Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Textual analysis of cruces in the Book of Mormon [part 1 of ?] Message-ID: Date: 23 Sep 90 07:29:02 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University (Software Engineering Institute), Pgh, PA Lines: 345 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu The story so far... This was my request: ...if somebody could cite several such passages - where the BoM disagrees with the AV and with the scholarship of Smith's time, but agrees with more modern scholarship, I'd regard that as strong evidence against my claim. I respectfully invite such evidence. Mr Smith most kindly responded: May I submit simply the tip of the iceburg, 12 cases: As he admonished, I have given some detailed investigation to these citations, and am prepared to comment on all of them. However, that would be a post of great length indeed, and, before inflicting it on you and our good moderator, and before inflicting upon myself many more hours of travail with "tangled things, and texts, and aching eyes", I'd like to know whether anybody cares. Accordingly, I submit here a detailed analysis of exactly one, the eleventh of the twelve, and will positively not send eleven more long essays unless enough of you ask me to. I have chosen this one because it seems to me the most illuminating; it illustrates just how much detail one must consider. Please believe me that it is neither the weakest nor the strongest of these twelve pieces of evidence. Here is the entire argument from Mr Smith's post: 11 - Isa 14:4 = 2 Ne 24:4 BoM addition at the beginning has version support plus internal evidence of change in MT. This presentation is admirably terse, but let me please set it out in a little more detail, to show how it is constructed. First, there is a difference between the texts of the Authorised Version (AV) and the Book of Mormon (BoM), which I grant. Secondly, the Masoretic Text (MT) agrees with the AV. As we shall see, it doesn't quite, and that small difference will turn out to be important later. Thirdly, there is "version support" for the BoM, and here I'd appreciate a fuller citation, for I haven't found any. As far as I can tell (from LXX, the Vulgate, the Hexapla - which I can read -, and from 1QIsA - where I rely on Burrows and Yadin) the BoM does not have version support. That there is no Hebrew document now in existence with this text is certain. Finally, if we do suppose an earlier Hebrew document with the same text as the BoM, we can explain the current MT as having been derived from it by "change". What change is unspecified. However, since any difference whatsoever between texts can be explained by "change", I shall assume that this means "change by means of well-established causes of transcription error". In which case we can't explain it, as I shall show later. Moreover, we have two other reasons for believing that no such document as the one hypothesized could ever have existed, and I shall come to them. The reader is the judge of the soundness of Mr Smith's argument, as of mine, but there is one comment I would like to make. The argument seems to me not derived from the text as primary; that is, it does not start with the text and try to explain it. Rather, it starts with an external hypothesis - of an independent New World tradition for the BoM - and seeks to reconcile the text with that hypothesis. This is a prevalent feature of biblical scholarship, where most people have strong hypotheses, but it does run the risk that one might end up not explaining the texts but explaining them away. For which reason, I decided (as far as humanly possible) to set aside initially all hypotheses, in the hope that my work would be helpful to the many of you who do not share my opinions. With this said, let me begin again, and this time where I ought to, at the beginning. Let us open the books, and allow the documents to speak for themselves. Here is the Masoretic text of Isaiah xiv, verses 3 and 4. Or, rather, here is the English translation by the Jewish Publication Society of America: [3] And it shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest from thy travail, and from thy trouble, and from the hard service wherein thou wast made to serve, [4] that thou shalt take up this parable against the king of Babylon, and say: How hath the oppressor ceased! The exactress of gold ceased! Note first the structure. The two verses form a single sentence, most of v3 being a subordinate clause, identifying a specific day, and v4 completing the sentence, by telling the reader (Israel) what he shall do on that day. Moreover, the text changes from prose to poetry halfway through v4, and the poem continues to the end of the Chapter. This is a very common - indeed, almost pervasive - stylistic feature of the MT. We have here a poem, accompanied by a prose introduction that leads into it. Other examples run from Genesis iv:23 through Isaiah vi:3, x:27, xxxvii:22, right up to Haggai i:5. I think of this as analogous to the 'blurbs' in a short story magazine - just as we expect a story to be introduced by a blurb, so the hearer will expect a poem, inserted in a prose narrative, to be introduced by a specific prose lead-in, detailing the circumstances of its recital. Moreover, this is