Reformed Egyptian

Sample detail image from the Cyrus Cylinder in the British Museum, showing cuneiform script, Wikimedia Commons.

Where Science Meets the Book of Mormon: Come Follow Me Lesson: November 4-10; Mormon 7-9

In Mormon 9:32-34, we read, “And now, behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record. But the Lord knoweth the things which we have written, and also that none other people knoweth our language; and because that none other people knoweth our language, therefore he hath prepared means for the interpretation thereof.”

The following, in part, is from my blog for the Come Follow Me lesson July 18-24, 2021; also from my post of January 8-14, 2024.

We read in Ezra 1:1-3: “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem.”

Upon what and in what language did Cyrus have the proclamation written? Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, conquered Babylonia in 539 BC. His policies included respecting the customs and religions of the people he conquered. So, in 538 BC, he issued an order allowing the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.1 The so-called Cyrus Cylinder is an ancient clay cylinder, broken into several pieces, and currently on display in Room 52 of the British Museum. It contains a declaration in Akkadian cuneiform script in the name of Cyrus the Great. The text of the Cylinder allows for religious freedom of conquered countries and empires, but does not specifically mention Judea or Jerusalem. This may be the proclamation referred to in Ezra 1:1-3 or there may have been a separate proclamation, now missing. None-the-less, such a separate proclamation would almost certainly have been nearly identical to the Cylinder in the British Museum.

Cuneiform means wedge-shaped and refers to characters made by pressing a triangular stylus into a soft material such as clay or wax. The clay could then be hardened to make a permanent record. Cuneiform originated with the Sumerians, between the sixth and fifth millennium BC, the earliest known civilization in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian empire was replaced by the Akkadian empire of the 24th and 22nd centuries BC, which in turn collapsed into the Akkadian-speaking nations: Assyria in the north, and Babylonia in the south. The Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Sumerian Flood Story, is probably the oldest of all written stories. It was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cuneiform script somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BC. A facsimile of the 11th tablet is in the British Museum. It measures 6 inches by 5 ¼ inches and is 1 ¼ inches thick.2

The Babylonian captivity of the Judean intelligentsia lasted from 16 March 597 BC until 538 BC. It was this very captivity that Lehi was warned of, which caused him to flee Jerusalem with his family. These intellectuals apparently were taught in the Babylonian schools. Some biblical experts argue that much, if not all of the Old Testament was written during this period of captivity. What was taught in the Babylonian schools was based on a group of Sumerian texts from the Old Babylonian period. Those texts were part of the curriculum and were still being copied a thousand years later. Students began their schooling at an early age in the é-dubba, the “tablet house.” In addition to mathematics, the Babylonian schools focused on writing letters, contracts and accounts in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform.3

Students in the Babylonian tablet schools primarily used waxed boards for their writing lessons. The boards usually were made of wooden or ivory leaves, with two or more leaves hinged together to make an early version of a book. The depressed portion of each leaf contained a layer of beeswax mixed with some other substance, such as yellow ochre or orpiment (arsenic sulfide), which thickened the wax, creating a lasting writing surface. Students used styli, some bronze, to write on the wax pads. The tablets could be melted and reused or could be kept for extended periods of time. It is estimated that as much as one third of the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, named for the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, in the 7th century BC, and rediscovered in 1849 near Mosul, Iraq, now mostly housed in the British Museum, consisted of wax tablets. Among its holdings was a copy of the Gilgamesh Epic on clay tablets. Although cuneiform script was originally created for writing on soft clay tablets and cylinders, it also was used on metal, stone, and other hard materials.4

