Bokovoy on the warpath again

[_dartagnan]

I was wondering if you agreed with Kevin that Joseph's understanding of the "divine council" seems to be a product of his Hebrew studies with Seixas rather than some recovery of an ancient concept.

I never asked anyone to agree with me. Agree with Smith!

He pretty much explicated this as best as he could. He never claimed to have received this from divine revelation. He claimed to have ascertained it through his private Hebrew studies. I do not think it is attacking him or the Church to simply acknowledge this, even though it undermines a favorite modern apologetic argument that he must have been a prophet by knowing this.

I must say I have been impressed with Fortigurn's efforts here. As some of you may know, I once dove into this subject as well, but as you could expect, I was trying to find sources that supported by preconceived notions. So I stuck with the liberal fringe and I had to circumvent a ton of conservative scholarship. I don't think I have ever witnessed a conservative argue against this thesis in detail, so this has been a very fun and interesting read for me.

It also seems that my initial question to David isn't that far off the mark. Though he never explicitly says the Hebrew means X simply because it did so in Ugarit, when pushed to explicate his reasoning, it sure seems all of his arguments are pointing in that direction. I also liked Fortigurn's analogy with Romance languages. I speak three of them, and his point is well taken. idioms can and do vary to a considerable degree, and I suspsect the same is true in semitic languages.

Now on elohim, I believe it means gods as Gordon and others have noted. But the conservative view is that it doesn´t mean god in the same sense as God Most High. In other words, they are not the same species as God Most High.

[_Runtu]

I never asked anyone to agree with me. Agree with Smith!

I agree with you. David said he though you misreading Joseph Smith, but I disagree. He seemed pretty clear on the origins of this belief. I was just wondering if Ben agreed with David or not.

[_Enuma Elish]

Hello John,

I agree with you. David said he though you misreading Joseph Smith, but I disagree. He seemed pretty clear on the origins of this belief. I was just wondering if Ben agreed with David or not.

Just to clarify, I do believe that Kevin misreads Joseph’s claims. As I illustrated, Joseph did not claim in the sermon to have learned the truth about a plurality of gods through his study of Hebrew. Joseph specifically stated, “I wish to declare I have always and in all congregations when I have preached on the subject of the Deity, it has been the plurality of Gods. It has been preached by the Elders for fifteen years. I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage and a spirit: and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods!” (Teachings, 370).

Of course I believe that Joseph learned about the plurality of Gods through his experience in the sacred grove. However, I have never denied that Joseph’s study of Hebrew contributed to his views concerning gods and the Divine Council. In fact, I specifically believe that it did. I maintain that Joseph’s studies were an integral part of the revelatory process.

Hello Kevin,

Though he never explicitly says the Hebrew means X simply because it did so in Ugarit, when pushed to explicate his reasoning, it sure seems all of his arguments are pointing in that direction.

Thank you for recognizing that I have never said that because Ugaritic means X, so does Hebrew. I have only used the Ugaritic examples to provide further support for what Hebrew does internally, namely, as a Semitic language, Hebrew uses the word “son” to denote the member of a class or guild.

I also liked Fortigurn's analogy with Romance languages. I speak three of them, and his point is well taken. idioms can and do vary to a considerable degree, and I suspect the same is true in Semitic languages.

In addition to the fact that I have many years of formal training in Hebrew, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Northwest Semitics, and Comparative Semitics, I too read French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

This is why I disagree. It's not a compelling point.

Fortigorn’s analogy with Romances languages is in fact completely off. I can’t think of anything comparable in the Romance languages for the mere fact that the use of son to denote a member of a class or guild in Semitic languages is not a mere idiomatic expression. Rather, it is a fundamental grammatical construct shared by all Semitic languages and therefore a construct that traces its roots to Proto-Semitic semantics.

