Hebrew Voices #206 – Revelation or imagination: Part 3

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #206, Revelation or Imagination: Part 3, Nehemia learns from Royal Skousen how the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon was changed to match printing errors despite the belief of some Mormons that angels helped operate the printing press. Nehemia also shares his vision for elevating Biblical Studies to its greatest potential.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #206 – Revelation or imagination: Part 3

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: And here’s why this is so valuable for someone like me. It would have never occurred to me that someone would change the original manuscript based on a copy, but that can happen. It happened here.

Royal: When they think it’s right, they’re going to do it.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: Nothing’s going to stop them.

Nehemia: That’s amazing, that’s absolutely amazing.

Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Royal Skousen. Royal, thank you for coming and joining me on this program. I’m so excited! And one last thing in this pitch, guys, just so you understand who we’re dealing with here. This is the Emanuel Tov of the Book of Mormon. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. No, really! I mean, you’re the guy! So, the fact that you’re joining me on my program, I’m really honored.

Let’s look at this example. So, there’s a section that you talk about where the 1830 edition was typeset based on the printer’s manuscript, but then proofread against the original.

Royal: Yeah, only one signature. One signature that we know of.

Nehemia: Well, let’s look at this one, Alma 42:10. I’ll show you this on my screen here. These are notes I took from what you presented. So, the original 1830 and 1837 have a preparatory state, but the printer’s manuscript has a probationary state.

Royal: Right.

Nehemia: And what that shows is 1830, although it was typeset from the printer’s manuscript… And I guess we can see that because of how the printer’s manuscript is marked up.

Royal: Yes. The printer’s mark shows that they’ve used the printer’s mark to do the 1830. And very often, though, you can look at the typeset version and see extra spacing like in this one. That there’s extra spacing in the 1830 showing they had changed it. So, they originally set probationary…

Nehemia: Woah, woah, wait a minute! So, what you’re saying is that the first printed page off of the printing press had probationary state, and then they cut it out?

Royal: Yeah, that was the proof sheet.

Nehemia: Oh, wow!

Royal: The proof sheet, instead of comparing it against their copy, which was the printer’s manuscript, they somehow did it against the original. And they saw that it was preparatory, they changed it, and when the typesetting occurred you can see that they had a longer word there originally.

Nehemia: That’s really cool! So now we have to find this. Sorry to… okay, hold on.

Royal: Now, I don’t know… we’ll see if this holds.

Nehemia: Alma 42:30.

Royal: I’m not sure.

Nehemia: And I have to say, this isn’t the… website. Because now they’re going to make me hunt for the page, so hold on a second.

Royal: Oh, yeah. That is going to be…

Nehemia: It says, “a preparatory state”.

Royal: It’s 42:10.

Nehemia: Okay, so it’s going to be on page 337.

Royal: They’ve reset it. You’ve got to look at this…

Nehemia: My English is like Oliver Cowdery’s, I can’t spell.

Royal: I don’t know… they could have shifted the word spacing. There’s preparatory state…

Nehemia: Let’s find it here. We can edit this out if it’s…

Royal: There’s “probationary.” It’s in there.

Nehemia: “This probationary state, it became a preparatory state.”

Royal: Notice all this extra spacing.

Nehemia: You’re saying this extra space is because…

Royal: All of it. They spread that thing across because “probationary” was in there.

Nehemia: Is this because of what you call a stereotype? Or is this actual lead?

Royal: This is not a stereotype edition.

Nehemia: Okay. So, they had actual pieces of lead, T-H-E-M.

Royal: Yeah, they were still working on those 16 plates.

Nehemia: And they removed these letters, and they said…

Royal: No, they just put this one in, and they shifted things around.

Nehemia: Oh, they pushed it, okay. But they didn’t want to bother re-typesetting this, so they just left these extra spaces.

Royal: Yeah. This is extra, really long.

Nehemia: That’s cool. That’s cool.

Royal: And so, you can see that this is a doctored state. They changed it.

Nehemia: So, if we could find the proof sheet that came off the press, which we don’t have… I guess there’s the guy who claims he has it, the uncut sheets.

Royal: Well, no, wait, those aren’t that. Those are bad sheets, and only the last one is a proof sheet, only the last one. And it never appears in any bound Book of Mormon, that last sheet.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: So, collecting bad sheets as they went along… ripped-out portions, wrinkled, smeared ink… They had this collection, and at the end they just took the proof sheet and put it in as the 37th one.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: So, it’s really valuable to have a proof sheet.

