LDS "And It Came To Pass" 1,400-1,800+ times? (Fishy BOM linguistics strikes again)

[dzheremi]

Hi all,

I am currently making the trek through the Book of Mormon via the excellent (but quite sarcastic and blasphemous, so I won't link it) "My Book of Mormon Podcast" (which you can find by searching for that exact title on YouTube, if you're interested), which is actually quite a bit easier to digest than reading it alone has proved to be in the past. The premise is simple: the narrator -- a man named David -- reads through the Book of Mormon for the first time and offers his thoughts as he goes along. He says in the introductory episode (I am now on episode 6, which covers 2 Nephi) that the only other religious scripture he has read cover to cover before this is the Bible and the Qur'an, both of which he found interminably boring in long stretches, and that at least the Book of Mormon is a lot more exciting, due to it being "more crazy" (his words).

I dunno about that ('crazy' is not exactly quantifiable), but one thing I have noticed is the prevalence of the phrase "And it came to pass" to introduce basically any and every event: "And it came to pass that so and so preached to so and so", "And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said to my brothers...", "And it came to pass that so and so repented", blah blah blah blah blah, etc. etc. It's used to the point where it's a major distraction. Once you notice it, you can't un-notice it (and of course it's impossible to not notice, because it's everywhere). I think I'm developing a kind of tic whenever he says it.

Anyway, since I'm always curious about the intersection of linguistics and religion, I decided to seek out some numbers to see how this repetition compares to the use of similar language in the Holy Bible. The one count I could find that was from a non-Mormon source was from an atheist's blog, and he reckons it as follows:

"it came to pass"

Bible: 452 times
BOM: 1,424 times

So the phrase occurs more than three times as often in the BOM than it does in the Bible. When you put this in the context of their relative lengths (the Bible is much longer than the BOM), it starts to seem a bit ridiculous:

Bible: "It came to pass" 452 times in 31,102 verses = 1.45% of the Bible
BOM: "It came to pass" 1,424 times in 6,553 verses = 21.7% of the BOM

I am not really able to confirm the raw numbers* due to various factors, but I have confirmed that the percentages are correct (1424 / 6553 = 0.217305051).

(* Actually, searching the BOM at LDS.org brings up 1,818 results for "it came to pass", but I don't really have it in me to go through every result in order to make the BOM look more redundant than the atheist's analysis does, and yet without doing so I can't account for the discrepancy, so I figure I'll save me the work and Mormons the headache and use the lower number as provided at the blog. It may or may not be charitable to the point of being wrong, but I'm also not that darn interested, to be honest... )

The apologetic reasons given by Mormons for why nearly 22% of their scripture consists of one rather perfunctory phrase are interesting. As per the atheist blog entry, some say Joseph used it to mark the beginning of paragraphs, which seems at least plausible until you see it show up multiple times per paragraph in certain passages. The blog cites Alma 47:11, which, yeah...it's a doozy:

And it came to pass that when Lehonti received the message he durst not go down to the foot of the mount. And it came to pass that Amalickiah sent again the second time, desiring him to come down. And it came to pass that Lehonti would not; and he sent again the third time.

That's an awful lot of paragraph markers that you have there in your one paragraph, Alma (which is sandwiched between verses which also begin "And it came to pass"!)...sounds like somebody's strainin' to do some explainin', as I used to hear people say.

LDS.org's explanation, courtesy of one Donald W. Parry, BYU instructor in Biblical Hebrew, is that the phrase is a translation of the Hebrew wayehi (which is a kind of conjuction), which was translated much more freely by the translators of the KJV (who translated it as "it came to pass" only 727 times) than Joseph Smith translated it when working with the BOM source materials.

And lest we think that this means that "Reformed Egyptian" is therefore claimed to be a kind of Hebrew, Parry ends his apologetic by claiming:

The Prophet Joseph Smith may not have used the phrase at all—or at least not consistently—in the Book of Mormon had he created that record. The discriminating use of the Hebraic phrase in the Book of Mormon is further evidence that the record is what it says it is—a translation from a language (reformed Egyptian) with ties to the Hebrew language.​

This makes me wonder a few things:

(1) How is using the phrase all over the dang place "discriminating"? Does Parry just not know what that word means?

