Carroll, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem”

I just started reading James Carroll’s Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited our Modern World (2011).  While I don’t agree with everything he has to say, he has important and provocative insight.  He is also a very lyrical writer.  So far, I recommend it.

Reading Nibley 5: Mirror of the East

“The Book of Mormon as Mirror of the East (CWHN 5:25–42) {1948}

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=59&chapid=555

This is Nibley’s first publication in the Improvement Era which would become a major outlet for his Mormon-related publications for the next two decades.  The article was rewritten and published as “Men of the East” in Lehi in the Desert (1952), and it is this revised version that is published in CWHN 5:25–42.

Nibley begins with some speculations about “strange names” searching for parallels between Book of Mormon names and ancient Hebrew, Egyptian, and more broadly ancient Near Eastern names (25-34).  Nibley is here developing an important methodology of looking to non-biblical BOM proper names for possible philological connections to ancient Near Eastern languages.

Unfortunately, Nibley is rather incautious in his philological speculations.  His basic problem is that he is not careful with various ancient Near Eastern sounds and the problem of representing them with the English alphabet without diacritical marks.  Therefore, many of the possible parallels Nibley suggests are in fact ambiguous and sometimes dubious.  He also doesn’t deal with the problem of how Egyptian names theophoric of Egyptian gods were transferred to the New World by Israelites.  (Example, his speculations about Ammon as perhaps related to Amun/Amon of Egypt (30-31) rather than Ammon of the Ammonites, the close neighbors of the Israelites).  He also does not deal with different periods or sub-cultures among Book of Mormon peoples and naming practices.  In other words, he doesn’t place sufficient controls on his data, a problem that will appear in some of his other works.

Although Nibley’s onomastic work was foundational, it has been superseded by recent scholarship which has produced a number of more refined studies on BOM names.  See:

For basic methodological considerations: Hoskisson, Paul Y. “An Introduction to the Relevance of and a Methodology for a Study of the Proper Names of the Book of Mormon.” In By Study and Also By Faith, ed. J. Lundquist and S. Ricks, (Salt Lake City, 1990) 2:126-35..

This FAIR web site lists a number of BOM names with related articles examining the philological details.

http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/Anachronisms/Names

And here at the Maxwell Institute, a number of additional articles and notes

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/display/topical.php?cat_id=337

Jeffrey R. Chadwick, The Names Lehi and Sariah—Language and Meaning, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 9/1 (2000): 32-34

J. Gee, M. Roper, J. Tvedtnes, Book of Mormon Names Attested in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 9/1 (2000): 40-51

Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “Lehi in the Samaria Papyri and on an Ostracon from the Shore of the Red Sea,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Restoration Scripture 19/1 (2010): 14–21

Paul Y. Hoskisson, “It Is OK Not to Have Every Answer: The Book of Mormon Onomastic Ending -(i)hah,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Restoration Scripture 18/1 (2009): 48–55

 

The second half of this article, “Lehi and the Arabs” (34-42) talks about Lehi as a caravaneer merchant.  Nibley here assumes that Lehi was a merchant (34), a plausible idea, but nowhere stated expressly in the BOM.  The thrust of his article is a bit circular: since the BOM describes Lehi as knowing how to travel in the desert, he must have been a caravaneer/merchant.  Nibley explores possible cultural connections between ancient Jews and Arabs (36-38), and then a few more names, again most of which have been superseded by recent studies (39-42).

I will discuss the methodological issues associated with Nibley’s “Lehi in the Desert” theory when I discuss that 1950/1952 book where the theory is more fully laid out.

 

Reading Nibley 4: No Ma’am, That’s Not History

No Ma’am, That’s Not History (CWHN 11:1-46) {1946}

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=77&chapid=961

After his service in WWII (on which, see the fascinating, Sergeant Nibley, PhD) Nibley briefly went to work for the LDS magazine Improvement Era in the spring of 1946, during which he wrote his review of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) published as a small pamphlet (Consecrated Life, 225-6).  This was Nibley’s first publication on an LDS topic, written when he was 36.  I will site the CWHN 11:1-46 edition.

