Thursday, July 28, 2016

Son or Sun of Righteousness?

One critic of the Book of Mormon wrote the following:

The confusion between “Sun” in Mal. 4:2 and “Son” in Ether 9:22 could only have happened by reading the English translation of Mal. 4:2. In Hebrew “sun” is shemesh and “son” is ben. The similarity between the two words is only found in the English. (source)

Such an argument is rather weak, to be honest--the Book of Mormon is a dictated text; regardless of one's views about its antiquity (I affirm such; the author of this article clearly rejects such), it is not difficult to see the scribe (Oliver Cowdery) mishearing "sun" as "son" when Joseph Smith translated whatever the Nephite equivalent of שֶׁמֶשׁ shemesh/sun was in 3 Nephi 25:2 and Ether 9:22. Furthermore, this confusion on the behalf of the scribe, instead of supporting copying from the KJV, refutes such, as it makes more sense as an error of dictation--the KJV, after all, reads sun, not son.

As I told a friend of mine who made me aware of this particular blog and its problems:

I have not seen this blog before, so will bookmark it; however, the methodology seems to be poor and that of parallelomania. For instance, trying to base literary dependency upon three-word phrases, regardless of how allegedly "high" the quantity, is fallacious; Jeff Lindsay has a rather good parody of such a methodology, alongside other related ones critics engage in, at:


Also, a lot of his comments about the Satanological terminology of the Book of Mormon works under the assumption (which he does not explicate) that the idea of an external supernatural Satan is a post-exilic construct. While popular even in scholarly circles, such a view is untenable as the main "proof" of this (Jews during the exile borrowing from the Persian religion) is being rejected by more and more scholars, even those that would fall under the "liberal" category (e.g., John J. Collins in his Hermenia commentary on Daniel). Furthermore, Deut 32:17 and other texts assume the ontological existence of what we would label "demons." I discussed Satan and demons in the Book of Mormon at the following posts: