Gee's paper on Four Idolatrous Gods in the Book of Abraham

[_aussieguy55]

I have learnt something new. Thanks "The 'Texas sharpshooter fallacy' (or: 'clustering illusion') refers to a man with a gun but no shooting skills who fires a number of bullets into the wall of a barn, paints a bull's-eye around a fortuitous cluster of bullet holes, and declares himself a sharpshooter (Smith, 2016).May 24, 2017"

[_SteelHead]

So we have two that can be shown to be taken from the Old Testament, and two that by casting as wide as net as possible across a wide enough area, and squinting real hard, we may be able to map syllables (again by squinting real hard) to the name of gods across a geographical area covering who knows how many cultures.- but Egyptian gods they are not.

Bullseye! How could Joseph have down it!!!?

[_Res Ipsa]

I thought this was an interesting comment from Bryce Hammond

"The odds of Joseph Smith guessing the names correctly is astronomical."

Not necessarily. Given a large enough corpus of texts, it seems one is likely to find many arbitrary patterns. It is perhaps the principle called Ramsey Theory: "Given enough elements in a set or structure, some particular interesting pattern among them is guaranteed to emerge." In other words, the chances are not astronomical, but rather it's basically guaranteed to happen.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... qus_thread

Exactly. The human ability to find patterns in randomness is infinite.

[_I have a question]

This "discovery" by Gee could be a game changer for The Book Of Abraham's status amongst the wider communities and bodies of Egyptological study and discovery. Has he submitted it for peer review by trained, independent (non Mormon) Egyptologists? If not, given it's potential for elevating the global status of The Book Of Abraham, why has he not? Would he appreciate someone submitting it for such a peer review?

[_Gadianton]

More likely for two of them, but Gee doesn't consider acknowledging in his paper:

* Libnah was borrowed from the Old Testament.
* Elkenah was borrowed from the Old Testament name Elkanah

Yes; I did some exploring myself. Elkanah is all over the Old Testament. I found two of these in the same sentence (but lost my place; will find again).

Also, there are some "kors"

['Korah', 'Korahite', 'Korahites', 'Korathites', 'Kore', 'Korhites']

Malchiram
Maalehacrabbim

we know how Joseph Smith puts pieces of Bible names in different combinations and ad libs. They all have that familiar "Joseph Smith" ring to them.

Anyway, I opened the Book of Abraham for the first time in a decade or two, and I'm baffled. I'm pretty sure Gee is misreading what the Book of Abraham says. Gee sees the names of Five gods, the four you mentioned, plus "Pharaoh", who as I understand it is considered a "god" in Egyptian lore. I'm pretty sure, the Book of Abraham names five individuals, including Pharaoh, who worship five respective false gods. For much of the text, it reads consistently either way. However:

"The priest of Elkenah was also the priest of Pharaoh."

Does it really make sense that the priest of Pharaoh, a living "king of Egypt" if also a deity, and Elkenah, an idol or god symbolized by an idol have the same priest?

"And it came to pass that the priest made an offering unto the god of Pharaoh, and also unto the god of Shagreel,"

So this same priest makes an offering to Pharaoh, "king of egypt", and Shagreel, another idol at the same time?

And then:

"Now the god of Shagreel was the sun."

Sure, that could mean Shagreel is the sun, but it's more straightforward that Shagreel's god is the sun.

And the lynchpin for me:

"Now, at this time it was the custom of the priest of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, to offer up upon the altar which was built in the land of Chaldea, for the offering unto these strange gods, men, women, and children."

The priest of Pharaoh offers up to these strange gods, (including Pharaoh's god).

And doesn't "the god of Elkenah" or "the god of Pharaoh" contrast with "The god of Abraham" "the god of Jacob"?

[_Symmachus]

Why bring in Hittite gods to the Egyptian court? That's ludicrous, you'd more likely have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump play golf together at Mar-a-Lago and Elizabeth Warren serving them sandwiches.

