Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The brass plates pose a really interesting problem for the Book of Mormon because Nephi says that they contain the five books of Moses. But according to a lot of scholars, the five books of Moses didn't exist by the time of Nephi. So welcome to Informed Saints. I'm Jasmine, joined by Neil and Stephen, and today we're going to be talking about some of Neil's research in this volume from Fair Open Thou Mine Eyes, Defending the Old Testament and Latter Day Saint Doctrine. And it addresses this problem head on, talking about the composition of the five books of Moses in relation to to what the Book of Mormon says about them. So to start off, let's look at Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge and truth. On this Wikipedia article about anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, it says books of Moses in the Book of Mormon. Around 600 BC, a prophet Nephi and his brothers recover brass plates that they discovered and did contain the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation and also of Adam and Eve, which were our first parents, and a record of the Jews from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, King of Judah, and also the prophecies of the holy prophets from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah. Now that's coming from First Nephi, chapter five, I believe, right?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Yeah, chapter five, verse, verses 10 and 11.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: So right after they get the brass plates, Nephi has slayed Laban, they bring it back to their father and they're like cracking these open and this is what they discover. Five books of Moses, but also Adam and Eve, creation. Right. Writings of the Jews, Zedekiah, Jeremiah, stuff like that. So what Wikipedia says about this is what's commonly understood as the five books of Moses was not completely written, compiled or attributed to Moses as the author until after the Babylonian Captivity. Modern scholarly consensus rejects authorship by Moses, affirm that it had multiple authors composed over centuries. Additionally, the concept of the book of Moses followed by a history and then the writings of the prophets reflected, reflects a contemporary understanding of the Christian Old Testament. So I mean, we can go on and on, but the basic gist here sounds like five books of Moses. Nephi says we're on the brass plates. Scholars say that's impossible. So what's the really the problem going on here?
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah, so what this is referring to is something that's often called. Well, they're referring to what biblical scholars call source criticism. Right.
Where they have scholarship over the years has analyzed the biblical texts and when they detect Things like inconsistencies in the narratives when they doublets, as they call them, which is like repetitious stories, basically, and like narrative seams and things like that. Scholars will say, oh, those are coming from different sources.
And the dominant kind of paradigm in the field for a long time has been what's called the documentary hypothesis.
And under the documentary hypothesis, which was developed in like.
Like the late 19th century with. Among German scholars particularly, and then it kind of became widespread throughout the field.
Julius.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: Julius Wellhausen.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Julius.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: Pronounce it right, Neil.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Thank you very much. Say it the German way. And then I forget his first name, but Graff as well was a. Played a significant role in this.
And so sometimes, sometimes called the Wellhausen graph hypothesis.
But it's basically this idea that there were actually four documentary sources that went into the compilation of the Pentateuch. And these sources are often called J for the Yahwist, which, as Stephen can inform us, I'm sure spelled with a J in German, not a Y, if it's easier for you to remember. Just like Jehovah. Right.
[00:03:32] Speaker C: The Jehovah source.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: This is the Jehovah source because that's the predominant name for God that's used in the source. And then there's E for the Eloist, because El or Elohim, El based names for God are most common, at least up until Moses, when the name Jehovah or Yahweh is revealed to him. Yeah.
And then there's the D source, which is more or less just Deuteronomy.
And then there's the priestly source, which has some narratives running through Genesis parallel to J and E, and through Exodus and Numbers. But then is also like the bulk of the, like, legal and like, scholars will call it cultic material, ritual material, if you will, priestly material that you find in, like, the back end of Exodus, pretty much all of Leviticus and then a big chunk of numbers as well. Right. So the priestly source is generally like the biggest source of the four.
And then within the priestly source, a lot of scholars will identify a fifth source that's kind of embedded in there, called the Holiness code, which, you know, you might get debate about the exact boundaries, but it's usually like Leviticus 17 through 26 or something like that.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: This is all very confusing.
I should know. I remember when I first learned about this in school, like, it did kind of like warp my mind. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like J, E, P, D. Like all these letters and all these sources. Like, there's five books of Moses who wrote what? There's like, did someone write Genesis? Someone write Exodus? Someone write Leviticus? Like, how does that work out? So can you just like, explain a little bit more about, like, what's going on there?
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Yeah, so. Well, I have bad news for you, because it gets more confusing, because that's the simplified version. And what's basically happened since Wellhausen is.
Over the course of the next century or so, the hypothesis just got increasingly more complicated and unwieldy as scholars began to parse apart even the J source and the E source and each of these and say, oh, there's a J1 and 2 and 3. And all of this stuff. Like, it just got very, very.
