The Ancient Scribal Schools Produced The Scriptures feat. Noel B. Reynolds

Exciting new scholarship from Noel B. Reynolds sheds light on how the scriptures were produced and how many of the ancient prophets were trained.

Beginning with Egypt, their scribal school taught both administrative and holy writing. But they were also taught many of the other skills such as metallurgy (think Nephi) and military stratagem and physical combat.

 Raw Transcript

mosiah when he's telling teaching his sons about this uh it seems to me the
Nephites are dealing with at least three languages uh they can read and write in
Hebrew uh they can and I assume that Isaiah was always in Hebrew and probably
some other things and that would have been their initial uh uh vul uh their ini initial
spoken language would have been Hebrew for the Nephites but they have these brass
plates and the brass plates are written in Egyptian and Nephi seems to start off in
the beginning with the idea that Egyptian is the appropriate language for
writing scripture and he chooses to write the small plates in
Egyptian and so mosiah sons and all the way down to Mormon Roni these uh these
scribes who are teaching the people out of the brass plates need to know Hebrew
Egyptian and nephite any linguist will tell you that by by the time of Mormon
and Moroni uh as Mormon says no one else knows our language yeah they have their
own language has evolved out of Egyptian out of uh Hebrew and what other language
groups they have become exposed to over a Thousand-Year period which we know
includes the muik kites the were not uh
easily understood when they came maybe even a little bit of jedite
yeah exactly so so um so they've uh
they've got to deal with multiple languages well you don't do that if uh if your entire life is in subsistence
farming yeah yeah exactly it's uh now I want to back up a little bit
again and we talked about this last but I think that this is this is an important issue to understand it's one
of the most important things I think to understand in understanding that there were scribal schools and that is the the
the compiling of the brass plates and the necessity to have the brass plates uh the brass plates we know go down
through a josephite line uh and and and in my estimation I
would guess that you've got the book of Joseph in there his writings he wrote in there he made may have been the
initiator of the plates or or maybe Abraham and Abraham would have his writings you know in there and sometimes
it seems like maybe he does maybe they're pulling from this a little bit and and so you've got this line coming
down through Joseph and what I try to explain to people because the the the kind of the
bumper sticker idea of the brass place is that it's it's just the Old Testament
uncorrupted but it's not it's it's it's a completely different line it is a
completely different book that has many of the similar books in it but it's
followed through by a different scribal tradition it is and and and that means a lot I mean what is kept in there what
what was left out of the Old Testament can be very different from this other line the scribal school line of
josephites that that were apparently focused on Jesus Christ and and and the
gospel of Jesus Christ that is not followed in a later scribal tradition
that we have in the Old Testament and so you have it's really two separate books it's not just a corrupted and an
uncorrupted version you've got two different books that come to us is that right yeah that's the way I see it um in
fact we can go a little further with that I think uh once we understand the history
of the Hebrew language and the and Hebrew writing uh the scholarly world does not
have any evidence that Hebrew uh was uh uh spoken as a separate
language uh or that there was Hebrew writing uh before about uh 900 ad uh
BC and um Egyptian of course goes back
uh into the 2000s BC uh so the uh if it's the case that
the manasi scribal school the josephites that they do have written
records going all the way back to Joseph that would include Moses right and Moses
was trained in Egyptian too that he was an educated Egyptian uh that's the people have
wondered how do the Israelites start producing written records of a of a uh literary tradition
they claim goes back a thousand years uh when they don't have uh
writing in Hebrew well the easiest answer once for people who believe in
the brass plates the easiest answer is that these uh that the Old Testament
materials uh many much of that Old Testament material especially the uh the Books of
Moses uh could have leaked over from the ephraimites the Manasses the josephites
who had a written record that went back all the way to Joseph and they're that
they're the ones the Judah sites are getting this from that would make the Old Testament a
much more real reliable tradition uh than Scholars have been
able to portray it because the scholarly the the standard assumption in this
Bible studies world today is that in the 600s maybe starting in the
700s BC that the judahite scribes in
