Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon

 

If you are a dedicated Mormon then Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon, by David Persuitte, will strike you as false, and perhaps even an attack on your religion.  But if you compare this book to work in the last hundred years on the sources of the Hebrew Bible, like Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic by Frank Moore Cross, then Persuitte’s work is well in line with historical studies of the birth of religions.  They are a product of their times.  Just as Cross sees elements of Ba’al and El worship from Canaanite religions in the Bible’s depictions of the deity, so too is the Book of Mormon a product, in part, of a book called "View of the Hebrews" written in the years before the discovery of the golden tablets.

The Hebrew Bible has the benefit of its great antiquity.  We know so little about its composition, that even the most well researched and erudite works are just very good guesses.  The Book of Mormon lacks antiquity.  Joseph Smith was a “prophet” in the modern world, and many people were interested in disproving his calling.  This book amply documents this grounding Smith and his book in the real world. 

Smith was someone who dug for buried treasure in his year years.  Persuitte explains how this pursuit was little more than a confidence scheme, and the “discovery” of the Book of Mormon was a confidence scheme on a grander scale with more lasting impact.  More generously we can say that Mormonism began as part of the folk religious practices of the eastern United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  LDS sources confirm this, like Smith's use of a "peep stone" to both find treasure and translate the Book of Mormon.  Yet this admission bolsters Persuitte's point that is work is a product of its time – before evolving, after all religions that take root, into a more institutional plant.

For me, the fatal flaw of the Book of Mormon is its lack of context.  The Hebrew Bible may not be literal history, but it has a cultural context in some early entity, a people called Israel.   The Merneptah Stele – an inscription by the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah (1213–1203 BCE) - documents battles with a people in the Canaan, and one is called Israel.  Far later extra-biblical references, like the Mesha Stele, dated around 840 BCE,  refers to the northern Kingdom of Israel and its king.  The world portrayed in the Book of Mormon has no such context (at least to non-Mormon scholars and historians).  You have little choice but to accept on faith that the events in the Book of Mormon occurred even in the most cursory sense - even as folk expressions or legends - as the people depicted in the book have no historical or cultural context.   

All and all this is an excellent book to examine at length one of the sources that probably one of the sources of the Book of Mormon.  This work goes into great detail, so if you only want to skim the surface of the topic, this is not the book for you.