[00:05:36] Speaker C: Yes, Maybe now's the time for me to interject with a fun anecdote. When I was in grad school and I was taking a class on Pentateuchal narratives. And of course, we discuss source criticism of these narratives from the Pentateuch. And I remember very vividly, my professor, when we did our unit on source criticism, at the end of it, we reviewed, you know, the. The standard hypothesis, the traditional explanation. Then we went over what Neil's talking about, like that since that time, there's been a proliferation of different views or different arguments, trying to really sort of, with a fine tooth comb, go through different sources and subsources and substrata, et cetera. And what he basically said was, and I'll remember this, he said, students, what we know now from current biblical scholarship is you can have two sources or 200 sources for the Pentateuch, but you can't have four.
And what he meant by that is, yeah, as Neil was saying, it's become much more kind of complicated, even unwieldy in some ways, since the classic Wellhausen articulation of just these four neat sources that we can identify. It's now become much more granular and microscopic in its analysis.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: I wonder if it's almost like we've got, like, four gospels. If we had, like, a fifth gospel that tried to, like, combine all those into one. And of course, there's source criticism in the New Testament, too.
[00:06:44] Speaker C: I was gonna say, don't brush aside Q. Right, Jasmine. All that stuff.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so. So actually, I don't remember it because I don't do New Testament stuff. But actually, I think there is, like, an early Christian source that basically does that. That takes, like, the four gospels and tries to integrate them. And source critics have often pointed that as, like, an example of, like. Yeah, this is what we think might have happened with the Pentateuch. An example I actually like to use, because it's maybe a little more relatable, is like, if you like comic book movies. A lot of comic book movies have been like, the series has been started and then stopped and then started again. Like, take Batman, for instance. You can go all the way back to like, Adam West Batman. And then like in the 90s, you have the Michael Keaton era and the George Clooney and Val Kilmer even played Batman, for heaven's sakes. And then you have. You get the reboot with Christian Bale and the. And the Christopher Nolan series, and then you've got Ben Affleck playing Batman for Batman versus Superman. And then you have. Most recently, I think this is the most recent one, unless I've missed one, the Robert Pattinson Batman. Right?
[00:07:42] Speaker C: The best Batman. By the way.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: I actually, I'm personally, I prefer Christian Bale Batman myself, but I want to go back and revisit the 90s series. I haven't done that in a while. But if you can imagine, like, these are basically all reboots of the same story, but they're told differently. And sometimes the characters and stuff are changed and things like that.
Imagine someone coming along, like coming across the scripts for all of those different Batmans and saying, I'm just going to make one big Batman story out of all of this. And so they integrate and they've got multiple stories of origins that they've got to figure out how to, like, line up in a way that kind of seems like it's maybe one story, but you're going to have some inconsistencies in there. That's kind of what scholars think happened with the Pentateuch, because you have these different traditions about the creation, about the. The primeval history, as they call it, which is like the period Genesis 1 through 11. Basically, you've got different stories about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the patriarchs, different stories about Joseph and. And the.
The 12 tribes of Israel, and some different stories about the Exodus and the wilderness wandering and stuff like that. And you've got all these different stories that are maybe floating around from some of the different tribes, maybe a southern and northern perspective, things like that. And basically scholars are saying all of those different versions got integrated into each other somehow.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: And of course, like that. That's using a fictional example. In Latter Day Saints, we don't necessarily think the Bible's fictional. But I remember there's another example that you've talked about before of, like, imagine you, like, get together with a big family Reunion. And, like, Uncle Joe has different stories from Uncle Ed about the same thing, and they remember things a little bit differently, but they get together and, like, try to write it all down in, like, a family history. And maybe there's some different versions of that memory that have gotten distorted over time or through different sources.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like if you. If you get together with your cousins and you start reminiscing about your grandparents who have passed away, for instance, and you might have different stories than some of your cousins do because your parents told different stories than their parents did. And. And then you picked up different details from the stories your parents did than even your siblings did, and things like that. And so as families go on and stories, you know, family traditions get passed on, you get variations and variants that emerge within the tradition. And then after a couple generations, you all get together and say, hey, let's tell. Let's write a biography.
Let's make a family history. And you're gonna have to hash out some of these different traditions and stories. That's. Yeah, I absolutely think that's. Maybe something similar could be. Could be used to talk about what's going on here.
[00:10:07] Speaker C: Well, it sounds like what you just described, Neil, is for Latter Day Saints, that's kind of staring us in the face. We've got this thing called the Book of Mormon that does the exact same thing. It seems like, sort of, in principle, Latter Day Saints shouldn't necessarily have a problem with this idea of that. Like, our scriptural accounts or our scriptural books are composites of different sources, Documentary source going into them. The nice thing with the Book of Mormon is we know the people doing it right.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: It's transparent.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: It's transparent.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Blatantly.