Jerusalem uh sat down and started to transcribe using their new written
language starting to sat down and transcribe the oral Traditions that
would go back all the way to Moses and before and so and it's hard for him to
believe that oral Traditions going back a thousand years are giving us an
accurate picture of Abraham and his family and his
predecessors yeah and that that that that brings up the additional
question though was okay so if we're talking about the judahite line which is
undeveloped and reliant on the josephi line right and and that develops later I
I think before you said you thought this developed sometime in the seventh century yes uh BC okay so the scribal it
it it it it develops later on the question is has there already been an
apost y on on the belief of of of of a savior
of the world taking on the sins of the world and the Gospel of Jesus Christ when that
develops this is just fun conjecture here but you've got the book that is found in the temple maybe come close to
the time you're talking about that is a new book under the under the under Josiah King Josiah that is
found and all of a sudden all these things have to change and there's Mass reforms it just
that's just interesting to me you talk about that that developing at that time and then all of a sudden here's a new
book yeah that comes up and shows up yeah it's I haven't uh uh again Bible
scholars tend to equate Josiah's new book with
Deuteronomy yeah I uh and there are several there are several things that uh
that do suggest that connection but certainly
even uh the the judite understanding of the law of
Moses uh in lehi's day uh did not
feature uh Jesus Christ at all yeah and I also wonder if that was
in a reformed book of Deuteronomy but um a a judahite edition of of of
Deuteronomy um okay what was that just
passing uh note that Margaret Barker uh has argued that the uh that what we all
have been taught is this wonderful reform by Josiah was actually uh a
significant step away from abrahamic religion uh advancing a new version uh
that could fit the culture of the times yeah and and I I've read all her stuff
and and I think she's right on many things there's a few things I'm like I not sure about that but but as far as
the the the reform at that point I think that that is right the deuteronomist take over and they're named after that
book um the issue though with saying that it is just purely Deuteronomy as it is you know now we only we don't get the
name Deuteronomy in the Book of Mormon but we do get the five books of Moses yeah saying that there are five books of
Moses so if if if they're pulling that then they've got a josephite record already of of Deuteronomy yeah if that's
the fifth book now maybe there's another book that we don't know about that's possible I suppose but otherwise we've we've got the five books of Moses are
included in the brass plates and then you have you know things like Jesus
quoting Deuteronomy several times later on and so uh you know I can't remember our last conversation whether I um you
stopped me if I've talked about this before but uh uh since the mid90s
I've been arguing that the book of Moses that Joseph that we have in our prar
great price that was given to Joseph Smith just months after the publication
uh of the book of Worman um that it is that it is
full of evidence that the Nephites were
using that version of Genesis
the book of Moses version of Genesis is what's in the brass plates and it's
what's used by the Nephites and we have uh Jeff Lindsay has
picked up what I started there in the 90s on that topic and is done wonderful
job in um identifying a hundred phrases and
evidences that I didn't notice back then and it's all now been published together
in interpreter articles yeah that's fascinating that's
uh yeah again you're talking about a different book The Old than the Old
Testament that's exactly right yeah for for the brass plates uh now moving on a
little bit here um what are some of the things I know I know that you're getting ready to publish on the paper you youve
followed up with this uh very fascinating field and going into the Bible schools what else have you
discovered in the last four months that you think is uh something you want to share with
us uh well I I do have two two more papers now that uh will be published
sometime this year uh that extend it uh the first one uh will be in a book that
uh uh Carrie Hull and Ryan sharp are putting together for the religious studies Center uh and that's one where I
show that you can document uh every transition of
responsibility for the uh scripture records uh in Among the
Nephites uh just all the way to the end uh of the book uh we don't have any of
this in the Old Testament uh you know who's responsible for keeping the
records uh in the Judi tradition is zero and it's a real frustration for this
scholarly world that they don't have any of of that uh but in the Book of Mormon
you we actually have uh Mormon is very
conscious of this this is he's a scribe he's from the
tribal school and he documents as he goes through the large plates of Nephi
