egypt called "Potiphar's Hill." If you do, I'd be interested in hearing more of this place.
There is a place called Makkedah which maybe Mahmackrah and there is a city of Libnah, Moses past through in Num 33:20-21. They are doing some archeology work there now. The question is did Egypt have influence over or perhaps trade with these places at the time Abraham was walking around.
Look at the hoops you have to jump through in order to avoid the obvious. There are no Egyptian gods known as html_removed Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah or Korash. So, now these are place names. But to get "Mahmackrah," you have to argue that "Makkedah" is close enough. I can't imagine trying to defend the Joseph Smith translation by asserting one condition upon another like a forensic house of cards. This is why Pinnochio's nose grew so long. It's why Occam argued that, all things being equal, the simplest solution (the one requiring the fewest assumptions) tends to be the most plausible.
Joseph said Fig. 9 was the idolatrous god of Pharaoh and in fact the crocodile was the god of the Pharaohs, Joseph had no way of knowing that. Also this god does not appear in any other lion couch vignette like this.
The waters are obviously the Nile, which is symbolic of death. Osiris, whose body was chopped into so many pieces and chucked in the Nile, was fished out by life-giving Isis, who used her healing to bring her husband back to life. In the process, Osiris became the God of the Dead, the Judger of the Dead. The Nile is also symbolic of the soul's journey, a metaphor familiar to Egyptians who saw so many barges going up and down the Nile the way ships, trains, steamers, planes and the like would symbolize departures in different ages.
As for the croc, there's a lot of material where crocodiles are used as symbolic "eaters of the dead." In Osiris's underwater court, the souls of men were weighed and tried. The righteous would pass on; the wicked would be fed to the crocs. It's not a huge leap to deify crocs in the process, but the connection between crocs and "the god of the Pharaohs" is more indirect.
#Bill; The wavy zig-zag lines Joseph identified as the firmament of Heaven are actually depictions of water, specifically the Nile, representative of death. That's where the croc is swimming. ….The boxes at the bottom of the picture are palace fortifications,
As described in various Ancient Egyptian texts, the temple or pylon is:
“...as the pillars of heaven, [a temple] like the heavens, abiding upon their four pillars ... shining like the horizon of heaven …”
The wavy lines which surround the crocodile Joseph says "signifying expanse, or the firmament over our heads… to be high, or the heavens …"
This from the same website as above; "This wall isolated the temple from its surroundings which, symbolically, represented the forces of chaos. Metaphorically, the mud resulted from the union of heaven and earth. The brick wall itself was therefore set in wavy courses to symbolize the primeval waters, representing the first stage of creation."
Now compare that to Gen 1
“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”
Same thought I should think.
The zig-zag lines are the Nile, the river of death. The croc floating in the Nile is a croc floating in the Nile. He's also a character in the perennial drama involving Osris's judgment. If you want to pull in Genesis and some other source to argue a connection between the waters of the Nile and Heaven, have at it. On the other hand, It's not a strong basis for replacing the obvious - a man's mummification as preparation for the judgment of the dead - with human sacrifice, let alone the sacrifice of Abraham.
Bill wrote; while the bird floating to the side is the "ba" or soul of the departed - not the "angel of the Lord."
But this guy aint dead yet, he’s very much awake and his hands are in a position of praying.
I don't know. He looks pretty stiff to me. The eyes are open but the eyes are dead. The arms are above his head, but if this is a depiction of human sacrifice, why are the hands left unbound?
Bill said; The Egyptians didn't engage in human sacrifice
They did do a small amount of human sacrificing during the Ist Dynasty and the Greek Septuagint places Abraham right around 3312 BC. Our Hebrew Bible places him around 1948BC which would take him out of that time period.
Go back far enough and human sacrifice happened everywhere, much more so in agricultural communities than among the nomadic hunter-gatherers. Argriculture, which separates the two halves of the Stone Age, created a new dependency. Where humanity was once dependent upon the successful capture of animals and plants, settling down made humanity dependent upon successful generation of animals and plants. In the case of farming, fertility was everything. The whole society was dependent upon yield, which required a new mastery. Plant late or harvest early and people go hungry. Likewise, drought and pestilence brought famine upon the land. For this reason, the calendar was the ancient equivalent of today's nuclear weaponry, a symbol of technological prowess. In Egypt, the ability to dam the Nile and harness the floodwaters made all of the difference between prosperity and annihilation.