However, whether “son” in Genesis is taken literally to mean “Sons of Elohim” in a manner comparable to the tablets of Ugarit which refer to the gods as the literal offspring of El, or rather Genesis 6 refers to “son” as a member of the group of gods, either way, the mainstream position holds that “there can be no doubt that in this fragment of a mythical narrative the author of the original oral or written tradition was thinking of gods.” H. Haag, “ben,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament; vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 152, 157.

Of course the English expression "no doubt" carries a pretty strong implication.

I suspect, since the fragment derives the J source, that the text simply uses the term son to denote the gods and not the literal divine sons of El/Elohim.

[_Enuma Elish]

Ahh! It came to me!

The word “son” in Semitic languages as a term that denotes the members of a class or guild is comparable to the semantic use of estar in Romances languages as a term that denotes the concept of “to be.”

That was silly. Should have thought of it right away.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

I hate losing lengthy comments.

Runtu writes:

It's good to see you over here. I enjoy just sitting back and learning from these kinds of discussions, and the civility warms my heart. I was wondering if you agreed with Kevin that Joseph's understanding of the "divine council" seems to be a product of his Hebrew studies with Seixas rather than some recovery of an ancient concept.

Here is the deal. I think there are several ways to look at this. There are a lot of topics loosely connected to this issue of divine assemblies and heavenly beings, and Joseph gets into them before he meets Seixas - and we see the beginnings of this stuff in the Book of Moses. I don't think Joseph gets this from Seixas. What I beleive Seixas provides is a way of speaking about it - a vernacular - that becomes more familiar to us.

I am not sure at all what Seixas would have believed on the subject. He came from a Sephardic Jewish background. His family was a family of rabbi-like figures (the US wouldn't actually get a real Rabbi for quite a while). But he himself, at the time he taught Joseph was a self-styled Christian, effectively orphaned by his Jewish roots. I am not sure what to make of this. Some evidence suggests that he may have become a Christian to help him professionally secure a teaching position that he so desparately wanted. He would eventually return to Judaism. But even in his Judaism I am not sure these topics would have come out in such a way as to influence Joseph much.

Joseph's language in discussing the Hebrew comes right from the Seixas grammars. When he mentions gramatical "termination" there it is in the Seixas texts. He doesn't actually have to learn any of his KFD comments from Seixas directly. I have the grammars and can point out where it occurs. So, this development doesn't seem to come from Seixas, although the way that Joseph talks about it is profoundly changed by Seixas.

At the same time, when we talk about "hits", we run into some ambiguity. Is Joseph really trying to "recover some ancient concept"? Or is he trying to express what God reveals to him? I think we sometimes get into prooftexting like this - in that we re-read ancient texts in light of present theological models. But this is rather useless. My own philosophical paradigm rejects the notion of authority embedded in a text. There is no need to show some kind of continuum between my religion and an ancient religion. The fact that I can communicate directly with God releases me from the need to authorize some ancient concept. And truth be told, ancient Israelite beleif is foreign to modern LDS orthodoxy. We don't believe that God the Father had seventy sons amongst whom he divided the nations of the earth, and so on. And I think on some level, while David does get a bit into the prooftexting, these discussions tend to avoid his main contention (which I tend to share). If the Book of Mormon comes from a fringe Israelite around 600 BC (and Lehi was fringe - they wanted to kill him for his teachings), then if we can use known sources to construct a model of what jsut such a person would believe and know, we can compare them. David's real interest is in the Divine Assembly as it peeks out of the Book of Mormon - and this notion as evidence for hsitoricity. In this way Kevin and David tend to talk past one another. But on many of these issues I tend to find myself siding with David.

Also, this naturally causes conflict with those who believe that true religious beliefs as expressed in the Bible do not come in a continuum but represent one homogenious constant picture of truth. This is where David and I bump heads with Fortigurn, who finds these concepts out of place with the Biblical Orthodoxy he knows.

