Vogel Schools Jacob Hansen on Book of Abraham

[I Have Questions]

What say you Dr. Shades?

I say that I was going to split it off, but everyone jumped in, quoted him repeatedly, explained what was at those links on his behalf, then continued talking about them. Excising his link-and-run would've required me to excise an entire section of the conversation, so I had little choice but to let it stand.

This happened to some extent or other in all your previous reported instances, too.

HELPFUL HINT: If you want something split off, just report it and ignore it. Don't respond to it and further add to the discussion about it.

Nobody wants it split off. Everybody wants MG 2.0 to stop linking and running. You’ve warned him. And warned him. And warned him. Yet here we are, he’s still doing it. At what point are you going to enforce the rule? Or can everyone now just link and run the same way that MG 2.0 is being allowed to?

[Dr. Shades]

Nobody wants it split off. Everybody wants MG 2.0 to stop linking and running. You’ve warned him. And warned him. And warned him. Yet here we are, he’s still doing it. At what point are you going to enforce the rule? Or can everyone now just link and run the same way that MG 2.0 is being allowed to?

Okay, fair enough.

[I Have Questions]

Nobody wants it split off. Everybody wants MG 2.0 to stop linking and running. You’ve warned him. And warned him. And warned him. Yet here we are, he’s still doing it. At what point are you going to enforce the rule? Or can everyone now just link and run the same way that MG 2.0 is being allowed to?

Okay, fair enough.

Okay - you’re going to enforce the rule, or Okay - we can all now link and run to our heart’s content?

[Dr. Shades]

Okay, fair enough.

Okay - you’re going to enforce the rule, or Okay - we can all now link and run to our heart’s content?

Okay, I'm going to enforce the rule from this point forward.

[Shulem]

The problem seems to be that Vogel does not directly engage with the significance of Shinehah as a genuine Egyptian word for the sun recognized by Egyptologists.

The problem seems to be that MG does not directly engage with the significance of ancient Egypt as a genuine nation state in the year 3000 BC under king Menes which greatly predates the times when the Book of Abraham claims Egypt was first founded by a woman bearing a Greek name.

Mormon Egyptologists won't touch it either.

Checkmate.

[Shulem]

I'd say it's another interesting somewhat hidden "easter egg" that some might overlook. Shinehah, in the Pyramid texts. Abraham has access. Joseph uses it to describe concepts revolving with the sun. Coincidence? Maybe. It's another one of those things, however, that Joseph just happened to be pretty much on target with.

I'd say you are misrepresenting the idea that one of the code names has a direct association with Smith's translation of the Egyptian papers because there is no evidence to support that idea. Your easter egg is an imagined thing. Shinehah is the only word that is adopted into the Egyptian translation work. Recall that Shinelah & Shinelane are also code names and what have they to do with Egypt? Smith used biblical names and even the name Shule from the Book of Mormon as code words but words used in Smith's translation papers from Kirtland and Nauvoo have no place in that list other than Shinehah. I think it's safe to assume that Smith invented Shinehah first and then later adopted it into the Book of Abraham.

You do agree, MG, right?

[Rivendale]

I'd say it's another interesting somewhat hidden "easter egg" that some might overlook. Shinehah, in the Pyramid texts. Abraham has access. Joseph uses it to describe concepts revolving with the sun. Coincidence? Maybe. It's another one of those things, however, that Joseph just happened to be pretty much on target with.

I'd say you are misrepresenting the idea that one of the code names has a direct association with Smith's translation of the Egyptian papers because there is no evidence to support that idea. Your easter egg is an imagined thing. Shinehah is the only word that is adopted into the Egyptian translation work. Recall that Shinelah & Shinelane are also code names and what have they to do with Egypt? Smith used biblical names and even the name Shule from the Book of Mormon as code words but words used in Smith's translation papers from Kirtland and Nauvoo have no place in that list other than Shinehah. I think it's safe to assume that Smith invented Shinehah first and then later adopted it into the Book of Abraham.

You do agree, MG, right?

I know a lot of codes were used to keep polygamy secret but what was their reason for using code words for buildings and towns? Was it simply Smith and others doing super secret club stuff?

[Shulem]

I know a lot of codes were used to keep polygamy secret but what was their reason for using code words for buildings and towns? Was it simply Smith and others doing super secret club stuff?