[00:10:36] Speaker C: Yeah. Mormon and Moroni, and they even say, you know, oh, and then I found Nephi, small plates, and I'm including it here. Or this is the record of Alma. I'm including it here. The record of Zenith. I'm including it here. That. That sort of thing.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: And we're not really getting a ton of, like, firsthand quotations of Alma or of all these people, because we know that Mormon's the narrator for a lot of this, and so he's the one retelling their story. Not in first person anymore. And I remember, like, when I first learned about source criticism, like, being a little bit unfooted, like, whoa. Like, Moses didn't write the Bible. Or Moses, like, you know, King David wasn't the one writing pen to paper immediately in the Psalms or whatever. But then, yes. When I realized, wait a Minute the Book of Mormon is explicitly doing this and I believe it's the word of God and I believe there's a historical core. Like we can still put our hat on the fact that God speaks to humans and we can accommodate that. This can be a complicated process, but still divine.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And you're absolutely right, like in principle, I don't think this is an inherent problem for us.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: We.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: What I do think, well, where the problem does come in, and this Wikipedia article kind of alludes to it, is that this process is not complete in most models by 600 BC.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy in their final form was maybe not complete by Nephi's day according to kind of
[00:11:50] Speaker B: the classical version of this hypothesis. And it is important to note that like, while this is like this classical version is sometimes presented as like the model or the consensus, there really is no consensus on how this process worked anymore. Like Stephen alluded to with his teacher, like you can have two sources or you can have 200 sources.
It really like there's a lot of diversity in the field. There are certainly some people who still defend the four source theory, or at least the four strata theory sometimes or whatever, but there are also a lot of other variations.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: But if someone's claiming consensus on the documentary hypothesis, you should be very skeptical of that.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:12:26] Speaker C: Just survey the field and get out of North America, get over into Europe, get over to Israel, look at different schools of thought literally on different continents and you're going to find discontinuity.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Yeah. If you're in Europe, you might actually get laughed out of the room if you, if you get up and present the documentary hypothesis now, which is kind of funny because it is where it originated. Right, right. But, but to, to underscore the issue of dating. Right. In that classical version of the hypothesis, the J source is usually thought, could be thought to be as early as the 10th century or the 9th century.
Nowadays again, if you have someone who's even still defending the existence of a J Source, they might down date that to the 8th or 7th century or even some like John Van Seders and stuff will actually date it to exilic period. So you don't have any consensus on these dates.
[00:13:10] Speaker C: So you don't have consensus on the sources. You don't have consensus on the date of the sources.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: It's very funny. Exactly. Exactly. But a lot of scholars, if they still defend the existence of a J Source, they'll attribute that to pretty early, like I said, 9th, 10th century. Richard Elliot Friedman would still defend, basically a 10th century version of J.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: 10th century. We're talking like the time of King Solomon, David ish.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: The monarchy. 10th century. Yeah, the united monarchy, maybe King Solomon. Like I said, I think Richard Elliot Friedman defends a Solomonic date for the J source. The E source is usually thought to be a northern perspective on the story that comes about in like the 9th or 8th century, kind of as, like as the kingdom split. They're like, okay, we need to tell our own story.
And so again, 8th century, maybe you'd still get. Again, if someone even still defends the existence of an E source, which is E is probably the biggest casualty of the loss of consensus. There's not a lot of people who would still defend an E, but if they do.
[00:14:06] Speaker C: 8th century BC probably before the Northern kingdom falls, basically. Right before it falls. Samaria.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Exactly.
D or Deuteronomy is usually linked to the Book of the Law that's discovered by King Josiah in. Is it 2 Kings 22 or 23?
[00:14:22] Speaker C: Yeah, somewhere around there.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Somewhere around there. The Book of the Law is often thought to be Deuteronomy. Okay. And so that's in 622 BC ish.
And so that's kind of your. I forget the Latin phrase. I should know it because Latin is actually the ancient language I did study. But there's a Latin phrase for it. But it's like the latest possible date, which. Right. That's kind of considered the latest date for Deuteronomy. A lot of scholars actually think that's a lot of northern traditions and material as well. So there is.
[00:14:49] Speaker C: It's making its way into Deuteronomy.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: It's making its way in. So there is like an early version of it. And we can talk a little bit more about Deuteronomy and its date in a little bit. But then the real issue for the Book of Mormon, at least under these traditional dates, is the P source. Right. Because the P source is usually what's thought to be from the exilic or even the post exilic period. The priestly source is what I mean by P. Right.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: So after Babylon comes, destroys Jerusalem and takes them Catholic. Right.
