A supplementary podcast to this letter can be read here.
To Truth Seekers,
When you read the second chapter of the Book of Abraham, you’ll notice that it sounds very similar to chapter 12 of the book of Genesis in the King James Bible. Here, for example, are some side-by-side quotations of these two chapters:
Book of Abraham (Chapter 2) | Genesis (Chapter 12) |
3 Now the Lord had said unto me: Abraham, get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee. | 1 Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: |
21 And I, Abraham, journeyed, going on still towards the south; and there was a continuation of a famine in the land; and I, Abraham, concluded to go down into Egypt, to sojourn there, for the famine became very grievous. | 9 And Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south. 10 ¶ And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was grievous in the land. |
Then there is Abraham 4–5, which also parallels what we read in KJV Genesis 1–2:
Book of Abraham (Chapter 4) | Genesis (Chapter 1) |
1 And then the Lord said: Let us go down. And they went down at the beginning, and they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth. 2 And the earth, after it was formed, was empty and desolate, because they had not formed anything but the earth; and darkness reigned upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of the Gods was brooding upon the face of the waters. 3 And they (the Gods) said: Let there be light; and there was light. | 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. |
The author of the CES Letter, Jeremy Runnells, is disturbed by the quotations or paraphrases of the King James Bible in the Book of Abraham. He writes:
86% of Book of Abraham chapters 2, 4, and 5 are King James Version Genesis chapters 1, 2, 11, and 12. Sixty-six out of seventy-seven verses are quotations or close paraphrases of King James Version wording.
Runnells cites Grant Palmer’s book An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins to substantiate this claim. Palmer claims that “the primary source for chapters 2, 4, and 5 of Abraham is Genesis 1, 2, 11 (vv. 28–29), and 12.” Palmer estimates that “sixty-six out of seventy-seven verses in this section of Abraham (86 percent) are quotations or close paraphrases of KJV wording.”(1) With this claim in mind, which he repeats uncritically, Runnells asks,
If the Book of Abraham is an ancient text written thousands of years ago “by his own hand upon papyrus,” then what are 17th century King James Version text doing in there? What does this say about the book being anciently written by Abraham?
These are fair questions, but ones that require a bit of unpacking in order to answer.
First, let’s assess the claim made by Grant Palmer and repeated by Runnells that “the primary source for chapters 2, 4, and 5 of Abraham is Genesis 1, 2, 11 (vv. 28–29), and 12.” In fact, most of Abraham 2 (verses 6-21) has no parallel with Genesis 12. The idea that Joseph Smith just copied Genesis does not account for that text. Moreover, if Joseph Smith simply made up this material, he successfully included several authentic ancient elements in the text of the Book of Abraham.(2) The CES Letter and its sources do not mention or account for this fact.
Turning to Abraham 4–5, which parallels Genesis 1–2, we find again that the Book of Abraham includes elements that are absent or only hinted at in the King James English text of Genesis. The most notable of these is the presence of the divine council in the Abraham text, which is unquestionably ancient and authentic to the world of Abraham.(3) The CES Letter and its sources ignore Abraham 3, which has no parallel with the King James Bible but which, once again, captures authentically ancient cosmological concepts?(4)
This essay does not deny the presence of King James passages in the text of the Book of Abraham, but it also accounts for material that is ancient but not in the King James Bible. Seekers need to account for the Book of Abraham as a whole, not pick and choose aspects of it that confirm biases one way or another.
Matthew Grey published a more responsible analysis of the relationship between the King James Bible and the Book of Abraham text.(5) Professor Grey notes how the Book of Abraham text was both subtly and profoundly influenced by Joseph Smith's study of Hebrew under Joshua Seixas in Kirtland in 1836. Grey notes that while Joseph “clearly deferred to his various textbooks on several points—sometimes preferring one resource over another—there were other instances in which his own examination of the papyri, developing theology, and revelations merged with his creative use of less conventional Hebrew definitions or technicalities, thus allowing him to tease out unique theological concepts and produce a distinctively expansive translation.” Grey calls this method of producing the English text of the Book of Abraham a “dynamic process” that “go[es] beyond the KJV” and Joseph’s knowledge of Hebrew he gained in Kirtland.(6) Grey concludes that,
Whatever the exact motivation for Smith’s methodology, the final result of his translation was a creation account that—even if initially inspired by the papyri—was largely based on the KJV text of Genesis 1–2 and adjusted or expanded at key points to reflect various Hebrew nuances, many of which derived from his personal studies and coursework with Joshua Seixas. These resources and his other sources of inspiration all converged and were animated by Smith’s prophetic genius to produce a distinct narrative of a divine council of Gods planning the creation of the world, organizing preexisting materials into a terrestrial form, and providing human bodies to house premortal intelligences so as to provide them with an opportunity for eternal progression. Thus in the process of translating the Book of Abraham, the blending of Joseph Smith’s academic endeavors and his prophetic creativity led to some of the most innovative aspects of subsequent Mormon theology.(7)
That way of thinking about Joseph Smith as a translator might challenge unexamined assumptions or undermine older ways of thinking based on limited data. But it does not repudiate the inspiration of the Book of Abraham and its authentically ancient elements that date to the world of Abraham.
So, to answer Runnells’s question (“If the Book of Abraham is an ancient text written thousands of years ago ‘by his own hand upon papyrus,’ then what are 17th century King James Version text doing in there?”), we give the same answer as that for the Book of Mormon: the presence of King James quotations in the text is the result of Joseph Smith as the modern translator. Pretty much everything written on this topic by Royal Skousen,(8) Brant A. Gardner,(9) and Nicholas J. Frederick(10) for the Book of Mormon can to a fair degree also apply to the Book of Abraham. King James quotations in the Book of Abraham, like those in the Book of Mormon, do not tell us much about the historicity of the text per se because the text purports to be a translation in the first place. But it does tell us something about the method by which Joseph translated or revealed the text of these ancient records for modern, Bible-reading, English-speaking persons.