In many societies, the first steps toward agricultural sustainability involve human sacrifice as an ofering to the gods. Instead of uncontrolled deaths from starvation and cannibalism, there would be controlled deaths from ritualized cannibalism. Society would eat its own, but on purpose, and in order to satisfy the gods.
The Bible contains no references to cannibalism, except during the Siege of Jerusalem. The closest Abraham comes to it is the near-sacrifice of Isaac. But Abraham doesn't line up with the Old Kingdom. He arrives too late.
But this does not take place in Egypt but in land of Chaldea, by the hill called Potiphar’s Hill, at the head of the plain of Olishem, somewhere near Ur. According to John Gee Olishem is a very real place! He quotes a Rim-Sin from between 2254–2218 B.C. He says “inscription mentions a town Ú-li-ši-imki or Ú-li-šé-emki in connection with Ebla”
“…Naram-Sin, the mighty, defeated Armanum and Ebla. Then, from the hither face of the Euphrates, he smote the river(-bank) as far as Ulisum….”
“The name also perhaps appears either as Irissymn or 3wšamm in Twelfth-Dynasty execration texts (ca. 1991–1783 B.C.) from Egypt. If this is the same place, its presence in the contemporary execration texts is an indication that it lay in the Egyptian sphere of influence during the Middle Kingdom.”
Joseph nailed this one just as he did with Nahom in the Book of Mormon.
What, exactly, did he nail? The Book of Abraham imagines that Egypt not only has contact with, but control over, "the land of Chaldea," enough that Pharaoh's priest comes to "the land of Chaldea" and offers human sacrifice there to "these strange gods," including "the god of Shagreel," by "Potiphar's Hill, at the head of the plain of Olishem."
That would be something if, a Nile-based/Nile-centric Egypt actually reached across the Arabian desert to oppress the empires of Mesopotamia so far away. It's a daring claim, given the technology of the time, and the lack of any evidence in support.
Is there evidence of Egyptian human sacrifice, not just in Egypt but in other lands? Is there any evidence that the Egyptians subjected Chaldeans to such sacrifices? Is there any evidence of a "god of Shagreel," or a place called "Potiphar's Hill," at the head of "the plain of Olishem?"
All you've given me is a BYU professor who says that Olishem was a real place. John Gee has found a town, Ulisimki, or is it Uliseemki, or is it Ulisum or maybe Irissymn? Gee wouldn't be grasping at straws, going through an index of place names, looking for a match.
It appears some Egyptian Pharaoh felt the need to build some sort of temple perhaps has a gift to this Elkenah and loaned him a priest. This priest then carried out sacrifice in behave of the local gods. Did Elkenah worship Qebehsenuef along with his other gods as a good will gesture? Maybe.
I find the idea that Egypt, which was far too enamored with its little bit of civilization along the Nile to have established much of an empire beyond its borders, to have crossed the Arabian desert to establish a presence - let alone beat up on - the Chaldeans, to be wide-eyed nonsense. Egypt had no problem beating up on Kush or dominating Canaan, but the idea that Egypt would have had the ambition, the technology or the might to have jumped the Chaldeans, let alone sacrificed her children to Egyptian gods, to be utterly preposterous.
The Persians, Macedonians and Romans later built vast empires that could land large armies beyond their borders, but that was much later - and there is no dearth of evidence for such extensions of empire beyond the homeland. I see no evidence of an early Egyptian oppression of the Chaldeans.
Claiming a match - as long as we can loosely define it - between "Olishem" and various actual place names somewhere in the linguistic neighborhood of "Olishem" - doesn't quite do it for me. I think if you can defend this, you can pretty much argue anything.
I'm at that point in my life when prophets and poets don't seem that far from one another, and when the "truth" of the story has less to do with the facts than with the "truths" behind those facts. I think what we do with our lives, both individual and collectively (in our marriages, our families and our communities) makes a lot more sense than any loyalty tests we might administer to one another through the stories we force one another to accept.
this part caught my attention...