[00:15:13] Speaker C: And after Lehi and his family leave, therefore making it, as Wikipedia says in anachronism. Because how could they have had the priestly source.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: Both till after they left.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: If I remember, priestly is representing, like the traditions of the Levitical priests. Well, yeah, the temple tabernacle traditions.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:15:30] Speaker C: And all the rituals. That law of Moses, you're told to
[00:15:33] Speaker B: reenact and yeah, and so that's. That's kind of thought to be like exilic or post exilic. And then obviously it would be after that that they get all combined by a redactor or sometimes like the R source. Right. And there will be. There will be. Yeah, the editor. There will be little strands or pieces here and there that scholars will say, oh, that's. That's R. That's the redactor. That's the editor who did that.
Maybe combined in the 5th century sometime. Lots of times this is attributed to Ezra or someone in the time of ezra, right around 450B.
And that's kind of, again, that's the traditional model right now. There have been a lot of disputes. We already mentioned that, like the J source and its date or the.
Lots of times you'll actually see a lot of scholars will just talk about P and the non P because there's just disputes over what.
[00:16:20] Speaker C: Or they make JE its own.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Yeah, JE is kind of its own thing. I think David Carr refers to that material as El, like the lay source. So you've got a priestly and then a lay source, but you'll see all kinds of different variations. But the point is you'll get some people who are. Who are moving to date that material later. But another interesting trend that I think is obviously very important to this discussion here is there has been a contingent of scholars, and these are not like fringe conservative Christian apologists or whatever. These are some of the most significant scholars of the priestly source over the last, like, 50 years who have said, no, the priestly source is early.
And in some cases they've said it's very early. But. But certainly there have been some who've come along and said, no, the priestly source is pre exilic.
And they have argued from a variety of different lines of evidence. Right. And so one of the biggest ones is historical linguistics.
[00:17:16] Speaker C: Archeology, too.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Archeology, yeah.
[00:17:18] Speaker C: There's a book, I think it's called Shifting Sands, the History of Biblical Archeology. If I remember the title, I read it when I was an undergrad at byu. And the author is basically tracing the history of modern biblical scholarship. And in his chapter on the documentary hypothesis, he points out the fact that, like, some of the first people to jump on board with the documentary hypothesis were all, like, literary critics. So people that spend a lot of time looking at just like literary narrative texts, and they're trained to identify things like different authorial voices and narrative themes and things like that. But sort of the last holdouts into jumping on board with this were archaeologists. And the reason why is because Wellhausen and that school of thought were, were proposing a model for the sort of priestly, the evolution of the priestly cult of ancient Israel that did not seem to jive with the on the ground archaeological findings that they were finding. Right. So one of the big, one of the big arguments for dating P late, at least in the classical articulation, is that he has like a full fledged temple cultic worldview and ritual apparatus. And you know, this whole thing is set up. Well, that has to have come much later because it takes time to evolve to get that sophisticated in your sort of religious practice.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: Like old school Darwinian evolution kind of thinking. Right. Kind of was going along with this. Like it takes time for these things to evolve. So it has to been late. And these archaeologists saying like, wait, dude, it's like, no, we have like full blown temple cults in like the Bronze Age, right. So they, so they were pushing back on the sort of archeological grounds for dating late. So anyways, just to interject to say historical linguistics and archeology were sort of the big pushbacks against the late dating form.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And again, these are some of the biggest names in the study of the priestly source in the light last 50 years. People like Jacob Milgram, who wrote the,
[00:19:01] Speaker C: literally the book on Leviticus, literally wrote
[00:19:03] Speaker B: the anchor Bible commentary on Leviticus.
Menahem Haran, who's a big Jewish scholar who studied a lot of the priestly material and published a lot on it. And Richard Elliot Friedman, who I've already mentioned, who's one of the biggest advocates for the traditional documentary hypothesis, but he's persuaded by the linguistic and archaeological and other lines of evidence that like, you know, yeah, the priestly source is early.
So there have been some different trends on the dating and the material. And that's why like you can't just take a simple Wikipedia explanation and say, oh, I guess this is a problem for the book Mormon.
