bom questions

[wileycoyote]

I could write volumes on my experiences and thoughts over the last few months. It sufficeth me to say, I am outside the box and seeking knowledge. How did JS know that King Zedekia's reign was 600 BC and what is the response to the pro mo argument that the bom was written by many different authors? thanks

[peter_mary]

I could write volumes on my experiences and thoughts over the last few months. It sufficeth me to say, I am outside the box and seeking knowledge. How did JS know that King Zedekia's reign was 600 BC and what is the response to the pro mo argument that the bom was written by many different authors? thanks

I'm not nearly the authority I think I am ;) , but I'm never one to shy from taking a stab! Someone else might have the authoritative answer.

I think that one of the principal issues you're dealing with here is the myth promulgated by Mormonism that Joseph Smith was nothing but an illiterate country bumpkin who had little in the way of formal education, and therefore, how could he POSSIBLY write the BoM? If you consider other possibilities, then these kinds of questions resolve themselves.

Now, I'm really not a bible scholar, but I would presume that since Zedekiah reigned during the years of the great Babylonian King Nebuchadnezer, the rough time-frame of his life would have been well known. It certainly is today...which becomes important in a moment. Given Joseph's penchant for the more mystical writings of the Old Testament Prophets (most notably Isaiah), I would assume it is likely that he also was familiar with Jeremiah and Ezekial, too, and therefore aware of old Zed (who also gets ink in 2 Kings). This familiarity was likely a product of the religious home in which he was raised (the principal reading material available to him was the family bible), and the general religeous revival that was occuring in this country during the late 1700s and early 1800s. Joseph was not in any way ignorant of the teachings of the bible, and he was also a gifted crafter and teller of stories. He used the story of Zedekiah and his son Mulek (who by bible accounts should have been slain with his brothers) to create part of the migration story to the New World. It is quite likely that Joseph actually had no idea what time frame this occurred, as it is my understanding that it has been the work of LDS scholars :eek: that have gone back and attributed dates to Book of Mormon times. They really only have a few points of reference to use in the BoM to establish time, the reign of Zedekiah on the front end, and the time period in which Jesus would have lived. Everything else is filling in the blanks to try to guesstimate when time frames would have been. It's important to note that BoM timeframes have come under a lot of criticism, by the way, since the vast number of BoM populations that existed at key points in time would have required unprecidented population explosions in order to squeeze all that growth into the necessary time frames between the time Lehi et al came from Jerusalem, and the time of the big Nephite/Lamanite battles. So my best guess, and it is ONLY a guess, is that Joseph really DIDN'T know when Zedekiah lived...it didn't really matter to his story (he was never one to get hung up on things that could later be proven wrong...see Book of Abraham for the most startling example).

The second question is, in my mind, even easier to answer. Joseph was a brilliant man, and the world should be grateful he was uneducated and raised in a backwater part of the early American frontier, else we might be writing this in the Deseret Alphabet today! :) Again, if you realize that by all accounts, Joseph was a remarkable teller of tales, and brilliant in his ability to weave a story off the top of his head, why is it a stretch to believe that he could do that in a variety of "voices?" But I think even more importantly, we should remember that he dictated the BoM over the course of a few months...it is very likely that the "voice" he used would evolve over the course of those months, and the books of the BoM evolved with it. It is not at all uncommon for the unskilled writer to begin a novel using one voice, and end it in a very different one, and a good editor has to watch out for that kind of thing and help keep them on track. Oliver Cowdery was not a good editor.

The "evidence" that FARMS and others use to "prove" that the books of the BoM were written by different authors is FAR from conclusive. If you compared many of my posts on this forum using the same techniques, you could easily "prove" that someone else was responsible for some of them, simply based on the mood I was in, or my energy level, or how seriously I was taking myself, or how NOT seriously I was taking myself at the time I wrote them.

Bottom line is this. Those that need to believe that Joseph Smith translated the BoM rather than invented it begin with that assertion, and then work backwards trying to prove that it COULD have been what he said it was. I prefer to start at the beginning and see where it leads...and the most simple, direct route (see Ocam's Razor) is simply that Joseph was a very clever guy who pulled one over on a lot of folks. End of story.

That's the way it looks from where I stand.

Paul