History
HISTORIES RELATING TO THE CARACTORS TRANSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW: It is rather difficult to understand historical subjects without knowing the backgrounds of the peoples involved and how their histories fit together.
In the study of the Caractors Transcript (CT), we find FOUR groups of ancient peoples that are named or referred to: the ancient Egyptians’ records go back to about 3000 BC, roughly 5000 years ago–but OUR period of interest in Egypt as compared with the CT, will start with Abraham and his descendants (the Israelites and Jews) running from roughly 2000 BC to 400 AD (the more recent date was also about the time that the last datable Egyptian papyri were written); the Nephite period was from 600 BC to 400 AD; and the Jaredites whose civilization probably dated as far back as the earliest Egyptian records but the Jaredite civilization was destroyed roughly 200 BC—we have no external dates by which we can figure even a date estimate, for the Jaredites came from the Tower of Babel and we don’t know how much earlier that was in relationship to the time of Abraham. There also was no known contact between the Egyptians and Jaredites.
The Caracators Transcript (CT) deals with a written history of the Nephites (a people from the Book of Mormon) that ran from about 600 BC to 400AD, approximately 1000 years. For the other groups, we will be primarily interested in the time periods in which their records overlapped this 1000 year Nephite history but there are some events which may require us to consider their histories as far back as Abraham (~2000 BC).
ISRAELITE AND JEWISH HISTORY: Most of what we know of the history of the Israelites and Jews is from the Jewish Torah (the first five books of the Bible), and the later Jewish records: The Prophets and The Writings, most of which we can find in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Some of the Old Testament history has been substantiated in documents of other civilizations which were involved with the Israelites (such as the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians), but in this blog, we will not make use of those external documents—we will restrict ourselves to the Biblical account only.
EGYPTIAN HISTORY: Most of what we know of the Egyptian history is due to Jean-François Champollion’s meticulous work in laying the groundwork for reading Egyptian hieroglyphics by analysis of the Rosetta Stone in the 1830s—Champollion’s earliest (1824)[i] work was based on his hunch that the Egyptians wrote using a genuine alphabet and from the names of Egyptian kings and queens, he determined most of the alphabetic letters and the Egyptian numbering system. His work on the alphabet and numbers also gave us a list of Egyptian kings and the dates of their reigns around which our understanding of Egyptian history is based. At the time Joseph Smith, Jr. copied the CT (late 1827), and Martin Harris took the copy to Professor Anthon at Columbia College in New York (early 1828), not even Champollion could really read Egyptian writings. It was later in 1829 that Champollion commenced his year-long journey to Egypt to collect ancient papyri and copy monument carvings from which he eventually made his unprecedented translations that led to the cracking of the Egyptian writing system. Champollion was sickly and died of a stroke in 1832, but he left behind voluminous records of his findings and his ground-breaking work was eventually published by his elder brother, Jacques-Joseph in 1836[ii]. To THAT point (1836), nobody on earth could read Egyptian hieroglyphics any more than to pick out the names and dates of the reigns of the many kings and even a few queens. While Martin Harris was hopeful of receiving confirmation of Joseph Smith Jr.’s Book of Mormon translation from Professor Anthon in 1828, NOBODY alive would have been able to give Harris or anyone else, any kind of Egyptian translation confirmation at that time.
Egyptian history is also important because the Israelites were slaves in Egypt for over 400 years before Moses led them on their 40 year Exodus toward the ‘Promised Land’ of Canaan. There are many disagreements among scholars as to the exact dates that the Israelite slaves were in Egypt and some scholars even doubt that there was EVER a period of Egyptian slavery of Israelites at all. Most of those skeptical scholars do not believe in the Bible and some even reject any kind of Bible-based research that pretends to document the presence of Israelites in Egypt, for they believe that the Egyptian period in the Bible is a fable, generated by authors who sought to justify the pretended claims of the Jews being a ‘God-favored people.’
