mentalgymnast wrote:honorentheos wrote:...it may have been the case the pre-exilic Israelites didn't actually graft olive trees.
Have we moved away a bit from the environmental surroundings/practices of Joseph now?
???
The claim of the Book of Mormon is that Jacob 5 was written by someone who lived in Palestine prior to the Babylonian captivity. It's always included the question of whether or not a person living then would have been able to write Jacob 5. Bringing up apples helps show that Joseph Smith need not be familiar with olive cultivation to have been the author or co-author of Jacob 5.
MG wrote:honorentheos wrote:The language does match well with someone who is envisioning how they worked with apples.
The reference I posted seems to point out that there's more to it than the Smith family simply having grown apples. The highlighted portion of my quote/link seem to show that it may not have been as simple as you're portraying it?
Your source is wrong. Pruning fruit trees to help roots get a chance to recover by reducing the amount of top growth is something practiced in the US long before Joseph Smith was alive. It was used on fruit trees. It isn't something unique to olives to say someone familiar with apple cultivation might prune a tree to try and help restore it's vigor.
MG wrote:honorentheos wrote:So Joseph Smith talked about dunging up around trees rather than saying "mulching" or avoided saying "incompatibility". I'd challenge a person to point out an instance of Joseph Smith saying this period. Why? If he is the author and was familiar with apple grafting, the language found in the Book of Mormon would be his language not that of a professional horticulturalist.
Did Joseph use the word
grafting? Does that matter when looked along side the highlighted material I posted? Why wouldn't/didn't Joseph use the language that may have been familiar to him?
I seriously wonder about how you think sometimes. No offense but the statement above is not showing you are following the line of discussion well.
The terminology used in your source is quoting terms that might have been part of professional horticulture but there's no way anyone would imagine that these are the terms that a person in the frontier would use. It makes my fingers curl up slightly with WTF?-itis when I read things like this from you, honestly. The source is actually being quite silly to toss out a lexical argument like that as proof. Wow.
honorentheos wrote:I also think your source is wrong about Americans of the 19th century not knowing that removing growth to rebalance the root masses ability to improve a tree's health could increase it's chance of survival when it comes to fruiting stock. But perhaps you'd be interested in checking with non-LDS sources for some of your research?
This is a new area of exploration for me. So I'm looking and asking questions. From what I'm seeing, at least up to this point, is that the grafting argument may not be a slam dunk and the fact that the Smith family raised and pruned apple trees may not be a 'smoking gun'.
Here's where things stand, one last time.
The Book of Mormon claims to be ancient in origin. It can't be shown using external evidence that olive grafting was actually practiced in a time and place required for this to be true. There is a proliferation of sources regarding olive grafting as this spreads later from Greece and through the later Roman empire. The claim of ancient authorship is challenged rather than supported by Jacob 5.
As a critic of the Book of Mormon's origin, I assert it is a product of the 19th century. There are no problems showing that Jacob makes sense when olives are replaced with a fruit which Joseph Smith would have had experience cultivating or his family cultivated. There are portions of the descriptions in Jacob 5 that actually apply better to apples than they do to olives. The claim of 19th century authorship is supported rather than challenged by Jacob 5.
ETA: fixed issue with code brackets.
