Rebuttal to Daniel Peterson's claims regarding the four gods in Facsimile 1
Daniel Peterson in his article News from Antiquity makes the following bold statement in an effort to show how Joseph was somehow correct when he identified the 4 gods as real Sumerian gods even though he got the names wrong and that they were not Egyptian gods:
Ancient texts indicate that the idolatrous gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, and Korash, described in the book of Abraham (Abr. 1:6, 13, 17; facsimile 1, figs. 5–8), truly were worshipped in the ancient world, despite the fact that the Bible makes no mention of them. 5
Peterson does not show the proof in the article. He merely lists a footnote. The footnote (#5) only states “See Lundquist, “Was Abraham at Ebla?” p. 232; Tvedtnes and Christensen, Ur of the Chaldeans, pp. 32–33.”
This is totally unacceptable. If you are going to make bold claims that challenge established views, then you can't simply write "See this book and that book" in the footnotes and expect to be taken seriously, especially when the sources you cite are not widely available. The reason he did this is clear.
This is an analysis from Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought on Peterson's claim:
From Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought by Stephen E. Thompson "Egyptology and the Book of Abraham" footnote 67. [Archived backup of article here]
67. John Lundquist has attempted to equate the names which Joseph Smith gave to the deities represented in Figures 5-8 of Facsimile 1 with names for Sumerian deities found in a list of names of such gods published by A. Deimel. He suggests that Elkenah corresponds to Sumerian Il-gi-na (the raised d, for dingir, indicating a divinity, has been omitted from this and the following names), Libnah to La-ban, Mahmackrah to Ma-mi-hi-rat, and Korash to Kurra- su-ur-ur ("Was Abraham at Ebla?" 232-33).
There are problems with the methodology used to arrive at these equations. First, Demeil's readings of these names cannot always be trusted. For example, the name which Deimel read as Ma-mi-hi-rat is actually to be read ma-mi-sar-ra-at (see A. Deimel, Pantheon Babylonicum [Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1914], #2042, and E. Sollberger, Ur Excavation Texts 8, Royal Inscriptions, pt. 2 [London: British Museum, 1965], 19, #86). Ma-mi-sar-ra-at is actually not a god's name, but the name of a canal which connected the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers with the sea (see D. O. Edzard, "Mami-sarrat," in Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archaologie, ed. D. O. Edzard et al. [New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 7:329, and Sollberger, 19).
The divine element in this name is Mami, a Sumerian mother-goddess (see J. J. M. Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon: A Study of the Semitic Deities Attested in Mesopotamia before UR III [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972], 43-44). The name translates as "Mammi is queen." There is no deity Ma-mi-hi-rat. This illustrates one of the problems which can arise when one randomly compares names in a list of deities with those found in the Book of Abraham. When attempting to correlate a particular Near Eastern god with one mentioned in the Book of Abraham, four conditions must be met: (1) the correspondences between the names have to be reasonably explained on phonological grounds (in my opinion, Lundquist's Ma-mi-hi-rat and Kur-ra-su-ur-ur fail this test); (2) whether a cult of the god existed must be determined; (3) the date and location of the practice of this cult need to be determined and then compared with the likely dates and locations for Abraham; and (4) occurrences of the name in material available to Joseph Smith must be ruled out as a possible source before the name can be claimed to be derived from the ancient text Joseph was supposedly translating. Until these criteria are met, any equivalences proposed between ancient divine names and those found in the Book of Abraham are simply sloppy guesswork and carry no probative weight.
It should be noted that parallels to the divine names in the Book of Abraham can be found much closer to home. The name Libnah occurs several times as a place name in the Old Testament (see F. Brown, S. Driver, and C. Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexikon of the Old Testament [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980], 526), Elkanah is a personal name borne by eight individuals in the Old Testament (see R. Youngblood, "Elkanah," ABD II, 475-6), and Korash could be a variant of the Hebrew name for Cyrus, Koresh, which occurs, among other places, in Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1.
A skeptical attitude must also be taken to Lundquist's postulated correlation between the Book of Abraham place-name Olishem and the Akkadian place-name Ulisum (Lundquist, "Abraham at Ebla," 234-35). Ulisum occurs in a text from the reign of the Akkadian king Naram-Sin (ca. 2250 B.C.), and apparently refers to a place in northern Syria. According to the Book of Abraham, Olishem was located in Chaldea, which is to be located in southern Mesopotamia. For this equation to be valid, one has to accept the considerably weak argument that Chaldea could refer to a place in northern Syria and overlook the fact that Ulisum is attested far earlier than the most likely dates for Abraham. This equation cannot bear the weight of proving the antiquity or historicity of the Book of Abraham.
Our Comment: This shows the importance of actually looking at the footnotes and the research that writers use to support bold claims. In light of Thompson's comments on Lunquist's flawed reasoning, Daniel Peterson's comments about Joseph correctly identifying the four gods is not to be taken as evidence supporting Joseph.