BH>>As usual for LDS "scholars" ...what we see above is LOTS of words, LOTS of empty speculation, LOTS of giant leaps of pure equivocation and LOTS of desperate grasping at non-existent straw and poor excuses all masquerading as "scholarship" ...but did you not notice ...there is not ONE bit of evidence presented abouve that shows that Smith identified the canopic deities correctly.
D>Abraham was not an Egyptian, and if it is the case that he did author on original Book of Abraham, it was probably not intended for a primarily Eyptian audience, but for non-Egyptian readers in a potentially more heterodox cultural setting.
Straw man. I never said or implied that Abraham was an Egyptian so attempting to correct me on that point represents either your failure to read the few paragraphs above and understand them, or you are wasting your time and effort refuting a claim I never made, thus your refutation is irrelevant. Otherwise you are simply failing to engage the post to which you are responding, also making your response irrelevant. Moreover, the FACT is, the original papyrus so cherished and guarded by your organization does not exist in a vacuum. It is not the only one of its kind. There are MANY "Breathing Permits" littering the museums and curio shops of the Middle East and the world. They appear wherever 1st century mummies are unearthed in Egypt. You have to at least wonder WHY the Egyptians wold have ignored the dictates of their own religion and gone about burying their dead relatives with copies of the "Book of Abraham" instead ...or EVEN with obscure, transliterated random assemblages of Chaldean syllables as your boy Shirts requires us to believe.
The very fact that all the names used are, indeed found in the ancient world (in Syro-Canaanite form) means only that Abraham was using different names for very much the same pagan deities (there was little substantive difference between the gods of one people and another in the ancient Near East, and much snycretism and borrowing in the ongoing development of all of them).
The names from which LDS "scholars" pretend to deduce these names are Chaldee. Sadly for them, there was no "Chaldean" people or langauge (there were people and they spoke a language, but it was not "Chaldean") and the names to which LDS "scholars" refer appear for the first time many centuries
AFTER Abraham was long dead.
Let's just look at the possibilities, again from the moronic Bro. Shirts. Let's begin with Elkenah:
The hawk headed canopic, called Elkenah can and does correspond, however, with the Egyptian "qen" or "qeni" the sound of a hard "k". "In Palestine and Syria it is common to find such names combining Egyptian and West Semitic elements. (Nibley, "Facsimile No. 1 by the Figures," in "Improvement Era,", August 1969). The Egyptian element "qen" means mighty or powerful and is used in various names of the kings according to the Berlin Dictionary.
Robert Smith's commentary (a Cuneiform and Assyrian scholar) on the Book of Abraham (unpublished) mentions that this word correlates very well with the Biblical Hebrew word El-qanah, a name for 6 or more persons (often Levites, cf. 1 Sam. 1:1-2, 1 Chron. 6:22, Exo. 6:23, 9:16) At Gen. 14:19 we read "El Elyon qoneh shamayim we'aretz," "El, the Exalted one, Creator of Heaven and Earth." It is a common hypocoristic form in the late Hittite story of
Asherah and El-Qone-ersi - El-Creator-of-the-Earth (which is written El-ku-ni-ir-sa and pronounced Elkoners according to Albright YGC, pp. 46,
107, n. 32 and R. Clifford, CBQ, 33;222) The East was identified with the falcon headed canopic counterpart of Elkenah, Dw3-mwt-ef (Cf. Pyr texts 17,
27-8, 2078-79, Ezekiel 1:10, 10:14, Rev. 4:7).
The ah ending of the name is typical of Canaanite proper names written in their Egyptian form. The well known name Horan is written in Egyptian as Hwrwnana, a personal name, and as a place name it is Hrwn-ah. (Nibley - Aug. 1969, p. 141).
Bar Hebraeus noted that in the days of Terah, Abraham's father, the Egyptians learned Chaldaeism.
According to Father De Vaux, the land of Canaan is designated in the Amarna Letters as the land of Kinahni or Kinahhi. This is close the Elkenah, close
enough philologically to know there really was such a place and name. A region of the earth as Joseph Smith designated it. A letter of Ranses II calls Canaan "Kinahhi", though the Egyptians preferred Kn'n.
