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To Truth Seekers,
One of the most famous anachronisms appears in William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, where in Act 2, Scene 1 the following exchange takes place:
Clock strikes.
BRUTUS Peace, count the clock.
CASSIUS The clock hath stricken three.
Something is anachronistic if it is out of place, historically speaking. The mechanical clock is an anachronism in this scene because such was not invented until the medieval period. Ancient Rome, in other words, had no striking clocks for Brutus and Cassius to hear.
Since at least 1831, people skeptical of Joseph Smith’s claims to being a prophet have looked for anachronisms in the scriptural texts he produced. Their point is that if Joseph got the historical order of things wrong, then, like Shakespeare, he was writing fiction, not translating ancient scripture.(1)
The CES Letter, “Why are there anachronisms in the Book of Abraham?” It points to three examples in particular: “the terms Chaldeans, Egyptus, and Pharaoh.”
Why Do Anachronisms Sometimes Appear in Historical Texts?(2)
Contrary to the CES Letter's assumption, authentic historical documents in fact can and sometimes do contain anachronistic elements. How is this possible? Using the Bible as an example, scholar Alan Millard explained how “anachronisms [are not] necessarily a sign of composition long after the events described took place.” This is so because ancient scribes who copied manuscripts over a text’s course of transmission were not always careful or precise and sometimes accidentally or intentionally introduced anachronisms to their text.(3) Another scholar, Daniel DeWitt Lowery, explains how “[ancient] stories were changed and adapted to fit the needs of a particular audience, something considered to be a completely acceptable practice of the day.” This is unusual or unacceptable by modern standards, but it was not so anciently. As a result “it was not at all unusual for anachronisms to appear in texts. That is, as stories were adapted for particular audiences, certain elements of the story—especially things such as gods, place names, and people—fit more naturally with the receiving audience than with the world of the text (appearing out of place in that world). As texts were adapted and updated as a matter of practice, the appearance of anachronism was not at all unusual or out of place.”(4)
Beyond the problem of ancient copyists updating their texts and thereby sometimes introducing anachronisms into the composition, translators sometimes introduce anachronisms into texts they translate. Take, once again, the Bible. The editors of NRSVue Bible explain in their preface how “deciphering the meanings of the Bible’s ancient languages involves a host of efforts: the study of the languages themselves, the comparative study of cognate languages from the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, the disciplines of philology and linguistics, and the historical study of the social, cultural, and economic contexts in which the Bible was written.” Because of this, “The NRSVue took special care not to use terms in ways that are historically or theologically anachronistic,” as this could confuse or mislead modern readers. However, the editors confess that “as in every translation, anachronism is unavoidable.”(5)
Finally, there is the simple fact that something once considered anachronistic may, with new discoveries, turn out in fact not to be anachronistic at all. A classic example of this that is relevant to Abraham is the mention of camels at Genesis 12:16. This has long been cited as an anachronism in the story of Abraham, since it has long been believed that the camel was not domesticated in the ancient Near East until the Iron Age, much later than Abraham’s own time period. However, new discoveries have effectively challenged this argument, and have forced scholars to reconsider assumptions they made about the biblical text.(6)
The CES Letter does not inform its readers of any of these considerations. It misleads readers by giving the mistaken impression that the mere presence of an anachronism in a text is enough to condemn it forever as a fraud. This way of thinking, however, while perhaps effective as a simplistic heuristic, is not how informed scholars or critical readers engage historical texts.
Anachronisms in the Book of Abraham
So how can informed, critical readers consider the CES Letter's three anachronisms in the Book of Abraham: Chaldeans, Egyptus, and Pharaoh?
Chaldeans
The Book of Abraham opens with the patriarch saying that he dwelt in “the land of the Chaldeans” (Abraham 1:1). In Abraham 2:1, we read that Abraham’s family lived at a place called Ur of the Chaldees. Who are these mysterious Chaldeans, and are they in fact anachronistic in our text? I have written extensively on this subject.(7) Based on our currently available evidence, the Chaldeans were, it appears, a northern Semitic people who migrated into central and then southern Mesopotamia. They eventually established a political dynasty that came to dominate the region, so that by the time of the prophet Jeremiah the name Chaldean had become synonymous with Babylonian (and this is frequently how it’s used in the Old Testament). Our earliest references to the Chaldeans (or Chaldees) outside the Bible come from Neo-Assyrian sources from the first half of the first millennium BC. This, effectively, is why the name Chaldean or Chaldee is considered an anachronism in the story of Abraham (both in the Bible and in the Book of Abraham). However, this supposed anachronism is not based on evidence. It is based on the absence of evidence. It is never wise to declare once and for all that evidence does not exist because the discovery of new evidence can overturn that premature conclusion.