By focusing on the mere preponderance of King James language in the Book of Abraham, the CES Letter misses the forest for the trees.
This narrow way of thinking about translation is not just encountered in Joseph Smith’s translations. Deborah Roberts has explained how “traces of a later text” (such as the King James Bible) might be present in an earlier text (such as the Book of Abraham or the Book of Mormon) “by virtue of both texts’ participation in a textual system and by way of our reading. But there is one way in which these traces are sometimes made more materially present, and that is when reading becomes (literally) writing, that is, in a translation.” She notes how “translations themselves are, of course, of necessity later than the work they translate.” As such, “Translators in their belatedness may read and therefore write a work as referring to still other texts, some of them not yet written at the time of the source text.”(11) Roberts offers examples of this phenomenon in other works:
As with instances of intertextuality in general, anachronistic quotations will only play a role in interpretation where the reader knows the quoted text. Many readers will presumably take Robert Fagles’s Odyssey to be alluding to The Godfather when Hephaestus says (8.401 in the translation, 8.358 in the original): ‘Now there’s an offer I really can’t refuse!’ Fewer will realize that the opening words of Stanley Lombardo’s Odyssey, ‘Speak, Memory’, are borrowed from the title of Nabokov’s memoir, and fewer still that Lombardo is quoting Thomas Nashe in a simile at Iliad 16.306–9 (16.297–300 in the orginal). Sometimes a translator supplies the necessary information. In her preface to Hecuba, Marilyn Nelson tells us she has added two allusions in the chorus’s concluding lines (1852–68), one to Robert Hayden’s poem ‘The Middle Passage’, and one to the spiritual, ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’; she also tells us why she has done so.(12)
Roberts notices how Victorian translators of the Classics gave deference to “a peculiarly privileged archaic intertext, the King James Bible,” in their rendering of the ancient Greek and Roman greats.(13) If this was acceptable for them, then why is it suddenly unacceptable for Joseph Smith? To put Joseph in some unique category apart from his contemporaries is simply special pleading. In any case, Roberts concludes her analysis with this thought-provoking observation:
It can of course be argued that this sort of translation by quotation is not radically different in its slightly surreal anachronism from translation itself; after all, if Homer can speak twentieth-century English, why can’t he quote Nabokov? Or—supposing we accept that the shift of language per se is by convention to be ignored—if the Greek tragedians can, in Murray’s versions, write choruses in the style of Swinburne, then why can’t they allude to Poe? A less perverse way to ask this question might be: if we can use all the linguistic and stylistic resources of our time to express what an earlier author says, why should the words of an author known to our time be excluded? But in fact such anachronistic quotations or echoes seem to lack the transparency (or what some would call the illusion of transparency) we otherwise grant to language and poetic idiom.(14)
“If Homer can speak twentieth-century English, why can’t he quote Nabokov?” To rephrase this for our purposes, “If Abraham [or Nephi or Alma] can speak nineteenth-century English, why can’t they quote the King James Bible?”
In order to truly understand Joseph Smith’s scriptural productions and translations, we must keep in mind all of the available data, not merely the data selectively highlighted by the CES Letter. Reducing the Book of Abraham’s quotations of the King James Bible to some kind of cold, sterile, derivative would be like reducing Mozart’s music to mere notes on a bar line scribbled on a piece of paper.(15) Seekers can look beyond the CES Letter’s few misleading sentences on this point and dive deep into the history, cosmos, and teachings of the Book of Abraham revealed for us through Joseph Smith’s prophetic proficiency.
Sincerely,
Stephen O. Smoot
Citations:
Grant Palmer, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 19.
See the many examples offered in Part 2 (“The Book of Abraham in the Ancient World”) of A Guide to the Book of Abraham, ed. Stephen O. Smoot et al. (published as BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 [2022], 67–201).
See Stephen O. Smoot et al., “The Divine Council,” in A Guide to the Book of Abraham, 150–154.
See Smoot et al., A Guide to the Book of Abraham, 135–174.
See Matthew J. Grey, “Approaching Egyptian Papyri through Biblical Language: Joseph Smith’s Use of Hebrew in His Translation of the Book of Abraham,” in Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, ed. Michael Hubbard Mackay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 390–451.
Grey, “Approaching Egyptian Papyri through Biblical Language,” 442–43.
Grey, “Approaching Egyptian Papyri through Biblical Language,” 445.
Royal Skousen, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon: Part 5, the King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2019).
Brant A. Gardner, The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011); Engraven Upon Plates, Printed Upon Paper: Textual and Narrative Structures of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2023).
Nicholas J. Frederick, The Bible, Mormon Scripture, and the Rhetoric of Allusivity (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016); “The Book of Mormon and Its Redaction of the King James New Testament: A Further Evaluation of the Interaction between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 44–87.
Deborah H. Roberts, “Translating Antiquity: Intertextuality, Anachronism, and Archaism,” in Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean, ed. S. J. Heyworth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 259.
Roberts, “Translating Antiquity,” 259–60.
Roberts, “Translating Antiquity,” 274.
Roberts, “Translating Antiquity,” 261.
For two examples of how the Book of Abraham both follows the KJV Bible in its language but captures authentically ancient concepts or themes not in the KJV, see Smoot et al., A Guide to the Book of Abraham, 113–120. For an example of the Book of Abraham’s rich narrative complexity, see Smoot et al., A Guide to the Book of Abraham, 129–133.
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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