Sheum in the Book of Mormon

On pages 185-6 of John L. Sorenson's book An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret, 1985), we read the following:

Two other puzzling plants are mentioned in Mosiah 9:9, among those cultivated by the Zeniffites: "sheum" and "neas." The former word has recently been identified as "a precise match for Akkadian s(h)e'um, 'barley' (Old Assyrian 'wheat'); the most popular ancient Mesopotamian cereal name." The word's sound pattern indicates it was probably a Jaredite term. This good North Semitic word was quite at home around the "valley of Nimrod," north of Mesopotamia, where the Jaredites paused and collected seeds before starting their long journey to America (Ether 2:1, 3). (Incidentally, the form of the word as the Book of Mormon uses it dates to the third millennium B.C., when the Jaredites left the Near East. Later, it would have been pronounced and spelled differently.) Apparently the Nephite scribe could not translate it to any equivalent grain name, nor could Joseph Smith do so when he put the text into English. The plant and its name no doubt were passed down to the Nephites/Zeniffites through survivors from the First Tradition, just as corn itself was. Since the words barley and sheum were both used in the same verse (Mosiah 9:9), we know that two different grains were involved, but what "sheum" might specifically have been in our botanical terms we cannot tell at this time. Perhaps this was amaranth?

Sheum is often cited as a major bull's-eye for the Book of Mormon, but I have several objections to this claim.

First of all, the Akkadian word for barley is techinically she. The -um ending is a nominative case marker. In the accusative case the noun would be sheam and in the genitive sheim. (The final m in all three cases, called "mimation," was dropped from the language by the time of Lehi. This is what Sorenson means when he says "Later, it would have been pronounced and spelled differently.") Although I am no expert in Akkadian, I have read that when an Akkadian noun is the object of a preposition (as sheum is in Mosiah 9:9) it takes the genitive case (see here). What we find in the Book of Mormon is the nominative case. Of course, when a word is borrowed from another language, its case endings will often conform to the borrowing language rather than following the rules of the parent language. It is certainly possible that "Reformed Egyptian" rarified the nominative ending and treated it as part of the noun stem. But at the very least, this issue of case endings complicates matters; we are not dealing with a simple one-to-one correspondence as Sorenson's text might suggest.

More important than this grammatical issue is the problem of transmission. Sorenson suggests that the term was brought over by the Jaredites. The trouble with this suggestion, of course, is that Mosiah 9:9 places the term on the lips of a Mulekite who has been instructed in the Nephite language some 2000 years later. That this word could survive 2,000 years of transmission by Jaredites-- who (if FARMS is to be believed) lived among and interacted regularly with other Mesoamerican cultures-- is frankly hard to believe. Even if it survives transmission, it must also survive the Ramah genocide and somehow pass into either Nephite or Mulekite usage. While it is remarkable to find that a Book of Mormon word that refers to an agricultural crop of some kind has a perfect parallel and a similar usage in an authentically ancient language, the means of transmission simply seems too outrageous to be believable. The case of sheum is analogous to Book of Mormon parallels to Swedenborg; they're good parallels, but it simply does not seem likely that Smith had read Swedenborg during his formative years. Similarly, it does not seem likely that Zeniff could have been privy to a pristine Akkadian-Jaredite loanword.

A further problem with Sorenson's suggestion is that he places the Jaredites in Assyria because of their association with the Tower of Babel (Ether 1:33) and the "Valley of Nimrod" (Ether 2:1,4). But both Nimrod and the Babel story are mythological; the notion that the Jaredites spoke the Adamic tongue can be little more than a fable. According to K. Van Der Toorn and P. W. Van Der Horst ("Nimrod before and after the Bible," Harvard Theological Review 83:1, Jan. 1990, p. 13), the biblical character Nimrod is probably based on the Babylonian deity Ninurta. Ninurta's rise to prominence in southern Mesopotamia roughly coincided with the traditional date for the departure of the Jaredites (2200 BCE), and there might well have been a Valley of Ninurta somewhere there at the time they left (although Sorenson's estimate here of 3100 BCE is too early for that). "Nimrod," however, is a later Hebrew corruption of this Mesopotamian deity's name, and could not have been known to the Jaredites. As for the Babel story, there is simply no evidence for a sudden transition from a unified language to a diversity of languages. Languages evolved and diversified gradually over time. The Babel myth may well be based on a real "Tower of Babel" (the Babylonian ziggurat is a solid candidate, even though it survived through 500 BC and reached its greatest height under Nebuchadnezzar), but we certainly cannot place the origin of all language there. Here again we have the Book of Mormon utilizing later Hebrew mythologies of which the Jaredites could not have been aware. So what then are we to make of Jaredite prehistory? Can we, with any reasonable amount of confidence, place them in 3rd- or 4th-millennium Mesopotamia? And if not, what is the value of the sheum parallel?

Even if we accept the Babel legend, the Jaredites were in the right time and place but spoke the wrong language. Their language would have been the Adamic language. Akkadian was preceded in Mesopotamia by Sumerian. If Adam spoke a known language, it would probably have been Sumerian. Here again we encounter a problem for the sheum "bull's-eye".