You really do need to start looking into like you've got to get into the weeds to really understand what's going on here. And for me at least, when you realize that like there's really no consensus on dating this stuff, well, if people can't agree on when it is, then there's no consensus. Who's to say it's not early enough? Right, Right.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: So if it sounds like P is the main stickler here about like, okay, P has to be early enough for Lehi in order for the Brass plates narrative to make sense. But you're saying that we've got linguistic evidence, we've got archaeological evidence to suggest it could be earlier. We don't know how much earlier exactly, but we could push it back before Lehi's time. So, like, what. What would the brass plates be looking like then? Are we suggesting that when Lehigh gets the brass plates, it would have been exactly the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy that we have today?
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Well, so that's. That's a hard question to answer because, again, there's. There's no real consensus on how this material came together. Right. You can follow maybe, like if you follow a Richard Elliot Friedman, for instance, then you can, you can maybe hypothesize that there was a traditional J, E, D and P, and that all of those, you know, would have existed by. By Lehi's time.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: But.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: And maybe there was something like that on the brass plates, though Friedman also, like, he argues that J and E have already been combined by that point and stuff like that. But taking just the sources, like, there could have been those four sources, and if you want five for the five books of Moses, well, maybe imagine H is still separate from P or something like that. Right. And now you've got five sources. But there's actually an alternative way of conceptualizing this that I think is actually pretty interesting, which is William Schneiderwind wrote a book called how the Bible Became a Book. And this was a little more than 20 years ago now, where he actually, he went through and he looked at the archaeology of writing in ancient Israel, and he also looked at the broader ancient near east. And he noted that, like, there's kind of a renaissance of literary activity in the 8th and 7th century in Mesopotamia. You see scribes beginning to copy old texts and the development of big archives become an important part for, like, your.
I don't know what to call it, like, royal.
You know, if you're a king, you boast of having a big library. It's part of, like, how you.
[00:22:01] Speaker C: Ashurbanipal man.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Ashurbanipal giant library. And these libraries are filled with old texts that have been forgotten prior to that time and things like that. And so scribes are copying these old texts and. And kind of there's this renaissance there. You see something similar going on in Egypt during this period. I'm sure Stephen could. Could probably tell us more about it. But you've got like, the Shabaka stone, which. That's the big example, which is from the 8th century BC and is copying this old, you know, cosmology from I don't even know how long.
[00:22:30] Speaker C: We don't know.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: It's kind of debated.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: It's debated at least the Ramesside period, potentially Old Kingdom, like some. I mean, it's. It's still an open question, but it's very old.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And so you kind of see this renaissance of old literature in these other places. And then what you see archaeologically in Israel itself is you see a proliferation of writing at a level that did not exist. Well, when I say Israel itself, I actually mean Judah. In Judah, you see this proliferation of writing and scribal activity.
And so the argument is that literary, well, that literacy has expanded and part of that is probably the destruction of the Northern Kingdom results in a bunch of refugees coming down from the north who are bringing with them a little bit more of a sophisticated culture. And they're actually bringing with them a bunch of texts and traditions about Israel and things like that. And under Hezekiah, in part because of like this Zeitgeist of the era, in part to.
To try and integrate the Northern Kingdom refugees within their, like, same cultural identity and stuff, they begin compiling and editing and writing a history of Israel and these traditions and bringing them together. Now, that doesn't mean all of this material just came into existence in the 8th or 7th century B.C. but what it does mean is you maybe have some compilation and editing and bringing together of the source material into something like the Pentateuch as we have it now.
And I mean, I don't want to speak for Schneiderwind. I don't know, he doesn't really sketch out exactly what he thinks that stuff looks like. That all looks like in that period. But the idea to me that you could have like a proto Torah and he's among the people who would date the priestly source early.
You know, he. He seems to believe that more or less much of the material from Genesis to Numbers predates Deuteronomy in the seventh century.
And. And so I think you have a good case that something like, like I said, a proto Torah or an early form of the five books of Moses could have come into existence around that period.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: I think we should also point out the fact that whatever the five books of Moses, quote unquote, look like to Lehi and Nephi, it cannot be identical to what it looks like to us today in our King James Bible, our received text, because Lehi and these guys are quoting material from the five books of Moses and other stuff from the brass plates that we currently don't have access to. Right, yeah, that, that raises a very interesting question for us as Latter Day Saints, when Nephi and Lehi and Jacob are quoting Zenos and Zenuck and Niamh and, you know, they have a version of Genesis that includes material about Joseph prophesying about a seer coming, things like that. Right. Like second Nephi, 2, 3, 4. That material, like their Pentateuch, whatever that looked like, does not appear to have been identical to our Pentateuch. And so if there's a recombination of sources happening in this early period, some of them get lost or others become normative or whatever. I think we should just be open to that idea. Our Book of Mormon sort of compels us to be open to the idea that their five books of Moses was not identical to ours.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: And it's almost an issue of assumption, too. Like, when we hear, oh, they had the five books of Moses, we assume that means, oh, it's just like what I have in my Bible today. But is that a warranted assumption? Like, does the Book of Mormon ever quote long passages of Genesis or long passages of Exodus? Not really. Like, they allude to the stories and they make little references here and there, but it's not like the Isaiah chapters where Nephi quotes massively. And so we would expect something a little bit more concrete there. But when it comes to the. To the five books of Moses, I mean, a proto or early version of the five books, I think is well within the realm of something we could expect in Nephi's day.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, absolutely.