So, if the Judean scholars were carried away captive into Babylon, why was the Old Testament not written in cuneiform? Those scholars were carried off into Babylon, not to enhance their culture but to destroy it. Hebrew, as such, perhaps was not written until after the captivity — around the fifth century BC — although some may date to as early as the tenth century BC. Before the captivity, the Judean scholars were mainly speaking and writing Canaanite — after all, Jacob came from Canaan when he went to Egypt (Genesis 45:17-18) around 1800 to 1600 BC, and the Israelites were going home when Moses led them to Canaan in 1400 to 1200 BC. Written Canaanite was a repurposed version of a combination of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Canaanite cursive equivalent, called hieratic (a form of ancient Egyptian writing of abridged hieroglyphics used by the Egyptian priests and others) — thus “reformed Egyptian.” (Mormon 9:32) What we know about early Canaanite is based on fragments of writings from archaeological excavations. The oldest Canaanite writings discovered so far are from prehistoric mines on the Sinai Peninsula located between Canaan and Egypt, where the cultures would have mixed. Based on two somewhat more recent discoveries in the Wadi el-Hol, north of Luxor, in Egypt’s western desert, proto-Canaanite can be dated to around 1850 BC. Canaanite was the predecessor of Hebrew (including the Israelites, Judeans and Samaritans), Amalekite, Amorite, Phoenician, and even Greek.5

We read in Exodus 24:4, 7, “And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel…And he [Moses] took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people...” This was around 1400–1300 BC, and apparently before Moses received the first set of stone tablets, which he broke (Exodus 31:18; 32:15-16, 19), and the second stone tablets which were kept in the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 34:1; Exodus 25:16). When the ark was built, the “testimony” had not yet been given, “And thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee.” (Exodus 25:16) According to 1 Kings 8:9, the “testimony” was “…the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, when the Lord made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt.”

So, what did Moses write and then read to the people in Exodus 24? Upon what material did he write and in what language? I have perhaps already answered the last question — he may have written in proto-Canaanite or Canaanite, which was “reformed Egyptian.” However, Moses was raised as an Egyptian until he was an adult (Exodus 2:1-15), so he was almost certainly taught Egyptian hieroglyphs and/or hieratic and he may have written in that text. Writing was an intrinsic part of ancient Egyptian society, and their main material upon which to write was Papyrus, which dated from the fourth millennium BC. However, they also wrote upon clay tablets and rock surfaces, as well as wood, ceramic and metal.6

Tradition holds that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, but most modern scholars believe that it was written by several authors. It is likely that Moses wrote much of the Pentateuch, especially Genesis and the law, but that other authors added to the work over time. It may have been this early law portion that Moses wrote and then read to the people in Exodus 24. The Pulpit Commentary for Exodus 24:7 states: “In this book [Book of the Covenant] we have the germ of the Holy Scriptures — the first ‘book’ actually mentioned as written in the narrative of the Bible…Upon this nucleus the rest of the law was based; and it was to explain and enforce the law that Moses composed the Pentateuch.”7

Then we read in 2 Kings 23:1-2, “And the king [Josiah, c. 640–609 BC] sent, and they gathered unto him all the elders of Judah and of Jerusalem. And the king went up into the house of the Lord, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great: and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord.” Josiah was king shortly before Lehi and his family left Jerusalem and not long before the Babylonian captivity. The “book of the covenant” from which he read would almost certainly have been written in Canaanite. We don’t know upon what material it was written.

Papyrus, vellum, and wood are relatively short-lived, and finding even fragments of documents written on these materials is extremely rare in archaeological sites. The oldest papyri ever discovered to date are thirty 4500-year-old papyri fragments now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The papyri were discovered inside caves at Wadi al-Jarf by a joint Egyptian-French archaeological team in 2013. They were written in the fourth dynasty, in the reign of King Khufu, for whom the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. The papyri contain hieroglyphic writing about the daily lives of pyramid workers, including transport of building materials on the Nile River and the tallying of food and other supplies.8

The oldest papyri ever discovered relating to Israel allegedly was found about ten years ago while authorities were pursuing antiquities thieves in the Judean Desert and dates to around the seventh century B.C. The fragment appears to discuss a wine shipment from Na’arat, in the Jordan Valley, to the king in Jerusalem. However, it has since been determined that the document is almost certainly a fake.9 Very few authentic papyrus fragments even date before the time of Christ, and early fragments of even the New Testament are extremely rare. I recall going to a display at the BYU Art Museum to see one tiny fragment of a New Testament text from the first century AD. The Dead Sea Scrolls date from the third century BC to the first century AD.