Ben

[_Runtu]

I appreciate that response, Ben. Obviously, I think the Book of Mormon has far too many problems to be considered an ancient text, but that's neither here nor there. Your approach (and David's by extension, apparently) seems the most reasonable. Too often apologists spend too much time taking parallels and clues as "bullseyes" (a word that seems to have gained currency on MAD), but finding interesting parallels and commenting on them from a believing perspective is a good approach. Sometimes I wish I had the time to dig into these issues, but for now, I'm content to sit back with some popcorn and a Shiner and watch y'all have at it.

[_Phaedrus Ut]

David Bokovoy is one of my favorite posters on MA&D and one of the few people in LDS apologetics that I really respect. I've yet to see him reach for questionable apologetics to try to salvage difficult problems with the church.

While I don't agree with 100% of his conclusions I respect his perspective as a believer.


Phaedrus

[_Fortigurn]

But this is clearly a problematic translation.

No it is not 'clearly a problematic translation'. It may be a problematic translation in the opinion of some people, but it is not 'clearly a problematic translation'.

Take for example the commentary on Genesis by Hamilton (the NICOT series)...

Why?

Thus, the main clause of the first sentance of the Bible is the command by God for light to exist. And since this becomes the first act of creation, the rest - the desert, the wasteland, the earth, the darkness, and so on - they all exist prior to the first act of creation and so by definition from all eternity.

This of course causes all sorts of problems with Orthodox theology.

Firstly, the idea that the earth and the darkness preceded the first recorded act of creation (the creation of light), has never been a problem for 'Orthodox theology', even though it hasn't been common.

Secondly, that the 'the desert, the wasteland, the earth, the darkness' exist prior to the first act of creation recorded in Genesis 1 does not necessarily mean that they have existed 'by definition from all eternity', even if we take the first recorded act of creation as the creation of light, and not the creation of the heavens and the earth.

So, the issue becomes a bit larger. On the other hand, I am probably one of the few people alive who has read all three of the grammars published by Joshua Seixas (I own copies of the first two editions - the 1833 and the 1834 editions - used to teach Joseph Smith), and for the most part, the way that Joseph Smith breaks down the word berosheit follows exactly the way that Seixas deconstructs it in one of his grammars.

That is certainly excellent evidence that Smith wasn't translating Genesis 1:1 by inspiration, and that he was simply rehashing what he had learned from a period grammar. Perhaps this is what he meant when he implied that his idea wasn't original, but that he was simply following what others before him had said.

This isn't in the other one (the one used by Zucker) and so it is often missed. But, the Seixas grammars are indespensible for understanding what Joseph Smith is saying in the KFD - he uses the same terminology that Seixas introduces, and so on. And if I had to comment, I would start by suggesting that Kevin's notions do not seem to be that far from the mark in terms of discussing the KFD. Yes, I am LDS, and clearly I am biased. But I also know more about this particular topic than most people, and my opinions are well informed. But since I can only give you my opinion, I am sure you will take it however you want.

None of this rescues Smiths' 'translation' of Genesis 1:1, which even Mormon apologists have acknowledged is wrong. It is so far wrong that the most incredible attempts have been made to extricate him from it. Thus the attempts on the one hand to claim that all accounts we have of his 'translation' are somehow inaccurate in various ways (misrepresenting the argument he apparently really made, though since no record of that argument exists we are left guessing how it could possibly be known), or on the other hand that he wasn't translating it but interpreting it in Kabbalistic style (a view unconvincing even to other Mormon apologists).

[_Fortigurn]

I must say I have been impressed with Fortigurn's efforts here. As some of you may know, I once dove into this subject as well, but as you could expect, I was trying to find sources that supported by preconceived notions. So I stuck with the liberal fringe and I had to circumvent a ton of conservative scholarship. I don't think I have ever witnessed a conservative argue against this thesis in detail, so this has been a very fun and interesting read for me.