No Ma’am is in part a satire, in which Nibley exposes a number of serious problems with Brodie’s work.  It also displays Nibley’s fine writing style, his often impish wit and great sense of humor which will stand him in good stead throughout his career (Consecrated Life, 96-103).  Here are a few of the major points he makes:

• Nibley wrongly “assumed with other reviewers that when [Brodie] cited a work in her footnotes, she had actually read it, that when she quoted she was quoting correctly, and that she was familiar with the works in her bibliography. Only when other investigations led the reviewer to the same sources in ensuing years did the extent of Mrs. Brodie’s irresponsibility become apparent.” (3)
• “no blundering, dreaming, undisciplined, shallow and opportunistic fakir could have left behind what Joseph Smith did, both in men’s hearts and on paper.” (5)
• “It is important to ask what principle Mrs. Brodie follows in making her choice.  This is not hard to discover. Our guide first makes up her mind about Joseph Smith and then proceeds to accept any and all evidence, from whatever source, that supports her theory.” (7)
• “This brings up a very important aspect of the Brodie method, namely, the use of parallels as an argument. It has become the favorite device of non-Mormon writers. Oriental [meaning Middle Eastern] literature bristles with parallels to the Book of Mormon that are far more full and striking than anything that can be found in the West.” (8)
• [Hamblin: this is the first notice of Nibley’s method of examining the Middle Eastern context for the Book of Mormon.  This methodological insight--which seems rather mundane now--is probably Nibley’s greatest contribution to Mormon Studies, and founded an entire new way of approaching the the Book of Mormon.  His first publication using this method is “The Book of Mormon as a Mirror of the East.” in 1948, two years after No Ma’am.]
• “The fact that two theories or books present parallelisms, no matter how striking, may imply a common source, but it certainly does not in itself prove that the one is derived from the other.” (8)
• [Hamblin: This passage notes the problem with the parallel methodology.  LDS scholars and critics are still working through precisely these issues that Nibley first noted here.  Nibley anticipates a wide range of ideas which have become standard interpretation of the Book of Mormon, which I’ll note later.]
• “Why does the language [of the Book of Mormon], with its strained and remarkably Semitic structure, in no way resemble his [Joseph Smith’s] own vigorous and extravagant prose?” (16-7)
• The BOM peoples “do not claim for a moment to be the sole inhabitants of the hemisphere” (17); here Nibley anticipates the Limited Geography theory.
• “Brodie’s argument throughout the whole period rests ultimately on nothing but her own insight into the inner, nay the unconscious, mind of the Prophet” (20).  This has become, of course, a fundamental problem with anti-Mormon arguments for decades, with no resolution in sight.  It is rather shocking how anti-Mormons are unwilling to come to grips with this problem.
• Nibley briefly responds to a number of fairly standard issues: sincerity (18), miracles (19), Book of Abraham (21-22), Masonry and the Temple (22-23), Caswall Psalter (23-24), polygamy 24-25).
• Nibley again emphasizes Brodie’s method consists essentially of mind-reading (26).
• Conversions could not be based on the personal charisma of JS, since most converts never met JS before they joined the Church, and most were from Europe (28).
• [Hamblin: Nibley makes this dubious claim:]  “But the Mormons have no History of Dogma. … there are no experts on matters of doctrine; there has never been a council or synod to alter or even discuss any matter of doctrine.  If Joseph Smith were to walk into a conference of the Mormon Church today he would find himself completely at home; and if he were to address the congregation they would never for a moment detect anything the least bit strange, unfamiliar, or old-fashioned in his teaching. Yet for all this incredible doctrinal stability, the Mormons have been of all people the least disposed to fight change — no one insists more emphatically on their passion for progress than Brodie herself. … Yet of all churches in the world, only this one has not found it necessary to readjust any part of its doctrine in the last hundred years.” (29-30)  [I think this is demonstrably wrong.  However, Nibley was writing before the beginning of serious Mormon intellectual history.]
• Nibley’s overall assessment is Brodie as a “glib and superficial mind of the modern English major, the copy-desk mind with its inevitable leaning towards journalism, and its buoyant faith in accomplishing all things by the mere manipulation of words. Brodie’s silences are an eloquent commentary on the shallow thinking of the times” (31).
• This gem: Brodie “is not one to be stopped by uncooperative documents and recalcitrant sources; and she is most at home when there are no documents at all.” (35)
• Brodie’s contribution is to show that you can’t make a plausible and consistent secular explanation of JS that accounts for all the evidence (35-39).  “If anyone has a right to reject Joseph Smith’s own story, it is also anybody’s right to ask the skeptic for a more plausible version of what happened.”  This insight has been confirmed again and again in the 65 years since Nibley wrote this review.
• Nibley’s final conclusion: “The book is nothing but a mass of strained interpretations and limiting explanations, mostly in terms of a highly intimate and intuitive psychology.” (37)

