The reason I have emphasized the Zohar issue is because you claimed that not only was Joseph Smith “particularly familiar” with the Zohar but that within the Zohar “the concept of the divine council preexisted.”
No, the reason you are dwelling on a point I have since declared moot, is because you are still trying to score points where you no longer can. You’re trying to relive your single lay-up while I have been sinking three-pointers left and right. My logic is clear to anyone willing to read it, so let me repeat. Smith probably obtained knowledge about the divine council through natural means. His experience with a Kabbalist is just one possibility that I threw out on the table. I read the Hamblin article but he never denied Smith had contact with him. He never denied that Smith was familiar with portions of the Zohar. But whatever its dubiousness, this is still far more plausible than your proposed divine revelation scenario which flies in the face of Smith’s own rationale. You tried to mitigate any influence Smith could have had from his Jewish teacher by saying he wasn’t necessarily a Jewish mystic. I simply stated that the fact that Joseph Smith quoted the Zohar is evidence in itself that the form of Judaism he was dabbling in was in fact mysticism, because that is what the Zohar is. In Jewish Mysticism, the divine council is an accepted concept. Whether the Zohar itself explicitly or implicitly hints to a divine council is really beside the point because I already established a plausible case that Smith had familiarity with this Kabbalistic concept.
Take the following analogy.
Mike surprised his Baptist congregation one day while teaching
theosis for the first time in his life.
Mike happens to have a Math teacher who is a Christian.
Mike quoted the Book of Mormon after his teacher gave him a copy.
Mike’s teacher is probably a Mormon Christian.
Mike’s
theosis doctrine was probably a product of his relationship with this Mormon.
The Book of Mormon which he received does not teach this doctrine, but Mormonism does.
Mike probably did not learn of this doctrine through divine revelation.
Mike this is not evidence that Mike is a prophet of God.
Now if by juxtaposing your polemic to this situation, you would deny that Mike probably learned about
theosis from his Mormon teacher. You would maintain that since the book he received did not mention the doctrine, the entire scenario is a hopeless “theory.” In the meantime, you would grant Mike his claim as a prophet because this doctrine must have came to him through revelation.
The second you made that claim, I knew that you had never even cracked the pages of the Zohar which does not contain references to a divine council of deities.
No, the second I made that claim, you thought you had found your precious error in which you would try to relive over and over, completely disallowing the argument to progress any further. It is a typical apologetic move whereby the apologist feels the discussion is over once he can demonstrate where the critic made a technical error, no matter how irrelevant and no matter if he merely misspoke. Again, look at the analogy above and then maybe you can see how absurd your compliant is from outside the box. From the get-go I never maintained that this was definitive. I agreed with Dan when he said it was in doubt. You falsely asserted that I said I would prove it. You were trying to add emphasis in my argument where I never intended, demonstrating that you were more interested in recreating my argument and beating a straw man than you were in comprehending what I actually said.
Even
still, you’re beating the Zohar issue. What has it been, three, four posts since I said it was moot? The fact is the divine council is a concept in Kabbalism, and the Zohar in Smith’s possession strongly suggests he had a particular interest in Kabbalism. There is no reason to assume his interest was limited to the Zohar itself anymore than it is reasonable to assume a person reading the Book of Mormon has absolutely no interest in Mormonism.
Do I have a Zohar on hand? No. Have I ever read the Zohar? Portions of it, yes.
Am I alone in saying the Zohar supports a doctrine that could naturally be understood as a divine council? Apparently not. This comes from an online course on the Zohar; Eating from the Tree of Life: A Course on the Zohar -
“The Zohar often imagines God as a whole family. The Zohar shares this vision of plurality in God with other Kabbalistic works…Indeed the Zohar purposely challenges the assumptions of monotheism”
http://www.kolel.org/zohar/intro.2.htmlYou pick one verse where you say the Zohar must render it "divine council" and then assume thsi proves the Zohar doesn't support the concept anywhere else. By that logic, since Joseph Smith didn't retranslate the various divine council passages accordingly, he must not have accepted it either.
You argued that “the Bible refers to the divine council on numerous occasions.” The fact is that you are wrong. As I illustrated, the King James Version of the Bible does not refer to the divine “council” of gods at all, let alone on numerous occasions.
You’re all over the place, speaking incoherently. First you go off with citations whereby Smith uses the word “council,” and then you jump to the above statement as if it were a natural follow-up statement. One has nothing to do with the other. Smith used the word council, sure. It appears in the Book of Abraham a few times. I never denied that so stop pretending you’re refuting anything I said. As far as the above statement goes, apparently you do not understand what the word “refer” means? When I say the KJV
refers to a divine council, I mean to say it alludes to one. To refer doesn’t require that the word be mentioned. When I say “village idiot,” I do not mention the words “William Schryver,” but I am probably referring to him.
I know that you’re intelligent enough to understand the argument. With the discovery of contemporary documents which provide a detailed depiction of ancient Near Eastern views concerning the divine council of deities, biblical scholars now recognize that the divine council is “a fundamental symbol for the Old Testament understanding of how the government of human society by the divine world is carried out;” Patrick D. Miller, “Cosmology and World Order in the Old Testament,” Israelite Religion and Biblical Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 432.
My intelligence certainly isn’t doing you any favors here, so don’t be too quick to invoke it.
The discovery of these Near Eastern accounts have effected the way the Bible is now translated by contemporary scholars. As an example, I pointed to Psalm 82:1:
Yes, that is
one example from one verse out of a dozen, from one modern translation among hundreds. Is that it your evidence that the entire world of scholarship agrees? Where else is a scripture translated “divine council”? I can tell you where it
isn’t rendered as such, and that would be in the numerous passages Joseph Smith used to justify his concept of it. If scholarship is truly vindicating Smith’s claims, then why aren’t scholars retranslating Gen 1, Rev 1:6, and several other passages Smith appealed to? It isn’t enough to say the concept is believed to be there because some scholars choose to use the Enuma Elish as an interpretive backdrop.
The fact is most translations do not refer to “council” because a council is literally a group of beings who serve a particular
function. Just like angels are all gods (
eloheim) but not all gods (
eloheim) are angels (malak). What sets an angel apart from other eloheim is their function as messenger. Joseph Smith also got this wrong when in the D&C he says that we as gods will be called gods because we will rule over angels. But according to the Hebrew Bible angels are gods. That's yet another strike against Smith's "prophetic insight."
But you completely ignored my argument on this point. Only when the text unambiguously indicates this particular function is being served, is the “council” rendering justified. You clumsily refer to “scholars” in a generalized way, while trying to hide the fact that not all of them agree with this. You know this of course, but that has never stopped you from generalizing as if all of scholarship was behind you. This has always been a pet peeve I have had with you, and it seems you’re not at all interested in moving away from sloppy polemic and towards responsible scholarly reports.
No one would have applied this divine council pattern to a text like 1 Kings 22:19ff without the discovery of Enuma Elish, Anzu, the Baal Cycle, etc. and yet Joseph places the exact same pattern in his portrayal of the divine council of Gods in the Book of Abraham.
But oddly enough, this is not found in Smith’s “inspired” translation of the same exact biblical text. And even odder is the fact that the RSV translators who rendered the Psalms passage accordingly, chose not to do so with the passage above. It is not always safe to assume the entire “host of heaven” is a
council membership by default, just because the Enuma Elish seemed to imply it in its own version of creation. It is irresponsible to assume everything in the Enuma Elish should be used to supplant what is in the Hebrew account, simply because it is older and there were obviously some borrowed concepts. This is why not all scholars agree that the Hebrew Bible is just borrowed myth from an earlier one found on the Enuma Elish tablets. Nahum Sarna for example, believed that the Hebrew account only borrowed certain aspects so it could better challenge the older belief system. It wanted a relationship to be manifest, but a correlation of correction, not inferiority. His argument was perfectly sound, and it made sense. Of course the earliest readers of the Hebrew account would notice resemblances to the Babylonian account. The whole point seems to be a correction of the former myth. If the Hebrew account didn’t include explicit mention to “council” then maybe that is done for a purpose.