he's documenting every transition in Chief scribes all the way down to the end
yeah that's fascinating so that's that's one thing and I and I guess I probably mentioned that a little bit last time
but it's uh but we can actually at in this new paper I actually show that
trans those Transitions and indicate how long any particular individuals were Chief
scrib uh and we can most that information is right there in the text
the second paper the one I'm uh working on mostly right now is uh is one that works the other
direction uh I think I think we have in in these first papers I've showed how
the Book of Mormon has a scribal tradition but then uh turning it around
uh how about Abraham back to the
beginning and again uh in a in the book of
Abraham uh and in the book of Moses we
have much clearer statements of the writing uh education of Adam and his
descendants a book of remembrance was kept uh they were taught in the language of Adam they were taught to read and
write uh go back to book of Moses chapter 6 uh God commanded Moses to
write the vision in a book that's in chapter one of the book of Moses uh and
uh and then you can carry that down it requires speculation so I've just I've
just off I'm offering the most uh what seemed to be about the most reasonable
speculations on that and one of them one of the main stories for Abraham right
there in the first chapter of Abraham is getting the
records and having the having the records of his ancestors is important uh
for documenting the priesthood uh and uh and as I look at it
uh I come to a conclusion that has been suggested by others it's not original with me uh but uh it seems to me needs
to be taken more seriously and uh looked at in more detail and that is that this
repeated encounter between Abraham and
melkisedek has a lot more going on than just Abraham P ties the melchisedek is the connection
to because Abraham's own immediate ancestors are
apostates they're worshiping idols and
uh and uh but he meets up with melchisedek and mzc seems to have uh be
coming from the uh and and we and we have side comments in the scriptures
Joseph Smith Revelations and other places uh that meisd preserves an
original adamic uh Authority and uh
scriptural tradition and uh so what language was he
writing in and that would be a nice thing to know now it it's uh
interesting that milisic and Abraham are spending most of their lives at least uh
in the area that we would call Palestine today U and that entire area a very
large area there uh include several uh smaller countries
today uh was speaking what Scholars have used to call
Phoenician now they call it West Semitic and Hebrew is a uh broke Hebrew
Edomite ammonite other languages broke away from West Semitic uh
probably uh in the 10th Century BC and so well
well after Abraham and and they're and they are mutually intelligible
languages uh and the writing system in which they're written really uh may have been invented
in Egypt a thousand years before that but is not adopted by any scribal schools for
writing serious texts until uh the time of in Jerusalem when
the Hebrews start writing down their moral Traditions that's when it first
becomes used in major texts so it's uh but it actually its invention
has been shown to go back to Abraham's time in Egypt the alab it's the invention of the
alphabet yeah you've got I mean I know that you can go back to even as far back as the third or fourth dynasty of of of
of the Egyptians and they're already mentioning scribes at that point which means that they were already somebody who was touring them and developed them
and you know so it's been around a very very long time in going through these schools but what about Abraham himself
then okay so he is he is going to go into Egypt from the
book of Abraham and and he has a vision he's going looking through the Y filum
and and he you know he's got Abraham 3 and and uh the creation story etc etc
that is given to him but what is told him is that he is going to be given this information so that he can teach
the Egyptians yes right that's that's what he he's get receiving this so that he can go in and teach the Egyptians who
are probably the world's leading astronomers and
so does Abraham already know Egyptian yes yeah it seems like he would have to
already know Egyptian he's going to go in there and flourish also like his great-grandson Joseph it's it's he must
already know Egyptian uh the hypothesis I've put together on
this and it cannot be proven given any contemporary uh knowledge of ancient
records uh but it's I think it's reasonable given what can be proven that
is that uh Abraham was born in
Ur uh we now have uh can see that that
uh Ur is uh Northwest Syria yeah the northern one right there where all this
trouble with the Kurds is taking place and uh the border with turkey up in that
area well that was Egyptian administered territory conquered and administered
during Abraham's time and the evidence would seem to be
that Abraham's family uh is part of that Administration uh they're
familiar uh certainly with their their
