Hebrew Voices #203 – Revelation or Imagination: Part 1

Hebrew Voices #203 – Revelation or Imagination: Part 1

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: This is amazing to me, because here we’re doing something I wish I could do with the Book of Exodus, which is… see, is this the handwriting of Joshua, and here’s the handwriting of Moses? And I don’t have that opportunity. And here we… it’s amazing that we can do this in the original manuscript.

Royal: Yeah, and it does turn out to be very important for this, this issue of easier and difficult readings, which we talked about.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Royal Skousen. He’s the editor of the Critical Text Project of the Book of Mormon. He taught in universities for 50 years; 41 years at BYU, Brigham Young University, nine years at a variety of other universities including Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Texas-Austin, California-San Diego, and a University in Finland I won’t attempt to pronounce the name of.

Before we get started, Royal, I want to try to convince my audience to listen. So, we’re going to talk today about textual criticism of the Book of Mormon, and the reason this should be important to my audience, to everybody who’s listening here, is that what I deal with is textual criticism of the Tanakh, of the Old Testament, and also of the New Testament. For textual criticism to be valid, there’s sort of this assumption that it should apply to any text. And here, we’re going to take an example that we don’t have in the Tanakh, or in the New Testament, where, with the Book of Mormon, we have literally the original manuscript, in English. And then we have a copy of the original manuscript called the Printer’s Manuscript, and then we have two editions that were made under Joseph Smith’s supervision, the 1830 and the 1837. And what Royal has done…

Royal: And 1842.

Nehemia: And the 1842; so we have three. So, we have an opportunity to do something we couldn’t even dream of with the Book of Exodus, with Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, which is to compare the original manuscript with a second manuscript, which was a copy, and then other editions, in this case printed editions, that were made under the supervision of, at least what I would say was the author, Joseph Smith Jr.

So, with that said, 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 mean, I don’t think that’s an exaggerat…No, really. I mean, you’re the guy. So, the fact that you’re joining me on my program, I’m really honored. I did have Emanuel Tov on the program as well.

All right. So, let’s give the audience a little bit of a background, though, because I don’t know that everybody in my audience understands what the Book of Mormon is, and more specifically, how it was produced in 1828 and 1829 in manuscript form.