In any event, it is pretty unfair for you to demand that the precise word be found in the Zohar ( a work I have declared irrelevant so many times I cannot keep track) when the same exact words don’t appear to exist in the Enuma Elish (a work you insist is entirely relevant).
He goes so far as to preserve the notion of God “standing” in the divine council:
Wow. This coming from a guy who said he saw God standing in front of him? What a shocking discovery. Must be divine revelation!!
Biblical scholar Simon Parker has shown that the distinction between sitting and standing in judicial settings also operates in the biblical view of the divine council; Simon B. Parker, “The Beginning of the Reign of God—Psalm 82 as Myth and Liturgy,” Revue Biblique 102/4 (1995): 537.
These nuances were not unique to the West Semitic world. In Mesopotamia, “anybody who happened along and had a mind to could ‘stand’—that is, participate—in the pu?rum [I.e., assembly].” As Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen explained, the Akkadian words “uzuzzu, ‘to stand,’ and yaš?bu, ‘to sit,’ are technical terms for participating in the pu?rum;” Jacobsen, 164.
That’s nice. Now can you please explain to us why this is supposed to be understood as evidence of anything else other than the fact that he was able to read and comprehend Psalm 82:1 from the KJV, which says, “God
standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods”?
What is more likely here?
Here you go again, taking parallels he could have easily borrowed from the KJV and pretending they represent amazing evidence that he was a bona fide prophet who was relaying all kinds of weird ancient concepts because God felt it was important to “reveal” them to him.
Well known to biblical scholars, but not to those who even today have studied only the King James Version of the Bible.
That is not a fair assumption to make. How many non-scholars are restoration founders who are looking for things to restore?
You should now understand why this argument is so faulty.
It isn’t faulty, nor have you demonstrated it to be such. You just ignored it. That says more about your argument than it does mine. Your entire argument hangs on the assumption that since the Enuam Elish seems to depict a divine council, and the Enuma Elish is a similar creation account with striking parallels to the Biblical account, then this means that every instance of “heavenly host” should be retranslated as “divine council.”
But that is not how biblical translations generally work, which is why only the RSV was able to sneak in that rendering in one measly instance, without a protest The Bible is a translation of Hebrew records, not Phoenician or Akkadian records. It is not intended to be a translation of what some liberal scholars assume those Hebrew records
should have said. If that is what they are doing, then they are betraying our trust. There is a perfectly good word in Hebrew for council, and for some reason the Hebrew authors decided not to use it in these particular instances. If there is no contextual reason to insist these verses define a group functioning as a council, the only other reason to render it as such is to beg the question: Does the Enuma Elish take precedence over the earliest Hebrew texts? If so, then where do we draw the line in what we choose to supplant? Maybe we should go ahead and refer to God as Marduk? If not, then why not?
This was 1944. I suggest that you read the article and discover for yourself why the extra biblical texts are so important.
I think you already know you’re not going to intimidate me by throwing out a dozen sources for me to read. I think you know which side I fall on here. I have read the relevant material for both sides. The Enuma Elish is interesting with its striking parallels to the Hebrew account of creation, but I have yet to read a compelling argument to believe pieces of it can arbitrarily be snagged and used to supplant portions of, and to recreate the traditional Hebrew account. Liberal scholars like change, always. They like to be central to major transitions. That is one thing that sets them apart from conservatives who generally like things the way tradition has set them. When something is “discovered” liberals want to justify using the discovery for making changes and stirring the pot; otherwise the field would be pretty boring for them. Of course, change is not always bad, and tradition is not always good. But in any case, a good argument must be made before I buy into the latest scholarly hoopla over how the Bible needs to be completely retranslated because of discoveries at Ugarit. You’re too easily swayed and molded by the liberal scholars you worship.
