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Abraham 1:1 & 13-14:

1 In the land of the Chaldeans, at the residence of my fathers, I, Abraham, saw that it was needful for me to obtain another place of residence;

...

13 It was made after the form of a bedstead, such as was had among the Chaldeans, and it stood before the gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and also a god like unto that of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
14 That you may have an understanding of these gods, I have given you the fashion of them in the figures at the beginning, which manner of figures is called by the Chaldeans Rahleenos, which signifies hieroglyphics.

Could an apologist pleeeeease explain one thing for me. FAIR is no help, and I have asked this many times, yet am always ignored. A frequent apologetic response is that critics should actually read the Book of Abraham rather than nit-pick over its origin. OK. I have read the Book of Abraham. I once read it to confirm that JSjr would clarify and correct an anachronism in the Old Testament, only to be sharply disappointed.

The Book of Abraham is grossly inaccurate regarding the history of the Chaldeans. They simply did not exist at the same time as Abraham. As a people, or a place. The original reference to Chaldea as the origin of Abraham, in the Old Testament, is a scribal gloss - a scribe's attempted clarification of the identity of Ur. Abraham predated Chaldea and the Chaldeans by about 1000 years.

I know there is scholarly debate as to the location of Abraham's Ur and Haran and other locations mentioned. Fine. But that does not solve the question as to why Abraham in the Book of Abraham discusses a people, place, customs, and language that were not to exist for another millenium.

The logical answer to this is that Joseph took an anachronism from the Bible (an anachronism which was also repeated in non-biblical historical material) and transferred it, in uninspired fashion, into the Book of Abraham and magnified it by elaborating. Is there an apologetic alternative?

Kishkumen wrote: I have one word for you: tapir.

CaliforniaKid wrote:Hey, Danna!

I've written a little about it. The apologists who defend the Syrian Ur hypothesis believe that the Chaldeans were a Syrian ethnic group for a thousand years prior to migrating to Babylon and making their mark on the historical record. They don't actually have any evidence to support this idea, so far as I know. Most scholars think the Chaldeans migrated from the south, i.e. from Arabia. I also have my doubts about whether such a historically-insignificant ethnic group could have maintained a distinct group identity for a thousand years in a region as volatile as Syria.

And then there's Occam's Razor to reckon with. There's a perfectly good "Ur of the Chaldees" in southern Mespotamia. Why assume the Book of Abraham text refers to some other Ur of the Chaldees? What are the odds that the Chaldeans dominated two cities called Ur, separated by a millennium? And why isn't this Ur named in the Egyptian execration texts, which pronounce curses against the various Canaanite and Syrian protectorates that broke away from Egyptian rule during the Amarna age as Egypt lost the strength and will to govern its foreign holdings? The Book of Abraham portrays these Chaldeans as a landed people who control at least one whole city. How did they so thoroughly escape historical documentation?

The Syrian Ur apologists also argue that this Ur must be close to Haran, and of course it must also be close to Olishem, which they identify with the "Ulisum" mentioned in an inscription of the Akkadian king Naram-Sin. I am quite convinced that Naram-Sin's Ulisum was the city the Egyptian execration texts call Ullaza, a little north of Byblos on the coast of modern-day Lebanon. (As David Bokovoy told me when I posed the idea to him by PM, "the sibilants z and s are interchangeable in Semitic languages. The -um ending would be disregarded as an Akkadian case ending plus mimation.") Ullaza is much too far from Haran, really, to be the "plains of Olishem". The initial "U" vowel also creates problems for the claimed "Canaanite shift" by which the apologists want to turn Ulisum into Olishem.

It is well-known that the Primeval History of Genesis 1-11, at the end of which we read that Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldees, has strong Babylonian influences. This is almost certainly because the Jewish writer who penned it was living in Exile in Babylon. Almost the whole History takes place in Mesopotamia, until at last Abraham leaves the land of his nativity with his family and sets out for Canaan, stopping along the way in Haran. This marks the end of the Primeval narrative. Can there be any doubt that the writer intended to denote the Mesopotamian Ur? The reason "Ur of the Chaldees" appears in the Book of Abraham is simple: Joseph Smith copied this anachronism into his text. He actually makes it worse, in fact, by making the Chaldean culture and language active parts of the narrative.

If you're interested in reading an old discussion of some of these issues, I recommend John W's old MADB thread about Lundquist "Abraham at Ebla" article: http://www.mormonapologetics.org/index. ... 29688&st=0

harmony wrote:The silence is deafening.

Brackite wrote:

harmony wrote:The silence is deafening.

Yes, it is, Harmony. This Discussion Thread has now been here for over 24 hours, and there still hasn't been any LDS Apologist of the Book of Abraham, who has responded here. Where is William? Where is Droopy?