Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

Serapha said:

This great old Christmas song heralds the words of the Bible as though the Angels are saying the words from Heaven. (Hymns, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1948, revised)


Hark! The herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!
Joyful, all ye nations rise;
Join the triumph of the skies;
With th'angelic host proclaim
Christ is born in Bethlehem!
(C. Wesley and Mendelssohn)



and also, the great Christmas song,

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie,
Above they deep and dreamless sleep,
The Silent stars go by;
Yet in the dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hope and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
(Brooks and Redner)



Luke 2:4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David

Alma 7:10
&nbsp10And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God.


One of the oldest and most continuous arguments against the book of mormon is the error of Alma 7:10.

In searching the book of mormon, there are 42 instances where the "land of Jerusalem" is used. None of them are identified to be Bethlehem. In fact, members of this forum who are members of the CoJCoLDS's have told me that Lehi left Jerusalem and traveled through the wilderness until such time as he left for the Americas. The text reads the "land of Jerusalem", not Jerusalem.

How does one determine the context of "land of Jerusalem". Is it Jerusalem for the standard meaning and "land of Jerusalem" when it needs to be the outlying area?

~serapha~

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FB: I went on a mission to England. I remember that when people found out that we were Americans, sometimes they had a relative that lived in the Americas. I remember one guy said his aunt lived in Kansas. On a map, Utah is pretty close, he asked if I knew him. Sometimes they would ask where I lived. I would say, Utah. I would never use the town I grew in, they would never have any idea, but I would use a larger city that was closer. Many times Salt Lake City. The Land of Jerusalem means the area around it. That would also include Bethlehem. If Joseph Smith was trying to fool people, surely you don't think that he did not know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem? Most of these prophets had never seen Bethlehem. It would be perfectly normal for them to describe a well known city and call it the Land of Jerusalem to describe any other smaller village.

Serapha said:

Hi there!



I've been through this discussion before, and it just doesn't hold water. But the one "fact" I never saw before because I always replied to the questions concerning the "land of Jerusalem"... and the arguments and discussions are directed to the "land of Jerusalem".


Though the argument is, as you imply, the "land of Jerusalem"... the text simply states "at Jerusalem"

There's no reference in the text to "land of Jerusalem". That's just a smokescreen to divert from the true text. "at Jerusalem" is specific.

"Near Jerusalem".... that could be the "land of Jerusalem", but "at Jerusalem".... there's no question.

You may cite that the Dead Sea Scrolls references "land of Jerusalem" in a bad copy of Jeremiah known as Pseudo-Jeremiah, and that fact is insignificant. On the same line of evidences, I am certain I could find text after text that identifies "at Jerusalem" to mean "at Jerusalem".

I did a search of the bom for "at Jerusalem", and you know what? All of the text seem to mean "at Jerusalem".... oops, except this passage which is supposed to be "understood" to be Bethlehem.

Grief, the pat answer index has failed.

~serapha~

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Sarapha,



You appear to be aware of some of the arguments.

You did not address what FB said, any man who knew the Bible would know that Jesus was born

in Bethlehem. Any man who was trying to perpetrate a fraud and was as successful as Joseph Smith certainly must know the Bible. So no man would both make the blunder and fool so many.



The argument that you make is a misunderstanding of the Land of Jerusalem position. The idea is that the Dead Sea scrolls show that a man such as Lehi would very possibly refer to the city of Bethlehem as at Jerusalem. Or as the Land of Jerusalem. 2 Kings 14 says that the City of David is “at Jerusalem.”



Two non-LDS scholars refer to “the land of Jerusalem” in pseudo Jeremiah as a term that "greatly enhances the sense of historicity of the whole." Lehi lived in the same time so the idea is that his referring to “at Jerusalem” and “land of Jerusalem” would not be inconsistent with his timeframe. I do not wish to suggest that there was no existence of a town called Bethlehem before Lehi left the Old World, but I wish to suggest that it was common to refer to the region as the “land of Jerusalem” and that one born in the “land of Jerusalem” surely was born “at Jerusalem.”