Much more probable than Sorenson's explanation for sheum's appearance in the Book of Mormon is sheer coincidence. Creative and determined Book of Mormon apologists like Sorenson are bound to find parallels for most of the Book of Mormon's invented words and names in at least one of the more than half-dozen languages (Hebrew, Egyptian, Akkadian, Arabic, Phoenician and South Semitic, to name a few) that they habitally scour. In this case, I'm afraid I find the connection too strained and implausible to sustain.

Mormons Give More, Says Christianity Today

In the latest issue of Christianity Today (vol. 52, no. 12, Dec. 2008), an article titled "Scrooge Lives" (pp. 24-9) looks at a new study from Oxford University Press by sociologists Christian Smith, Michael Emerson and Patricia Snell. The study, called Passing the Plate, reports on the stinginess of American Christians. According to the study, 5% of American Evangelicals give 60% of the money churches use to operate. 10% give no money at all (to any church or charity, religious or otherwise), and 36% give less than 2% of their income. Only 27% tithe.

Among the interesting findings of the study was that Mormons give the most. They give an average of 5% of their income to religious organizations and other charities. The next highest-ranking groups were Pentecostals and "other Protestants" (meaning non-denominational churches and churches from small denominations), coming in at just over 3% of their income. The fourth highest-ranking group was members of non-Christian religions; they were just ahead of Baptists and Jews, and significantly surpassed members of mainline groups like the Catholics, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. The group that gives the least-- less even than atheists-- is Jehovah's Witnesses.

Image excerpted from Christianity Today vol. 52, no. 12, Dec. 2008, p. 26.

Why do Mormons give so much more than other Christians? There are actually two questions to be asked here. The first is why Mormons give so much, and the second is why other Christians give so little.

The CT article may help us answer the latter question. The article suggests three reasons for low levels of giving among Protestant Christians. First of all, "majorities in several church families (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Catholics) say they don't have high levels of trust in the denomination's management and allocation of funds." Secondly, there is "a strong correlation between perceived expectations and readiness to give money," and many Protestant pastors are hesitant to preach about giving because it's so closely tied to their own salaries. And finally, evangelicals have a theology of spontaneity (based partly on 2 Corinthians 9:7) that tends to militate against budgeted or structured giving.

The answers to the second question may simply be the reverse of the answers to the first. The Mormons I know have a fairly high degree of trust in their church's use of funds, Mormonism has very in-your-face accountability structures in place to encourage tithing (without which you can't go to the temple and attain exaltation), and Mormon theology is more a theology of structured obedience than of spontaneous worship.

Antoher interesting finding of this study is that Mormons give almost entirely to religious organizations. Pentecostals are the same way. Other Christians and members of non-Christian religions, by comparison, give much of their money to non-religious charities. This probably says something about the priorities of the various groups, some of which tend to be oriented toward salvation the next life and some of which are oriented toward healing in the present one. Maybe it also says something about their level of trust and dedication to their own religious group vis-a-vis other charities. And finally, it perhaps says something about where the strongest pressures to give are coming from.

I think that comparative studies like this one are interesting, but I am highly skeptical when people try to use them to prove that their religion is truer or better than the others (which is not what the CT article was doing, by the way-- I'm just editorializing and generalizing now). For one thing, the difference between the various faiths is not that great. It appears to be the result of organizational and theological differences rather than of baptismal regeneration or the workings of the Holy Ghost. As a matter of fact, the more I study the religions the more I find myself convinced that no religion's adherents are demonstrably better or more regenerate than the others. Some religions have developed more effective structures for the channeling of human energies into constructive activities (just as Western-style capitalist democracies are more effective in this regard than communist regimes). But clearly no one religion has a monopoly on transformative power.

Happy Birthday to My Blog

Today is a landmark in the history of the world. Not only is my MA program's graduation ceremony today, but today is also the one-year anniversary of the creation of this blog. The world shall surely never be the same.

And now for the State of the Blog Address.

Since its creation, Mild-Mannered Musings has been visited 10,523 times by 7,340 "absolute unique visitors". These visitors spend an average of two minutes and four seconds here per visit, and have viewed more than seventeen thousand pages. Readers of this blog come from 103 different countries, though the overwhelming majority are from the United States, with significant numbers coming also from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The top ten search strings that have brought people here are as follows:
1) ray agostini on mormonism
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The twenty weirdest (and funniest) search strings by which people found my blog (in no particular order):
1) "christopher jones" gay bars
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5) dr. william lane craig pwned
6) "what was joseph smith smokin'?"
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8) fiction - spanked jouvenile buttocks
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The ten most viewed posts were the following:
1) Gustavo Gutierrez: Solidarity and the Preferential Option for the Poor
2) Man Cannot Live By Bread Alone: Night by Elie Wiesel
3) On Homosexuality and Sin
4) A Smoking Gun in the Book of Abraham: Could Joseph Smith Translate Egyptian?
5) Is Spanking a Viable Method of Punishment?
6) Jurgen Moltmann's Crucified God
7) The Book of Mormon's Exaggeration of Elizabethan Idiom
8) Same-Color Optical Illusion
9) John Gee and the "Egyptian Test"
10) Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire!