Nehemia: For sure.

Royal: Because it’s the only one where we actually have a proof sheet.

Nehemia: But if we had the proof sheet for this one we would see, the spacing here would be smaller, and it would say, “It became a probationary state.”

Royal: “A probationary state.”

Nehemia: Okay, that’s cool. That’s very cool. Very cool.

Royal: Yeah, that’s right. That’s what we would see. But you usually can find evidence of it in the 1830.

Nehemia: Okay. So, here’s another one. “Chief Commander”. And again, here’s an example of how these aren’t theological changes. “Chief Commander” versus “Chief Captain”. Oh, and then here Joseph Smith reintroduced the error into the 1837…

Royal: Yes, because he was working off the printer’s manuscript. So, he put back in “captain” in that…

Nehemia: Wow, that’s amazing.

Royal: But this next one is the really interesting one.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: The 1830 typesetter had put “O” in accidentally somewhere.

Nehemia: Right, so here’s my confusion if “O” here is the original. So, the original has, “and now my son ye are called of God.” And the printer’s manuscript has, “and now, my son, ye are called of God.”

Royal: Right.

Nehemia: The 1830 has, “And now, O my son, ye are called of God.”

Royal: That’s right. The “O” is inserted by the typesetter, and then, when proofing it against the original, they decide that they ought to put “O” into the original. Oliver writes it in there in pencil. You didn’t… you know it isn’t good because if you see it in color, you see everything in color and then the penciling in of the “O”, and it’s in the wrong place. It’s in the wrong place. He put it in the wrong place. The current text has “O” there, and I took it out, of course. Those are interesting.

So, that whole section… is really influenced. And there are a couple of places where you’re not sure what really happened. But pretty much we can tell they caught errors. They corrected them, what they thought were errors, and they were. “Commander” and “probationary”, those were ones that needed to be fixed. If they had done it… we’d have a much better… See, that’s in pencil and the rest of it is in ink.

Nehemia: So, in the 1830 edition, the typesetter, who wasn’t even Mormon, put the “O” in.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: And now this has now been reintroduced from the 1830 edition back into the original manuscript in pencil.

Royal: This is Oliver Cowdery. The original should read like the 1830. He’s going backwards, so he puts in the “O”, but he puts it in the wrong place, “My O Son.”

Nehemia: This is incredible. Oh, he put it in the wrong place! Oh, wow! So, it should say, “O my son.”

Royal: Now he’s got, “My O son.”

Nehemia: “And now my O son, ye are called of God,” instead of “And now O my son.” Oh, wow, that’s amazing. So, they added the “O” based on the 1830 edition and they put it in the wrong place.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: And we know that because this is in pencil, and they used pencil in the print shop. Is that the idea?

Royal: That’s right, pencil is in the print shop, and ink is outside. They have a basic good rule to not use a pen in the print shop.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Except for some of the tape marks are in ink, but that’s the only time we ever find it.

Nehemia: So, it’s possible this was put in by the typesetter, who put the “O” in here.

Royal: No, that’s Oliver Cowdery.

Nehemia: That’s Oliver Cowdery, okay.

Royal: He’s the one doing the proofing against the original.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Royal: The 1830 says, “‘O my son,’ that makes sense. It must be a mistake. I’ll put it in.”

Nehemia: And he put it in the wrong place.

Royal: He put it in the wrong place.

Nehemia: And here’s why this is so valuable for someone like me. It would have never occurred to me that someone would change the original manuscript based on a copy, but that can happen. It happened here.

Royal: When they think it’s right, they’re going to do it.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: Nothing’s going to stop them.

Nehemia: That’s amazing! That’s absolutely amazing. Wow, that’s mind-blowing stuff to me.

So, let’s look at some other examples here. This is an interesting thing I want you to talk about. Let’s talk about this. Here the issue is some paratextual features.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: So, this is at the end of…

Royal: 1 Nephi.

Nehemia: 1 Nephi.

Royal: The beginning of 2 Nephi. It’s a new book. Joseph Smith was telling his scribe, when he saw the end of a section, to write “chapter”. It didn’t have any numbers, that’s just extra canonical. He knows he’s going to need chapter numbers, so he just puts “chapter”. There’s no numbers, he just puts in “chapter”. So, this handwriting is in the same ink as this, “chapter”.

Nehemia: Where it says here “chapter” in the middle, this is in the flow of the text?

Royal: Well, no, it isn’t. It’s at the end of 1 Nephi and 2 Nephi.