I believe there's no way to go wrong by being the best person husband/wife, father/mother, neighbor, employee, friend, helpful stranger, etc.
but a question remains, if identical twins performed identical actions all their life, one an atheist the other a believer...
would there be any difference in the end?
how does that feel to be a lawnmower man? must be a real rush.
Bill ya aren’t the only one who has done some thinken about the Book of Abraham, we do all have brains too;
Ya need to read some of the pro Mormon material from time to time.
Facsimile 1 is an Egyptian vignette which were mass produced on a factory line. The buyers would then have a professional fill in their own story line.
A long time ago I looked up some of these on line and the Book of Abraham one is really different. Most of them are highly stylized, with very precise lines but the BA looks like an amateur did it.
There was no way for them to make it look 3d so the four jars are suppose to represent the four corners of the bed and the four corners of the earth. Just as Joseph Smith said.
Unlike other vignettes in the original of facsimile 1 the priest is standing in front of the couch and then Abraham is placed in front of him. Whoever copied it for the BA placed priest behind the couch, not sure why.
In the other vignettes I saw the person on the couch was all bundled up and very dead. Abraham here has some sort of robe on and ropes or shackles on his ankles. I guess that was just an incredible coincidence.
The bird looks rounded off with wings hanging down, the others had wings straight out with very clean lines.
The reason I’m saying this is because Abraham wrote;
“….that you may have a knowledge of this altar, I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record….That you may have an understanding of these gods, I have given you the fashion of them in the figures at the beginning, which manner of figures is called by the Chaldeans Rahleenos, which signifies hieroglyphics….”
In other words he put this together himself and he was an amateur.
Bill said; Joseph Smith identifies the four figures below this action as the Egyptian gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and Pharaoh. The croc is the idolatrous god of Pharoah;
This is my opinion the scholars might disagree with me but Abraham does not say the god Elkenah but "the god of Elkenah". I don’t believe Joseph or Abraham meant to call the gods by their names.
Elkenah and the rest mentioned are not gods themselves but are either a place name or person. In the Bible there is a man named Elkenah who is the husband to Hannah.
Note that in chapter 1 verse 7 it says "The priest of Elkenah was also the priest of Pharaoh", and Pharaoh was a person thus Elkenah was person who shared a priest with Pharaoh. The place where this happens is Potiphar’s hill which means ‘that which Pharaoh gave’.
There is a place called Makkedah which maybe Mahmackrah and there is a city of Libnah, Moses past through in Num 33:20-21. They are doing some archeology work there now. The question is did Egypt have influence over or perhaps trade with these places at the time Abraham was walking around.
Joseph said Fig. 9 was the idolatrous god of Pharaoh and in fact the crocodile was the god of the Pharaohs, Joseph had no way of knowing that. Also this god does not appear in any other lion couch vignette like this.
#Bill; The wavy zig-zag lines Joseph identified as the firmament of Heaven are actually depictions of water, specifically the Nile, representative of death. That's where the croc is swimming. ….The boxes at the bottom of the picture are palace fortifications,
As described in various Ancient Egyptian texts, the temple or pylon is: “...as the pillars of heaven, [a temple] like the heavens, abiding upon their four pillars ... shining like the horizon of heaven …”
The wavy lines which surround the crocodile Joseph says "signifying expanse, or the firmament over our heads… to be high, or the heavens …"
This from the same website as above; "This wall isolated the temple from its surroundings which, symbolically, represented the forces of chaos. Metaphorically, the mud resulted from the union of heaven and earth. The brick wall itself was therefore set in wavy courses to symbolize the primeval waters, representing the first stage of creation."
Now compare that to Gen 1
“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”
Same thought I should think.
Bill wrote; while the bird floating to the side is the "ba" or soul of the departed - not the "angel of the Lord."
But this guy aint dead yet, he’s very much awake and his hands are in a position of praying.
Bill said; The Egyptians didn't engage in human sacrifice
They did do a small amount of human sacrificing during the Ist Dynasty and the Greek Septuagint places Abraham right around 3312 BC. Our Hebrew Bible places him around 1948BC which would take him out of that time period.