We are told in 2 Kings 24:11-14 that in 598/597 BC, “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came against the city [of Jerusalem], and his servants did besiege it…And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces [and probably melted down] all the vessels of gold which Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of the Lord…And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.”

Nebuchadnezzar then placed a puppet king, Zedekiah, upon the thrown of Jerusalem, but Zedekiah didn’t even last ten years before he rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar. So, we are told in 2 Kings 25:8-9 that in 587 BC, “…came Nebuzar-adan, captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, unto Jerusalem: And he burnt the house of the Lord, and the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man’s house burnt he with fire.” Anything that hadn’t been taken to Babylon ten years earlier were now looted and hauled off (2 Kings 25:13-17). The Babylonians again broke the gold, silver, and brass objects into pieces and probably melted them down. No written records are mentioned in the list of loot from the temple, but it is almost certain that any records written upon plates of gold, or silver, or brass would certainly have been melted down after either the first siege, or certainly after the second siege and total destruction of Jerusalem. Certainly, any papyrus or wooden records would have been destroyed in the fire that consumed the city. Had Lehi not taken the Brass Plates of Laban with him, they almost certainly would have been destroyed in the conflagration of 587.

It is not at all clear what records “the princes, and all the mighty men of valour” were able to take with them to Babylon, if any. After all, the Babylonians were not interested in preserving Judean culture. What records the ten tribes of Israel, who were taken captive by the Assyrians in 722-721 BC, took with them is completely unknown. The derivative languages of the Lost Tribes are, well, lost — with very little archaeological data to go from.

According to Ethiopian Christian tradition, the Church of St. Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia, holds the Ark of the Covenant. As per the tradition, Menelik I brought the Ark to Ethiopia after he visited his father, King Solomon. Certainly, the Ark would hold the tablets of the Ten Commandments, but the church may also house other ancient records — early copies of the Old Testament? Only one guardian monk, appointed for life by his predecessor before the predecessor dies, is allowed to see the Ark, and even perhaps other records. The guardian is confined to the chapel of the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of his life, praying before it and offering incense. Are there other sacred places where other records may be stored among the Lost Tribes — only to be returned when the Tribes are gathered?

In 2013, a Torah scroll from the University of Bologna, Italy was deemed to be the world’s oldest complete Torah. The scroll is about 800 years old, dating from between 1155 and 1225 AD. The oldest fragment of the Torah in existence is a silver amulet dating from the late seventh or early sixth century BC and containing perhaps a segment from an early version of the Book of Numbers.10

Finally, we read in Nehemiah 8:1-3 “And all the people gathered themselves together as one man into the street that was before the water gate; and they spake unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded to Israel. And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month. And he read therein before the street that was before the water gate from the morning until midday, before the men and the women, and those that could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law.”

This event would have occurred shortly after the Jerusalem temple was rebuilt in 515 BC. Where did Ezra get the book from which he read? It seems highly unlikely that the “book of the law” would have been compiled completely de novo from oral tradition while the Judean scholars were in Babylon. I believe that they had written records that they had taken with them to Babylon — perhaps even in secret. Those records were very likely written in Canaanite, reformed Canaanite, or even reformed Egyptian; and written on papyrus, wood, and/or metal. Those records became the foundation of the proto-Hebrew and then Hebrew scriptures that eventually became the Old Testament.

We may now return to Nephi’s statement in the beginning of his record (1 Nephi 1:2), “Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.”

It is highly unlikely that Joseph Smith, or anyone else, for that matter, would have known much about proto-Canaanite or Canaanite language, which was hieratic — thus “reformed Egyptian,” or, “…the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians,” in 1830. Indeed, Joseph was some seventy-five years ahead of the scientific curve on that one.

