Skylark1 wrote:
Is the article written by Lance Owens that was published in Mormon Dialogue, titled Joseph Smith and the Kabbalah?
You have to be very careful when using Owens. He is attempting to explain the King Follett Discourse in terms of Kabbalah, but this can be shown to be completely erroneous. This isn't to say that Joseph didn't have any contact with Kabbalah (through Neibaur or some other source), it simply shows that Owens is over-reading the KFD.
I haven't yet produced an official response to Lance Owen's paper - but had Owens taken the time to review the sources on which his arguments depend, it would have helped. He may not have had complete access to the Seixas grammars however, so perhaps he can be forgiven on a few points.
To begin with, in the third part of the on-line edition of the article which Owens wrote (at
http://www.gnosis.org/jskabb3.htm ) under the heading:
Kabbalah in Mormon Doctrine: The King Follett Discourse
We get the area where I feel it can cleanly be argued that Owens is wrong. That is to say, that Owens spends a great deal of time going through the proper process - explaining the availability of Kabbalah to Joseph Smith, and so on, but when he gets down to the actual evidence, it seems clear that he has misread it. He writes:
By any literate interpretation of Hebrew, this is an impossible reading. Joseph takes Elohim, the subject of the clause, and turns it into the object, the thing which received the action of creation. Bereshith ("in the beginning") is reinterpreted to become Roshith, the "head" or "Head Father of the Gods," who is the subject-actor creating Elohim.134 And Elohim he interprets not as God, but as "the Gods." Louis C. Zucker, who published an insightful examination of Smith's study and use of Hebrew, notes that this translation deviates entirely from the interpretative convention Joseph had learned as a student of Hebrew in Kirtland. Joshua Seixas, the professor who had instructed Joseph and the School of the Prophets in early 1836, used in his classes a textbook he had written, Hebrew grammar for the Use of Beginners. In the Seixas manual (p. 85), this Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1 is given along with a "correct" word-for-word translation: "In the beginning, he created, God, the heavens, and the earth." Seixas would not have introduced in his oral instruction a translation entirely alien to the conventions of his own textbook. Zucker comments on Smith's strange translation of the verse: "Joseph, with audacious independence, changes the meaning of the first word, and takes the third word `Eloheem' as literally plural. He ignores the rest of the verse, and the syntax he imposes on his artificial three-word statement is impossible."
Owens has made a significant error when he states above: "Seixas would not have introduced in his oral instruction a translation entirely alien to the conventions of his own textbook."
The textbook actually treats the material in Genesis 1:1 in several places, and not consistently either. I will supply links to images in a moment. It is clear however, that this method of dealing with the text is entirely consistent (and not alien) to the Seixas approach. A little later Owens remarks:
In his next step of translation, Smith interprets Bereshith to become Rosh, the "head" or head God. As Zucker objected, orthodox standards of translations do not yield the word Rosh, or "head," from Bereshith. But it was not "audacious independence" alone that led Smith to changed the meaning. A basis for this reading is actually found in the next verse of the Zohar: By a Kabbalistic cipher of letters--a technique used in Kabbalah to conceal deeper esoteric meanings--the Zohar explains that the word Reshith "is anagrammatically Rosh (head), the beginning which issues from Reshith."
In this case, as Owens notes, Joseph breaks the word down in the KFD as follows:
"I want to analyze the word BERESHITH. BE--in, by, through, and everything else; next, ROSH--the head; ITH."
Now, Owens would like for us to recognize in this statement a deconstruction based in the Kaballah. In actuality, this same deconstruction is explicitly articulated by Seixas in his grammar. On page 85 of the 1834 edition of the Seixas grammar we find this statement.
(Hebrew characters represented in transliteration and indicated with _text_):
_bereshith_ in the beginning. For the prefix _b_ see §9, with note. For the termination _ith_ see §11. See Lexicon _reshith_.
This follows on instructions on page 76 of the 1834 edition of the grammar on how to discover the root of a Hebrew word.
To find the root.
§101. Divest the word of all its adjuncts, and if three or more letters be left, they are the root;
An exmaple follows in which the root is stripped of prefixes and suffixes.