You know, I'm not saying that every word of the Pentateuch existed. Right. As of the 8th and 7th century.
And, you know, you'd have to look at it more systematically as to what's being referred to and alluded to in the Book of Mormon, which I don't think anybody's done at this point.
[00:26:38] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, offhand, like, they know about Adam and Eve.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:40] Speaker C: They know about the Exodus.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Sounds like they have different understandings of the fall of Adam and Eve.
[00:26:45] Speaker C: Yeah, right, right.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Very much so.
[00:26:46] Speaker C: They know about Joseph of Egypt. They know about the bronze snake, the Nehushtanim, because they quote it like eight times. They allude to it. Right. They're obsessed with the, with the bronze snake incident from Numbers.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:57] Speaker C: And I'm thinking, what else? What are the big, like, Pentateuchal stories that stand out?
[00:27:00] Speaker A: They talk about building a temple, and so we assume that that means they had, like, ritual and priestly.
[00:27:05] Speaker C: Well, they say. They say we're living the law of Moses.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: And there's so.
[00:27:08] Speaker C: But what is that? They don't specify what that looks like.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: They don't. They never specify what that looks like. Now, there are. There are.
You know, academic arguments have been made for various points where they might be celebrating different festivals.
[00:27:19] Speaker C: Yeah, Sukkot.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Sukkot. King Benjamin's sermon, Pentecost at the time of Abinadi and Passover has been associated with, like, Alma's instruction to his sons Helaman and Shiblon and Corianton. Or Coriantum.
[00:27:36] Speaker C: Yeah, no, Corianton. Yeah.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: Oh, Corianton.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: My bad.
[00:27:40] Speaker C: Confusing. Yeah, Coriantum.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: And so they have maybe some form of the priestly literature with this priestly calendar of festival. This festival calendar and stuff like that. But, yeah, exactly what that all looks like.
I don't think there's been a systematic study of it. And so if you want to, like, pick out a random chapter, like numbers 5 or numbers 36 or something like that, and say, like, did they have that on the brass plates? Well, you'd have to. You'd have to look really closely to see if there's maybe some intertextuality with that and. And see if you can really determine whether that's not coming from the translation, but that is reflected in the plates in some way.
But something that more or less reflects the narrative arc, if you will, of Genesis through Deuteronomy. Something that kind of reflects like, like I said, a proto version that maybe has, I don't know, 80% of it, 90% of it is there, plus some of this extra material that Stephen's talking about. And. And I think there's actually a really interesting context for that here because, like I said, you have these northern refugees coming down, and a lot of people think there's. There's traditions and. And even texts that are coming down with them. There are prophets, there are northern prophets that they would have known and had source material of that did not get preserved in the Bible. Now you have some of that getting incorporated into the Bible as we have it today. But some of it would have been too politically sensitive, let's say, because it maybe reflects a pro Northern Kingdom perspective or whatever the case might be. And so it gets omitted from this Judah version, this Judahite version of the Bible.
And so what's maybe going on with the brass plates is they're saying, well, hey, they're not including this stuff. We want to make sure this stuff gets preserved. And so they preserve some of these traditions about Joseph of Egypt, these traditions from Prophets like Zenos and Xenoch who are said to be descendants of or members of the tribe of Joseph.
And so, you know, I think there's actually a really interesting context here for preservation of some of this extra northern material on the brass plates.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: Well, so we've been talking about all these different sources from different times and all of that, but, like, where does Moses himself fit into all of this? I think a lot of people grow up thinking like, well, Moses wrote the five books of Moses. Who makes sense of this as a Latter Day Saint?
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Yeah. So from the Book of Mormon perspective, strictly speaking, we don't actually need Moses to be the author of this material. We certainly need him to be an important figure to the people.
[00:30:00] Speaker C: And we need Nephi to think that
[00:30:02] Speaker B: he's the author, and we need Nephi to think he's the author.
Now we do also have like, things like the Book of Moses and we've got. And the pearl of great price. Right. That maybe suggest that, do suggest that we need some kind of Moses figure, figure and maybe some authorship or, or some attribution of this material to him in some form.
