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When you are writing with your own hand, do you usually lose your train of thought and ramble on in a jumble of sentence fragments and half-finished thoughts? No, I didn't think so. We do this when we are speaking, but not so much when we're writing with our own hand. That's because we can look back at what we've just written in order to remind ourselves what comes next. So why does Abraham ramble on so incoherently in the Book of Abraham if he wrote it with his own hand?

"If two things exist, and there be one above the other, there shall be greater things above them; therefore Kolob is the greatest of all the Kokaubeam that thou hast seen, because it is nearest unto me."

Right. How does that follow, exactly? Oops, false start. Let's try that one again.

"Now, if there be two things, one above the other, and the moon be above the earth, then it may be that a planet or a star may exist above it; and there is nothing that the Lord thy God shall take in his heart to do but what he will do it."

That was a little better, although that last bit after the semicolon (besides being barely grammatically coherent) doesn't seem to quite fit with what came before.

"Howbeit that he made the greater star; as, also, if there be two spirits, and one shall be more intelligent than the other, yet these two spirits, notwithstanding one is more intelligent than the other, have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are gnolaum, or eternal."

What the hell? I dare someone to try to parse that out for me. Not only is it not a complete sentence or even a coherent thought, it's also just downright twisted reasoning. God made the greater star, ergo the greater spirit is eternal? If there are two spirits, and one is more intelligent than the other, then they must both have always existed? Was the prophet in a drug-induced stupor when he dictated this?

"And the Lord said unto me: These two facts do exist, that there are two spirits, one being more intelligent than the other; there shall be another more intelligent than they; I am the Lord thy God, I am more intelligent than they all."

That was much more coherent than the rest, except for the part where we lay down a general principle and then violate the general principle in the very next thought. It's like saying, "No matter how smart one is, there's always someone smarter. I think I must be the smartest person in the world!"

Anyway, my point is that this passage shows signs of basically stream-of-consciousness composition: the kind of signs we would expect from an oral composition rather than from a written one. Add to that the fact that the passage basically operates under the assumptions of nineteenth-century natural theology, and I think we can say that this pretty clearly was not written by Abraham's own hand upon papyrus. Instead, it's a nineteenth century product of the mind of Joseph Smith, dictated by Smith to his scribe Willard Richards. And it's not even a very articulate or well-thought-out one.

Good valid points, CK.

Was the prophet in a drug-induced stupor when he dictated this?

It is noted that during at least the last year of his life, Smith suffered from a great deal of sickness. Has anyone ever suggested that perhaps he was suffering from the debilitating effects of Venereal Disease when he was fabricating the Book of Abraham?

CK's points are, as ever, cogent. To someone who has not been conditioned by religious upbringing to regard it as a sacred text written by the great prophet Abraham, the Book of Abraham text comes over as rambling and confused however hard you try to disentangle a coherent line of thought from it.

But of course if you do think it is the word of your deity, speaking through his prophet, you'd almost be a bit disappointed if it made obvious sense to a mere human being, wouldn't you?

PS: One section in the material that CK cites struck me very forcibly the first time I read the Book of Abraham, and remains for me a flashing red light saying "this is not an ancient semitic text":

And the Lord said unto me: These two facts do exist, that there are two spirits, one being more intelligent than the other ...

I just don't know anywhere in the Bible, or other ancient Near and Middle Eastern literature that I have read casually where someone talks about "facts" "existing". It just doesn't seem to have been the kind of concept people used. Admittedly I am talking mainly about translations here - but then the Book of Abraham is supposed to be a translation too, is it not?

Hey Chap,

Great point. That's a very nineteenth-century empiricist, Baconian kind of statement. The Common Sense Realist philosophy that dominated the America of Joseph Smith's day often referred to the observable phenomena of nature as "facts" to be catalogued and inductively studied. It placed the statements of the Bible into the same category, to be studied by the same methodology. Thus propositional truths and objective realities were both treated as existent, immutable, equivalent entities. While Joseph Smith's language seems almost as strange to us today as it probably would have sounded to the ancient Hebrews, it fits quite well in his own nineteenth-century context.

-Chris

Well, another apologetic myth bites the dust. That being the one created by Nibley: "Critics refuse to deal with what the text actually says."

Playing devil's advocate here: Do egyptian characters translate word for word? Or do the characters merely represent ideas? I'm not familiar with how the characters translate into english.

During the time of Joseph Smith, it was commonly believed that Egyptian characters represented concepts or ideas. Athanasius Kircher was the scholar of the day who made this understanding seem authoritative. This has since been proved to be incorrect. So translating single characters into long sentences is exactly what we would expect from Smith, if the crtics are right.

When apologists make claims like, "it is ridiculous to think Smith thought a single character could represent full sentences of translated text," they are speakng in ignorance because the EAG illustrate that this is exactly what he believed.

Has there been no "parallel mania" on this point yet? Nothing showing that "stream of consciousness" sounding writing was typical for the period/location in which we'd expect Abraham to be writing? Seems like the FARMS guys are good at this sort of thing.

Who Knows wrote:Playing devil's advocate here: Do egyptian characters translate word for word? Or do the characters merely represent ideas? I'm not familiar with how the characters translate into english.

Egyptian script combines consonantal, syllabic, and symbolic components, but the answer to your question is that yes, it generally translates word for word (although as with any translation the grammatical rules are different and an overly literal rendering may be confusing or inelegant compared to a conceptual rendering).

Californiakid wrote:That was much more coherent than the rest, except for the part where we lay down a general principle and then violate the general principle in the very next thought. It's like saying, "No matter how smart one is, there's always someone smarter. I think I must be the smartest person in the world!"

It seems like pseudo-logical gibberish to us, but it could be an authentic Egyptian poetic or logic style that apologists will soon reveal to us. Kind of like how "if/and" seems like poor Book of Mormon grammar to us but is actually an authentic Hebrew version of "if/then". Rest assured, apologetic talents will be applied, and a sweet lemonade will be squeezed from this lemon. Apologists have been known to squeeze lemonade from turds, even.