HISTORIES OF THE NEPHITES/LAMANITES AND JAREDITES: We know of the Nephites’ history only from their record in the major part of the Book of Mormon. Almost everything we know of the Jaredites’ history is from a single, short book (Ether) near the end of the Nephite record. There are no known written records of any other civilizations in the region to support the history of the peoples in the New World; and the few surviving Maya documents which have been translated were written long after the Nephite civilization. Most of the native writings had been destroyed by the well-meaning Spanish conquerors who did their best to destroy all evidence of the natives’ ‘idolatrous’ religion which the Spanish priests considered to be of the devil. Thus, all we really know of those peoples is in the Book of Mormon itself, and in the buried archaeological evidence consisting primarily of structures of cities, temples, and artifacts of art, pottery, animal bones, etc.
The Book of Mormon peoples (the Nephites) were living in the land of Jerusalem about 600 BC, during the time of the prophet, Jeremiah who prophesied of the coming Babylonian captivity. Lehi, the patriarch of the Nephites, was also a prophet who echoed Jeremiah’s dire prophecies to the doubting Jews. Like Jeremiah, Lehi’s prophecies were rejected by his Jewish neighbors and God directed Lehi to take his family to a new land where their seed would be blessed and preserved. While Lehi had been LIVING among the Jews in Jerusalem, Lehi was an Israelite (actually a descendant of Manasses, the elder son of Joseph of Egypt), so Lehi was NOT a Jew in the genealogical sense. Thus, while Lehi was living among the Jews, and was practicing the Jewish religion appropriate to the Judaism of HIS day, he was not a descendant of Judah (i.e., he was not a Jew) and he was NOT practicing the form of Judaism that exists today. There are great differences between the Judaism before the Babylonian Captivity (of 600 BC) and what we find today and it is important to recognize those differences to place Book of Mormon doctrines in perspective with today’s doctrines of today’s denominations, whether they be Judaism, Islam, and Christian (both Catholic and Protestant).
The Book of Mormon makes extensive use of the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah regarding the coming Messiah. Those prophecies, along with other prophecies received by the Nephites themselves, were the reason that the Book of Mormon Nephites knew of Jesus some 600 years before he was born in Bethlehem.
There are other non-historical actors that should be included concerning the Book of Mormon but they are not historical in the sense that the history is in written form. For example, archaeological findings may be dated by measuring the radioactivity of isotopes which decay at a known rate. This science is becoming quite sensitive in dating certain kinds of artifacts. While earlier methods of dating might have a time measurement error of a couple of centuries, more sensitive techniques may now be accurate to a few dozen years. Perhaps, further refinement can pinpoint dates that separate a parent’s birth to the birth of its first child within a few years.
DNA analysis is a new technique which has potential to tell us about the people of ancient times. A DNA sample taken from a single bone of a long-dead person may reveal evidence suggesting an ancestors’ geographical origin or route of migration.
These scientific techniques may have serious implications on our interpretations of the written histories but will not be considered in THIS section. However, given sufficient time to complete the implications of the written histories, I plan to address the scientific methods as related to the Book of Mormon and/or Bible histories elsewhere in this blog.
CONCLUSION OF INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIES
So far, we have been discussing the need for integrating the histories of the peoples that are mentioned within the Book of Mormon. We will proceed to the individual histories starting with the descendants of Abraham, to include the Israelites and the Jews. This first discussion of individual History may be skipped for those who know the stories in the books of the Old Testament, most especially in the first five books of the Bible. I suggest however, that it may be helpful for students knowledgeable of these stories, to revisit them in this context, because there are significant facets in that history which are specifically related to the Egyptian slavery period of the book of Exodus (and in the Book of Mormon) that are missed by the majority of Bible students.
Thus, we suggest that most people should GO TO THE HISTORY OF THE ISRAELITES AND JEWS. (not yet written).
FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE THEY ARE VERY ‘FLUENT’ IN THE STORIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT GO TO EGYPTIAN HISTORY (not yet written.)
FOR THOSE WHO ARE KNOWLEDGEABLE OF THE HISTORIES OF BOTH THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE EGYPTIANS, GO TO ‘NEPHITE HISTORY.’ (not written yet.)
[i] In 1824 Champollion published a Précis in which he detailed the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script demonstrating the values of the phonetic and a few ideographic signs. In 1829 he traveled to Egypt where he was able to read many hieroglyphic texts that had never before been studied, and brought home a large body of new drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Champollion
[ii] He died in Paris in 1832, 41 years old. His grammar of Ancient Egyptian was published posthumously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Champollion