a famous poem. It is the "satire against the king of Babylon" - the Hebrew word is 'mashal', usually translated "proverb", but which by this time could mean a much longer poetic text. Let us now compare the text of the BoM [2 Nephi xxiv:3-4]: [3] And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall give thee rest, from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve. [4] And it shall come to pass in that day, that thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say: How hath the oppressor ceased, the golden city ceased! The text has a different structure. It is two sentences, not one. Moreover, the first sentence no longer identifies a day, it talks about a day previously identified (though there is no prior identification of a specific day earlier in the Chapter). The two sentences are independent, but run in parallel. There is another difference in meaning, in the last phrase of v4 - this difference will be addressed, but not for rather a long time. And, of course, the distinction between prose and poetry has gone, which is entirely unexceptional, since the authors of the AV made the same decision, and other translators of, say, Homer and Dante have likewise replaced verse with prose. Could the MT be derived from a Hebrew version of the BoM? I do not think so. Haplography might explain the disappearance of the first part of v4, 'And it shall come to pass in that day', except that not one, but both such passages are changed, and except that haplography typically occurs when the repetitions are adjacent. But there is no reasonable way the two verses could be changed by transcription errors so as to become one complex sentence, with subordination, instead of two simple ones. Indeed, transcription errors are much more likely to simplify the structure of a text than to complicate it, which observation has been dignified by textual analysts into the working rule "lectio difficilior potior". There remains the hypothesis of a deliberate change. This is not impossible - indeed, there are eighteen places in the MT where the tradition recognises a deliberate change - but this one would be unusually large and seemingly without compelling reason. Moreover, we are now hypothesizing not only an unknown text, but an unknown scribe who wilfully changed that text for an unknown reason. For me, that is too close to the argument of the Irish Israelite who claimed that Moses was originally named Mulligan, until some over zealous copyist deleted 'ulligan' and added 'oses'. It seems superfluous to argue against the existence of an absent document. Nevertheless, there are two other things that argue against a Hebrew version of the BoM text. One I defer, the other I give now. If we look at what the MT and the BoM are saying here, it seems rather odd for its historical context. Why is Isaiah talking about release from bondage, when Israel was not in bondage, and moreover when the Lord had promised she would never again go into bondage? [see II Samuel vii:10...] Why is he saying nasty things about the King of Babylon, when the Babylonian Empire was dead these 800 years, smashed by the Hittites, and its former royal line had been extinct for three centuries? We have been here before, I think. The modern consensus is that these verses are post-Exilic, not original Isaiah. The majority view is that the entire chapter is by a later hand. The minority view is that Isaiah wrote the poem, and a later editor put it here and added the blurb (sorry, the prose introduction). (For what it's worth, that's my opinion: the text of the poem reads as though it were written not about Babylon but about Assyria, which was a real menace in Isaiah's time, and not about the future but about the past - the repulse of Sennacherib and his later death.) And, finally, there are some who hold out for a single Isaiah, and seek to explain away this text. But if you accept in principle the idea of two or more Isaiahs, I think you will agree that it is unlikely that verses 3 and 4a existed in 600BC, and without them the argument that the BoM is here older surely must fall. Now, if one probably cannot get from the BoM to the MT, for texual and historical reasons, is the reverse transition possible, from MT to BoM? Again, I think not. If haplography cannot get us one way across the chasm, dittography surely won't get us the other way. Neither text is derived directly from the other. There remains indirect derivation, by way of an unknown number of now vanished copies, each derivable from the previous, the whole completing the chain. Unfortunately, by such means one could explain anything - any change whatsoever, of any degree, give only enough intermediates and enough poor copyists. But our task is to explain not any text but THIS text, the BoM as it is, every word. Is that possible? I believe so. Indeed, here is my own reconstruction of the chain of events that created the BoM version. It relies on an intermediate text; not a vanished one in the New World but a present one in the Old; and the text is this text, which I ask you to read very carefully: [3] And it shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve, [4] That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased! Compare this first with the Masoretic text. Apart from the very last phrase (which, yet again, I defer) the meaning is the same. Moreover, the grammatical structure is the same: v3 is mostly a subordinate clause, and v4 continues the main sentence, which reads: "And it shall come to pass (...) that thou shalt take up... the ellipsis in parentheses being the subordinate clause. Apart from those different words - eg "bondage" for "service" and "proverb" for "parable" - that are legitimate differences between two translations, there is only one change. Again, the poetry has been replaced by prose; which, again, is unexceptionable. In the light of which, I conclude that this is very probably an English translation derived directly from the MT, without transcription error. Of course, we knew that anyway, because this is the Authorised Version and we have its provenance. But even if we did not know - if the history and the Epistle Dedicatory had been lost - we could still conclude as much, from the texts themselves. Now compare the AV with the BoM. Ignore please the difference in meaning, and compare only the words - the marks on paper - as if both documents were in Akkadian cuneiform or some such. Clearly, the two texts are very close, so close that one might suspect a relationship. Is the chasm of meaning that could not be crossed in Hebrew crossable in English? Could one be derived from the other? Astonishingly, the answer is yes - it is possible to pass from the AV to the BoM by the misreading of a single word, as I shall now show. In the AV, verse 3 begins: And it shall come to pass on the day that the Lord... The author of the BoM misread this text, thus: And it shall come to pass on that day that the Lord... This is a plausible misreading. First, the two fragments are very close. Secondly, the latter occurs in the AV more often than the former, and it would be natural for a hurried reader to mistake the one for the other. Finally, other evidence in the BoM shows that the second phrase was a favourite one of its author, so he might well see it where it wasn't. But the mistake is a disastrous one, for it alters the meaning of the whole. The grammatical structure of the AV phrase - the parse, if you will - must be this: And it shall come to pass / on the day that the Lord... with which opening, it is clear that the rest of v3 is subordinate to the main sentence, describing the day named, and that the main sentence must therefore continue in v4, as indeed it does. But the BoM fragment parses thus: And it shall come to pass on that day / that the Lord... with which opening, v3 does read as a separate sentence, entire of itself. The BoM author read it so, parsed it so, wrote it so, and duly ended it with a full stop, which you can see right there at the close of v3, in the place where the AV has a comma. And I hope you saw that difference: for such minutiae, piled one atop another like grains of papyrus dust, are the dusty lifeblood of textual criticism. But he now has a problem, for if v3 ends a sentence then v4 must start a new one, and it clearly can't. At which point, many readers would realise they had made a mistake, and would try again - as I'm sure many of us have done, many times, when wrestling with that Jacobean prose. This reader, however, decided otherwise. He decided that the text was in error, and determined to set it right, by making it a complete sentence. And how better than to make it exactly parallel with the previous verse, by adding a second copy of what he had already miscopied once? And there you have it. The argument is almost over. There is one loose end, the difference between the MT How hath the oppressor ceased! The exactress of gold ceased! and the AV ... How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased! What does the Hebrew say? That's the problem - it doesn't. The MT here contains a word whose meaning is unknown, and that is found nowhere else. All translations are therefore conjectural, not least the two above. But the ancient translations read differently - LXX, Origen, the Vulgate - even the Syriac, though for that again I rely on authority, since I can't read it for myself. They are close to each other, though not in exact agreement, and go against the MT. It had long been suspected that there was an error in the MT at this point, but it was impossible to say just what the error was, since there was no Hebrew version with which to compare it, and no agreed back-translation of the older translations. The answer to the puzzle was found in the caves of Qumran, for 1QIsA reads thus [JB translation]: What was the end of the tyrant? What was the end of his arrogance? This is now the accepted reading, first because it makes sense, secondly because it is supported by the old translations, and thirdly because it differs from the MT by but a single consonant, a miscopying of the word "arrogance" that made it resemble the Aramaic word for "gold". It is impossible to date the error precisely, but it must have occurred somewhere between about 100BC and 500AD. I note, finally, that the BoM text follows exactly the AVs conjectural translation of a Hebrew original now known to have become corrupted long after 600BC, and again let that text speak for itself. Kind reader, if you're still here, you have my thanks and admiration. Robert Firth