(2) Something having "ties" to Hebrew such that it borrows such basic function words would imply a lot more interaction between Hebrew and whatever language Reformed Egyptian is supposed to be (and, no, I'm not getting into that question again here) than can be proven or even supposed by the (over)use of one phrase in one particular setting/domain.

For example, in his article "Code-Mixing Strategies in Coptic Egyptian" (Lingua Aegyptia 9, 2001, 193-237), linguist Chris Reintges focuses on the presence and function of various kinds of Greek words in the Coptic language, including the borrowing of the switch-reference marker de from the Greek (which has more functions than just that), and its usage along with the Coptic owoh, which is a kind of discourse marker. (Switch-reference is, like it sounds, the term used for the phenomenon by which the things/events/people referenced in a given narrative are switched from a previously established referent to another referent, so it is relatively similar to the use of "and it came to pass" in the BOM, as it marks the introduction of new information/participants which are thereafter the referents of any "they"s, "it"s, or "he/her"s that might come up; discourse markers track the same referent through the discourse -- Markos pi-apostolos ethowab owoh em-martyros "St. Mark the Apostle and martyr" tells us that both descriptors "apostle" and "martyr" have the same referent: St. Mark.)

Reintges concludes his study with the following thoughts (232-233):

We have also seen that code-mixing is not restricted to lexical borrowing alone since
the simultaneous use of two languages within a single utterance serves a communicative
function. The pragmatic underpinning of code-mixing in Coptic Egyptian was illustrated
with the example of the Greek rhetorical conjunction de. The borrowed particle de
turned out to be operative at all levels of discourse: it marks the transition into a new
narrative unit, a shift in the temporal-spatial setting of the plot, switch reference and
topic shift and disambiguates pronominal reference. Despite their functional overlap,
Coptic and Greek de display rather different word order patterns. This is because enclitic
rhetorical conjunctions are syntactically phrase-initial, but sentence phonology
places them to the right of the first phonological word. The scope of phonological
words, however, must be established for each language separately.

It generally appears, then, that Egyptian-Greek code-mixing is a multi-dimensional
process, which involves not only a substantial re-lexification of the native dictionary, but
also the mastering of foreign rhetorical conventions and norms and their application as boundary-marking and topic-shifting devices in vernacular discourse.

[....]

The big picture that emerges from the previous discussion is that Coptic Egyptian
demonstrates the same code-mixing behaviour as contemporary bilingual language
varieties. In my opinion, this reveals a 'deep' property of the Coptic language, which
should not so much be regarded as the final stage of Ancient Egyptian, as in the traditional
model of language development, but rather a bilingual language variety with
two parent languages, Egyptian and Greek. Language contact phenomena at all grarnmatical levels (lexicon, phonology, syntax, and information structure) are not simply
additions to the native grammar hut represent the innovative and creative aspects of a new language form.

(End of quote)

That last paragraph is quite controversial, as he well notes, but it bears consideration for the BOM/Reformed Egyptian case: it is because of this "deep" properties of code mixing behavior found in Coptic Egyptian that he can at least claim that it represents a mixed language -- meaning that if it had borrowed less, or the borrowings been restricted to one domain only (e.g., purely lexical borrowings) rather than affecting so much of the language at all levels, we would not see the kind of behavior that we do in Coptic, which betray such heavy contact with Greek as to describe it as a combined "parent" language of Coptic, together with Egyptian.