For a centennial appraisal of Nibley’s approach to JS and early Mormonism, see: R. Bushman, “Hugh Nibley and Joseph Smith,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 19/1 (2010): 4-13

Since Nibley’s 1946 review, a number of important new critiques have been made of Brodie’s work (from FAIR web site http://en.fairmormon.org/Specific_works/Fawn_McKay_Brodie):

Cohen, Charles L. “No Man Knows My Psychology: Fawn Brodie, Joseph Smith, and Psychoanalysis,” Brigham Young University Studies 44 no. 1 (2005): 55–78. PDF link

Midgley, Louis, “F. M. Brodie “The Fasting Hermit and Very Saint of Ignorance”: A Biographer and Her Legend (Review of No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, The Mormon Prophet by Fawn McKay Brodie),” FARMS Review of Books 8/2 (1996): 147–230. off-site PDF link

Midgley, Louis, “The Legend and Legacy of Fawn Brodie (Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life),” FARMS Review of Books 13/1 (2001): 21–72. off-site

Midgley, Louis, “Comments on Critical Exchanges (Review of: “A Hard Day for Professor Midgley: An Essay for Fawn McKay Brodie”),” FARMS Review of Books 13/1 (2001): 91–126. off-site PDF link

Novak, Gary F. “Review of Dale Morgan On Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History by John Phillip Walker,” FARMS Review of Books 8/1 (1996): 122–167. off-site PDF link

My Exploration of John 5:19-49 on Patheos

Full pdf version on DropBox
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15865520/Enigmatic%20Mirror/EM-John%205b2.pdf

Online at Patheos
http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Three-Witnesses-of-Jesus-William-Hamblin-03-18-2011?offset=0&max=1

Reading Nibley 3: Sparsiones

“Sparsiones” CWHN 10:148-194

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=76&chapid=950

“Sparsiones” was accepted for publication in the Classical Journal August 1942 (age 32), but was not published until 1945.  It is an expansion of chapter four (and other sections) of his dissertation.

The first thing I noted in reading this was that two thirds of the article is footnotes (text, 148-164; notes 165-194 in a smaller font), representing an immense amount of research–a characteristic that will continue throughout Nibley’s career.

“Sparsiones” describes the practice of scattering seeds, gifts, tickets, money or food in ritual contexts (148-149).

[Hamblin: note, the practice survives in throwing rice at weddings and trinkets at Mardi Gras.  Confetti is a degenerate version of this practice.  Papal blessings from the window of the Vatican in Rome are the last ritual vestige of sparsiones, though what is scattered by the hand is spiritual blessings rather than money or tokens.]

It was generally given by the king or emperor, and often associated with New Year (150-1).

Kings cast sparsiones from platforms, balconies, chariots (154).

[Hamblin: The CWHN edition has a number of very nice ancient illustrations of this practice from Rome, Egypt and Byzantium by Michael Lyon (153-159).]

It is symbolic of the scattering of seeds, rain and sunlight from the heavens (155-158).

Burning sacrifices on altars is a sparsiones as the sacrifice is transformed into smoke and scattered by the wind where all can smell it (160)

Sparsiones as lottery and divination (161-2).  It was not viewed random; the gods decide who receives and what each receives.  The best throw on Roman dice–two sixes–was called “Venus” indicating the goddess had blessed the thrower (163).

Nibley gives several ritual and mythic examples of casting dice/lots to determine fate of priests/heroes/kings (162-164).

[Hamblin: to Nibley’s examples could be added the dicing for the kingdom by the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata.  Also, in biblical examples: the Land of Israel was divided by lot (Josh. 19); guilt was determined by lot (1 Sam 10:20-21); priests in Israel were chosen by lot (1 Chr. 24), as was the disciple Matthais (Acts 1:26).]

Nibley summarizes his article as follows:  (1) the objects of the sparsiones were tokens symbolic of life, health, strength, and abundance, and were actually exchangeable, as far as possible, for the tangible realization of these blessings; (2) they were given by the king or his counterpart—emperor, magistrate, or paterfamilias—as the living representative of the father and founder of the race, by (3) being scattered like seed or rain from a celestial station in a manner to simulate the sowing of the race itself on the day of creation, with all the blessings and omens that rightly accompany such a begetting and amid acclamations that joyfully recognize the divine providence and miraculous power of the giver. (164)

It is also interesting to note that Nibley was already studying ancient Egyptian in the early ‘40s.  (158; Consecrated Life 141)

The Treasury of Scripture

“Scriptures are like a great house whose rooms are all closed, with a key beside each locked door. Only, the key does not fit the door it is placed beside, and the inquirer must know how to find the right key for the door he wants to open.” Jewish scholar of Caesarea to Origen, c. 240 CE)

 

Book Notice: The Jerusalem Temple and Early Christian Identity

T. Wardle, The Jerusalem Temple and Early Christian Identity, (Mohr Siebeck, 2010)

I haven’t read it yet, but it looks interesting.