uh the uh Egyptian priest is certainly aware of them uh and some of the
Traditions about Abraham none of which you know can be taken as a proof but the
traditions of Abraham are that basically he was running around the
uh as a child and learning and in the uh schooling there yeah so Abraham comes uh
he's learning not only uh the u v the vernacular of his
family that which probably was an early form of
Aramaic it was the assumption that which is very closely related to West am medic
and uh Aramaic the Babylonians eventually bring over to Babylon yeah and uh and was and
Aramaic uh picked up the uh West Semitic alphabet and that's they have their own
alphabet derived from the same alphabet that the Hebrews comes from
um but the so the hypothesis would be that that's how Abraham grew up that he
did know Egyptian uh and uh Aramaic uh but he lives most of his life
as does apparently mezc in an area that is speaking West citic which would be
closely related to Aramaic uh then uh you also we need to remember
that as uh Abraham goes to Egypt where he goes is the Nile Delta
up there up there in Northern Egypt North East Egypt even
and that area uh is
regularly uh encroached upon by West Semitic
speakers hi house and others and yeah the uh famine that Abraham was
fleeing was not the first famine uh this is cyclical and so these
people in the west Dominic area Palestine regularly go down there and
Scholars are starting to suspect that some of the Pharaohs were actually from this uh West citic group and uh so that
uh Abraham knew the two languages that were used in that area he could teach
them and of course the idea of Abraham teaching and later Joseph Joseph teaching uh uh the
leading people in Egypt uh those are Traditions that have come down in different kinds of
Legends uh most of them Jewish yeah uh there is so much
intermingling with Egypt that I I think people don't realize this is one of the things I try to do here I am in Cairo right now and I'm you know one of the
things I talk to those that that come on these tours is look this is not you have this idea of Egypt and it's almost a
Protestant idea that that uh Egypt's bad and Israel's good and and that's all we
know because of the Exodus story and it's like there's so much more to this I mean Abraham goes to Egypt Joseph is in
Egypt they're teaching in Egypt there Moses is from Egypt it's all of you know if you if you look out a restored uh two
books from uh the pearl of great price they're they're Egyptian you know they the book of Moses
and the Book of Abraham and Jeremiah UAH Jesus's family goes to Egypt in Exile
it's uh there there's so much more there and then of course if we're looking at the scribal
school and and the the the foundational language for for those scribal schools
as Egyptian we should look at this like wait a minute this The Book of Mormon
comes through that line The Book of Mormon the brass plates through that josephi line is is in Egyptian and
um there's there's so many stronger ties to Egypt than people actually realize and and of course you know we'll walk
people around the temples and show them a number of things here as well there's also other ties there but uh um our
heritage is in in many ways you know and I think
you brought this up last time in fact even DNA maybe our heritage is
Egyptian um so you're in Cairo I'm in Cairo how far is it to
Jerusalem uh I don't know the miles on that not that far it's about 200 200
okay that's pretty close yeah uh even on
Horseback you that's yeah that's very it's a week away yeah so uh the
uh you know I've made a lot of difference and emphasized this difference between the
man asite scribal school that would have been thriving in the northern kingdom
and of course our our Old Testament doesn't give us northern kingdom records
uh the way it does the southern Kingdom but uh Jerusalem and Samaria are about
45 miles away from each other it's just these are not big
distances and these people intermingled and when the uh you know
when the Assyrians were threatening uh to take over the northern
kingdom the uh the elites some of the elites and apparently lehi's ancestors
among them fled to Jerusalem the archaeologists that have been digging up
ancient Jerusalem claim that Jerusalem's the size the population of Jerusalem
increased 15 times wow at the time these Elites were moving
south yeah so so you well I mean you think about you have you have Judah and
Benjamin in the in Judah in in Judah and you've got the other 10 tribes up north
right right I mean there's a big difference in population but it also you know the scribal school also when you
think about it you go back to the the Rivalry that had to have existed and I
wonder how much of this has feel logical because of the scribal schools that would have existed between
the northern kingdom and the southern Kingdom even before they split if there is a if you are if one side is keeping
only an oral tradition and the festivals and one side has the actual written
documentation from Abraham and Joseph and and Moses you know
