Carmack takes on the Late War
Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2021 5:43 pm
Stanford Carmack has a new https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... haic-text/ paper on the Late War, or more generally, pseudo-Bible writing and the Book of Mormon.
For the Book of Mormon:
examples of 'commanded by'
['at I Omni being commanded by my father ', 'd1089 they were commanded by Ammoron to', 'ich it had been commanded by Alma shoul']
examples of 'commanded of'
[again & being commanded of the Lord t', ' that Moses was commanded of the Lord t', 'hat I should be commanded of the Lord t', 'hat I have been commanded of him to wri', 'hem having been commanded of God & they', 'lma having been commanded of God that I', 'ords which I am commanded of the Father', 'ngs I have been commanded of my Father ']
There isn't a huge amount of data here, but it is interesting that all examples "by" are mortals, and "of" is always god. Even "of my father" vs. "of my Father".
There are no examples of "commanded by the Lord" in Late War.
Are there possibilities other than the Book of Mormon being a 15th century text translated by a committee in the Spirit World?
Well, it could be "of the" connotates additional holiness. Interestingly, I see "of the Lord" only a couple times in the other standard works, it is usually "by the Lord" -- I'm surprised Carmack didn't mention that. But, one of those instances is interesting, as I found it online but couldn't find it in my text dump.
Here is President Newsroom:
Another possibility is repetition. "of the Lord" appears 476 times in the Book of Mormon. That might influence your brain if "by" or "of" could be used and you're used to saying "of the Lord" constantly.
Late War:
['the angel of the Lord whisper', 'he temple of the Lord, and he', ' judgment of the Lord fell up', ' the hand of the Lord was str', 'e temples of the Lord were op']
There are no instances where he needs to say "by the Lord", so we don't know how he'd put it. But, isn't it interesting he could just say "the Lord's temple"? I guess that argument is Hunt was the B student with these easy ones, but not as many advanced examples. It just seems to me that there are going to be too many other possibilities to explain the similarity.
Anyway, we'll see what others have to say about this. I might try another example later.
I haven't read the whole article yet, but he says this as if he's going to show that Joseph couldn't have. That's pretty ambitious. I always thought everyone agreed he could have, but did he or didn't he?Carmack wrote:A number of LDS scholars believe that because Joseph Smith’s mind was saturated with biblical language, he could have produced the text of the Book of Mormon from a mixture of biblical language and his own dialect
How dare they be unaware of your work. Actually, That they picked out other pseudo-Bible texts and only those is interesting. It seems as if the author's mind really was saturated with "Bible writing".Carmack wrote:A significant flaw in the comparisons they made was failing to incorporate many Early Modern English texts — regularized for spelling and morphology — in their large corpus.1 Nor is it clear that they used the critical text, the text closest to Joseph Smith’s 1829 dictation.
Statistical proof, eh?Carmack wrote:An example of this is the passive construction “commanded of/by.” The King James Bible has four examples of “commanded by” but no [Page 189]examples of “commanded of”; the Book of Mormon has nine examples of “commanded of” and three examples of “commanded by.” This means it is not inaccurate to state that the Book of Mormon’s agentive of usage approaches but is independent of biblical usage. This is statistically verifiable.24
Well, that might be one example, but I'd say it's a pretty impressive one.Carmack wrote:Hunt’s text (1816) has only one example of agentive of: “the king was possessed of an evil spirit” (1:14). The estimated agentive of rate in this text is 2.5% (1 of 40 regular verbs).
For the Book of Mormon:
examples of 'commanded by'
['at I Omni being commanded by my father ', 'd1089 they were commanded by Ammoron to', 'ich it had been commanded by Alma shoul']
examples of 'commanded of'
[again & being commanded of the Lord t', ' that Moses was commanded of the Lord t', 'hat I should be commanded of the Lord t', 'hat I have been commanded of him to wri', 'hem having been commanded of God & they', 'lma having been commanded of God that I', 'ords which I am commanded of the Father', 'ngs I have been commanded of my Father ']
There isn't a huge amount of data here, but it is interesting that all examples "by" are mortals, and "of" is always god. Even "of my father" vs. "of my Father".
There are no examples of "commanded by the Lord" in Late War.
Are there possibilities other than the Book of Mormon being a 15th century text translated by a committee in the Spirit World?
Well, it could be "of the" connotates additional holiness. Interestingly, I see "of the Lord" only a couple times in the other standard works, it is usually "by the Lord" -- I'm surprised Carmack didn't mention that. But, one of those instances is interesting, as I found it online but couldn't find it in my text dump.
Here is President Newsroom:
A bishop is appointed of the Lord, D&C 72.
This example does use "of" instead of "by", but it's not a direct quote so interesting the modern bibliographer went with "of the Lord".ccount of their stewardship
unto the bishop, who shall be
appointed of me
Another possibility is repetition. "of the Lord" appears 476 times in the Book of Mormon. That might influence your brain if "by" or "of" could be used and you're used to saying "of the Lord" constantly.
Late War:
['the angel of the Lord whisper', 'he temple of the Lord, and he', ' judgment of the Lord fell up', ' the hand of the Lord was str', 'e temples of the Lord were op']
There are no instances where he needs to say "by the Lord", so we don't know how he'd put it. But, isn't it interesting he could just say "the Lord's temple"? I guess that argument is Hunt was the B student with these easy ones, but not as many advanced examples. It just seems to me that there are going to be too many other possibilities to explain the similarity.
Anyway, we'll see what others have to say about this. I might try another example later.