But this does not take place in Egypt but in land of Chaldea, by the hill called Potiphar’s Hill, at the head of the plain of Olishem, somewhere near Ur.
According to John Gee Olishem is a very real place!
He quotes a Rim-Sin from between 2254–2218 B.C. He says “inscription mentions a town Ú-li-ši-imki or Ú-li-šé-emki in connection with Ebla”
“…Naram-Sin, the mighty, defeated Armanum and Ebla. Then, from the hither face of the Euphrates, he smote the river(-bank) as far as Ulisum….”
“The name also perhaps appears either as Irissymn or 3wšamm in Twelfth-Dynasty execration texts (ca. 1991–1783 B.C.) from Egypt. If this is the same place, its presence in the contemporary execration texts is an indication that it lay in the Egyptian sphere of influence during the Middle Kingdom.”
Joseph nailed this one just as he did with Nahom in the Book of Mormon.
It appears some Egyptian Pharaoh felt the need to build some sort of temple perhaps has a gift to this Elkenah and loaned him a priest. This priest then carried out sacrifice in behave of the local gods. Did Elkenah worship Qebehsenuef along with his other gods as a good will gesture? Maybe.
not unlike the $200 ticket I got for taking my Z4 past the speed limit.
how fast were you going?
I once got caught doing 95 in a 55 with an off road motorcycle. if I'd just gone 10mph faster the officer wouldn't have had the hp to close the gap, but you live an learn.
You are now my new hero.
I had pulled to the side of the road to let an ambulance go by. When I looked through my side mirror, I saw a wall of cars heading my way like a herd of wildebeasts, so I punched it. She clocked me at 69 in a 55. You know those commercials that talk about zero to sixty in three seconds? They don't tell you what happens after four seconds. Now we know why.
not unlike the $200 ticket I got for taking my Z4 past the speed limit.
how fast were you going?
I once got caught doing 95 in a 55 with an off road motorcycle. if I'd just gone 10mph faster the officer wouldn't have had the hp to close the gap, but you live an learn.
how does that feel to be a lawnmower man? must be a real rush.
The argument used to be that we don't have the material anymore. After the death of Joseph Smith, the mummies - and the manuscripts - were sold, by Emma, to a Chicago museum.
When the spit hit the spam - so to speak - there were many who hoped the whole load had burned up in the Great Chicago Fire.
It didn't.
So now, the argument is that there was more. I, personally, am skeptical of the claim for the obvious reason that the papyri came with the mummies. There were originally five that Chandler bought. By the time he got to Kirtland, he was down to four of them. Facsimile 2 was actually from a different mummy, a sort of mistake in handling. Facsimile 3 should have been Facsimile 2. There were also errors in placement with the text, errors corrected when Nibley brought in an Egyptologist to tutor him and the correct placement was made by matching the documents by their grains.
I think it's a stretch to suggest that there was a kind of Hill Cumorah in a box here, even if that box was the size of a room. The point was that the papyri that came with each mummy amounted to the Book of Breathings (a kind of how-to guide to raising the dead) and a hypocephalus (a papyrus placed just under the head). Facsimile 2, with its Wheel of Fortune/Mayan Calendar explosion of characters, is a hypocephalus.
The problem with "but there's more" is that what we have, right here, is problematic enough. At best, it's an attempt to explain the obvious gap between the content of the papyri and the content of the Book of Abraham. It's a situation troubling enough that Neal A. Maxwell and Dallin H. Oaks took up the argument that the papyri were not the basis of the Book of Abraham, just inspirations for it. It's a concession that makes the "but there's more" argument unnecessary.
The more inextricable problem is in the facsimiles, themselves. Even if we found a room full of Abrahamic writings that finally established a physical basis for the content of the Book of Abraham, Joseph Smith has already provided his own translation of the symbols and writings in the facsimiles. Those translations have already been debunked by a broad panel of qualified experts in Egyptology. Nor have these debunkings been anything like the snooty backtracking of Charles Anthon (who probably didn't know anything anyway). When asked to translate the facsimiles, these Egyptologists have walked through each symbol and explained not just what they mean but the process used to determine that meaning.