It is true that we do not presently have external, independent evidence of Chaldeans contemporary with Abraham. That does not necessarily mean they did not exist in his day. As the old adage goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As with Abraham’s camels, future discoveries might one day confirm the presence of the Chaldean people in Abrham's time. In the meantime, it is accurate to say that there is no known evidence for that now. It is inaccurate to say that no such evidence exists. In the meantime, believers (such as myself) are content merely to acknowledge a gap in our knowledge and wait to see what the future may have in store for us.
Egyptus
The name Egyptus in the Book of Abraham appears as a personal name for one of the daughters of Ham (Abraham 1:23–25). However, the name originally appeared in the Kirtland-era manuscripts of the Book of Abraham as Zeptah. This could very easily be a rendering of the attested Egyptian name Siptah, meaning “son of [the god] Ptah.” The name was changed for unknown reasons to Egyptus sometime shortly before the Book of Abraham went to press in Nauvoo.(8) The CES Letter appears to claim Egyptus is an anachronism because this form of the name clearly derives from the Greek Aigyptos (Latin: Aegyptus). What would a Greek name be doing in a text purportedly written by Abraham around 2000 BC?(9) There is a good answer and it relates to what I mentioned earlier. As my coauthors and I explained:
Aigyptos is a rendering of one of the Egyptian names for the ancient city of Memphis, which contains the theophoric Ptah element (ḥwt-kꜣ-Ptḥ; literally “the estate of the Ka [spirit] of [the god] Ptah”). Since Egyptes/Egyptus is a Greek name that would be anachronistic for Abraham’s day, it might reflect the work of ancient scribes transmitting the text who “updated” the name centuries later. This may likewise have been the case with the name Zeptah as well. (10)
It may be significant that the Joseph Smith Papyri date to the Ptolemaic Period (circa 330–30 BC) when Greeks had a prominent cultural and linguistic presence in Egypt.(11) This could explain the presence of an anachronistic Greek name in a book originally composed by Abraham. Or, alternatively, since he appears to have made the change from Zeptah to Egyptus before the Book of Abraham went to print, the anachronism could have been introduced by Joseph Smith as the modern translator of the text.(12) In either case, this is exactly the sort of anachronism scholars are used to seeing when texts are transmitted or copied over a long period of time.(13) In cases like these, the argument that anachronism is evidence that a text is not ancient is premature.
Pharaoh
The final anachronism mentioned in the CES Letter is the name/title Pharaoh, which appears at Abraham 1:6–9, 13, 17, 20, 25–27. There it appears as both the name of a deity but also the name or title of the ruler of Egypt. In fact, contrary to what the CES Letter seems to argue, the word Pharaoh (deriving from the Egyptian meaning “great house”) itself is not intrinsically anachronistic to the Book of Abraham. The word is attested before Abraham’s day.(14) What appears anachronistic is the usage of Pharaoh as a name for one of Ham’s descendants in the text. (But note that Abraham 1:27 seems to use Pharaoh as a generic title, not a personal name.) The reason this is considered anachronistic by some, such as Stephen Thompson,(15) is that the usage of Pharaoh as an appellative for the monarch him or herself personally and not the royal estate generally only became standardized centuries after Abraham’s day.(16) While this may be true, rare exceptions to this rule are attested before Abraham’s day, so it’s not so much an anachronism as it is an oddity in the text.(17)
Abraham 1:12, 14
Finally, the CES Letter says that “Abraham refers to the facsimiles in 1:12 and 1:14.” This is a problem because the papyri do not date to Abraham’s day, so it would be impossible for Abraham to have referenced something he himself did not compose. What the CES Letter does not consider is that Abraham 1:12, 14 could be interlinear insertions in the text and not original to Joseph Smith’s translation.(18) If this is the case, as it appears to be, then the placement of these verses in our modern text reflects assumptions Joseph Smith or his clerks may have had about the source of the Book of Abraham or the placement of the facsimiles, and not the historicity of Abraham's text itself.(19)
So where does this leave us? The CES Letter identifies three potential anachronisms in its case against the Book of Abraham.(20) The implication is that anachronisms prove that a text can only be as ancient as it's most recent historical element. That simple explanation does not account for the facts of ancient documents being transmitted through time, with anachronisms introduced along the way. It is also the case that none of the CES Letter's three anachronisms in the Book of Abraham are conclusive. Each can be plausibly accounted for. The CES Letter does not explain why or how they are an issue for the Book of Abraham. Jeremy Runnells, author of the CES Letter, is not a scholar of the Ancient Near East and probably did not know how to study these things systematically in light of all that is known about them. He probably just uncritically repeated what he got elsewhere. In any case, the CES Letter is not a dependable source of all the facts or analysis related to this issue. For more thorough treatments of the complex issue of anachronisms in the Book of Abraham (or the Book of Mormon, for that matter), keep seeking.