After discovering the term “land of Jerusalem” in ancient documents, I think the above for Anti-Mormonismists is at best a non-issue. At worst for them, it is evidence that “greatly enhances the sense of historicity of the whole.” How could Joseph Smith have been so ignorant to not know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem? Why would he allow the BOM to say that Jesus was born “at Jerusalem?” Where would he come up with the phrase, “land of Jerusalem?” And how could he know that history would vindicate his use of this phrase and ancient linking of Jesus’ birth? He could not know these things.



He was either so inept that he didn’t know where Jesus was born, stumbled upon a term that had no place in the Bible, and was so intelligent and clever he deceived thousands. Or, he used “Land of Jerusalem” because the ancient text did. He said Jesus was born at Jerusalem because the ancient text did. And while unlearned, he was able to bring forth God work and rather than fool, he inspired thousands of people by showing them God’s truth.



I actually love this particular “concern” associated with the BOM. Most of the above is of course from Jeff Lindsey’s site. The “pat answer” not only works here, but the “concern” is really evidence of the truth of Joseph’s claims. I do not base my logical position on one little aspect of debate. But were I to rest on this “Bethlehem vs. Jerusalem concern” alone, I would believe Joseph was a prophet and have no trouble doing so. As Jeff Lindsey’s site says, this is evidence that shows Joseph Smith could not have made it all up.



Charity, TOm

Serapha said:

Grief, the pat answer index has failed.

~serapha~

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Doc: Perhaps your problem is failing to grasp the "pat answer". The full phrase used in Alma 7:10 is "at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers." This does not speak of the city of Jerusalem, but of the land of Jerusalem. Daniel Peterson explains:

Bethlehem, it seems, belonged to a district known as "the land of Jerusalem," of which Jerusalem proper was the capital or "mother-city" (metropolis). Such things were hardly unknown in antiquity. "City and state often have the same name in the Ancient Orient, although distinct entities." [1] Thus, for instance, northern Syria's "Carchemish" was both city and land. [2] Egyptian texts of the Twelfth Dynasty, dating from the nineteenth century B.C., likewise seem to suggest that the ancient Palestinian city of Shechem was surrounded by a "land" of the same name, as do the so-called "Amarna letters," which date to approximately 1400 b.c. [3] The Amarna letters also allude to "a town of the land of Jerusalem, Bit-Lahmi by name," which the illustrious W. F. Albright regarded as "an almost certain reference to the town of Bethlehem." [4] This is interesting evidence, which goes some distance to establishing the plausibility of Alma's prophecy since it give us a glimpse of an ancient administrative arrangement in the vicinity of Jerusalem. It shows, from an ancient perspective, that it was possible to conceptualize the regions surrounding a major city, including its dependent villages, as "the land of" that city. And it demonstrates, furthermore, that Bethlehem itself was, at least at one point, anciently regarded as a part of Jerusalem's "land," exactly as in the Book of Mormon.

What do we learn from the history of Israel during the biblical period? Anti-Mormons claim, correctly, that the precise phrase "land of Jerusalem" never occurs in the Bible. [5] However, this is almost certainly not as important a fact as they believe it to be. Jerusalem played a central administrative and political role from the reign of King David in the tenth century B.C. down to the period of the Babylonian exile-i.e., to roughly the time of Lehi and the departure of the Mulekites. David's successor, King Solomon, divided his kingdom into twelve administrative districts, largely for purposes of taxation, with each one governed from an administrative center. [6] One of those districts included both Bethlehem and Jerusalem, with the latter serving as district capital. [7] During the reign of Hezekiah, between 716 and 687 B.C., Solomon's twelve districts were consolidated into four, but Jerusalem "did double duty as the royal and district capital." [8] Using the Hebrew word migrash, meaning the open agricultural or pastoral land surrounding a city, rather than eretz, which refers to land or ground in general, the prophet Ezekiel speaks of the area immediately surrounding Jerusalem (Ezekiel 48:15). [9]