Since we're just playing word association games, I'll take Abraham's connection to Arabia via Islamic tradition, which Gee loves to exploit elsewhere. It's more likely than Hittite gods at the Egyptian court, and in any case the supposed time of Abraham would have been a few centuries before the earliest attested Hittite anyway. Very bizarre.

But let's try our word association game in three minutes or less. My hypothesis is that these were not names or titles but references to the gods of people's and places, which actually fits the phraseology of the text quite well, as Gadianton points out.

The god of Elkenah = the god ("El" in Semitic) of the Banu Kinana, a tribe in Arabia
The god of Korash = the god of the Quraish tribe, of which Muhammad was a member in later centuries.

Remember that Abraham established the Kaaba at Mecca, so this makes sense, right? My theory is that the Egyptians Abraham was encountering were from the second intermediate period, when the Semitic Hysksos dominated the country, and they likely included contingents of Arabian tribes. That is how you get their gods there.

The god of Libnah = the god of the city of Libnah in western Israel, in Canaan, where Abraham sojourned. The rule of the Hyksos was preceded by the influx of Canaanites into the eastern delta.

The god of Mahmackrah = an Egyptian pronunciation of the Arabic mamlaka, which means "kingdom," or the chief god in the Hyksos pantheon. (r/l were in variation in some dialects and stages of Egyptian, so no problem with the linguistics here, and the transposition of a liquid consonant presents no problems; it's very common cross-linguistically, especially when you have a bilingual society, which you would have had with the Hyksos). Or it could it could be a nomen loci, with an unattested mamakrāh in Semitic, which would mean "a place of selling." Remember that Abraham came down to Egypt because of famine—that is, to buy food.

This all makes more sense than the Egyptians' importation of Hittite gods into the royal court, especially a bag-god (as the two great powers of the near east in the mid second millennium, they were constantly at war with each other until the end of that millennium). I fudge the chronology too—since when do apologists take pains with chronology—but I still manage to connect Abraham with established traditions unknown to Joseph Smith and without relying on a complete absurdity.

[_moksha]

This all makes more sense than the Egyptians' importation of Hittite gods into the royal court,...

How much sense do any of these Idolatous Egyptian Gods make versus a horrendous misunderstanding of what the canopic jars actually represented?

[_Shulem]

I fudge the chronology too—since when do apologists take pains with chronology—but I still manage to connect Abraham with established traditions unknown to Joseph Smith and without relying on a complete absurdity.

Been there done that. But it simply is not possible. Abraham's time far precedes the Hyksos anomaly -- there is no connection or association with Abraham's Egyptian sojourn and the Hyksos takeover. Period. Don't even go there or bother to speculate that disastrous thought. Chronology is firm based on king's lists and absolutely fixed based on Sothic star dating which I might add is based on solid math and exact calculation.

Period.

The apologist lose at every turn. Joseph Smith was wrong on every turn and account. According to the records, the gods of Egypt are the gods of Egypt and the god of Abraham is Israel's god.

John Gee, Screw you! Your apologetics is abhorrent and totally misleading and deceptive. You're in my opinion a horrible man and a terrible example of what an Egyptologist should be. The Egyptologists at BYU are monkeys making fools of themselves and their apologetic reasoning for the Book of Abraham have zero credibility in the academic world.

Screw you, Gee. You should be fired from BYU but seeing it's a school for monkeys you may stay and continue to teach crap.

[_Dr Moore]

Is there any evidence Joseph studied Hebrew words or letters on his own, eg in 1835 before producing Abraham 1:1-2:18 and before hiring Seixas?
I'm curious what the thinking on when Joseph first attempted to read Hebrew words.

[_Symmachus]

Been there done that. But it simply is not possible. Abraham's time far precedes the Hyksos anomaly -- there is no connection or association with Abraham's Egyptian sojourn and the Hyksos takeover. Period. Don't even go there or bother to speculate that disastrous thought. Chronology is firm based on king's lists and absolutely fixed based on Sothic star dating which I might add is based on solid math and exact calculation.

Abraham’s date is not based on any of this. It’s based on whatever is needed to make a claim about him sound plausible.

This was a guy who lived to be 175, so...