The point is that all over the Egyptian-Syro-Palestinian area Kinah was a common
designation for Canaan, and the name El-kenah could certainly mean "God of Kenah" or Canaan. And this particular Canopic stood for the designation of
the east, East of Heliopolis, since, to the Egyptians this was regarded as the exact center of the world. Everything to the east of this was Kenite country. These are the people who covenanted with Abraham no less.
This is also the vast area that Abraham was promised as a promised land in the Dead Sea Scrolls Genesis Apocryphon. The Rabbis identified Kenite country with the deserts stretching all the way from the southern tip of Arabia to Asia Minor. In the prophecies of the last days, the Kenites are identified with the Ishmaelites and Nelson Glueck equated them with the Rachabites, the ancient sectaries of the Arabian deserts. Jethro was called the Kenite, and
his Midianite countrymen called themselves the Kenim. Some have seen in these latter the beni Kain, or Sons of Cain, traveling smiths and metal casters, with their wandering habits and their blackened faces.
H. Seebass notes that the Kenites provide the link between the Patriarchal period and the desert period of Israel in their original home being the Negev. Whatever else they are, the Kenites, are form the Egyptian point of view, the people to the EAST, its name El-kenah might well refer to the god of an eastern region or people. (Nibley, p. 142) It is more than of passing interest that in one system of classification the EAST is the hawk-headed
disc Re-Harahkte Lord of Heaven. And J. De Witt has noted in the "Chron. D' Egypte," at the purification of the king, the East is the Hawk. (Nibley,
note 118).
This is nothing but 100% pure, unadulterated equivocation dressed up with an academic reference and sprayed out as yet another example of the "snow job" tactic so common among corrupt politicians, used car salesmen, Mormon "scholars" and con artists of every type. Its the kind of pseudo-scholarship that impresses the heck out of Mormons, but fails to even earn scant consideration among those who are even minimally informed on matters of Egyptology or ancient history or even those who maintain some basic intellectual honesty. Look, man ...I know you are REAL impressed with Shirts. He's your boy! I get it. But
anyone can mix and match phonemes and syllables from different languages and construct elaborate imaginary linguistics, Droopy. Heck, I can do that and "prove" that Abraham was "really" Japanese. Is it "possible" therefore that Abraham REALLY WAS Japanese???
Furthermore, even
REAL "possibilitiies" do not replace
FACTS to anyone who is even minimally cogent. The
FACT is, the original papyrus was discovered in
Egypt, written with
Egyptian script, depicted well-recognized
Egyptian mythological characters and "gods" and is duplicated almost everywhere
Egyptian mummies from ~1st century AD Egytptian mummies are found as well as many other
Egyptian documents and inscriptions. There is no reason WHY the Egyptians would have bothered burying their dead with a linguistic hodge-podge of pseudo-Canaanite syllables.
By contrast we have EVERY necessary and sufficient reason to conclude that the original document WAS Egyptian (meaning
NOT Canaanite), reflecting Egyptian language, lore and religion. It was found in Egypt. The canopic jars in question depict important Egyptian mythological characters, and many others like it have been found wherever Egyptian mummies from the same period have been found. It obviously contains Egyptian Hieratic script and NOWHERE contains a single word of Chaldean.
Refute those facts if you can. Until you do, your copy-paste efforts simply do not replace the FACTS here son, and the FACTS prove to the undisputed satisfaction of ALL Egyptologists and archaeologists that this document is EGYPTIAN and NOT the product of a Chaldean author. As long as you are not going to actually THINK and construct your own arguments, as long as you are going to reduce your efforts to simply citing others and repeating THEIR arguments, I suggest you AT LEAST seek out better sources. Kerry Shirts has earned and deserves exactly no academic or even honest intellectual respect in this field where he has no credentials and yet pretends to correct and instruct all qualified experts who are unified against him.
-BH
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