Nehemia: What I’m saying though, is, was this written originally? Or was this added into a blank space?

Royal: No, it’s original.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: It’s on its own line. It’s on its own line here, complete, and just the word “chapter”, in this quill ink as before and after. Then, later, Oliver Cowdery will come through and put in the chapter numbers.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: In case somebody else was doing it and they got off on the chapter numbers, and only the typesetter fixed it. But putting them in, they’re not canonical. So, he started with a “V”, and he made some mistake. He crossed it out and put in “VIII”. This is in heavier ink. It is not the same flow, it’s heavier ink. It says his quill dipped. Okay. So, he does that, then he starts reading down here, the Book of Nephi, and account, and so forth, and he realizes, “Wait a minute. This is a new book.” So, he crosses this out, and the number, and he puts “Chapter 1”. He writes it all at the same time.

Nehemia: That’s over here where he writes “Chapter 1,” right?

Royal: “Chapter 1.” And he put it in the wrong place, because it really belongs after the preface. There’s a preface here, and it should be down here.

Nehemia: So, it should be further on the page, okay.

Royal: It’s not canonical, he’s just putting it in. But then later you can really see heavier ink flow. Here, “The Second Book of Nephi.” There’s four Books of Nephi in the Book of Mormon. None of them are “First”, “Second”, “Third”, and “Fourth”. That’s all been added by editors and so forth. Oliver Cowdery added it here.

Nehemia: So, in the original, and what Joseph Smith, according to what you believe, read from the stone or the hat, said, “The Book of Nephi.”

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: And somebody added the word “Second” with a little caret symbol above the line.

Royal: He did, he did. That’s Oliver.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: Now, the important thing is, Joseph Smith… see, I don’t believe Joseph Smith… he’s reading off a text. He doesn’t know what’s going to follow. This is why he says, “Write ‘chapter’ here,” because he came to an end and he could see that it was an end, however it was shown, and he said, “Write ‘chapter’… we’ve got a new chapter here.” And then they went on. And only later, when they came back, they said, “Well, we really don’t have a new chapter here, we have a new book.” And so, Oliver is making adjustments for that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: This, to me, shows that Joseph hasn’t got this thing… he’s not planning this thing out, and he should have known he was at the end of a book. But he doesn’t know he’s at the end of a book.

Nehemia: But he knows he’s at the end of some sort of section.

Royal: That’s all he knows. And he tells his scribe, “Write ‘chapter’ because we’re going to put the numbers in later.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: So, I think it’s very insightful, interesting, about what took place. So, in the Yale text, I don’t put the word “chapter” at all.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: I just put a little squiggly mark to represent a break.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: And very often, Oliver Cowdery did put a squiggly mark when he put “chapter”. Like, he put “chapter” and then a squiggly and something. So, I put squiggly alone, no chapter, because it’s “extra canonical” as I call it.

Nehemia: Okay. And by extra canonical, I think you mean this wasn’t revealed to Joseph Smith, the word “chapter”, but the space was. Is that right?

Royal: The page was?

Nehemia: Meaning the word “chapter” wasn’t revealed.

Royal: No, it wasn’t.

Nehemia: That’s what you mean by…

Royal: It’s been added. I call it extra canonical; it’s been added to the canonical text.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Most people think that chapter belongs in the canonical text. It doesn’t. So, I take them out and I only have the current LDS chapters and verses out in the margin. I don’t even put the 1830 numbers at all.

Nehemia: Right. So, this is really interesting. In your belief something’s being revealed to him, but everything from what he sees, even coming out of his mouth, there’s not divine intervention. Now, contrast that with the story of the angels coming and helping him with the typesetting.

Royal: Well, that’s… yes, of course.

Nehemia: So, that’s the other extreme.

Royal: That’s made up by people. They can’t believe these typesetters in seven months did 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon, but they did. And we have almost a daily… we can see inside into what they’re doing in their struggles and all the problems. These people have paper being delivered, they have Scotch Roman type being delivered from Scotland, when in fact it came from the United States. It wasn’t made in… it’s just a face.

So, there are some Mormons that can’t believe that humans can do things; they’ve got to have God intervening everywhere. And in the transmission of the text, we just find… I don’t care what edition it is, there’s not one reading where you could say, “Oh, the Lord told the prophet here that this should be this reading.”

