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The BOM does not read like a genuine ancient work.
When one looks at the BOM manuscript, or what there is of it on the Joseph Smith papers project, what we see reads more like the frontier fiction intentionally drafted in a biblical style – as critics have rightly noted, a Monte Carlo analysis revealed that the BOM draws most frequently from two sources:
1. The Late War
2. The First Book of Napoleon
In places it is word for word matching sections from these books.
With regard to the comments on silver and coinage. I discussed this recently with another LDS academic who argued that the Nephites did not have any coinage. I expressed surprised at this, since even if we accept that coinage did not exist in the way we see it today as a pressed or stamped lump of metal, we do see clear evidence that metals were weighed to set amounts in sufficient volumes that the Nephites had common names for the ‘coins’.
If this is the case, can we conclude why we haven’t found any? I mean, by comparison (as someone who lives in the UK) we have an abundance of Roman coinage. We have coinage covering all of the major Emperors from the time of the Roman arrival in britain. We have roman buildings, inscriptions on plinths, lintels, columns, walls, mosaics in floors, cities like Chester, Bath, York, Londinium, Forts like Lunt (which is just a couple of miles from my house and a place of frequent visit as a child).
As a boy my father introduced me to collecting coins. You’ll find Roman coins in most city museums in the UK – why is this – well it is because they were in common use in the UK and were frequently lost.
So why then do we find no comparison for the BOM coinage in the Americas?
Consider, the number of Romans in the UK was circa 30,000 at any one time. Yet the number of Nephites numbers in the millions, sufficient that they had such huge battles with fighters in the millions slaughtering each other until the two lead protagonists remained (with beheaded bodies attempting to get up).
Across the Americas we’ve discovered the Incas and Aztecs, Myans, Olmecs, etc etc. We’ve translated the 26 Myan languages, and yet we find no mention of the Nephites anywhere. Nor is there any reference to Abrahamic languages in these Amerindian languages – Brian Stubbs might disagree but i took this matter personally to Lyle Campbell the worlds foremost expert on Amerindian Languages and he confirmed for me that the evidence simply does not exist, there is no link no matter how much Latter-Day Saint or other Christian Groups attempt to assert we all emerged from Eden.
The simple fact is, in the circa 200 year since the emergence of the BOM, we have failed to find a single Nephite city. Yet we have a huge log of documented cities or towns and even villages and camp sites that were roman (despite them being present in significantly smaller numbers).
Then comes the DNA evidence which also confirms that the Amerindians are intact Asian in origin – which causes the LDS church to change the intro to the BOM. It has a new narrative now that places the Nephites as a small group surrounded by Asian tribes in the Americas – even though support for this cannot be found in the text of the BOM).
It also faces other scientific challenges, it recently admitted it had been wrong for more than 150 years in claiming that black people had been less valiant in the pre-existence, or wore the mark of cain. Yet now we know that such claims are silly. Skin is affect by melanocytes. The melanocytes of black people are fully functional, as were in white counterparts a genetic defect prevents them working properly and means our skin fails to respond to the sunlight effectively leaving us more prone to skin cancer. Would God really curse ‘white folks’ with whiter skin that exposed them to a greater risk of cancer? Yet curse black people with functioning melanocytes that protect them? The story sounds muddled. It also fails to address that the admission that skin colour is not determined by sin or transgression unturned the BOM claims that the Laminates were cursed with a darker skin for their unbelief? It creates a direct contradiction in print.
So arguing a random example of how an invented name ‘might’ be related to a jewish word is really playing darts in the dark and hoping randomly to hit the board and then claiming it was all skill. It simply isn’t. Many, many, BOM names are just variants on biblical names. Some of them are very much out of place, like Timothy in the Americas anyone?
A fair evolution would pick up on the problems as well as the possible hits.
The simple matter is, the church was founded circa 200 years ago when such dramatic claims could be made. Today, all these years later we have access to so much more data – we see what the facsimiles really translate into. We see Monte Carlo data on the BOM, we have copies of Thomas Dick and in it we see extensive overlap with the POGP and recognise that Joseph Smith not only owned this book but was seen reading it in the years running up to the production of the POGP.
As an academic, i’d appeal to your sense of fair play and ask you to consider the implications for some many evidences that now argue in line with Popper as disproof.
Kind regards,
D.
Would Jershon have any similarity to Gershon in Genesis 46:11?
I agree. Jershon is most likely a bastardization of Gershon. Try again.
And yet, isn’t it remarkable that Jershon bears a much stronger resemblance to an actual Hebrew toponymic that would mean “land of inheritance”?
If given the two etymologies side by side, I’d have to say that the Hebrew yršôn is a much more likely candidate, statistically speaking. If he was merely cannibalizing Biblical names at random, why pick one that’s SO CLOSE to an actual linguistic match? What are the odds of that? Wikipedia lists at least 250 Biblical place names, which means the odds are likely under 0.4%.
Your hypothesis strains credulity.
After Zeezrom begins to be confounded, one his peers, Antionah, comes forward to continue arguing (Alma 12:20). The name Antionah has been analyzed with several possible meanings, but is there a chance that his name is mentioned because like Zeezrom’s possible link to money via ezrom, the Anti in Antionah has some similarity to the Nephite onti, the largest silver measure, a step above the ezrom?
Or more relevant than onti might be the unit “antion” of gold (Alma 11:19). So if a wordplay of sorts is being made between Zeezrom and money, might the same hold for his successor in the attack against Amulek and Alma, a man whose name also includes a Nephite monetary unit?
Add this article to Dan Peterson’s file of ‘Joseph Smith’s Greatest Hits.”
Stephen,
Very nicely done.
Hirsch Miller, a long ago Jewish convert to Mormonism, who was fluent in biblical Hebrew and who was a master Torah scribe, translated the entire Book of Mormon into Hebrew from about 1923 to 1927. He rendered the name Jershon into Hebrew just as you do, and even applies the obvious word-play in verse 24 – as you suggest.
There is a great deal more of this sort of thing in the Book of Mormon.
Thank you for this quick, informative article. I especially enjoyed the Farrer quote. Sure this kind of evidence is not a substitute for a testimony of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, but having these evidences brought forward certainly doesn’t harm such testimonies. Thank you for helping maintain “a climate in which belief may flourish.”
Thank you, Stephen. Both of these are very intriguing additions to the other Book of Mormon names.
Both the naming and titling conventions of the Book of Mormon seem remarkably restrained compared to the way exotic societies were depicted in 19th Century popular literature. At the time, a classic revival had led to many cities and towns, even those on the frontier like Palmyra, being named after locations in ancient Roman, Greek, and Egyptian cultures (like Alexandria, Virginia). Orson Scott Card has pointed out how counter-cultural the Book of Mormon is compared to popular stories of thst era.
Very enlightening. I enjoy articles like this. I am always learning from Interpreter. I appreciate everyone who works on these things, and keeps discovering new information and sharing it
My maiden name is pronounced exactly like a name in the Book of Mormon. My maiden name is spelled differently by one letter. My father always said that he nor anyone in his family knew the origin of our last name. About seven years ago I discovered where my maiden name comes from – Armenia. And growing up members in my Branch would tease us about being related to this person in the Book of Mormon because the pronunciation is exactly the same, and the name in the BofM is a bad guy. LOL We had fun with it. Name are interesting!