THE LANGUAGE OF MY FATHERS.

Yesterday, I spent time talking about chiasmus in Hebrew poetry, the point being that Christ is at the center of most Book of Mormon chiasmus.  In fact, Christ is the central focus of the Book of Mormon itself. We don't know the exact name King Benjamin gave his people, but it is safe to assume that it was some Nephite equivalent of Christian. Key to becoming a Christian in any age is learning to love with Christ-like love.  It may take a lifetime to achieve that pure love, but we take a great step forward when we serve others with a love unfeigned.  Love is not a feeling, it is an action.  When we serve with love, we will feel love.  King Benjamin taught that when we love and serve each other, we are loving and serving God at the same time.

King Benjamin led by example.  He was not a "do as I say, not as I do sort of person." He served as an example to his people, but he was an even bigger example to his children. He had three sons: Mosiah, Helorum, and Helaman.  He taught them the language of his fathers, and about the records engraved on the plates of brass. ( Mosiah 1: 2, 3) He gave his son, Mosiah, care of the Nephite records that had been kept since Lehi.  If you will remember, Nephi said that he wrote in the language of my father, which consists of the leaning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.(1 Nephi 1: 2) This was central to their understanding so that they might read the records and write more as inspired by God. As I read it, Benjamin taught all of his sons these sacred things. 

Hebrew is a very concise language, but Egyptian is even more so. Here is one example I learned a few years ago. The symbols of Pharaoh's authority are the crook and the flail.  You will see them represented in pictures of Egyptian royalty. The crook, like a shepherd's staff, represented mercy.  The flail or whip represented justice. A Crook and a Flail were found atop the sarcophagus of Tutankamen. 

The learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians would have added the symbol for house in order to represent the place where God dwells.  The Egyptian hieroglyph for house actually looks like the Hebrew letter Bet, which means house (as in Bet-lahem, the house of bread.)

The Egyptian symbols actually look like the Hebrew letters Kaf (if the crook were turned sideways, you can see the top of it in the kaf); Lamed (easy to see the flail); and Bet (easy to see the house.)  In the hieroglyph, the three symbols can be written as one hieroglyph. Hebrew is represented by the consonants only. KLB would be pronounced Kolob.

This is, of course, supposition on my part, I find it interesting and quite plausible.  I found a symbol of the kaf, lamed, and bet as one symbol in a novel by Jack Lyon, which means none of this is doctrinal, but sometimes my mind likes to hypothesize, "What if. . .?" I found it as a way of showing how the learning of the Jews could be written in the language of the Egyptians.

In the early days of the Church, Joseph Smith was ridiculed for saying that the Nephites wrote a form of hieroglyph. Scholars have since learned that this form of communication was used frequently in ancient Israel.

I found the following quote in the 1971 New Era Magazine.  I've posted the Link below.  Here are just a few key thoughts:

In 1967, at the site of Tel Arad in Israel, there was found an ostracon of particular importance to students of the Book of Mormon. . . . a piece of broken pottery on which writing is found; . . . Upon examination, the text of this particular ostracon was written in a combination of Hebrew letters and Egyptian hieratic symbols. It has been determined that the ostracon was written just before 600 B.C., or about the time Lehi left for the new world.

[M]any persons have pooh-poohed this aspect of the Book of Mormon story, claiming that no such combination of the two languages existed among the people of the Near East. . . The ostracon . . . proves that there were in Judea . . . people who could write both Hebrew and Egyptian and that these two tongues were being intermingled.

John A. Tvedtnes
Learning of the Jews; Language of the Egyptians

Food for thought while we are all sheltering in place.

© Dr. Kathleen Rawlings Buntin Danielson, April 2020