Book of Mormon and the Cognate Accusative

[_Drifting]

One could imagine that mention of DCP's name out loud around the corridors of power in the COB might be met with awkward silences. Mentioning it out loud in front of the senior paid clergy might lead one to be treated to a tirade about "that damned man".


Anyway, back to reality.

I imagine that DCP's mouth and typing finger are beginning to become larger problems for the Church's ongoing PR charm offensive.

[_Equality]

Check out this ancient Hebrew hymn:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDfe9dn59Mk

Here's another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BvBkTmDWBA

[_Uncle Dale]

>I am surprised that anyone would find this impressive.
>I did a very brief google search and gathered the following list (pardon and redundancy):


Try Thomas Hartwell Horne's "An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge
of the Holy Scriptures," Volume 2 (various editions have different page nos) --
under the sub-heading "Quotations Nearly Agreeing with the Hebrew."

There you'll find the famous quote from Joel -- that in the last days,
the old men will DREAM DREAMS...

Put that in the past tense -- so that Lehi, or Joe Smith, Sr., or any other
pious old man could be said to have fulfilled prophetic scripture, and you'll have:

DREAMED DREAMS
--
or
DREAMED A DREAM
--
or some such expression.

Joe Smith, Jr. need not have read Horne -- just Joel.
However, I suspect that a close reading of Horne's 4-volume
1825 edition will help explain a whole host of LDS questions
about Book of Mormon "Hebraic language" that simply "could not
have been constructed by an 1820s New York farmboy...."
(nor even by an 1820s Pittsburgh Baptist pastor).

UD


ps -- Smith's personal signature appears in three of the four volumes
of Horne's book (as viewed at the CoC archives, some years back).

[_Fence Sitter]

UD,

Good to see you post again.

I hope all is well with you sir.

[_Uncle Dale]

UD,

Good to see you post again.

I hope all is well with you sir.

Glad to be of help.

I've been thinking about uploading my corrected OCR of Horne's
1825 Philadelphia volumes to the web.



But the version at Google Books seems adequate for
Book of Mormon studies -- and, besides that, I've been
a bit under the weather lately.

Maybe some day. There's a lot in Horne that we really
ought to put before the LDS polemicists.

UD

[_MCB]

Google books PDF downloads have not been working for me since they made the change. Some kind of software incompatibility, I guess. OK I got pdf here: http://ia700407.us.archive.org/27/items ... orn_bw.pdf

Thanks. That diversion into Islam was so fruitful I was satisfied for a while.

[_Uncle Dale]

...diversion into Islam...

Folks here might be interested in this historical tidbit:

In 1884, in a preview of some of his evidence for use in the forthcoming
"Braden-Kelley" debate, the Rev. Clark Braden disclosed a fragment of an
interview he had conducted with Dr. John Stafford, an early neighbor of
the Smith family in Manchester: “Joe used to read Tom Paine's writings a
great deal and talk their sentiments. He read the Koran and was a great
admirer of Mahomet and his pretended revelations. He defended polygamy,
and contended that the Bible taught it, and that it was right. He did this
before he left New York for Ohio.” It is not unlikely that Joseph Smith
occasionally perused Abner Cole's Reflector, and appreciated its articles
on Islam and sundry other religious topics.

Islam teaches that the religion revealed through God's ancient oracles was
subject to periodic corruption -- and thus the necessity for a series of
guiding prophets, each heading up a fresh dispensation of the one true
religion. In a professed series of seven such Divine dispensations, Mohammed
was the final and greatest revelator of the holy sequence. In this way Islam
took a less appreciative view of the guidance of Jesus than did, say,
Alexander Campbell, who preached only three such dispensations, ending in
the perfect culmination with Jesus' ministry. In Campbellism, Jesus instituted
the perfected religious message, with no need for a successor. In Islam Jesus
was viewed as the head of the sixth dispensation, which had failed to bring
about the necessary perfect culmination -- eventually requiring a restorationist
continuation under Mohammed's guidance. --- While Alexander Campbell
admitted flaws in the Holy Scriptures (and even published his own, corrected
translation of the New Testament), he did not go so far as Mohammed had
taught -- that the Bible had been so altered as to require a new, restorationist
set of latter day scriptures. Nor did Campbell pretend to receive revelations
that were intended to be added to an open canon of scripture. For these and
related reasons, Campbellism had no interest in (or need for) post-apostolic
supplements to God's original holy writ.