That's the level at which you get the borrowing of function words to the degree that you would find them all over a given text or discourse, as is clearly the case with this "It came to pass" coming from the Hebrew wayehi, according to the apologetics briefly discussed at the atheist blog. And yet other than the chiasmus that is commonly pointed to by Mormons as evidence of "Semitism" in the source text, and the borrowing and twisting of various obscure Hebrew and/or Aramaic names from different apocryphal sources (Egyptian would be out even if they were present, as Egyptian is not a Semitic language), they cannot point to any such thing. "A language with ties to Hebrew", Mr. Parry? Where? In this one phrase, that is for some reason (*cough*) tied to the its translation in the KJV in Mormon apologetics, as though that should have any relation to anything if Joseph Smith was really translating "by the gift and power of God", as the LDS religion and its adherents like to claim?

I'm sorry. I don't claim to be the king of all language-related topics or whatever just because I happen to have a masters in linguistics (you really don't need to have any linguistics training at all to see through the BOM's claims about "Reformed Egyptian" or whatever; it just makes it easier to dismiss it as an obvious fraud), so I'm not writing this to "show off" or whatever, but to present the topic for public discussion, and to ask all curious members of this message board: am I the only the one who sees how terribly lame this all is? How the more you try to treat the BOM like what its proponents claim it to be, the more the so-called 'evidence' for it falls apart completely?

You have, in summary:

• A book that is supposedly miraculous that at the same time is filled to nearly a quarter of its total length with the repetition of a stock phrase that basically means "and then".
• A book whose apologists try to connect to Hebrew by the supposed use of a kindred translation in the KJV, despite the fact that this same book is supposed to be more correct than the KJV (that is, if we take Joseph's statement that the BOM is "the most correct of any book on earth" seriously), so that shouldn't matter. What does that even mean? God wanted the translators to repeat "It came to pass" 1,400-1,800 times, and they actually messed up by only doing so 727 times in the KJV? Not to be flippant, but I think we can still get the point with 'only' 727 repetitions of the same darn thing.
• A book whose overdose on one word of Hebrew supposedly connects its source material to the ancient Israelites and their language use, despite no other evidence of Hebraicization akin to the structural, lexical, and other impacts found in languages which actually interact with one another at a deep level in the real world, e.g., the Coptic-Greek example. (I still maintain that chiasmus is out as there is nothing essentially Semitic about it; it's just a structural device that can either appear or not appear, independent of the actual language in which the literature is written or the speech is spoken. JFK did not magically turn into an ancient Hebrew Israelite Native American when he said "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country", and he still would not have been one even if he had continued this manner of speaking for many, many lines within the prepared text of the speech.)

I just needed to get this out somewhere, because listening to the BOM is...well, from my perspective, it's a penance. But more professionally (linguistically), I can say with confidence that it's a failure, and quite an obvious at that. And again you don't even need to be especially educated in this particular discipline to know that. Some of the BOM's earliest detractors called Joseph "Old Come-to-pass" for his obvious over-reliance on this phrase in a desperate attempt to pass the book off as "Biblical" (~ authoritative/authentic?). It's quite transparent, which only makes the fact that millions have based their life around it all the more regrettable.

Christ didn't need to pretend to be an ancient Jew, y'know?

 

[Ironhold]

Got a storm moving through my area, so I'll have to remember to look at this one later.

 

[mmksparbud]

Hi all,

I am currently making the trek through the Book of Mormon via the excellent (but quite sarcastic and blasphemous, so I won't link it) "My Book of Mormon Podcast" (which you can find by searching for that exact title on YouTube, if you're interested), which is actually quite a bit easier to digest than reading it alone has proved to be in the past. The premise is simple: the narrator -- a man named David -- reads through the Book of Mormon for the first time and offers his thoughts as he goes along. He says in the introductory episode (I am now on episode 6, which covers 2 Nephi) that the only other religious scripture he has read cover to cover before this is the Bible and the Qur'an, both of which he found interminably boring in long stretches, and that at least the Book of Mormon is a lot more exciting, due to it being "more crazy" (his words).