Now, they do say that they make a change, and the spirit confirms to them that it’s correct. They may do that; I don’t know whether it’s really accurate or not. I don’t ever base my decisions on anything like that. They sent me, once, a deal saying, “We want you to know that the first presidency in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles met in the temple on such and such a Thursday morning and approved this reading, and it says, ‘strait and narrow,’” where “strait” is “strait jacket narrow.” So, it’s redundant as “straight and narrow”. And I have it as “straight” and “narrow.”

Nehemia: Just to be clear, there’s “straight” as in there’s a straight line…

Royal: Not crooked, yeah.

Nehemia: …and there’s strait as in dire straits, narrow. Okay.

Royal: Like strait jacket or in these straits… difficulty.

Nehemia: And in the Greek New Testament it is “strait” as in not wide.

Royal: Yeah, it does that… Actually, the Book of Mormon gets through the gates and the paths and so forth appropriately, with Isaiah on one hand, and Mark and so forth on the other hand. But it’s okay, it’s fine. But when it came to that phrase, “strait and narrow,” which is not in the Bible, they wanted the redundant one, because Oliver Cowdery…

Nehemia: Just to be clear, redundant meaning, “strait and narrow” is a phrase, S-T-R-A-I-T…

Royal: That means “narrow and narrow”.

Nehemia: “Narrow and “narrow.” And that’s a very Hebraic style, to say something twice.

Royal: Yes, I understand that, and they made that argument. But I said, “But the Book of Mormon isn’t doing this.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: It isn’t doing it, so I went with the other. Anyway, they sent me this message that they had decided it was “narrow and narrow”, “strait and narrow”.

Nehemia: Wait, that actually happened? That somebody official sent you that message?

Royal: Yes, yes. The Secretary of the Committee wrote me and said, “We want you to know.” I dismissed it automatically. I said, “They have no evidence.” And even if they said God himself came down and told them it was “narrow and narrow”, I still wouldn’t follow them saying that. God would have to come down and tell me. I’m bad that way.

Nehemia: Okay. I try to have the approach that people in their faith believe all kinds of things, and it’s not for me to tell them what to believe. And if somebody wants to believe… and you obviously disagree, but if somebody wants to believe that angels came and helped the printer in New York make the first edition, okay, that’s your faith.

Royal: Well, I want the evidence.

Nehemia: What you’re saying is there isn’t evidence to support that. Fair enough.

Royal: There’s no evidence at all, and it’s just made up. It’s just made-up stuff, people. And I don’t like that kind of stuff. I like to see what the record says in the history, and so forth. So, I have not found any change. The church has always said that we had gone back to early sources. Joseph Smith said it when he did the ‘37 edition. He didn’t say, “I’ve got a new revelation.” And that’s one of the things I investigated in the ‘37 edition. I went through all 3,168 changes that he made.

Nehemia: Wow!

Royal: How many of them restored original readings of the original manuscript? Not many. Nine. What were they like? You and I could read those and predict what was correct. Like it said, “I spoke,” and it’s supposed to be, “I spake,” because the Book of Mormon only has “spake” 108 times. So, Joseph Smith would know that “spoke” was wrong, and he just changed it to “spake”. There are others like this that you and I could just predict. But the ones like, “Feeling your way towards the great and spacious building,” he didn’t change that one.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: All the ones that were missed by Oliver Cowdery when he copied, when the typesetter missed things, and so forth, they didn’t restore them. Joseph Smith didn’t restore them. And there was a religion professor that said the 1837 edition was a second inspired recension of the text. And I said, “Well, I don’t know what you mean by ‘inspired’, but I find no evidence of it.” I went through nine changes. They’re all predictable by you and me, anybody, and all the ones that he should have gotten, he missed. All the 200 and some… meaning that I put into the Yale text, he missed every one of them.

Nehemia: And I just want to emphasize, because I’m not Mormon… if there are Mormons who are watching this who are saying, “Whatever the church prints today, that is divinely inspired,” I’m not telling you that’s the case, Royal is.

Royal: They will, and they will say…

Nehemia: But it’s not my position to say that.

Royal: I understand that. They’re not going to come after you.

Nehemia: No, but I feel that it’s actually important for me to respect both views.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: And look, there are people in Judaism who will tell you, every single letter in the Torah scroll in their synagogue is what Moses wrote. And you can count the letters and find secret codes, even though there’s no two manuscripts that are identical. So, if you’re counting letters, it’s hopeless because… and here, particularly, it has to do with the spelling, which doesn’t change the meaning.

Royal: Yes, I know. I’ve seen those arguments.