The link that I provided in Wikipedia gives a short description of why code names were adopted:

These names appear only in seven of the book's sections, mainly those dealing with the United Order (or United Firm). It is believed that their purpose was to avoid the use of these sections in lawsuits by opponents of the Church, since giving the real names might have provided evidence that the United Order was legally a company, with its members financially liable for each other and the whole Order.

I hope that Vogel doesn't feel his thread has been hijacked in posting subject matter not discussed in his podcast which is the purpose of this thread.

I will say that Jacob Hansen seems somewhat stoopid.

[Physics Guy]

The best I can gather from Mormon apologetics about “Shinehah” in Abraham 3:13 is that an Egyptian word with similar consonants (but unknown vowels) was one term for the ecliptic.

The ecliptic is the apparent path of the sun around the night sky, as seen from Earth, over the year. Of course we never see the sun in the night sky—it must be a conspiracy—but we can see what constellations were showing, as late before sunrise or as soon after sunset as any stars were visible, above the point on the horizon where the sun rises or sets. If you keep track of these spots in the sky over a year, you see that they slowly change through the year. The sun moves around the night sky.

In modern terms, the ecliptic is the plane of the Earth‘s orbit. Extend that plane out to infinity and it will come to close to some stars, while never getting near most of them. The view of those stars from Earth is a strip around the night sky.

Egyptian astronomers cared about the ecliptic. They used the movement of the sun around the ecliptic, as tracked by pre-sunrise and post-sunset observations, to keep track of the seasons in a way that didn’t get confused by variations of weather. From this they could tell ahead of time when the Nile would flood, at least to within a few days or so, so they could organize for the event. So I learned years ago from a very interesting though somewhat technical book, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity by the distinguished historian of mathematics Otto Neugebauer. That book will do a lot to build one's respect for ancient scientists: they were smart people and their ideas worked to solve practical problems.

The ecliptic is not the sun, and Egyptians would not have confused the two things. They apparently thought of the ecliptic as a waterway (so I read on a Mormon apologetic site, not in Neugebauer). Thinking of the ecliptic as a canal or stream on which the sun slowly rides as if in a barge makes good sense from an ancient viewpoint, but it makes it unlikely that Egyptians would have used “ecliptic” as a word for the sun itself even poetically. You might poetically refer to the sun by mentioning its barge, perhaps, but not its canal, which is long and thin and watery and dark, very much unlike the sun itself.

Perhaps the best Mormon apologetic here would be to suggest that either Smith’s translation of Abraham, or Abraham’s transcription of the Lord, was badly garbled, because in the speech represented in Abraham 3:13 the Lord was not talking about heavenly bodies themselves but about their orbits or locations. So "Shinehah, which is the sun" would really have been, "the ecliptic, which is the path of the sun through the sky", only Abraham muddled it and/or Smith mistranslated it. That's at least better than the Lord solemnly saying, Abraham painstakingly recording, and the Prophet of the Restoration finally miraculously translating, "The sun, which is the sun." That's what the sentence written by Abraham in Egyptian would have to have been, after all, if Shinehah were really Egyptian for "sun".

It’s all a stretch, anyway. A sort-of coincidence of three consonants in an ancient language with all different sounds from the sounds in English isn’t so much more notable than the fact that “Shinehah” starts with “Shine”, in much the way that “Mormon” starts with “mor” and is supposed to mean “more good”.

The hypothesis that makes the whole passage in the Book of Abraham make sense easily is that Smith was just exploiting the folk linguistic theory of his day, that all languages had developed fairly recently from a single Adamic language, which was the language of God, with Hebrew and ancient Egyptian being particularly close to it because they were ancient, and therefore also close to each other. In a culture where everyone took that theory for granted, it would make a nice scene to have God teach Abraham a couple of words in Adamic. Giving those words phonetically would add some flavour to the story.

Smith could make up some of the Adamic words by cribbing from the Hebrew that he had just learned ("Kokau" and "Kokaubeam"), since it would sound bizarre but plausibly Adamic to most people and might impress a few educated people in a way that couldn't hurt and might pay off well. And he could also toss in something that sounded more like English with a weird added suffix, so that the uneducated wouldn't feel left out. Hebrew might be closer to Adamic, but English was not supposed to be too far from it, and Smith wouldn't want to admit that he was fully dependent on his Hebrew teacher. The fact (if such it is) that Shinehah roughly shares the three consonants of an Egyptian word for the ecliptic would just be a coincidence that isn't so unlikely for a three-rough-consonants match and a kind-of-relatedness in meaning.

