Tobin wrote:You have yet to demonstrate any "KJ translator errors".Arrakis wrote:Isn't that like trying to argue whether a woman is a little bit pregnant? Regardless of the KJ % in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Mormon definitely contains KJ translator errors.
Let me help:
Isaiah 2:16 KJV:
14 And upon all the high mountains,
and upon all the hills that are lifted up,
15 And upon every high tower,
and upon every fenced wall,
16 And upon all the ships of Tarshish,
and upon all pleasant pictures.
17 And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down,
and the haughtiness of men shall be made low:
and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.
There are a few things to note here. First, the poetry centers on a single image: height. Everything here is something that stands out from the rest of the landscape by virtue of its sheer size, as the ships of Tarshish would have stood out from the flat seascape to any viewer. Tarshish (Tartessos) was equated with mineral wealth (the original Rio Tinto, not the thing formerly known as Kennicott, flows by it) and with ships and mercantile wealth, because it was a harbor city. Second, each verse contains two parts which are semantically parallel; only the last contains a third part, which, by breaking out of the pattern, calls attention to itself. The fact that it is the Lord's exalted state is what stands out is what makes this an effective poetic image, since the meaning matches the form. This final part of the verse alone stands out from the parallelism, as the Lord alone stands above else. Without that image and that parallelism, the whole thing falls apart.
The more obvious but not more important problem is the translation of v. 16, since "upon all pleasant pictures" not only makes no sense but in fact violates the image the controls the poetry. This is simply a bad translation, and that the phrase "כָּל־שְׂכִיֹּ֥ות הַחֶמְדָּֽה" (kol-sekhiyyot ha-7emdah) can better be translated as "every finely-wrought craft" or the like (literally: "all crafts of pleasantness"), then the imagery is preserved. And the "finely-wrought" activates that association with wealth (mineral or mercantile) that Tarshish/Tartessos had in antiquity. In fact, the old school BDB even offers "ships" or "towers" as a translation. Nor was the idea that ships were high like towers an image unique to Hebrew poetry; for the classics people, see Horace Epode 1.1 (alta navium...propugnacula). Those make better sense; the KJV's "pictures" makes no sense at all and is clearly borrowed from the Vulgate's "quod pulchrum visu est" (that which is beautiful to see), which was mediated/translated by Jerome, who thought that "Tarshish" was simply a Hebrew word for sea. The Latin captures the Hebrew sense of הַחֶמְדָּֽה (ha-7emdah) by avoiding שְׂכִיֹּ֥ות (sekhiyyot), which is basically untranslated. The KJV translators relied heavily on the Vulgate for the Old Testament, and their "upon all pleasant pictures" is itself a very loose translation of the Latin, so they clearly had no idea what to make of this.
Now look at the Book of Mormon:
2 Nephi 12:16
14 And upon all the high mountains,
and upon all the hills,
and upon all the nations which are lifted up,
and upon every people;
15 And upon every high tower,
and upon every fenced wall;
16 And upon all the ships of the sea,
and upon all the ships of Tarshish,
and upon all pleasant pictures.
17 And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down,
and the haughtiness of men shall be made low;
and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.
First, notice how Joseph/god/Moroni/Holy Ghost insert his/their own parallelism but miss the imagery of elevation in the second part; "upon every people" does not contain the idea of height anywhere, so it is not likely to be by the same writer, certainly not by a writer who knew anything at all about Hebrew literary style. This would be the equivalent of having an extended series of rhyming couplets and then all of the sudden having a couplet that doesn't rhyme, followed by an other series of rhyming couplets. Any philologist worth his/her salt would say bracket that line as at best problematic and likely spurious.
Second, notice how v. 16 contains not two parts but three. This obliterates the entire poetic structure that builds up to the Lord's singularly exalted state. When the verse before stands out like that, the effect of the Lord's standing out is much diminished—and this in a poetic structures whose whole point is that the Lord alone is above everything else and thus, by definition, not able to be diminished. Joseph Smith/Moroni/Holy Ghost/God's addition ruins the whole effect.
One apologetic argument has it that "upon all the ships of the sea" restores a variant from the Septuagint, but if you look at the Septuagint, you will notice three things: 1) There are only two elements, so the parallelism isn't disturbed by having three. 2) since we know Jerome thought that "Tarshish" was a Hebrew word for sea, we know that Jerome was actually reading the Septuagint, and in fact the textual history shows that "Tarshish" was in one tradition of the Septuagint miscopied as "thalassa" (in Greek, "Tarshish" would have been transcribed in such a way that that mistake could easily have been made; Jerome's translation has "Tharsis" which, given the fanciful etymologies of ancients in general, could easily have been read, even deliberately, as a deformation of the Greek "thalassa," and see also this letter). 3) the Septuagint has the bit about pretty ships. The Septuagint's full translation is: "upon every ship of the sea [thalassa, miscopied or misconstrued from Tarshish], upon every display of fine ships." Wonder of wonders, this very information was available to Joseph Smith. And one of my own Old Testament teachers at BYU, a faithful Latter-day Saint, has published on this with a great deal of candor (and Dana Pike, for the record, is both a competent scholar and real mensch).
Lastly, notice how Joseph Smith/Moroni/Holy Ghost/God broke the parallelism that is perfect in Isaiah by using the exact same translation error as the KJV. It's not just that it's "upon all pretty images" or the same idea but the exact same set of wrong words in the exact same order. If that is not taken from the KJV, then that is an astronomically astonishing coincidence. There are only TWO texts in the world that share this exact mistranslation of the Hebrew, the KJV and the Book of Mormon. There is an embarrassing plenitude of signs that indicate a relationship between the KJV and the Book of Mormon, and thus the burden is on John Gee to show how the Book of Mormon makes this identical translation error from some source other than the KJV.
Conclusions:
1. Joseph Smith/Moroni/Holy Ghost/God didn't understand Isaiah's poetic structure
2. Joseph Smith/Moroni/Holy Ghost/God definitely had the KJV at hand.
3. Joseph Smith/Moroni/Holy Ghost/God, thinking about the prose of the page rather than the poetic parallelism that appeals to the ear, opted to "restore" all things that the marginal commentaries available to him/them seemed to suggest had been lost.
4. John Gee's philological instincts suck.
5. Tobin herewith has an example of a borrowed translation error as plain as any borrowed translation error in the history of textual criticism. Ever.
Of course, if you're not susceptible to empirical arguments and evidence-based reasoning, then...God did it. Just, God.