It's not that difficult, since despite the giddy array of scholarship being quoted the fundamental issue is the logical fallacies in their arguments. You would have noted their preference for quoting Ugarit scholars who say that 'son/s of god' in Ugarit means 'god/s', as if that proved anything, as opposed to dealing with the demonstrable semantic range of the Hebrew 'son of X' idiom. I've never disputed the meaning of the Ugarit idiom. But the overwhelming evidence for the fact that the Hebrew 'son of X' idiom clearly does not uniformly mean the same as the Ugarit idiom is too much for them to handle.

The real problem is that they realise they cannot make the argument that the Hebrew 'son/s of X' idiom always means 'X', so they're confined to arguing that since the Ugarit 'son/s of god' idiom meant 'god/s', the Hebrew idiom 'son/s of God' must mean the same. Of course this is a non sequitur, as I have demonstrated. The very fact that the Hebrew 'son/s of X' idiom does not always mean 'X' proves that the Ugarit meaning for the 'son/s of god' idiom cannot dogmatically be asserted for the same idiom in Hebrew.

You will note that Enuma Elish has made several slipups in his attempts to address the Hebrew idiom, first claiming that it does always mean 'X' when it says 'son/s of X', but that was so swiftly and easily disproved that he had to drop that argument and switch tactics on the fly (just as he did with his exposition of the court room scene in 1 Kings 22). Unfortunately, acknowledging that the Hebrew 'son/s of X' idiom does not always mean 'X' means that he sold the farm. Given that it doesn't always mean that, he faces a serious difficulty asserting that it certainly means that in the specific case 'son/s of God'.

Then there's my question as to how post-exilic Babylonian Jews would be so remarkably familiar with the language, idioms, and especially religion of a society which was dispersed some 500 years ago. I've asked that a couple of questions, but it's still floating around there without an answer.

It also seems that my initial question to David isn't that far off the mark. Though he never explicitly says the Hebrew means X simply because it did so in Ugarit, when pushed to explicate his reasoning, it sure seems all of his arguments are pointing in that direction.

Yep, exactly right. When all the arguments lead to that conclusion, it's difficult to disavow the conclusion. If that is not the conclusion being drawn, then different arguments should be raised.

I also liked Fortigurn's analogy with Romance languages. I speak three of them, and his point is well taken. idioms can and do vary to a considerable degree, and I suspsect the same is true in semitic languages.

I was going to use - and still could use - English as an example. British English, North American English, and Australian English all share an indisputable common source. Yet they differ widely in their use of certain terms and idioms. An idiom which means X in British English could mean Y in North American English, and Z in Australian English, and this despite the fact that these languages are all contemporaries.

The idea that a 12th century BC Ugarit text used an idiom to mean X means that a 6th century BC Hebrew or Aramaic text must also mean X when it uses the same idiom, is simply a logical fallacy. If the argument being made was that it could possibly mean X, then I would agree (though of course one would have to examine the relevant textual data).

But the argument being made here is simply unsupportable. It's too dogmatic for reality. Unfortunately any argument less dogmatic (but more in harmony with reality), would blunt the entire case which they are trying to build, so they're compelled to defend the dogma.

Now on elohim, I believe it means gods as Gordon and others have noted. But the conservative view is that it doesn´t mean god in the same sense as God Most High. In other words, they are not the same species as God Most High.

I believe Reise's material is helpful here. As I've pointed out, I could agree with everything Reise had to say, since his views (though radical), aren't sufficient to threaten an 'orthodox' reading of the text.

[_Fortigurn]

What I am saying is that you don't get to decide on the basis of the text what orthodox religion was in Ancient Israel.

Why not? Unless you have contemporary Hebrew texts for the eras under discussion (Samuel to Babylon), these are the relevant proximate Hebrew texts.

The Biblical text as we have it significantly postdates this period. It can be seen as describing orthodox religion at the time of its final composition (perhaps) but it cannot be seen as a reflection of earlier orthodoxy. What I mean by the statment that Israelite religion was not homogenous is simply this - Israelite religion evolves. It changes over time. It goes from a polytheistic or henotheistic state to monotheism.

In your opinion.

At the time of Jesus, which was seen as orthodox Judaism? Was it Phariseeism? Saduceeism? Essenism?