[MG 2.0]

The best I can gather from Mormon apologetics about “Shinehah” in Abraham 3:13 is that an Egyptian word with similar consonants (but unknown vowels) was one term for the ecliptic.

The ecliptic is the apparent path of the sun around the night sky, as seen from Earth, over the year. Of course we never see the sun in the night sky—it must be a conspiracy—but we can see what constellations were showing, as late before sunrise or as soon after sunset as any stars were visible, above the point on the horizon where the sun rises or sets. If you keep track of these spots in the sky over a year, you see that they slowly change through the year. The sun moves around the night sky.

In modern terms, the ecliptic is the plane of the Earth‘s orbit. Extend that plane out to infinity and it will come to close to some stars, while never getting near most of them. The view of those stars from Earth is a strip around the night sky.

Egyptian astronomers cared about the ecliptic. They used the movement of the sun around the ecliptic, as tracked by pre-sunrise and post-sunset observations, to keep track of the seasons in a way that didn’t get confused by variations of weather. From this they could tell ahead of time when the Nile would flood, at least to within a few days or so, so they could organize for the event. So I learned years ago from a very interesting though somewhat technical book, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity by the distinguished historian of mathematics Otto Neugebauer. That book will do a lot to build one's respect for ancient scientists: they were smart people and their ideas worked to solve practical problems.

The ecliptic is not the sun, and Egyptians would not have confused the two things. They apparently thought of the ecliptic as a waterway (so I read on a Mormon apologetic site, not in Neugebauer). Thinking of the ecliptic as a canal or stream on which the sun slowly rides as if in a barge makes good sense from an ancient viewpoint, but it makes it unlikely that Egyptians would have used “ecliptic” as a word for the sun itself even poetically. You might poetically refer to the sun by mentioning its barge, perhaps, but not its canal, which is long and thin and watery and dark, very much unlike the sun itself.

Perhaps the best Mormon apologetic here would be to suggest that either Smith’s translation of Abraham, or Abraham’s transcription of the Lord, was badly garbled, because in the speech represented in Abraham 3:13 the Lord was not talking about heavenly bodies themselves but about their orbits or locations. So "Shinehah, which is the sun" would really have been, "the ecliptic, which is the path of the sun through the sky", only Abraham muddled it and/or Smith mistranslated it. That's at least better than the Lord solemnly saying, Abraham painstakingly recording, and the Prophet of the Restoration finally miraculously translating, "The sun, which is the sun." That's what the sentence written by Abraham in Egyptian would have to have been, after all, if Shinehah were really Egyptian for "sun".

It’s all a stretch, anyway. A sort-of coincidence of three consonants in an ancient language with all different sounds from the sounds in English isn’t so much more notable than the fact that “Shinehah” starts with “Shine”, in much the way that “Mormon” starts with “mor” and is supposed to mean “more good”.

The hypothesis that makes the whole passage in the Book of Abraham make sense easily is that Smith was just exploiting the folk linguistic theory of his day, that all languages had developed fairly recently from a single Adamic language, which was the language of God, with Hebrew and ancient Egyptian being particularly close to it because they were ancient, and therefore also close to each other. In a culture where everyone took that theory for granted, it would make a nice scene to have God teach Abraham a couple of words in Adamic. Giving those words phonetically would add some flavour to the story.

Smith could make up some of the Adamic words by cribbing from the Hebrew that he had just learned ("Kokau" and "Kokaubeam"), since it would sound bizarre but plausibly Adamic to most people and might impress a few educated people in a way that couldn't hurt and might pay off well. And he could also toss in something that sounded more like English with a weird added suffix, so that the uneducated wouldn't feel left out. Hebrew might be closer to Adamic, but English was not supposed to be too far from it, and Smith wouldn't want to admit that he was fully dependent on his Hebrew teacher. The fact (if such it is) that Shinehah roughly shares the three consonants of an Egyptian word for the ecliptic would just be a coincidence that isn't so unlikely for a three-rough-consonants match and a kind-of-relatedness in meaning.

This adds to the number of lucky coincidences associated with Joseph's output. There seems to be a mix. Some that lead towards doubt and skepticism and others that lead to one saying, "Well, that's interesting.'

Regards,
MG