The ten most highly approved posts (measured by the amount of time spent browsing the site after loading a particular page) are as follows:
1) Why Even Conservative Christians Should Vote "No" on the CA Marriage Amendment - Part 1
2) Some Objections to Newman's Anti-Rationalist Polemics
3) Racism on the Mission Field
4) American Pluralism and the Integration of Faith and Politics
5) Martin Luther by Martin Marty
6) John Henry Newman, Julius Charles Hare, and the Idea of Progress
7) Postmodern Historiography and the Visual Record: Picturing Faith with Colleen McDannell
8) Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries: A Review
9) Orson Pratt on the Missouri Temple
10) Brigham Young Throws Reuben Hedlock under the Bus

Thanks for reading!!

Christian Scripture and Neoplatonic Tradition in Pseudo-Dionysius' The Divine Names

The author who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Aeropagite was actually probably an Athenian disciple of the Neoplatonic teacher Proclus near the end of the fifth century. But in addition to being a Neoplatonist, Pseudo-Dionysius was a Christian; he evidently wrote in order to convince his Christian brethren that true Christianity is essentially Neoplatonic. The major outlines of the relationship between Pseudo-Dionysius’ Christianity and his Neoplatonism are evident in his remarks on scripture and tradition. The former is his source for the specifically Christian content of his system, and the latter of its Neoplatonic content. Both sources are said to be derived from and secondary to illumination; the proof of their authority lay in the mystical illumination of their authors.

The Divine Names begins by insisting, in thoroughly Christian fashion, that we dare not apply words or conceptions to God aside from those revealed in scripture, for only the One itself “could give an authoritative account of what it really is.” Yet in the same breath scripture is adduced in order to establish divine inscrutability, so that its own scrutiny of the inscrutable is denigrated as a mere accommodation and condescension to human weakness. True communication of the divinity occurs only by illumination and mystical union; the purpose of the “enlightening beams of the sacred scriptures” is to raise us gradually into this union (49-51). It is soon made clear, in fact, that scripture and the liturgy are actually a pedagogical veiling of the truth in sensible symbols; these symbols become obsolete when the mind, raised to mystical union and passionlessness, abandons cataphatic theology in favor of the via negativa (52-3, 130). In the scriptures themselves we find paradoxes designed to lift our minds outside of that which can be affirmed so as to grasp the ineffable Truth (105). In this mystical union there is “simple and immutable stable truth,” in contrast to the shifting sands of affirmative theologies and dogmas (109-110).

The Neoplatonic elements in The Divine Names Pseudo-Dionysius attributes to an esoteric tradition that he received from his (fictional) teacher, Hierotheus (131). It seems probable, given the seemingly genuine and rapturous admiration with which Hierotheus is described, that this fictional teacher serves as a proxy for the pseudepigrapher’s true teacher, the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus. Having established that divine truth comes through illumination, Pseudo-Dionysius establishes his teacher’s mystical credentials. Hierotheus is said to have studied the scriptures, “not only learning but experiencing the divine things. For he had a ‘sympathy’ with such matters, if I may express it this way, for he was perfected in a mysterious union with them and in a faith in them which was independent of any education” (65). The term “sympathy” is borrowed from Proclus, and is therefore suggestive of the true identity of the Aeropagite’s teacher.

The effect of Pseudo-Dionysius’ appeal to the teaching of Hierotheus is twofold. On the one hand, it serves to deflect charges of innovation. Hierotheus is presented as a follower of the apostles and as one fully approved by them (70-1). The larger purpose, on the other hand, may be to lead readers to reflect on the faith of the great classical Neoplatonic teachers. If these men were mystically enlightened like the fictional Hierotheus, the truth of their teaching cannot justly be denied.

The weight that Pseudo-Dionysius gives to scripture and to the Neoplatonic tradition, respectively, is difficult to pin down. In one passage they are said to be “at one” (52), and in another Hierotheus is ranked “next to” Paul while his own writings are said to be “second only to the divinely anointed scriptures themselves” (69). But if Pseudo-Dionysius seems to occasionally privilege the scriptures over this tradition, it is probably only to appease his Christian audience. He considers the tradition to be particularly holy, and therefore commands that it be kept from the uninitiated (58). And in describing a eucharistic meeting attended by Hierotheus, James, Peter, and other great apostles, Hierotheus is said to have praised the divine omnipotence with eloquence that “surpassed all the divinely rapt hierarchs, all the other sacred initiators. Yes indeed” (70). The Neoplatonists are thus placed on a higher plane than the scripture-writers with respect at least to eloquence, but probably also to content, since their stress on transcendence and apophatic theology is presented as a more advanced truth than the cataphatic theology of names and symbols that characterizes the Bible.

(Note: All page numbers refer to Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. New York: Paulist, 1987.)