Cordially Yours,
Stephen O. Smoot
See “Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon” at mormonr.org, accessed April 14, 2024, for an overview of the arguments for and against the presence of anachronisms in the Book of Mormon.
The points made in this section are drawn and summarized from “Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon” in note 1 above, of which I was one of the lead authors and researchers.
Alan R. Millard, “Abraham,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1:37.
Daniel DeWitt Lowery, Toward a Poetics of Genesis 1–11: Reading Genesis 4:17–22 in its Near Eastern Context (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 134.
“Preface,” NRSVue Holy Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2022), xii.
See Martin Heide and Joris Peters, Camels in the Biblical World (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2021).
See Stephen O. Smoot, “‘In the Land of the Chaldeans’: The Search for Abraham’s Homeland Revisited,” BYU Studies Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2017): 7–37. See also Paul Y. Hoskisson “Where Was Ur of the Chaldees?” in The Pearl of Great Price: Revelations from God, ed. H. Donl Peterson and Charles D. Tate Jr. )Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1989), 119–136.
See Stephen O. Smoot et al., “Zeptah and Egyptes,” BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 5 (2022): 101–106.
This is the implicit question Runnells raises in his objection, but which he does not bother to actually articulate.
Smoot et al., “Zeptah and Egyptes,” 103–104.
Incidentally, Runnells is mistaken when he claims the papyri date to the Roman Period (the first century AD). See Stephen O. Smoot et al., “What Egyptian Papyri Did Joseph Smith Possess?” and “The Ancient Owners of the Joseph Smith Papyri,” BYU Studies Quarterly, 61, no. 4 (2022): 13–18, 201–205.
Smoot et al., “Zeptah and Egyptes,” 104
Smoot et al., “Zeptah and Egyptes,” 104.
For just one instance, see the Fifth Dynasty tomb inscription of Ptahshepses (British Museum, EA 682, columns 2 and 3).
Stephen E. Thompson, “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 28, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 154–155.
Again, this appears to be the implicit argument the author of the CES Letter is making but which he does not actually articulate, perhaps because he himself is unaware of precisely how Pharaoh is apparently anachronistic in the text.
See Ogden Goelet, “The Nature of the Term pr-‘3 During the Old Kingdom,” Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar 10 (1989/1990): 77–90, esp. 86, 90.
See the discussion in Stephen O. Smoot, “Framing the Book of Abraham: Presumptions and Paradigms,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 47 (2021): 282–286.
See John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017), 143, who observed, “The references to the facsimiles within the text of the Book of Abraham seem to have been nineteenth-century editorial insertions.” I believe Gee’s conclusion is probably correct, although see Kerry Muhlestein, “Assessing the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Introduction to the Historiography of Their Acquisitions, Translations, and Interpretations,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 22 (2016): 29–32; “The Explanation-Defying Book of Abraham,” in A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History, ed. Laura Harris Hales (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2016), 82; “Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: A Faithful, Egyptological Point of View,” in No Weapon Shall Prosper: New Light on Sensitive Issues, ed. Robert L. Millet (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011), 225–26, for an alternate explanation.
See additionally John Gee, “‘The Wind and the Fire to Be My Chariot’: The Anachronism that Wasn’t,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 50 (2022): 299–320.
Biography:
Stephen O. Smoot is a doctoral candidate in Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literature at the Catholic University of America. He previously earned a master’s degree from the University of Toronto in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, with a concentration in Egyptology, and bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, with a concentration in Hebrew Bible, and German Studies. He is currently an adjunct instructor of religious education at Brigham Young University and a research associate with the B. H. Roberts Foundation.
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