Nehemia: So, alright, it’s not for me to tell them. I can tell them that I don’t find two manuscripts that are identical and so I don’t accept the thing about counting the letters. But if they want to believe that, then okay, I respect their belief. People believe all kinds of things.

Royal: I generally don’t.

Nehemia: Fair enough, that’s fine.

Royal: And I turn up that path a little more, and I say, “Let’s look at the real evidence, what we have in front of us, and it is faith-promoting.” The stuff I’m telling you is faith-promoting. It also shows that, when they did editions of the Book of Mormon, they tried their best. I think we can say that. There’s only one edition I’ve discovered where the typesetters were cheating Brigham Young: the 1841 edition. They did all kinds of nasty things in that text.

Nehemia: Which year was it?

Royal: 1841. In Britain, in Liverpool.

Nehemia: That was in Liverpool?

Royal: Yes. And it’s the worst printed book of the Book of Mormon. It’s got 720 typos.

Nehemia: Wow!

Royal: And the 1837 has about 200. 1840 has about 150, and all of a sudden you get 720 by these jokesters.

Nehemia: Wow. Let’s look…

Royal: Okay, go ahead.

Nehemia: I want to look at an example where there actually is sort of a theological… A lot of the examples we’re bringing, it doesn’t really matter…

Royal: That’s right, it doesn’t.

Nehemia: …whether it’s, “O my son,” or just “my son,” it doesn’t change the meaning.

Royal: I know it doesn’t.

Nehemia: But from my perspective, I spend all day, every day, looking at, “Is the word Sukkot spelled with two Vavs or one Vav or no Vav?”

Royal: Yeah, yeah…

Nehemia: It doesn’t change the meaning. But this is the bread and butter of Masoretic studies, which is my main thing.

Royal: That’s right. That’s what I do, too.

Nehemia: But here’s an example where it actually changes the meaning. It’s Alma 39:13.

Royal: Oh, that one’s really important.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, talk to me about this one. These are your slides, so present it. What do we have here?

Royal: So, originally, “repair that wrong” is what I believe the original manuscript read. It’s hard to read the word “repair”. The P has got a defect on top of it, so it looks like a T. And the R that he makes goes down a little, so it could be an N. So, when he did the copy of the original, he wrote “retain”. “And acknowledge your faults and retain that wrong which ye have done.”

Nehemia: And this is Oliver Cowdery who’s copying it?

Royal: It’s Oliver Cowdery copying his own hand, but there’s a defect in it. In fact, he dropped ink on this page, and the ascender to the P has a cross on it, a big ink drop, actually. But he interpreted it as a T. So, he gives “retain”. So, “retain that wrong which ye have done.” So, “retain” in the Book of Mormon can mean “keep it” or “to take it back”. Riteneo, the literal…

Nehemia: Take it back?

Royal: It isn’t even in Latin. Nobody ever used riteneo to mean “to take back,” but Riteneo, “retain that wrong which ye have done.” And you can think of it as when you commit sins, they’re out there somewhere and your job is to somehow get them back, take care of them.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: You could say “retain” is okay. But Talmage, in 1920, did not like “retain” there. It just didn’t really make sense to him, so he “x’d” it out. So, he changes what it says. He says, “Acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done.” “Go back and say you’re sorry. It’s okay.” I used to say this is the Clinton way of going about saying things. But the original… and there are other scriptures that talk about repairing the wrong which you have done, that you’re… is not just to acknowledge your mistakes, but to fix them, repair them. And I think I did one here. Did you get the next slide or not?

Nehemia: I don’t think I have that one, no. What’s…

Royal: I give other passages.

Nehemia: Do I have that? No, I don’t have that. But in other words…

Royal: There are others that talk about “repair that wrong which ye have done.” The very phrase…

Nehemia: So, that’s a phrase that appears in the Book of Mormon, “to repair the wrong that you have done.” And apparently that’s what this originally said, and…

Royal: That’s what it said I think, yes.

Nehemia: And in 1830 he printed, or copied, “retain”.

Royal: “Retain”, that’s right.

Nehemia: Right.

Royal: Keep it back. It doesn’t make much sense.

Nehemia: Yeah, it doesn’t make sense.

Royal: He realized that, but he made a mistake by deleting a word. So, then you end up with “just say you’re sorry, that’ll do the job.”

Nehemia: The beauty here is that Talmage could have never imagined that it was “repair,” and this is an example of what we’re talking about.