Jerusalem enjoyed manifestly higher status than other cities in the immediate area. It was not, contrary to Bill McKeever, "just a city within a kingdom." [10] Thus, for instance, Babylonian texts describe Jerusalem as "the city," par excellence, of Judah: "In the month of Kislimu, the King of Akkad called up his army, marched against the city of Judah [Jerusalem] and seized the town." [11] Assyrian provincial terminology had generally used the name of the capital of a province to designate that province as a whole [12]*-a practice which would therefore have been familiar to Lehi [13]*-and such usage appears to have continued among the Babylonians. [14] Whatever its origins, however, the practice of naming an area after its leading city was obviously widespread in the ancient Near East. And if Jerusalem was "the city of Judah," would it have been unreasonable to regard the region of Judah as "the land of Jerusalem"? This is precisely the same ambiguity between land and capital city that is displayed in the Book of Mormon, in a record that dates from precisely the time of Nephi. And Lehi's contemporary, the prophet Jeremiah, describing the siege of Jerusalem, says that Nebuchadnezzar's armies fought "against Jerusalem and all its surrounding towns" (Jeremiah 34:1; New International Version)-by which he apparently means the other cities and towns of Judah (Jeremiah 34:7). In this, Jeremiah was entirely consistent with common biblical usage, according to which the name "Jerusalem" was often used to designate the en tire southern kingdom. [15]

Other cities, too, had their surrounding "lands," named after them. Samaria, for instance, was often used as a designation for the entire northern kingdom of Israel even though, strictly speaking, it was only the name of the royal city that had been founded by Omri in the early ninth century B.C. (1 Kings 16:24). The Bible speaks of "cities of Samaria." [16] Thus, when we read of "Ahab king of Samaria," we are to understand him as the monarch of the northern kingdom as a whole, not merely as the glorified mayor of its largest urban center. Jeremiah 31:5 even refers to "the mountains of Samaria."
_______________________________
1. K. A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament (London: The Tyndale Press, 1966), 68 n. 63.

2. Kitchen, loc. cit.

3. See Walter Harrelson, "Shechem in Extra-Biblical References," The Biblical Archaeologist 20 (1957): 4, 6-7.

4. See James B. Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near East, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 1:274; also Yohanan Aharoni and Michael Avi-Yonah, eds., The Macmillan Bible Atlas, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1977), map 39. Hugh Nibley drew our attention to the Amarna letters years ago. See Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 100-102. Nibley's references are to the Amarna letters, tablets 287:25 = "the land of the city of Jerusalem ([a-]mur mat u-ru-sa-lim an-n[i-]ta)"; 46, 61, 63 = "lands [matat] of Jerusalem"; 290:15-16, discusses "a city of the land of Jerusalem, whose name is bit-ninib." Samuel A. B. Mercer, The Tell el-Amarna Tablets (Toronto: Macmillan, 1939), 722 n. L16, speculated that it might be possible to read this as "Bethlehem." Transliteration and translation can be found on pp. 710-11, 722 of Mercer's book. A more recent translation is now William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992).

5. For example, McKeever, "Problems in 'the Land of' Jerusalem," 3-4.

6. John Bright, A History of Israel, 3d ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), 221-22; Yohanan Aharoni, The Archaeology of the Land of Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 258-59.

7. See A. F. Rainey, "The Biblical Shephelah of Judah," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 251 (Summer 1983): 8.

8. Aharoni, The Archaeology of the Land of Israel, 259.

9. See Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, Charles A. Briggs, The New Brown, Driver, and Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Lafayette, IN: Associated Publishers, 1981), 117. Although the actual phrase migrash Yerushalayim does not occur, the context of the passage shows that it refers to the migrash of Jerusalem.

10. The phrase is from McKeever, "Problems in 'the Land of' Jerusalem," 4.

11. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East, 1:203; cf. James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 564. This occurred in year 7 of Nebuchadrezzar (= 598-597 B.C.). For the original text, see A. K. Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1975), 102, line 12.

12. Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography, 2d ed., translated by A. F. Rainey (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979), 374-77, with additional references found in Aharoni's notes.

13. We do not know Lehi's age "in the first year of the reign of Zedekiah" (1 Nephi 14 = 597 B.C.; see Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, 2d ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Academie/Zondervan, 1983], 190-91). However, since he had several adult sons at this time, we can probably conclude that he was at least in his late thirties. This would place his birth at the latest around 640 B.C., and probably earlier. Assyrian power in Palestine and Syria collapsed about 616 B.C., meaning that Lehi, an adult of at least twenty-five years at the time of the fall of Assyria, would have been familiar with the usage of that period.

14. Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography, 408-11.

15. See, for example, 2 Kings 21:13; Isaiah 10:10-11; Ezekiel 23:4; Micah 1:1, 5.

16. See 1 Kings 13:32; 2 Kings 17:24, 26; 23:19; Ezra 4:16.

I studied this issue in College, and the critics definately don't know what they are talking about.

Here's a short and consise paper I wrote on the subject.....

http://www.leeuniverse.org/portfolios/papers/allens/religion/christs_birth_land.doc

I find it interesting that TCoJCoLdS would have a hymn in it's hymnal written by Mr. Wesley.

Serapha said:

Proof please of this statement. There is only one, very vague known reference to "the land of Jerusalem" outside the bom, and it does not identify Bethlehem as being in the "land of Jerusalem".


so, proof please.


~serapha~

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Serapha,

Not that it is particularly important, but this is incorrect.



Let me quote Jeff Lindsey’s site directly this time:

For anyone honestly concerned with the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, there was little to argue about after Hugh Nibley showed in 1957 that one of the Amarna letters, written in the 13th century B.C. and discovered in 1887, recounted the capture of "a city of the land of Jerusalem, Bet-Ninib" (CWHN 6:101 [Note from J.L.: CWHN = The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley. Volume 6 is An Approach to the Book of Mormon]). Predictably, this evidence, along with further evidence of the general usage of this type of terminology in the Old World (see John W. Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon, 170-72) has been ignored by critics of the Book of Mormon.



TOm:

I am also aware of at least one additional ancient reference that uses the term “Land of Jerusalem.”



Now since I do not think my reference to what the two non-LDS scholars said was powerful enough, I will again quote Jeff Lindsey’s site.



Jeff:

Robert Eisenmann and Michael Wise, in The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (1993), discuss one document that they have provisionally named "Pseudo-Jeremiah" (scroll 4Q385). The beginning of the damaged text reads as follows:

...Jeremiah the Prophet before the Lord
[...w]ho were taken captive from the land of Jerusalem [Eretz Yerushalayim, column 1, line 2] (p. 58).

In their discussion of this text, Eisenmann and Wise elaborate on the significance of the phrase "land of Jerusalem," which they see as an equivalent for Judah (Yehud):

"Another interesting reference is to the 'land of Jerusalem' in Line 2 of Fragment 1. This greatly enhances the sense of historicity of the whole, since Judah or 'Yehud' (the name of the area on coins from the Persian period) by this time consisted of little more than Jerusalem and its immediate environs." (p. 57)

Based on the evidence from Qumran, and in the words of Eisenmann and Wise, we can conclude that consistent usage of such language among a people of Israel who fled Jerusalem at the time of Jeremiah also "greatly enhances the sense of historicity" of the Book of Mormon.



TOm:

Here is the URL:

[url]http://www.jefflindsay.com/BM_Jerusalem.shtml[/url]



Charity, TOm

Serapha said:

Proof please of this statement. There is only one, very vague known reference to "the land of Jerusalem" outside the bom, and it does not identify Bethlehem as being in the "land of Jerusalem".

so, proof please.

~serapha~

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Doc: I supplied references from Dr. Peterson's article


~

Serapha said:

The "land of Jerusalem" would not be an accurate rendering of anyone who was familiar with the area to include Bethlehem, and the second reference cited is a reference to "land of Jerusalem" and no no specific relationship to "Bethlehem"

If the people in the bom were familiar with the area, they would not use the term "land of Jerusalem" to mean Bethlehem.

~serapha~

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Doc: I believe that is part of the point. Alma is speaking to people who are removed from the area of Jerusalem by about 500 years. They were not familiar with the area surrounding Jerusalem. They only knew of Jerusalem as it was the land of their forefathers. They would have been familiar with the term "land of" and its meaning that it included surrounding towns as part of that "land."

~

Does anyone notice that the Bible doesn't talk about angels singing?