“`The land of Jerusalem.’ .
. . There is no such land. No part of Palestine bears the name Jerusalem,
except the city itself.”
Origen Bacheler, Mormonism Exposed Internally and Externally
(1838), 14.
The phrase “land
of Jerusalem” is a common phrase in the Book of Mormon and is used by prophets
in the Book of Mormon to refer to the place of their original inheritance
before their journey to a new land of promise (1 Nephi 2:11; 7:2; 7:7; 16:35; 17:20;
2 Nephi 1:1).Hugh Nibley and subsequent Latter day Saint scholars have shown
that, while the phrase, “land of Jerusalem” is not found in the Bible, it does
appear five times in the El Amarna Tablets, which date to the fourteenth century
B.C. (Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert,
1988, 6-7), as shown in the examples from
El Amarna Letters 287 AND 287 and 290
below.
“Behold
this land of Jerusalem . . .”
“[If] they send into the land
[of Jerusalem] troops, let them come with an Egyptian officer”
“Let my king
requisition for them much grain, much oil, (and) much clothing, until Pawure,
the royal commissioner, comes up to the land
of Jerusalem”
“Behold, the
king has set his name in the land of
Jerusalem for ever; so he cannot abandon the lands of Jerusalem!”
“But now even a
town of the land of Jerusalem, Bit-Lahmi by name, a town belonging to the king,
has gone over to the side of the people of Keilah”
James B.
Pritchard, The Ancient Near East, 1:271-272,
274 emphasis added.
The Amarna tablets were not
discovered until 1887, some fifty-seven years after the publication of the Book
of Mormon.
The phrase “land of Jerusalem”
has more recently turned up in a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls attributed
to the prophet Jeremiah (4Q385b).
[…and] Jeremiah
the prophet [went] from before YHWH, [… the] exiles who were brought into exile
from the land of Jerusalem and were
led […] king of Babel, when Nabuzaradan, chief of the escort, struck […] … and
he took the vessels of the temple of God, the priests [… and] the children of
Israel and led them to Babylon.
Florentino
Garcia Martinez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition (1998), 2:773.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.