But it's a problem that spreads like cancer. If the facsimiles are unreliable - if none of the translations provided are correct - how can I accept, as true, any of the content of the Book of Abraham? And if the Book of Abraham goes, where do the dominoes stop?
On the other hand, I wonder how much of the Bible has to be literally correct in order to produce a community that uses its stories as inspiration. Are we any worse off if the Flood Story was just a Hebrew version of some old Babylonian tale about the merchant who saved himself from the floodwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates - by jacking a house as his impromptu canoe? Would we be better off believing - quite literally - that God destroys his toys when he gets mad? Can we really trust an all-powerful God who once tried to waterboard the human race?
The Old Testament is full of silly stories that work best when you don't think too much about them. The New Testament's best parts are the stories of Jesus, stories that nobody ever questions too closely. When Jesus spoke of the good Samaritan, nobody ever asked who, specifically, was the victim and who was the Samaritan. Nobody ever asked where this attack occurred or when. Nobody cares about the actual extent of the injuries, the costs or who acted as the healthcare provider. Nobody cares about anything other than the simple, symbolic power of allegory.
We have, in this world, true stories about nothing (Check the newspaper). The best stories are about truths that are universal, truths that transcend the basic transactions of the situation. Joseph Smith told a lot of great stories, stories that inspired people to live their lives a certain way. In the century-and-a-half after him, the LDS Church has succeeded in building not only a church but a way of life, a way of life that is not really dependent upon the literal truthfulness of these stories.
Every time the other Christians - Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant - bash away at the Mormons for their silly tales, I have to laugh. These people believe God created the world in six days, created men out of mud and women out of a rib, flooded the world out of rage, told Abraham to kill his son, firebombed two cities for being a little pink, split the Red Sea (although there was a dry route just to the north, which is where the Hebrews lived anyway), caused frogs to fall from the sky, made the Sun stand still, caused a donkey to chew out a false prophet and sicked some angry bears onto some juvenile delinquents for mocking his prophet.
I'm at that point in my life when prophets and poets don't seem that far from one another, and when the "truth" of the story has less to do with the facts than with the "truths" behind those facts. I think what we do with our lives, both individual and collectively (in our marriages, our families and our communities) makes a lot more sense than any loyalty tests we might administer to one another through the stories we force one another to accept.
For example, while what we have now can fill a desk, what Joseph reportedly had filled the entire floor of his office. What's more, another anecdote had it that some of the papyrus had been mounted to thicker paper for preservation; no such samples have been recovered.
If the anecdotes are true, then much of it is still missing.
That would be some huge rolls to fill a room. Since other scrolls from the Book of Breathings are not anything so immense, sounds like these anecdotes are embellishments. However, when you have a 30 foot Cricket eating the newly planted crops, all you need is a 240 foot Seagull to take care of it for you.
Jeff Lindsay's noted that there are a couple of historical anecdotes concerning the papyrus from which the BoA was translated.
If you put the anecdotes together, there's reason to believe that what's been recovered is only a small fraction of what there originally was.
For example, while what we have now can fill a desk, what Joseph reportedly had filled the entire floor of his office. What's more, another anecdote had it that some of the papyrus had been mounted to thicker paper for preservation; no such samples have been recovered.
If the anecdotes are true, then much of it is still missing.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about The Book of Abraham.
For most members, this is probably not the Times Square of their Triple Combination. The story of Abraham's search for the priesthood is not as vital - as an origin story - as Joseph Smith History or the first few chapters of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon ranks up there, with Isaiah, as either boring or a difficult slog. The facsimiles that intercut the text are about as inviting as a men's room at a rest stop in Arizona. The Genesis chapters are mostly copy and paste. Apart from establishing that the Creation was a corporate action, carried out by "the gods," there's not much there to compel a whole lot of interest.
But as smoking guns go, The Book of Abraham is ground zero. I can't think of any other five chapters that put it all on the line quite like these. After translating the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith gave the Golden Plates back to Moroni. In the case of the John Parchment, Joseph Smith simply saw a vision of the document he was translating. The same might be said of The Book of Moses, Joseph Smith's divinely-inspired preface to Genesis. But with the Book of Abraham, there's no question that the original documents existed. They're still here. What's more, by offering his own word-for-word translation of the facsimiles - let alone an Egyptian alphabet and lexicon - Joseph Smith made it possible for scholars to check his accuracy.