it's you're going to have they're going to be saying wait a minute here what what are you doing here you know this is
I'm checking you on this this is what's in the writings here right as far as the religion goes you'd think that there'd
be a natural a natural uh uh not just a power struggle for land and for for for
power but a theological struggle perhaps even even going back that far well let me push you a little bit
further on that um the archaeologists uh are
shifting now over the last two or three decades they've they've shift pretty
dramatically to the idea that the northern kingdom was far more advanced
than the southern Kingdom stories about Solomon and David aside that the that the real Center of
civilization was in the north and uh the uh and here they come fleeing to the
South now Drew Jerusalem has a nice wall around it uh and it did turn out to
protect them for over a century yeah the syrians took doorn Kingdom they couldn't take Jerusalem but
by the time we have this little hint in the book Mormon if laan is the uh custodian of
the scribal school library and that's where they have to go to get the the the brass
plates um but he's carousing with the Elders of Jerusalem
he his buddies are the other guys in terms of the competition you
just suggested yes uh I've gone a step further on this
and suggested that this
um uh that the Elders of the massit
scribal school could have become very concerned
about their records uh losing significance losing Authority in the in
the world that they can see right around them what's going on in Jerusalem and they determine the need to
inscribe their written tradition on metal plates which makes it a permanent
witness and that phrase the permanent witness is in the Old Testament and that's why Things are Written on Stone
and on metal is to make permanent it wasn't as effective as they had thought
it would be uh later generations of people who get a hold of those materials
say I could melt these down and make a lot of money so they they're not as
permanent as uh as they had was hoped but that gives us an explanation for why
the brass plates were written in lehi's lifetime and it may also suggest why Lehi thought
he had a right to ask laan for them he may have helped produce them he
may have financed them uh but certainly as a member of the scribal school he may
have just had a right Tas for well and a major concern being in there that this is is this going into
the wrong hands and and uh what's going to happen with this and yeah you know
you bring that up and I start thinking about some of the things Old Testament you know Solomon the wise Solomon you
know is that a response to the northern the northern kingdom the whole the whole legend of
his wisdom you know is that well wa you know if you don't have these schools but they do up North you know let's put
Solomon up as the wise one I I don't know it's just interesting to look at those things in in these archaeologist
who have found so much more advanced culture in excavations in the northern C
cities uh are exploring exactly the kind of question you just asked though and
that there's a literature developing trying to reread uh everything
through uh those Northern eyes yeah that's that's really interesting I mean
it's it's it really changes your idea because of course to the victors goes
the spoils and in this regard the 10 tribes are taken away and you've got Judah left right and so who's keeping
the record of the history and and uh it's um there's not a lot of good
things that they say about the north well and it goes back to your first point that these are two very different
books book of Mor men in the Old Testament that they come they are coming out of
some uh Traditions that are different in important ways yeah I agree no really
appreciate your time this is fascinating stuff I hope we can bring you back again as you you continue to go down this road
and and gather some more information on this um wonderful stuff I I hope that
people could see number one this is there's a josephite tradition and there's a judahite tradition the Old
Testament is the judahite tradition the brass plates in the Book of Mormon are the josephi tradition you I think we
need to really separate that and understand that they are two witnesses and they're two witnesses not just
because they're two books there's there's two different lines there there's two different groups that are uh
uh producing this for us so anyway from Cairo back to are you in in Utah County
orm okay back to orm Utah really appreciate it no and uh hopefully we'll get you on soon thank
you all right really appreciate that no it really is fascinating I I really love this stuff um it it just brings up so
many new questions and context and and perspective on uh on the scriptures so
well for me it's uh it's just
um so many things in the Book of Mormon all of a sudden fall into place the Book of Mormon writers keep
being kind of obsessed with this point and that point and another point and all
of a sudden when you see this you see why those were important points for them
yes and uh