Mary the Goddess?

While Catholics and Orthodox have great devotion and veneration for the Blessed Virgin Mary, Protestants view the veneration of Mary as a non-biblical accretion to Christianity.

As with many other issues (priesthood, sacraments), Mormons seem to be somewhere in the middle.  While Mormons of course do not venerate Mary, we do, in fact have a rather exalted view of Mary.  From the perspective of Mormon theology Mary is, or will be, a deified goddess.  In some ways this parallels Catholic concept of the exaltation and celestial coronation of the Virgin.  (On the other hand it is unfortunate that LDS conceptualizations of the Mother Goddess have been hi-jacked by neo-feminist thought.)

On the other hand, Mormons share the Protestant view that much of the Catholic doctrine and devotional practices are excessive, if not purely apostate.

There is a huge literature on the history of the Virgin.  Here are some useful works:

Boss, S. (ed.),  Mary: The Complete Resource (Oxford 2007).  An excellent encyclopedia of all aspects of Mary, with bibliography.

Gambero, L. Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought, (1999).  Gambero, L. Mary In The Middle Ages: The Blessed Virgin Mary In The Thought Of Medieval Latin Theologians, (2005).  These two volumes provide a complete survey of all major Catholic and Orthodox scholars on Mary through the end of the fifteenth century.

Graef, H. Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, (2009).  A detailed scholarly treatment of the history of the veneration of Mary.

Paravicini, G. Mary, Mother of God: Her Life in Icons and Scripture (2004).  A devotional book with many splendid icons of Mary.

Pelican, J. Mary Through the Ages, (1996).  An excellent academic summary of cultural history of Mary.

Rubin, M.  Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, (2009).  A cultural history from a secular perspective.

Sri, E. Queen Mother: A Biblical Theology of Mary’s Queenship, (2005).  An attempt by a Catholic scholar to establish Mary ideology in the Bible.

Warner, M. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, (1976).  A popular history of the Virgin.

 

Reading Nibley 2: New Light on Scaliger

“New Light on Scaliger” CWHN 10:303-310

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=76&chapid=954

Nibley’s first scholarly publication was a brief note in 1942 on Joseph Scaliger in the Classical Review, the preeminent publication on Classics at the time.  Nibley identified the proper pronunciation of Scaliger’s name based on an Arabic rendition of the name in a painting of Scaliger.  He also published some annotations about Scaliger by one of Scaliger’s students found handwritten in an early seventeenth century book Nibley found in the Claremont library.

In itself the article is a minor note on the life of the great Renaissance scholar.  It’s importance for Nibleyology, however, is that it reflects Scaliger as one of Nibley’s intellectual model.  Scaliger’s scholarly discipline involved the intensive study of an ancient language, followed by a chronological reading of the major texts in that language, then moving on to another language.  (Scaliger, like Nibley, had an eidetic (photographic) memory, which greatly facilitates the process.)  For Scaliger this involved learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, which are among the same ancient languages Nibley studied during his college career (Consecrated Life 105-117).  Nibley himself says explicitly that he saw Scaliger as an “intellectual hero” (Consecrated Life, 141).

The best intellectual biography of Scaliger is the rather ponderous Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983, 1993).  We also have Scaliger’s autobiography: George W. Robinson (tr.), Autobiography of Joseph Scaliger (Harvard, 1927).

Reading Nibley 7b: Dissertation background

Nibley’s life during graduate school is described in Peterson, Hugh Nibley, 104-117, and the dissertation on pages 116-117.  Nibley researched his dissertation in about eight months, from Spring 1938-December 1938.  He wrote the dissertation in about six weeks in a wild writing marathon, which is about 40 pages a week or about six pages a day.  He collected “thousands” of 3×5 cards in shoeboxes in perfect order, but tripped once, and scattered them all.  He wanted to write about mobs in ancient history, but his committee rejected that topic.  He would later publish some of his research on Roman mobs in his article “Acclamatio (Never Cry Mob)”.