Posted by:
RPackham
(
)
Date: July 17, 2020 11:15PM
I was forwarded a missionary's post and asked to respond. The forwarding email:
>Subject: Richard, what do you make of this?
It was posted by a returned missionary defending Joseph Smith.
Critics often bring up the fact that linguists and archaeologists do not refer to any written language as “reformed Egyptian” and suggest that it is “proof” that Joseph Smith was a fraud.
In truth, they do not use this term to refer to any one written language simply because it encompasses too many written languages. Nearly all phonetic alphabets in the world originate from a single phonetic script invented on the Sinai Peninsula thousands of years ago…based on Egyptian characters.
Also, it is well established that people in the Levant did, in fact, use Egyptian characters in a logographic manner, altering them to better fit their own needs. (A logographic language may be used to write different spoken languages. This happens today in China.) Archaeologists have found literally hundreds of examples of locals in the Levant using Egyptian characters logographically.
The type of written language that Joseph Smith claimed to have been translating from most definitely did exist. He referred to “Reformed Egyptian” as if it were one specific language because he did not know any better. Scholars today would never do so because they know that there were many such derivations of written Egyptian.
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My response:
The writer is correct on three points: Smith's referring to the original BoM languages as "reformed Egyptian" is not on its face proof against the BoM; and, all modern (western) alphabets (including Hebrew) are derived from "Egyptian" (rather, "proto-semitic") writing; and examples of Egyptian writing have been found in ancient Palestine.
However, there are still significant problems with the BoM's claim that the Lehites and their descendants kept their history and sacred writings in any form of Egyptian.
The BoM claims that these Jews would have kept their sacred writings and history in the Egyptian language. There is no evidence of that, and it contradicts the general attitude of Jews toward the sacredness of Hebrew and their hate of Egyptians.
The BoM claims that Egyptian was "the language of [their] fathers." This is blatantly false.
Of course there exist examples of Egyptian writing and Egyptian alphabet use in ancient Palestine. Palestine was often occupied by Egypt, and Egyptian authorities and troops would be stationed there. That they left scraps of writing there, from communiations among themselves and other records, is no suprise, but it is not evidence that Egyptian was widely used by the Jews themselves for their own purposes, any more than finding documents from the 1940s in France written in German would be evidence that the French had adopted German for writing documents for their own purposes.
See my articles "Linguistic Problems of Mormonism" at
http://packham.n4m.org/linguist.htm#NOTVALIDand
"The Brass Plates" at
http://packham.n4m.org/brassplates.htm