JustMe wrote:Jersey Girl
Are you saying that such artifacts have been discovered from the same time period of the Book of Mormon?
Oh not only that, but from the same place as the Book of Mormon's origins! Jerusalem, 600 B.C.
religious writing on metal plates. Actually quoting and use of scripture. And discovered by non-LDS archaeologists! But I know, that doesn't count.
Well, it would count if you'd ltell me what they are. Pretend I'm from Missouri and show me.
For you I would be glad to oblige. The silver plates from Jerusalem 600 B.C. discussed by Wendell J. Adams in the
Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. Also discussed in the relatively new book
Glimpses of Lehi's Jerusalem. The JBMS articles are free on the FARMS website. They even have a search feature. I'd try first "silver plates." Hope that helps ya!
I love checking out evidence for the Book of Mormon, and I have not had much time lately, so I am glad I came across your post. I checked up the article you referred to, and things got quite interesting. First of all there was the FARMs article “Lehi’s Jerusalem and Writing on Metal Plates.” By William J. Adams Jnr. Which looked pretty straight forward and – by crikey – it describes the discovery of metal plates, no less, from about the time of Lehi, from Jerusalem.
Plate I, lines 14–20 and Plate II, lines 5–12 are quotations from Numbers 6:24–26 and thus are quite readable on the plates. The other parts of the plates are not quotations and are more difficult to read.
The conclusion for Book of Mormon studies is that the gap has been filled, and we can be certain that religious texts were written on precious metal plates in Lehi's Jerusalem.
Wow – fantastic I thought. Then I read closer that the plates were 1 inch by 4 inches - pretty small for record keeping one would think. Or anything other than a wee prayer or similar. And even worse, they were all rolled up. And took three years to unroll. Rolled up metal plates? Wouldn’t that make them a bit hard to read? Sounds like they were probably never intended to be unrolled after they were made.
But, there at the bottom was a reference:
Gabriel Barkay, "Priestly Blessings on Silver Plates" (in Hebrew), Cathedra 52 (1989): 46–59.
Having learned to always check a FARMs reference out, I did just that.
Bugger me, I could not find it with a standard search anywhere. So thinking that there may be slight translation problems I cranked up Google and looked for Prof Barkay’s CV. The original was in Hebrew (as Adams states), and not only were the pp wrong, but this and every other academic translation of the paper title calls the items ‘plaques’ or ‘amulets’. Looking further into what Prof Barkay says about the plaques in a variety of sources I find they are described as ‘scrolls’, ‘amulets’, ‘tiny silver scrolls’, ‘thin silver strips’ and ‘phylactery’. Never ‘plates’.
The only place in any literature where these things are called ‘plates’ is in Mormon apologetic literature.
Their value is in that they were the oldest Old Testament scripture found; that the scripture was inscribed on an amulet was not remarkable. The FARMs article appeared to conflate the significance to the scripture with the material it was written on.
It is a good thing that FARMs is not an official voice of COJCOLDS, otherwise, I might think someone were trying to pull the wool over my eyes.