The first published scientific account of a Proto-Sinaitic language (also referred to as Proto-Canaanite, when found in Canaan) was based on the discovery of ten inscriptions in Sinai in the winter of 1904–1905 by Hilda and Flinders Petrie, and which only later became known as Proto-Sinaitic. Those inscriptions, plus an eleventh published (in French) by Raymond Weill in 1904, and taken from the 1868 notes of Edward Henry Palmer, were reviewed in detail, and numbered (345–355), by Alan Gardiner in 1916. Then in 1993, John and Deborah Darnell discovered two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, in Middle Egypt, which, published in 1999, strongly suggest that Proto-Sinaitic writing originated in Egypt, around the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC.11

But why does the Book of Mormon use the term “the learning of the Jews” and not “the learning of the Israelites” or “the learning of the Canaanites”? Book of Mormon critics have claimed that the use of the term “Jew” in the Book of Mormon is an anachronism.

Of course, the word “Jew” is a modern English word. The Book of Mormon text, originally apparently written in a proto-Canaanite, hieratic language, was “translated” or “transliterated” into English in 1830. The Modern English word “Jew” first appeared around 1200 AD as Giw or Jeu, derived from the Anglo-French iuw, Old French giu, from Latin Iudaeum, from Greek Ioudaios, from Aramaic jehudhai, and the Hebrew y'hudi.12 In like manner, the word “learning” in the same verse is derived from the Old English word leornian.13 If the Book of Mormon had been translated into Old English, it would have to have been re-translated for us to understand it today.

The Hebrew term y'hudi or Yehudi (יְהוּדִי‎) shows up 74 times in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in 2 Kings 16:5-6, “Then Rezin king of Syria and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel came up to Jerusalem to war: and they besieged Ahaz, but could not overcome him. At that time Rezin king of Syria recovered Elath to Syria, and drave the Jews from Elath: and the Syrians came to Elath, and dwelt there unto this day.” Here the word Yehudi is translated as “Jews” in the King James Bible. Rezin reigned from 754 to 732 BC — around 150 years before Lehi’s family left Jerusalem. Although the books of 1 and 2 Kings were probably written during the Babylonian Exile (c. 550 BC), knowledge of those events obviously predated the Exile, and may have been recorded in the Brass Plates. Apparently by this time, the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah, even though consisting mainly of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, with smatterings of other tribes, were considered Yehudi — modern translation: Jews.

The term “Hebrew” first appears in the Bible in Genesis 14:13, when Abraham was referred to as “Abram the Hebrew.” The word “Hebrew” in Hebrew is Ivrie, which comes from root words that mean to “cross over” or “pass through.” Some scholars argue that the name “Hebrew” is derived from the name of semi-nomadic Habiru people recorded in Egyptian inscriptions from the 12th and 13th centuries BC as having settled in Egypt. The term may also denote various groups of invaders of Palestine, mentioned in letters from the 19th and 18th centuries BC.14

Moroni said, “…none other people knoweth our language…” (Mormon 9:34). According to some estimates, there were more than 2,000 indigenous languages spoken across the Western Hemisphere at the time Christopher Columbus’ arrived.15 Hebrew was probably not one of them. Those people who were assimilated into various Native American cultures, and became known as Lamanites, probably also adopted whatever language was spoken by the various tribes with which they joined. It may have been that the Nephites of the time continued to speak some form of Hebrew that allowed the Lamanites and other native tribes to identify them and eliminate them, as described by Moroni in Mormon chapters 6 and 8.

Trent Dee Stephens, PhD

trentdeestephens.com

stephenstrent7@gmail.com

References

1. Rattini, Kristin Baird, Who was Cyrus the Great? National Geographic, May 6, 2019, nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/cyrus-the-great

2. britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-3375

3. khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/ancient-near-east1/the-ancient-near-east-an-introduction/a/cuneiform

4. University of Oxford; ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=cuneiform_writing_techniques

5. Simons, Frank, Proto-Sinaitic – Progenitor of the Alphabet, Rosetta, 9:16–40, 2011

6. Sanders, David, Writing Materials in Ancient Egypt, classroom.synonym.com; egypttoursportal.com/en-us/ancient-egyptian-hieroglyphs

7. biblehub.com/exodus/24-7.htm

8. Boddy, Jessica, Oldest papyrus ever discovered revealed at Egyptian Museum, 14 Jul 2016 science.org/content/article/oldest-papyrus-ever-discovered-revealed-egyptian-museum