Last spring, Interpreter published a short paper by Dr.
Stephen D. Ricks on a few names found in the Book of Mormon.[1]
A second such paper by Dr. Ricks was also published just last month.[2]
In the first paper, Ricks quotes Nibley, who quotes William F. Albright,
about how the story of Sinuhe seems historically plausible on the grounds that,
among other things, “the Amorite personal names contained in the story are
satisfactory for that period and region.”[3]
Certain Internet denizens were quick to fault Ricks for drawing on Albright
methodologically. They used a Google search to find a few quotes from William
G. Dever criticizing Albright’s methods. Hence they made the hasty
generalization that Mormon scholars are “always” drawing on out-dated methods (evidently not aware that some Mormon scholars have actually drawn on Dever himself for methodology).
While it is certainly true that Albright’s
work, generally speaking, is out of date today, and his methods of doing
Biblical archaeology have come under fire from Dever (and others, I am sure), not
a single quote they produced from Dever chided Albright for using personal
names as a means of evaluating the authenticity of a text. And the story of
Sinuhe—which Albright concluded was “a substantially true account of life in
its milieu”[4]—is still
largely considered a genuine Middle Egyptian text which dates to the time
period it is set in, even if it is not regarded as historical.[5] That
is, it certainly has verisimilitude, if not historicity, which seems consistent
with Albright as quoted, and having the right kind of personal names, along
with the other criteria Albright outlined, would seem to be part any assessment
of verisimilitude. Hence, Albright does not seem to be off in his assessment or
methods here.
This begs the question, what does Dever think of using personal names
in testing the legitimacy of a document? In his own assessment of the
historicity of the biblical documents, Dever notes, “If space permitted, I
could cite hundreds of 9th–6th-century [BCE] seals inscribed with Hebrew
personal names, the vast majority of which occur also in the Hebrew Bible,
including the supposedly ‘Hellenistic-Roman’ Deuteronomistic materials.”[6]
While Dever opts not to go through such a tedious exercise, the clear
implication is that since the Biblical texts that record events set in the 9th–6th
centuries BCE have many overlapping personal names with recovered seals from
that same time period, those texts were likely based on real historical events,
of which the authors had authentic, contemporary records, and not just some
fictional narrative made up out of whole cloth in the Hellenistic/Roman era.
A few pages later, Dever makes
this argument more explicitly (though he still opts not to belabor the point by
going through the various names). While discussing ostraca which date to the same
time period, Dever notes that among “several interesting convergences with
biblical texts,” found in these ostraca, “The personal names are usually
similar to those known in the Hebrew Bible, consistent even to the short form
of the divine name, -yaw in northern
compound names, compared with -yahu
in Judah.”[7]
So Dever clearly sees names as a legitimate type of convergence that can be
used to determine when and where a text was written. Hence, the exercise
undertaken by Ricks (and many others) of comparing Book of Mormon names to the
kinds of names found in ancient Israelite and other Semitic sources is entirely
legitimate.
A particularly interesting comment
comes from Dever when he is discussing bullae (the hardened clay with the seal
impression in it). Responding the suggestion, made by some, that the bullae are
forgeries, Dever argues, among other things, that a forger simply could not
have invented the many “nonbiblical personal names that are precisely of
biblical type,”[8]
which are found throughout the various bullae collections that have been
recovered. As has been pointed out by many scholars, this is exactly what we
find in the Book of Mormon: many biblical names, yes, but also many of the
right type of non-biblical names (a good deal of which are now attested in some
of the very ostaca and bullae to which Dever refers).[9]
If the foremost Syro-Palestinian archaeologists doubts this can be done in
forging seals and bullae, then I think we are more than justified in being
skeptical that Joseph Smith could have achieved the feat while forging a
lengthy and complicated text with hundreds of names, and in the early 19th
century, at that, when there was far less data regarding ancient Near Eastern
names to draw on.
[1] Stephen
D. Ricks, “Some Notes on Book of Mormon Names,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 4 (2013): 155–160.
[2]
Stephen D. Ricks, “A Nickname and a Slam Dunk: Notes on the Book of Mormon Names Zeezrom and Jershon,” Interpreter:
A Journal of Book of Mormon Scripture 8 (2014): 191–194.
[3]
Stephen D. Ricks, “Some Notes on Book of Mormon Names,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 4 (2013): 155, quoting Hugh
Nibley, Lehi in the Desert; The World of the Jaredites; There Were
Jaredites (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988), 3; quoting William
F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1942), 62.
[4]
Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 63; as quoted by Nibley, Lehi
in the Desert, 3.
[5] At
least, according to Wikipedia: “It is a narrative set in the aftermath of the
death of Pharaoh Amenemhat I, founder of the 12th dynasty of Egypt,
in the early 20th century BC. It is likely that it was composed only shortly
after this date, albeit the earliest extant manuscript is from the reign of Amenemhat
III, ca. 1800 BC. There is an ongoing debate among Egyptologists as
to whether or not the tale is based on actual events involving an individual
named Sinuhe, with the consensus being that it is most likely a work of
fiction.”
[6]
William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical
Writers Know & When Did They Know It? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 2001), 206, brackets mine. Since nearly all dates given in the book
are BC (or BCE), Dever has a tendency to consider that to be a “given” and not constantly
specify BC/BCE.
[7] Dever,
What Did the Biblical Writers Know, 210.
[8] Dever,
What Did the Biblical Writers Know,
208.
[9] I
recommend browsing through the Book of Mormon Onomasticon to see for yourself.
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