I dunno about that ('crazy' is not exactly quantifiable), but one thing I have noticed is the prevalence of the phrase "And it came to pass" to introduce basically any and every event: "And it came to pass that so and so preached to so and so", "And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said to my brothers...", "And it came to pass that so and so repented", blah blah blah blah blah, etc. etc. It's used to the point where it's a major distraction. Once you notice it, you can't un-notice it (and of course it's impossible to not notice, because it's everywhere). I think I'm developing a kind of tic whenever he says it.

Anyway, since I'm always curious about the intersection of linguistics and religion, I decided to seek out some numbers to see how this repetition compares to the use of similar language in the Holy Bible. The one count I could find that was from a non-Mormon source was from an atheist's blog, and he reckons it as follows:

"it came to pass"

Bible: 452 times
BOM: 1,424 times

So the phrase occurs more than three times as often in the BOM than it does in the Bible. When you put this in the context of their relative lengths (the Bible is much longer than the BOM), it starts to seem a bit ridiculous:

Bible: "It came to pass" 452 times in 31,102 verses = 1.45% of the Bible
BOM: "It came to pass" 1,424 times in 6,553 verses = 21.7% of the BOM

I am not really able to confirm the raw numbers* due to various factors, but I have confirmed that the percentages are correct (1424 / 6553 = 0.217305051).

(* Actually, searching the BOM at LDS.org brings up 1,818 results for "it came to pass", but I don't really have it in me to go through every result in order to make the BOM look more redundant than the atheist's analysis does, and yet without doing so I can't account for the discrepancy, so I figure I'll save me the work and Mormons the headache and use the lower number as provided at the blog. It may or may not be charitable to the point of being wrong, but I'm also not that darn interested, to be honest... )

The apologetic reasons given by Mormons for why nearly 22% of their scripture consists of one rather perfunctory phrase are interesting. As per the atheist blog entry, some say Joseph used it to mark the beginning of paragraphs, which seems at least plausible until you see it show up multiple times per paragraph in certain passages. The blog cites Alma 47:11, which, yeah...it's a doozy:

And it came to pass that when Lehonti received the message he durst not go down to the foot of the mount. And it came to pass that Amalickiah sent again the second time, desiring him to come down. And it came to pass that Lehonti would not; and he sent again the third time.

That's an awful lot of paragraph markers that you have there in your one paragraph, Alma (which is sandwiched between verses which also begin "And it came to pass"!)...sounds like somebody's strainin' to do some explainin', as I used to hear people say.

LDS.org's explanation, courtesy of one Donald W. Parry, BYU instructor in Biblical Hebrew, is that the phrase is a translation of the Hebrew wayehi (which is a kind of conjuction), which was translated much more freely by the translators of the KJV (who translated it as "it came to pass" only 727 times) than Joseph Smith translated it when working with the BOM source materials.

And lest we think that this means that "Reformed Egyptian" is therefore claimed to be a kind of Hebrew, Parry ends his apologetic by claiming:

The Prophet Joseph Smith may not have used the phrase at all—or at least not consistently—in the Book of Mormon had he created that record. The discriminating use of the Hebraic phrase in the Book of Mormon is further evidence that the record is what it says it is—a translation from a language (reformed Egyptian) with ties to the Hebrew language.​

This makes me wonder a few things:

(1) How is using the phrase all over the dang place "discriminating"? Does Parry just not know what that word means?

(2) Something having "ties" to Hebrew such that it borrows such basic function words would imply a lot more interaction between Hebrew and whatever language Reformed Egyptian is supposed to be (and, no, I'm not getting into that question again here) than can be proven or even supposed by the (over)use of one phrase in one particular setting/domain.

For example, in his article "Code-Mixing Strategies in Coptic Egyptian" (Lingua Aegyptia 9, 2001, 193-237), linguist Chris Reintges focuses on the presence and function of various kinds of Greek words in the Coptic language, including the borrowing of the switch-reference marker de from the Greek (which has more functions than just that), and its usage along with the Coptic owoh, which is a kind of discourse marker. (Switch-reference is, like it sounds, the term used for the phenomenon by which the things/events/people referenced in a given narrative are switched from a previously established referent to another referent, so it is relatively similar to the use of "and it came to pass" in the BOM, as it marks the introduction of new information/participants which are thereafter the referents of any "they"s, "it"s, or "he/her"s that might come up; discourse markers track the same referent through the discourse -- Markos pi-apostolos ethowab owoh em-martyros "St. Mark the Apostle and martyr" tells us that both descriptors "apostle" and "martyr" have the same referent: St. Mark.)