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY ... htm#021330

But suppose that Campbellism DID have a desire to fabricate "post-apostolic
supplements to God's original holy writ." -- Where would an educated
Campbellite leader of the mid-1820s have looked, to find instruction on
how such supplemental scripture ought to look and sound?

Certainly he would not have aped his own denomination's recent creation
of the "Third Epistle of Peter," -- for that was an obvious biblical parody.

No -- such a devious Campbellite writer would have done sufficient
research, in order to "bone up" on Hebraic linguistic constructions, on
inverted parallelism, on the structure of works of apocrypha, on the
content of the recently translated Book of Enoch, and perhaps also on
the very nature of scriptural inspiration and inerrant revelation ----
in short, he would have read the very same three volumes of Bishop
Horne's 1825 Philadelphia edition as still bear the ownership signatures
of Joseph Smith, Jr. -- in the CoC archival vault.

"But -- but -- but!!!" the LDS polemicist will object: "But little Joseph
was too young, and uneducated, and poor to have ever perused Horne's
volumes. He would not have understood a word of their erudite content.
Some admirer must have given those books to Joseph at Nauvoo, etc, etc."

And, of course, "little Joseph" was not a Campbellite, and so he would
not have been interested in the iron-clad "reformed Baptist" dogma --
that new insights into God's prophecy and commandments can only
be derived from divine scripture, and not from human theologizing.

Nevertheless, I'm interested in the instruction provided by Bishop Horne.

Such as:


"Rabdomancy, or divination by the staff.... The person consulting [the divining rod]
measured his staff by spans, or by the length of his finger, saying, as he measured,
'I will go, or, I will not go; I will do such a thing, or, I will not do it;' and as the last
span fell out, so he determined..."


or


"Hebraic parallelism [or chiasmus] occurs also, with much variety, in the Apocrypha...
[I] expect a similar parallelism" [in any ancient writing] "by native Jews... by men whose
minds were moulded in the form of their own sacred writings... Now, it is improbable in
the extreme, that such men, when they came to write such a work, should, without
any assignable motive, and in direct opposition to all other religious teachers of their nation,
have estranged themselves from a manner so pervading the noblest parts
of the Hebrew Scriptures, as the sententious parallelism [or chiasmus]."


or


...the apostles of Jesus Christ were under the infallible guidance of the Spirit of Truth,
as to every religious sentiment which they taught mankind... When they acted as writers,
recording Christianity for the instruction of the Church in all succeeding times, I apprehend,
that they were under the guidance of the Spirit, as to the subjects of which they treated;
that they wrote under his influence and direction; that they were preserved from all error
and mistake, in the religious sentiments they expressed; and that, if any thing were inserted
in their writings... this was immediately communicated to them by revelation from the Spirit.
But with respect to the choice of words in which they wrote, I know not but they might be
left to the free and rational exercise of their own minds, to express themselves in the manner
that was natural and familiar to them, while at the same time they were preserved from error,
in the ideas they conveyed.


or

...whole paragraphs on the 1822 Book of Enoch, too long for UD to copy here...


Luckily for the mid-1820s Campbellites, that they had no visionary leaders
who were subject to delusions, false revelations, and a desire to pen latter
day prophecies, direct from God.

Lucky for Joe Smith, that he knew no such visionary pseudo-apostles,
conversant with the proper methods by which "the infallible guidance of the
Spirit of Truth" might be translated from the mind's reasonings, and the
bosom's burnings, into divine commandments set down in ink on paper.

I think that the curious reader, researching "the Cognate Accusative" in
the Book of Mormon, should spend a few hours browsing Horne's 1825 edition.

UD

[_MCB]

I'm a workin' on it, UD!!

I am at the library, and Google PDF's download fine. I just got Lawrence's translation of Book of Enoch, a later edition, the early one is not available. I had used Schodde's before.

I have a wicked-looking USB hub!!