The reference from page 85 to §11 is noteworthy because it defines the termination _ith_ as a feminine suffix.
Gender and Number of Nouns.
[§11. The following terminations exhibit the Gender and Number of Nouns.
_ith_ is listed as "sing. fem."
Now, here comes the next part of the puzzle. The version of the KFD which Owens uses is the Larson text. This site
here details all of the original sources of the KFD, as well as the Times and Seasons composite. In this particular case, the version is important. The Larson text removes a couple of words because they do not exist in any of the source texts. Yet, arguably, since they exist within the Times and Seasons composite, there was a reason to include them. This version reads:
"I shall comment on the very first Hebrew word in the Bible; I will make a comment on the very first sentence of the history of creation in the Bible, Berosheit. I want to analyze the word; Baith, in, by through, in, and every thing else. Rosh, the head. Sheit, grammatical termination."
You will notice that Seixas refers to the _ith_ as a "termination". Essentially, this notion of _ith_ as a grammatical termination can also be traced specifically back to the Seixas instruction. Joseph Smith here breaks down the first word exactly as Seixas would have done, in the classroom environment, while searching for the Hebrew word to then look up in a lexicon. The lexical entry however is _reshith_ (includes the termination) and, even though Joseph comments on the _ith_ as a grammatical termination, he continues to use _reshith_ as a complete term - just as Seixas suggests on page 85.
Further, where Owens gets this wrong (and this is following Kevin Barney's arguments in his Dialogue article on the subject), Joseph apparently did not redefine the first sentence in the fashion which Owens argues - his reconstruction is perhaps even more extreme. Owens argues:
"In his exegesis Joseph takes Elohim, the subject of the clause, and turns it into the object which received the action of creation from the first god-image (here called Reshith), just as does the Zohar. Indeed, his words as transcribed by William Clayton, "Rosheet signifies to bring forth the Eloheim," are almost identical with the Zohar's phrasing of the interpretation."
The problem is that _reshith_ is taken to mean (all by itself) "to bring forth the elohim" - and thus by extension, the phrase _beroshith baurau elohim haeretz wahashamayim_ would mean something along the lines of "God brought forth the gods to create the heavens and the earth." This does not resemble very closely Owens's arguments from Kabbalistic literature. It does however resemble closely the later comments in the KFD (from the composite text):
"The head God called together the Gods, and set in grand council. The grand counsellors sat in yonder heavens, and contemplated the creation of the worlds that were created at that time."
So, a few points now in further response to Owens. He writes:
In his next step of translation, Smith interprets Bereshith to become Rosh, the "head" or head God. As Zucker objected, orthodox standards of translations do not yield the word Rosh, or "head," from Bereshith.
This is true - but we have to note that Seixas does exactly this - although he does not translate it in this way. He certainly does reduce Bereshith to Rosh within his grammars. Zucker may not have been aware of this - and certainly Owens does not know this (or at least didn't at the time).
We also have this statement:
As he began his exegesis of the opening Hebrew phrase of Genesis in the King Follett Discourse, Joseph stated that he would go to the "old Bible." In Kabbalistic lore, the commentary of the Zohar represented the oldest biblical interpretation, the secret interpretation imparted by God to Adam and all worthy prophets after him. Joseph certainly was not using the knowledge of Hebrew imparted to him in Kirtland nine years earlier when he gave his exegesis of Bereshith bara Elohim, or plural interpretation of Elohim. Was then the "old Bible" he used the Zohar? And was the "learned man of God" he mentioned Simeon ben Yochai, the prophetic teacher attributed with these words in the Zohar?
The composite text reads near this point:
"I have an old book of the New Testament in the Hebrew, Latin, German and Greek. I have been reading the German and find it to be the most correct, and it corresponds nearest to the revelations I have given for the last fourteen years.
Based on this, and on evidence from the JST, it seems much more likely that Joseph is referring to a German Bible - probably Luther's translation, and not to the Zohar - or any Kabbalistic text.
In any case, I have several issues with Owens, and wouldn't recommend his article as being terribly helpful in answering this question.
Ben