So far, every Egyptologist who has looked at these translations has come to the same conclusion: There's no correlation, of any kind, between the symbols and text Joseph Smith translated and their actual, Egyptian, meaning. I can remember Hugh Nibley's claim - that nobody knows anything about ancient Egyptian - but every published opinion on the matter not only shreds Joseph Smith's translation but goes into very specific, and persuasive, detail about what these symbols mean - in the Book of Breathings/Book of the Dead - and what Joseph Smith said they meant.
I don't want to go into exhaustive detail here, because my post is really not meant as an expose. This is stuff I'm sure we're all painfully aware of. Take Facsimile #1, for example, with its 12-point explanation of a figure standing over another, postrate on a lion-headed slab. The standing figure has a knife in his hand while the postrate figure has his arms raised. There's a floating bird and beneath the slab there are four figures. Beneath them lies a zig-zag area, with a crocodile. At the bottom, there are block-like drawings.
Joseph Smith ventured a 12-point translation, one where the standing figure is the priest of Elkenah, sacrificing the prostrate figure of Abraham, as the angel of the Lord (in the figure of the bird) looks on. Joseph Smith identifies the four figures below this action as the Egyptian gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and Pharaoh. The croc is the idolatrous god of Pharoah; the zig-zags are the expanses of the heavens; and the boxes at the bottom are the pillars of Heaven. At the time he ventured an answer, Joseph Smith lived in a world where Egyptology was in its infancy, and his answer was as good as anybody else's. It supported a story where Abraham fled human sacrifice and went in search of the priesthood.
But this isn't 1835 (when the mummies were acquired) or 1842 (when the Book of Abraham was first published). A lot has happened since then. Egyptology has progressed far beyond the "anybody's guess" stage of its infancy. There have been thousands of similar papyri containing the Book of Breathings/Book of the Dead. Egyptologists routinely identify the standing figure as Anubis, the god of embalming (which is why he is dressed in black). The Egyptians didn't engage in human sacrifice (at least not during the Abrahamic period). They did, however, mummify. The slab Joseph Smith identified as a sacrificial altar was a lion couch (a common funeral bier). All those figures identified by Joseph as Egyptian gods (Libna, Elkenah, Mahmackrah, Korash, Pharaoh) are canopic jars (where wet organs are stored to prevent decomposition) shaped like the four sons of Horus, whereas the gods Joseph named don't exist; the Egyptians didn't have them. The wavy zig-zag lines Joseph identified as the firmament of Heaven are actually depictions of water, specifically the Nile, representative of death. That's where the croc is swimming. Joseph Smith's word, Raukeeyang, is Hebrew, not Egyptian. The boxes at the bottom of the picture are palace fortifications, while the bird floating to the side is the "ba" or soul of the departed - not the "angel of the Lord."
Facsimile #2 is a pain to go through (too much detail) but Facsimile #3 nails the point home fairly well. What do you make of the five figures in this scene? If you're Joseph Smith, they're Abraham sitting on his throne, with a scepter representing the authority of his priesthood. Behind him is King Pharaoh. Before him is the Prince of Pharaoh and Shulem, his servant. Behind them, dressed in black, is Olimlah, a slave. But according to the Egyptologists, this is way off the mark. That's not Abraham on the throne; it's Osiris, god of the dead, who is recognizable by his headdress, the atef. Joseph apparently missed the inscription above his head, the one reading, "Rescitation by Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners, Lord of Abydos, the great god forever and ever."
It gets worse. Standing behind Osiris is not Pharaoh. In fact, it's not even a guy. It's Isis, the wife of Osiris. How do they know? Well, beside the long hair, there's an inscription above her head that reads, "Isis the great, the god's mother." Although it's badly duplicated, she's sporting an ankh, the symbol of life associated with Isis. And before them is not a prince and his servant; it's Maat, goddess of justice. How do they know? The headdress. That and the inscription above her head: "Maat, mistress of the gods." How could Joseph Smith have missed it? He wouldn't if he had read Egyptian.