Royal: That’s right, he didn’t have a computer.

Nehemia: So, you were able to do a lot of this with computers. Talk about that just for a minute.

Royal: Well, I created… it took me three-and-a-half years, my own… I wrote the program to do a computerized collation of the two manuscripts lined up, 20 editions lined up. It automatically did the punctuation and the capitalization, but anytime there was a letter difference it stopped and asked me, “How do you want to line this up?” And that was really important, because Oxford had a program for doing a collation. It had a lot of garbage it put on, but it would automatically do these things. And it wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. So, I wrote my own program and did my own controlling, and I created the computer collation. It’s basically the apparatus of the Book of Mormon, a total apparatus with every difference; punctuation, capitalization, the whole bit. And I’ve actually made that now available online in WordCruncher. Now WordCruncher is a search engine where you type in what you want, and it gives you all the examples. So, I’ve got it in that WordCruncher form. I’ve been using that since 2002 to write all the books and everything I’ve done. Every time I want to look at something, I go and look at what it is in the collation.

Then I wrote these six books called Analysis of Textual Variance, where I go through the main pages and talk about them, and argue for why they should be this way or not this way, and so forth. Then, when I published the collation, I did something that, as far as I know, has never been done in textual criticism. I gave, right beside the collation, the Analysis of Textual Variance linked with the variant.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: It gives the arguments. You can click on the argument immediately. You don’t have to go find the book or the articles somebody wrote about this issue.

Nehemia: This is the dream for Old Testament studies. But go on.

Royal: I put everybody’s stuff in that did work on the text, so their stuff is in my ATV. I call it ATV, all-terrain vehicle, I guess.

Nehemia: What does ATV stand for?

Royal: All-terrain vehicle, but it stands for Analysis of Textual Variance. It’s got every variant. It’s electronically there, and you can study the punctuation if you want to. Some people do; I don’t get thrilled much by it. But having it linked to the commentary directly, because otherwise, you’re at the mercy of a critical text. You look at that apparatus and unless you know what Alef means, and “A” and “B” in the New Testament, you are up a creek. And you don’t even know if, for this book, if Alef is really good or not.

Nehemia: It’s actually worse than that, because when you do track some of these things down, you find out the manuscript doesn’t say what they said it said in the…

Royal: Well, yeah, that’s… Comfort has shown a lot of that stuff. And I like Comfort too, because he’s got his commentary. But they’re selective, and it’s pretty much there, and you can use the collation to make your own studies. So, I made this available for $100 for people. I don’t think people realize what I’ve given them.

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: I gave them a search engine that I’ve been using for 15 years.

Nehemia: And just to put this in perspective, you have all the available manuscripts, all the printed editions, am I right?

Royal: The most important ones.

Nehemia: The most important ones, okay.

Royal: The ones that affect the text.

Nehemia: So, if we’re looking at… let’s take the example of the New Testament, where we have over 5,000 manuscripts. No individual actually has access to all those 5,000 manuscripts, whereas they have access to everything, of significance at least, in the case of the Book of Mormon. It’s amazing that you have the full corpus of the textual…

Royal: Yeah, the apparatus is complete. It really is there. There are a few things that some people need to do. There’s a Deseret alphabet version that they did in 1858 of the 1852 text, but the only thing it would have in there is the pronunciation of names. It would tell you how they were pronouncing names at a certain time, but somebody else can study that.

Nehemia: That’s a master’s thesis for somebody out there.

Royal: That’s right, yeah.

Nehemia: Or maybe a dissertation.

Royal: So, I think the collation has been a really tremendous search engine, the key for me doing all the research I’ve done and having it… All the time when I’m writing, I just click on ATV, do a search for the word I want, and get what I’ve written about it, so I remind myself what I’ve written about it.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, I really appreciate it!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Alma 42:10 (Book of Mormon)
Alma 43:17 (Book of Mormon)
1 Nephi 22:31 to 2 Nephi 1 (Book of Mormon)
e.g. 1 Nephi 8:20 (Book of Mormon)
Matthew 7:13-14
Alma 39:13 (Book of Mormon)

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes

OTHER LINKS
The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale Edition)
edited by Royal Skousen

Book of Mormon images courtesy of:https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/images?lang=eng

Dr. Gordon’s PhD dissertation:
The Writing, Erasure, and Correction of the Tetragrammaton in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts

https://wordcruncher.com

Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research (ihbmr.com)

The post Hebrew Voices #206 – Revelation or imagination: Part 3 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.