Both the Pharisees and Saducees saw themselves and each other as orthodox, the Essenes were more exclusive. But that's not particularly relevant since Christ identified all of them as unorthodox.

This idea that you have of the death of God being foreign to Israelite religion can only be seen as accurate within specific contexts - within specific instances of Israelite religion, and certainly this is reflective of later Israelite and Jewish belief, and is far less characteristic of early Israelite religion and belief, and it assumes that Biblical religion was representative of orthodoxy.

Can you show me the earliest example of Jewish orthodoxy teaching that the gods of the Jewish orthodoxy die? Please use the Biblical texts.

So when you suggest that Israelite society did not uniformly follow orthodox religion, that is a problematic statement, because I don't think you can define orthodox Israelite religion, nor can you demonstrate to what extent the popular religion as practiced by most Israelites resembled or differred from your model of orthodoxy.

I can define orthodox Israelite religion, and I can demonstrate to what extent the popular religion as practiced by most Israelites resembled or differed from my understanding of orthodoxy.

No actually they weren't condemned for doing so. At least not by anythign contemporary.

In your opinion.

One of the interesting features of the Bible is that while Israel is supposed to worship YHWH/EL, other pagans were not.

Except Abraham. Oops.

In fact, it was expected and considered appropriate that they worship their own divinities (see Deuteronomy 4). Not until Jeremiah do we see the first criticism of the foreign nations for not worshipping YHWH - not until around 600 BC.

In your opinion.

And as far as real gods not dieing - that is nonsense. Psalm 82 suggests that these gods - these elohim (of which YHWH is one), can in fact die - just like men. There is no suggestion that these aren't real gods. Just that they are impotent ones.

Again, you're simply assuming that these are gods, and then assuming that they are the 'can die' type of gods. You have to make one assumption, and then stack another assumption on top of it.

Please supply evidence that the original text in Deuteronomy 32 'was manipulated to remove such references'. And no, the cross reference to the passage in Exodus is not evidence.

Sure. The phrase "sons of God" was changed to "sons of Israel". The sons of God passage seemed to have existed at least prior to the LXX where we get a translation that cannot support the notion of the "sons of Israel" and texts from among the Dead Sea Scrolls collection suggest a Hebrew original for the Greek LXX text. The Masoretic text coming significantly later is now generally assumed to be a modified text designed to theologically protect the later stricter monotheism of Judaism. It is really that simple.

Ok, so you haven't actually shown me any textual evidence that the original text in Deuteronomy 32 'was manipulated to remove such references'. All you've done is claim (without evidence), that the 'sons of God passage seems to have existed at least prior to the LXX'. Which Hebrew text preceding to the LXX contains the unredacted text? Please cite it. Do bear in mind the LXX reading 'angels of God'.

e have a clear context culturally for the area in which this statement can be seen. YHWH, for example, is called the son of God (the son of El) in Ugaritic texts. Outside of the Biblical text, the related phrases (bene elyon, bene elim, bene el, etc) are all given this meaning.

Key words here are 'in Ugaritic texts', and 'outside of the Biblical text'. On the one hand you argue that the Masoretic text cannot be trusted because it post-dates the time when the Israelite religion allegedly became strictly monotheistic, but on the other hand you want to tell me that the most relevant proximate texts for understanding the post-exilic Hebrew writings are not the LXX and the Hebrew vorlage (separated from the post-exilic texts by a couple of centuries), but the 12th century BC Ugarit texts (separated from the post-exilic writings by some 500 years, in a completely different society).

Yes, but they can't be men. Otherwise they wouldn't "die like men" they would "die as men".

Why?

The syntax of Psalm 82 does not allow the reading that the elohim there are men.

Tell that to Jesus (John 10:34-15).

So ... here is a good place for you to start in your reading on Psalm 82:

Thanks, but I've already read plenty. I've read many articles from JBL and BibSac, as well as pages and pages of Heise.