As for the "servant" and the "slave," Egyptologists identify the "servant" as the spirit of the deceased," an interpretation aided by the traditional cone of perfumed grease and lotus flower on his head as well as the figures above his hand, reading "The Osiris Hôr, justified forever" (the dead guy's name was "Hor"). That "slave" at the back is the god Anubis, guide of the dead. Anubis usually appears with the head of a jackal. While it's not clear why the Anubis head isn't more jackal-like here, Anubis is easy to pick out, dressed all in black. Another clue? The inscription above his head that read, "Recitation by Anubis, who makes protection, foremost of the embalming booth." "Olimlah" is not an Egyptian word.
To me, the Book of Abraham is a gift, not unlike the $200 ticket I got for taking my Z4 past the speed limit. I would not have asked for a test of my faith quite like this. Joseph Smith really stuck his neck out here. This is not a case of believing him when he said God and Christ appeared to him in the woods behind his house. It's not a case of believing that a Native American angel led him to the Golden Plates. It's not a matter of believing that he was visited by Peter, James, John, Elijah, John the Baptist or any of the old gang from the Bible. All of that stuff belongs to the realm of faith. You can't prove it happened. Nobody can prove it didn't. You are left to sing a hymn and fold your arms and wait for the burning of the bosom.
But here, Joseph Smith took actual Egyptian writings and created a side-by-side English translation. He did this at a time when nobody could catch him if he just made stuff up, but eventually - because he had dared to put it all on the line like this - the field of Egytology would be able to put this prophet, seer and revelator to the test.
170 years later, it's a bloodbath. Today, we know what Joseph Smith's contemporaries never could have. We have the benefit of more than a century of digs and photographs and analysis. We don't know everything about Egypt but we know enough to recognize the Chandler papyra for what they were: the Book of Breathings/Book of the Dead, writings stuffed into a sarcophagus, written instructions on how to raise the dead.
Abraham had nothing to do with it.
It's a problem that has perplexed a lot of smart people within the Church, including B.H. Roberts, Hugh Nibley, Neal A. Maxwell and Dallin H. Oaks. Everybody has an answer - from "Nobody knows anything" to "The papyra were lost" to "Maybe the papyra inspired some independent vision."
But none of these defenses really confront the reality that Joseph Smith made his own English translation of Egyptian figures, translations that have proved to be not only inaccurate but wildly imaginative.
Maybe it's time to confront the likelihood that this faith is based on the imaginations of a man who saw the world the way he wanted to see it. Maybe all of this is an inspired synthesis that has less to do with historical claims than with a mode of life that gives people a sense of identity, that builds communities, that teaches young men to "choose the right," that teaches young women to see themselves as future mothers, that teaches parents to stay close to their children, and teaches people to be loving, friendly, forgiving and hopeful.
Having read the contents of the Book of Abraham, I cannot accept the idea that Egypt is named after Egyptus, which is not even an Egyptian name; it's Greek. I don't accept the idea that black people are black because of the "curse of Cain." Did Joseph know that the Africans who were enslaved in America were from West Africa, rather than Egypt? Probably not. Does the astronomy make sense? No. Is it even consistent with the Babylonian astronomy of Abraham's day? No.
At best, the Book of Abraham is a piece of modern pseudepigrapha. It tries to make sense of the world, from within the fabric of antebellum America. Laying aside all of its problems, this is a story that suggests that the power of priesthood, with its intendent authority and power of God, lies within each individual. It's a story that suggests that Abraham - and by extension, the reader - was called into this world, and this life, to do great things.
Even the Book of Abraham's "Genesis" chapters add an interesting twist to the Creation story. Instead of saying that "God" created the Heavens and the Earth, it suggests that "the gods" did so. And while that sounds like polygamy on a stick, the moral to the story is that, by working together, human beings can do just about anything.
In a recent episode of House, a certain course of action - the introduction of a pungent gas into a staff meeting (while Dr. House addresses them from behind his gas mask) - is sarcastically labeled a "team building exercise." The Book of Abraham seems to argue that the Creation, itself, was nothing less. And whether that's literally what happened - or just more imaginative musings - it has become a source of inspiration for Mormons who, over the generations, have learned to build communities capable of doing great things, that is, when they're not laughing at the ward lunatic.