But I think that, you know, we see, we see how complicated this can be. But I actually like when I. What I found over and over again as I was researching, and I'm still working on studying different parts of the Pentateuch to see how early some of this material might go back, is that even though there were a lot of, in a lot of ways, these texts did seem to reflect maybe an 8th or 7th century period, suggesting that they came into their final form at that time. There was a lot of different things that tied them back to much earlier periods, including the late Bronze Age or at least the early Iron Age, late second millennium, which is generally, you know, contemporary with the time period of Moses. And to give just one example, one that I think Stephen probably knows a lot about because it ties back to Egypt, is the tabernacle traditions.
[00:31:11] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: Okay.
The description of the tabernacle in Exodus 25 through 40 is very much. Appears to be describing something from the late Bronze Age. There's some interesting parallels, like in the Ugaritic material and some other, like, Levantine material. But most of the good parallels come from Egypt and they come from the Bronze Age. Specifically the ramside, the tent, the military tent of Ramses II is like a dead ringer for what the tabernacle is described as being. And you've actually got some biblical scholars like Richard Elliot Friedman.
You know, you've got Egyptologists like Kenneth Kitchen and James Hoffmeyer, who have pointed this out. But, but biblical scholars like Richard Elliot Friedman and one of his students, Michael Homan, who have argued that, like, yeah, this is the strongest parallel and the text must be describing a real tent shrine that existed in no later than the early Iron Age. And the source text, the source material itself must have been written contemporary with the shrine.
And so you've got this big chunk of what's usually attributed to the priestly source that, that scholars are saying must be describing a real tent shrine from, like the late Bronze Age, early Iron Age. And the texts themselves must date to when that tent shrine was standing.
So could that be putatively something that goes back to a Moses figure? Could he be the first one who instituted this, this tabernacle, this tent shrine in the wilderness, and, and, and be a description that comes from him? Obviously, we would believe, not strictly from him, but revealed to him by God. But, but just taking theological premises out of it for a moment, could this go back to a real Moses figure who was in Egypt, by the way, and was part of the royal court and would have known about these kind of, these sort of things?
Could that have originated with a Moses figure? And maybe as the texts get edited over time, they reflect some things from a later period. But he's like, the origin of that and like the same thing can be. A lot of the rituals of the tabernacle, as Stephen was talking about, have parallels in, in second millennium temple cults and things like that. So could a lot of this ritual that we find associated with the tabernacle have originated with someone like a Moses figure instituting these institutions? They maybe undergo some development the same way our own rituals. Right. Have undergone development like Joseph Smith instituted them or Brigham Young instituted them, but they've since undergone some modification. Modification. Right. And that's reflected in maybe general handbook text that we have or whatever describing them. The same thing could have happened with the Bible, but it has an origin point. It does have a foundation in the Mosaic age. Right. And Moses himself could be the source
[00:33:50] Speaker A: in antiquity in general. I mean, things. We had oral traditions before you ever put pen to paper. So even if we don't have a five books of Moses that's codified on paper does not mean that there couldn't have been oral traditions for many, many, even centuries before, leading to. Yeah. Some kind of originating source.
[00:34:07] Speaker C: Yeah. A good example that may be Exodus 15, the song of the Sea.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:11] Speaker C: Which is dated.
It's dated as one of the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible by Biblical Linguistic scholars, Right. So doing historical linguistics. Right. It has very archaic features in its syntax and other things like that. Right. So, and the context of it is it's, you know, they cross through the sea and they, you know, erupt in a song and they're celebrating and it's the short little punchy poem, right? The song they're singing. That's the kind of thing that you could plausibly suggest was circulating orally among Israelites. They, you know, it was. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that there's a real Moses, a real Miriam, a real, you know, these people, a real Aaron, and they, they sing this song at the, at the occasion of crossing the sea. That song will be solidified in Israelite cultural memory. It will get passed down over centuries and then eventually it will be recorded. Right. So even though the song itself, again, hypothetically originates at an actual occasion, it gets written down later. Right. Again, that I know plenty of scholars would disagree with that formulation. But that's the kind of plausible thing we're kind of talking about is we're in this wheelhouse of since we don't have more concrete data, there's different, you know, competing models or understandings how to do this. And this is one that I think could make sense.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: Well, sorry to revisit the imperfect New Testament model, but we don't have a book of Jesus. We have a book of Matthew, Luke, Mark, John. And it doesn't mean that Jesus didn't existed or wasn't an originator of where
[00:35:37] Speaker B: this material's coming from, that the sayings, the words that are quoted didn't originate, these teachings originate from a real Jesus,
[00:35:43] Speaker A: but rather that his disciples, students of Jesus later, then took those traditions, wrote them down and become a thing we have to do.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: Exactly.