Could you imagine historians in the 51st century deciding to retranslate the Brazilian constitution because they found one with similarities that was written in a century earlier in 1787?
In my opinion, Kevin use to bring some compelling arguments to the table.
Until I became a turncoat, right? That’s generally how the sociological tribal rejection narrative plays out. You’re just responding as one would expect.
Unfortunately, as of late, it seems that anger has overpowered his judgment.
Uh huh. I’ve been frothing at the mouth ever since my compelling arguments turned sour, huh? I always get a kick out of those who try to describe me as “angry.” Again, this is an expected sociological reaction towards the exile. It is always a deficiency in the exile, never anything to do with a deficiency in the tribe itself. Perish the thought!
I did address the issue. You seem to have missed the point. Granted, Joseph uses the plural meaning of Elohim to establish his theological point in the discourse, however, in the same sermon Joseph specifically declares:
“I will preach on the plurality of Gods. I have selected this text for that express purpose. 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).
Interesting still, the “divine council” is mentioned nowhere in the sermon. You’re hopping all over the place again trying to avoid the inevitable train-wreck that is awaiting you. You maintain that Smith’s belief in a plurality of Gods proves he receives divine revelation. You raised Smith’s sermon as evidence, yet the he spends all of his time trying to convince his audience that the belief came to him from his knowledge of the scriptures. Knowledge he had learned from his Jewish teacher.
Can’t you see that according to the last sentence, Joseph Smith is referring to the plurality of the Father-Son? Yes, we all recognize this. Smith maintained for many years that he saw both of them standing in front of him. But it is wrong to say he has taught the plurality of gods (gods outside the trinity) for fifteen years, in the sense that an eternal regression of gods is at play.
Now you refer to the 1839 D&C 121:32 because it mentions “council,” but even in D&C 121 the question of a plurality of gods outside the Trinity, was still an open one. Verse 28 says, “A time to come in the which nothing shall be withheld, whether there be one God or many gods, they shall be manifest.” Thus, this D&C revelation did not “reveal” the answer to this question. It was still an open question until Joseph Smith provided the answer. He did so by gradually hinting at it in other 1843 D&C entries, but in 1844 this sermon made it official for the confused public,
“It has been my intention for a long time to take up this subject and lay it clearly before the people.”
The fact that the people were not clear on his position, flies in the face of the assertion that he had taught it for 15 years.
“I will show from the Hebrew Bible that I am correct, and the first word shows a plurality of Gods…”
Again, it seems he felt simply saying “God told me so” wasn’t going to work for them, so he had to show them how he acquired this knowledge naturally.
“…as others have translated it, ‘The head of the Gods called the Gods together.’”
This in and of itself debunks your insistence that he didn’t get this from anyone else. He admits that he did. Who are these “other” translators he refers to?
“In the very beginning the Bible shows there is a plurality of Gods beyond the power of refutation.”
“The word Eloheim ought to be in the plural all the way through—Gods. The heads of the Gods appointed one God for us.”
He is actually wrong. Eloheim ought not to be translated in the plural all throughout, and modern scholarship does not agree. He also said his Jewish teacher admitted he was right, but that isn’t what his teacher said at all. He said there are exceptions. This means it is not correct to say it should always be plural.
Now I concede the point that he said the Holy Spirit testified that his interpretation was correct, but nothing changes the fact that Smith felt that the doctrine was already there in the Bible in its “very beginning” and that it was “beyond the power of refutation” and that anyone could see it. This doesn’t sound like he was claiming evidence that he was a Prophet. This doesn’t sound like a declaration of divine revelation. It sounds like something that needed to be read without traditional monotheistic blinders.