Reintges concludes his study with the following thoughts (232-233):

We have also seen that code-mixing is not restricted to lexical borrowing alone since
the simultaneous use of two languages within a single utterance serves a communicative
function. The pragmatic underpinning of code-mixing in Coptic Egyptian was illustrated
with the example of the Greek rhetorical conjunction de. The borrowed particle de
turned out to be operative at all levels of discourse: it marks the transition into a new
narrative unit, a shift in the temporal-spatial setting of the plot, switch reference and
topic shift and disambiguates pronominal reference. Despite their functional overlap,
Coptic and Greek de display rather different word order patterns. This is because enclitic
rhetorical conjunctions are syntactically phrase-initial, but sentence phonology
places them to the right of the first phonological word. The scope of phonological
words, however, must be established for each language separately.

It generally appears, then, that Egyptian-Greek code-mixing is a multi-dimensional
process, which involves not only a substantial re-lexification of the native dictionary, but
also the mastering of foreign rhetorical conventions and norms and their application as boundary-marking and topic-shifting devices in vernacular discourse.

[....]

The big picture that emerges from the previous discussion is that Coptic Egyptian
demonstrates the same code-mixing behaviour as contemporary bilingual language
varieties. In my opinion, this reveals a 'deep' property of the Coptic language, which
should not so much be regarded as the final stage of Ancient Egyptian, as in the traditional
model of language development, but rather a bilingual language variety with
two parent languages, Egyptian and Greek. Language contact phenomena at all grarnmatical levels (lexicon, phonology, syntax, and information structure) are not simply
additions to the native grammar hut represent the innovative and creative aspects of a new language form.

(End of quote)

That last paragraph is quite controversial, as he well notes, but it bears consideration for the BOM/Reformed Egyptian case: it is because of this "deep" properties of code mixing behavior found in Coptic Egyptian that he can at least claim that it represents a mixed language -- meaning that if it had borrowed less, or the borrowings been restricted to one domain only (e.g., purely lexical borrowings) rather than affecting so much of the language at all levels, we would not see the kind of behavior that we do in Coptic, which betray such heavy contact with Greek as to describe it as a combined "parent" language of Coptic, together with Egyptian.

That's the level at which you get the borrowing of function words to the degree that you would find them all over a given text or discourse, as is clearly the case with this "It came to pass" coming from the Hebrew wayehi, according to the apologetics briefly discussed at the atheist blog. And yet other than the chiasmus that is commonly pointed to by Mormons as evidence of "Semitism" in the source text, and the borrowing and twisting of various obscure Hebrew and/or Aramaic names from different apocryphal sources (Egyptian would be out even if they were present, as Egyptian is not a Semitic language), they cannot point to any such thing. "A language with ties to Hebrew", Mr. Parry? Where? In this one phrase, that is for some reason (*cough*) tied to the its translation in the KJV in Mormon apologetics, as though that should have any relation to anything if Joseph Smith was really translating "by the gift and power of God", as the LDS religion and its adherents like to claim?

I'm sorry. I don't claim to be the king of all language-related topics or whatever just because I happen to have a masters in linguistics (you really don't need to have any linguistics training at all to see through the BOM's claims about "Reformed Egyptian" or whatever; it just makes it easier to dismiss it as an obvious fraud), so I'm not writing this to "show off" or whatever, but to present the topic for public discussion, and to ask all curious members of this message board: am I the only the one who sees how terribly lame this all is? How the more you try to treat the BOM like what its proponents claim it to be, the more the so-called 'evidence' for it falls apart completely?