The difference potentially being that like, there's maybe a few generations separating the material, whereas we're only talking in most cases with like, depending on how you date, a few decades versus a few decades. Right.
[00:36:02] Speaker C: Maybe another potential example to kind of get this in a more concrete way of thinking for modern church history. So if you go on your bookshelf, or I guess more probably your grandma's bookshelf, you're going to see the six volume history of the Church, right? These blue hardback books that your grandma has, you've always looked at as a kid. And if you pull open History of the Church, it will say History of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints by Joseph Smith, the Prophet, edited by B H Roberts, Right Underneath, Right. Like, and, but but just for decades and decades, we attributed, oh, this is Joseph Smith's history, right, these blue volumes, and we just cited them as such. And, oh, yes, in his history, Joseph Smith said this.
[00:36:38] Speaker B: Right, right, right.
[00:36:39] Speaker C: And it took the Joseph Smith papers to come along and say, hey, wait a second, we now know that a lot of this material, some of it is indeed deriving from Joseph Smith in his history, but a lot of it is being attributed to Joseph Smith by secretaries and clerks who are working around him. And then after later decades, these sources were then sort of solidified. They were finalized and presented in this sort of arcing narrative of.
Of the history of Joseph Smith. Right. So. And then later, BH Roberts comes as the. The redactor, as it were, to kind of finally all put it together. So I'm not saying it's a perfect analogy, but perhaps it's somewhat analogous to see the composition of the Pentateuch with the composition of the history of the church volumes.
[00:37:20] Speaker B: Well, and what's actually really interesting about that example, and I've thought this before, I've thought, you know, biblical scholars should actually maybe take a little bit closer look at early Latter Day Saint history and historiography, if you will, because I do think we've got a lot. Like, if you want a close example of how a new tradition forms, right, this is. This is a modern example with lots of documentation that we have, and it could be used by analogy to help us understand a lot of this stuff. I think in a lot of cases, what's being attributed to Joseph Smith maybe wasn't directly recorded by him, but we do have a primary source that's contemporary to Joseph Smith that is saying this is what Joseph Smith said or is being recorded. Like, you've got entries from Wilford Woodruff's journal or whatever that are then being taken and then rewritten into first person as if it's the words. As if it's the very words to use. Actually, you know, scholars debating the Jesus material, are they the very words or are they the paraphrased sayings? The paraphrased sayings, right. Like to make it seem like it's the very words of Joseph when it's really maybe like Wilford Woodruff's paraphrase written in Clayton or something, William Clayton or something like that. And so again, we don't have to jettison a historical Moses. We don't even have to jettison Moses as a originator.
The word author is a little bit loaded because we have a modern sense of authorship that wasn't necessarily held. And there are actually. It's a whole new can of worms start going into, like, what was authorship in the ancient near east and what did that mean and how did they attribute it? Right. And Stephen's actually dealt with some of this stuff, I think, in relation to Book of Abraham stuff. Right. But authorship is a loaded word. But an originator. An originator.
[00:39:07] Speaker C: An authorial figure.
[00:39:08] Speaker B: An authorial figure. You know, this idea that there could have been. We don't have to jettison Moses as a historical figure and as an originator of a lot of these, both the historical traditions, especially if they're associated with the Exodus. Right. And there's a real Exodus that happens and Moses is the leader for it, but also with the ritual institutions and the legal institutions and things like that. Moses could very well be the originator of a lot of that material, but it undergoes some development and whatnot over time, and then it's later codified into writing.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: Well, what I love about this is that sometimes people will say, will take the. Say I believe in the Bible, I believe in the Book of Mormon, therefore the scholarship's wrong. Or they'll take the other extreme and saying, well, the scholars are right, therefore I can't really trust my Scriptures, and Moses didn't exist. Moses didn't write the five books of Moses. But I love that this takes a really thoughtful approach in taking the scholarship very, very seriously and saying, okay, like, what is the consensus or lack thereof, and what can we actually determine based on the dating of these sources and not compromising on the truth claims of the restoration? Like, we can still believe in both. You can, if you will. We can study deeply and believe boldly. You don't have to compromise one or the other. You can be a scholar and you can also believe. So remember, everyone, if you want to learn more about this, open thou mine eyes. Defending the Old Testament in Latter Day Saint Doctrine has this paper by Neil Rapley going over all of this material in much greater depth and with thorough documentation if you really want to get into the sources. So study deeply, believe boldly. We'll see you next time.
