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From another poster on a different board:

'I have always known about the King Follet discourse and how Joseph Smith used it as a way to prove that there are characteristics about God we do not know about until this sermon. He has, and it has, been used to prove that we can be gods one day. The following paragraph hit me the other day when I read it and googled the word "Berosheit". That is when it all hit that he did not have a clue about Hebrew and was making stuff up.
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I shall comment on the very first Hebrew word in the Bible. I will make a comment on the very first sentence of the history of creation in the Bible--Berosheit. I want to analyze the word. Baith--in, by, through, and everything else. Rosh--the head. Sheit--grammatical termination. When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the Baith there. An old Jew, without any authority, added the word. He thought it too bad to begin to talk about the head! It read first, "The head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods." That is the true meaning of the words. Baurau signified to bring forth. If you do not believe it, you do not believe the learned man of God. Learned men can teach you no more than what I have told you. Thus, the head God brought forth the Gods in the grand council.'

Anyone care to disprove the point?

Another poster on a different board wrote:The following paragraph hit me the other day when I read it and googled the word "Berosheit". That is when it all hit that he did not have a clue about Hebrew and was making stuff up.

Joseph did have a clue about Hebrew, but in this case he probably wasn't translating "berosheit." The definitive treatment is Kevin Barney's article, "Joseph Smith's Emendation of Hebrew Genesis 1:1."

Barney argues that "Joseph was conjecturally emending the Hebrew prior to translating it. That is, Joseph was not translating the single word bere'sit directly into 'the head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods'; rather Joseph was modifying and expanding bere'sit into a Hebrew phrase that could be rendered 'the head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods.' The idea was that his conjectured Hebrew phrase had been original, but was altered by scribes until all that remained was the extant word bere'sit" (p. 27).

Using Joshua Seixas's grammar, Barney then plausibly reconstructs how Joseph may have arrived at his conjectural emendation (pp. 128-133). Actually, I think Joseph's Hebrew skillz were pretty good.

In order to answer the OP don't we first have to determine the nature of the discourse? Was it secular or revelatory?

I don't know whether or not he got the Hebrew right, but the concepts he is talking about are definitely real - originally the Hebrew religion included a whole pantheon of gods. That's because the Hebrews really took their faith from the Canaanites. It didn't start to resemble the Judaism we see represented in most of the Old Testament until the Babylonian captivity. Joseph's really talking about the wild, pagan era of what we might call "Judaism," which was more interesting. El and his pantheon weren't that much different in the beginning from any other set of pagan gods. Yahweh wasn't originally part of it - he was taken from the Edomites and promoted/merged with El.

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