You have, in summary:

• A book that is supposedly miraculous that at the same time is filled to nearly a quarter of its total length with the repetition of a stock phrase that basically means "and then".
• A book whose apologists try to connect to Hebrew by the supposed use of a kindred translation in the KJV, despite the fact that this same book is supposed to be more correct than the KJV (that is, if we take Joseph's statement that the BOM is "the most correct of any book on earth" seriously), so that shouldn't matter. What does that even mean? God wanted the translators to repeat "It came to pass" 1,400-1,800 times, and they actually messed up by only doing so 727 times in the KJV? Not to be flippant, but I think we can still get the point with 'only' 727 repetitions of the same darn thing.
• A book whose overdose on one word of Hebrew supposedly connects its source material to the ancient Israelites and their language use, despite no other evidence of Hebraicization akin to the structural, lexical, and other impacts found in languages which actually interact with one another at a deep level in the real world, e.g., the Coptic-Greek example. (I still maintain that chiasmus is out as there is nothing essentially Semitic about it; it's just a structural device that can either appear or not appear, independent of the actual language in which the literature is written or the speech is spoken. JFK did not magically turn into an ancient Hebrew Israelite Native American when he said "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country", and he still would not have been one even if he had continued this manner of speaking for many, many lines within the prepared text of the speech.)

I just needed to get this out somewhere, because listening to the BOM is...well, from my perspective, it's a penance. But more professionally (linguistically), I can say with confidence that it's a failure, and quite an obvious at that. And again you don't even need to be especially educated in this particular discipline to know that. Some of the BOM's earliest detractors called Joseph "Old Come-to-pass" for his obvious over-reliance on this phrase in a desperate attempt to pass the book off as "Biblical" (~ authoritative/authentic?). It's quite transparent, which only makes the fact that millions have based their life around it all the more regrettable.

Christ didn't need to pretend to be an ancient Jew, y'know?

Wow--interesting. Within the 1st paragraph I found the BOM to be very lightweight, biblically sounding literature. It is like the Quran in that is sounds rather ---simplistic ---well, umm--- written by someone who didn't have much education. Not sure I'm stating that right. But when you read the bible, though that guy calls it boring, trying to figure out what it says is part of the intrigue of it. You have to take a lot into trying to figure out the bible---the Jewish culture, the Jewish mind, the Jewish language itself for one word can often mean several different things. The BOM has none of that. The first thing that hit me was that it was trying to sound biblical, but didn't have nearly the depth. It sounds rather childish. I prayed earnestly before I even began to read it. And it came to pass that I very quickly knew without a shadow of a doubt, that this is not of God.

 

[drstevej]

Got a storm moving through my area, so I'll have to remember to look at this one later.

Stay safe.

 

[dzheremi]

Got a storm moving through my area, so I'll have to remember to look at this one later.

Yikes! Here's hoping it passes without any major incident.

 

[Rescued One]

This too shall pass.

 

[Ironhold]

Yikes! Here's hoping it passes without any major incident.

It hit the hardest after I logged off for the night; we had about two inches if I heard the weather right.

Anyway...

Why is the phrase “and it came to pass” so prevalent in the Book of Mormon? - ensign

134 - "It Came to Pass" Occurrences in the Book of Mormon

The root Hebrew term "Wayehi" is the basis for "And it came to pass", but it can easily be rendered in other fashions. In fact, according to the former link the Hebrew manuscripts for the Bible have the word 1,200+ times, but it's only translated that way about 730 times in the more common translations; the rest of the time saw the translator change things up and use another term.

Either way, it's a common term in Hebrew narrative text, and since so much of the Book of Mormon *is* narrative text - especially since Mormon had to edit the plates down and create an abridgement - it makes sense that it shows up so often.

 

[drstevej]

Glad you are OK

 

[dzheremi]

It hit the hardest after I logged off for the night; we had about two inches if I heard the weather right.

Anyway...

Why is the phrase “and it came to pass” so prevalent in the Book of Mormon? - ensign

134 - "It Came to Pass" Occurrences in the Book of Mormon

The root Hebrew term "Wayehi" is the basis for "And it came to pass", but it can easily be rendered in other fashions. In fact, according to the former link the Hebrew manuscripts for the Bible have the word 1,200+ times, but it's only translated that way about 730 times in the more common translations; the rest of the time saw the translator change things up and use another term.

Either way, it's a common term in Hebrew narrative text, and since so much of the Book of Mormon *is* narrative text - especially since Mormon had to edit the plates down and create an abridgement - it makes sense that it shows up so often.

Firstly, I'll join Dr. Steve in saying that I'm glad you made it through the storm okay.

Secondly, I addressed all of this in the OP.

Pointing to a Hebrew word as the reason why this appears so often in the BOM only makes sense if you want to posit a sort of Hebrew superstratum in "Reformed Egyptian" (cf. Coptic-Greek), which is obviously not possible due to a lack of a analyzable corpus of texts in the supposed 'original' (not translated). And if that were the case, we would see a lot more wide-reaching effects of the language upon Reformed Egyptian. One hypothesized word doesn't mean anything.

It is still unclear to me why the translation of the Hebrew source text (NB: not 'Reformed Egyptian' source text) made by the translators of the KJV has anything to do with what we may or may not find in the BOM. While such a direct comparison between the Bible and the BOM is necessary to establish the relative frequencies of given phrase, the same doesn't really need to be done if JS is in fact translating independently via "the gift and power of God", right? I am unaware of anywhere where it is claimed that JS checked his translation against either the KJV or the Masoretic text of Daniel Bomberg's Rabbinic Bible (which was the source of the OT as consulted for the KJV, with adjustments made for those passages to which Christianity had attached a Christological interpretation via the LXX or the Vulgate), and it indeed would have made no sense to do so, since they are after all different texts entirely (the BOM is not the OT, and vice versa), supposedly not even written in the same language.

So how do we know that wayehi has anything to do with anything in the first place? This defense assumes more knowledge of the character of 'Reformed Egyptian' and indeed the actual text that JS was supposedly working from than anyone actually has, or can have. (Since the hypothesized original is not extant.)

 

[Ironhold]

It is still unclear to me why the translation of the Hebrew source text (NB: not 'Reformed Egyptian' source text) made by the translators of the KJV has anything to do with what we may or may not find in the BOM. While such a direct comparison between the Bible and the BOM is necessary to establish the relative frequencies of given phrase, the same doesn't really need to be done if JS is in fact translating independently via "the gift and power of God", right? I am unaware of anywhere where it is claimed that JS checked his translation against either the KJV or the Masoretic text of Daniel Bomberg's Rabbinic Bible (which was the source of the OT as consulted for the KJV, with adjustments made for those passages to which Christianity had attached a Christological interpretation via the LXX or the Vulgate), and it indeed would have made no sense to do so, since they are after all different texts entirely (the BOM is not the OT, and vice versa), supposedly not even written in the same language.

So how do we know that wayehi has anything to do with anything in the first place? This defense assumes more knowledge of the character of 'Reformed Egyptian' and indeed the actual text that JS was supposedly working from than anyone actually has, or can have. (Since the hypothesized original is not extant.)

One thing a careful reading of the BoM should make clear is that JS was *not* an experienced translator.

Many of the things I've seen critics of the church go after, like this "and it came to pass" bit here, are all hallmarks of a rookie.

Overly-literal translations in one place, clunky attempts at localizing foreign or unusual concepts there, just giving up and letting words through as-is from time to time, et cetra. He may have had divine power to do the job, but he still had his mortal limitations as well.

Seriously. Run random bits of foreign-language text through something like Google Translate and see what happens. A lot of your free-to-use online translators are about on par with, or even slightly worse than, a rookie translator. There's a reason "bean jam sprouting" almost became a meme in the "Transformers" fandom once upon a time...

 

[Ironhold]

Case in point -

Here's Matthew 1 in Greek, as provided by Bible Study Tools.com ->

Matthew 1 - SBLG Bible - Bible Study Tools

The abomination that is the Google Translate rendition:

Google Translate

 

[dzheremi]

True enough, but the point is less about Joseph Smith's own abilities (because, again, gift and power of God...) and more about how this is all supposed to fit together in terms of apologetics. It's all fine and well to say "Well Joseph didn't necessarily know not to repeat 'it came to pass' fourteen hundred plus times" or whatever, but that doesn't fit with the picture painted by the other apologetics, whereby not only was translation supposedly divinely guided, but also carries some functional content that helps us identify something of the character of the original (e.g., that it functions as a kind of paragraph marker, or that it represents a particular Hebrew word that we have no way of knowing was actually present in the source text, since as far as anyone can actually know there was no source text to begin with...or if there was it was not what the LDS and BOM say it was).

 

[drstevej]

One thing a careful reading of the BoM should make clear is that JS was *not* an experienced translator.

Many of the things I've seen critics of the church go after, like this "and it came to pass" bit here, are all hallmarks of a rookie.

Then rename it the JSD (Joseph Smith Distortion). Rookie??? or False Prophet???

He could have used a hat and a rock and done better.

 

[Ironhold]

True enough, but the point is less about Joseph Smith's own abilities (because, again, gift and power of God...)

Everything I've seen says "he could read and translate, but the choice of words was up to him."

but also carries some functional content that helps us identify something of the character of the original

Paragraph breaks and the like are the function of the translator.

since as far as anyone can actually know there was no source text to begin with...or if there was it was not what the LDS and BOM say it was).

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not speaking from ignorance when I talk about the hallmarks of translation. In addition to 7 years of Spanish training (which I ended up not using since I didn't go into the career field I needed it for...), I also frequently deal with translated foreign material, both in my hobbies and professionally as an entertainment critic.

That's how I know what some of the hallmarks are of an experienced vs. inexperienced translator.

So even though I don't have the raw texts handy, I can look at the finished product and tell what was going on.

 

[dzheremi]

Everything I've seen says "he could read and translate, but the choice of words was up to him."

That's not what the witnesses to the translation process say:

[...] Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear. Thus the Book of Mormon was translated by the gift and power of God, and not by any power of man.

-- David Whitmer, An Address To All Believers in Christ, p. 11

By aid of the Seer Stone, sentences would appear and were read by the Prophet and written by Martin, and when finished he would say 'written;' and if correctly written, the sentence would disappear and another appear in its place; but if not written correctly it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates, precisely in the language then used.

-- Martin Harris, as quoted in B.H. Roberts' Comprehensive History of The Church

(these and several more are available here via MormonThink)

Paragraph breaks and the like are the function of the translator.

Again, the point is even if he used it as a paragraph indicator (which doesn't really even make sense relative to what we've got in translation; see again Alma 47:11), the apologetics would have us believe that these are somehow reflective of the underlying text -- that there are "wayehi"s all over the place. It's a little hard to believe when they're coming in several deep per 'paragraph'.

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not speaking from ignorance when I talk about the hallmarks of translation.

Respectfully, nothing in this thread has anything to do with either you personally or Joseph's supposed skill or lack thereof as a translator.

 

[BigDaddy4]

Everything I've seen says "he could read and translate, but the choice of words was up to him."

For doing "apologetics" as long as you claim to have been doing it, you surely jest. Or just aren't being truthful. See dzheremi's references from the post below. Please don't tell me you don't know about them. They flat out contradict your statement that "the choice of words was up to him". Your statement doesn't pass the sniff test or the truth meter.

That's not what the witnesses to the translation process say:

Whom to believe, right? Actual witness statements or ....?

 

[Bob Crowley]

The only time I ever started to read the Book of Mormon, which a couple of their missionaries had given to us, I was struck almost immediately by the prevalence of this particular phrase. It seemed to be in every second paragraph.

Needless to say I didn't continue for long.

In any case, I'm somewhat cynical about a religion founded by an adulterous con-man.