The purpose of plates: A hypothesis

Obviously, I haven't posted on this blog for a while. I've been hung up on my inability to make sense of the whole idea of "plates" as a record-keeping medium, but I think I'm finally starting to make some progress.

Why would any people want to engrave its scriptures on metal plates rather than writing them on scrolls as the writers of the Bible did? The reason given in the Book of Mormon is a concern for the permanence of the records:

I cannot write but a little of my words, because of the difficulty of engraving our words upon plates; and we know that the things which we write upon plates must remain; but whatsoever things we write upon anything save it be upon plates must perish and vanish away (Jacob 4:1-2).

In theory, something engraved in gold should be permanent, since gold is one of the least reactive substances known to man and will not rust or corrode or decay the way other materials eventually do. In practice, though, we would not expect a document written on gold to be preserved down through the millennia, simply because the material itself is so valuable and so easily cannibalized for other purposes. "Neither moth nor rust doth corrupt" gold, granted, but what about the "thieves break through and steal" bit? Trusting that something will be preserved for future generations simply because it's engraved in gold seems foolish.

With relatively few exceptions, documents of great antiquity which have survived down to the present have done so not because the original was written in some uniquely permanent and incorruptible medium, but because a great number of copies were made, and then copies of those copies, and then copies of copies of copies, and so on.

This process of iterative copying is not perfect, of course, and over time errors and emendations creep into the text. All things considered, though, it's a remarkably effective way of preserving a text for a long period of time. Written language consists of discrete characters, drawn from a finite set and arranged in a linear order, which makes it the kind of thing that can be copied perfectly. It's even possible to memorize a lengthy composition word-for-word and then write down a faithful copy from memory, which is likely how the first written copies of the Homeric epics and the Quran originated.

The words of Homer, who sang nearly three millennia ago, are still readily available today. Of the celebrated works of Parrhasius, four centuries closer to our time than Homer, nothing survives. The reason for this is simply that Homer was a poet, and Parrhasius was a painter, and paintings cannot be copied perfectly by hand the way poems can. If you had the time and the inclination, you could copy down the entire Vulgate Bible by hand, and do so perfectly, even if you didn't understand a word of Latin. Now try to imagine producing, by hand, a perfect copy of this picture of Jerome writing the Vulgate:

Obviously this is impossible. Not just difficult, but strictly impossible. Dürer himself, who created the original, could not have produced a perfect copy by hand. However, many perfect copies were made, and long before modern photographic technology, because what Dürer created was not a painting on canvas but an engraving on a copper plate. This could be used to produce any number of prints, with perfect fidelity, through the technique of intaglio printmaking. The process is illustrated on Wikipedia as follows:

When you hear that Dürer is most famous for his woodcuts and copper engravings, you should not imagine sheets of engraved copper hanging up in a museum somewhere. The copper plate was not the artwork itself, but a means of producing and reproducing countless iterations of it.

As you can see above, the intaglio process involves getting ink into the engraved grooves on the plate and then transferring this ink to paper, creating a perfect mirror-image of the engraving. Although the diagram above makes it look as if this completely removes the ink from the grooves, in fact the grooves remain black with ink even after the print has been made.

In his book The Lost 116 Pages, Don Bradley quotes some little-known early descriptions of the Golden Plates. Citing Orson Pratt, he writes:

The plates, witnesses reported, were partly sealed shut and were engraved with hieroglyphics, in the grooves of which was a "black, hard stain" that contrasted the characters against the golden page.

He also quotes a similar description given by Francis Gladden Bishop:

The characters are rubbed over with a black substance so as to fill them up, in order that the dazzling of the gold between the characters would not prevent their being readily seen.

Both Pratt and Bishop apparently understood the black ink to be in the grooves for the purpose of contrast, to make it easier to read the text directly from the plates. Doesn't it seem likelier, though, that this black stain is an indication that the Golden Plates, like the copper plates of Dürer, were primarily used for making prints? Of course, one could read directly from the plates, but the text would be in mirror image. Perhaps a pair of specially designed spectacles could correct that, though. Hypothetically speaking.

If I am correct in my hypothesis that the scriptures used by ordinary Nephite literati were intaglio prints from the Plates, that would suggest that their sacred writings had a form that made this particular form of copying necessary -- that the "text" on the Plates was much more like Saint Jerome in His Study than it was like the Vulgate Bible. Had they relied on low-fidelity hand-copying to preserve it, much of the content would rapidly have "perished and vanished away."

It is interesting to note in this connection that, in addition to texts in the narrow sense, Joseph Smith introduced certain pictures into the canon of sacred writings, and that these were of Egyptian origin. Take for example this Facsimile from the Book of Abraham:

I don't want to get into questions about this facsimile in particular -- Joseph Smith interpreted about half of it as being about a rather cryptic astronomical theory and left the rest of it a mystery, while modern scholars see it as a common funerary talisman -- but simply to note the significance of the fact that this picture, just as much as the text of the Bible or Book of Mormon, is part of the scriptural canon of the Latter-day Saints. The facsimile as we have it is an excellent example of my point about it being impossible to produce perfect copies of pictures by hand, as it is pretty clearly a copy of a copy of a copy, from which much of the detail has been lost or corrupted. It's a pity that Abraham didn't use intaglio printing technology instead of writing "by his own hand upon papyrus"!

This, according to Joseph Smith, is an example of what Egyptian scripture looks like. Both the Golden Plates and the Brass Plates, we know, were written in the Egyptian manner (see 1 Ne. 1:2, Mosiah 1:4, Morm. 9:32). Is it possible that the engravings on the Plates consisted of, or at least included, similar "facsimiles"? For evidence of that, I turn again to Don Bradley's indispensable work. According to Charles Anthon, who looked at characters hand-copied from the Golden Plates:

The characters were "arranged in perpendicular columns, and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks." Anthon saw in this circular design an echo of "the Mexican Calendar given by Humboldt," meaning the Aztec calendar published by Alexander Von Humboldt in 1814.

Anthon wrote this well before Joseph Smith had purchased the papyri from which the Book of Abraham was produced, but doesn't that description -- "a rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks" -- sound exactly like Facsimile 2? As with that facsimile, I attribute the "rudeness" of the delineation to the fact that it was a hand-drawn copy. Presumably the original on the Plate was anything but rude. If this was indeed the character of the Nephite records, the need for intaglio printing to preserve the details intact is evident.

Finally, there's the question of why the Nephite and Jaredite plates were gold but Laban's were brass. Given the costliness of gold, there must have been some compelling reason for using it, but the existence of Laban's plates seems to indicate that brass -- cheaper, lighter, less susceptible to deformation -- would have served just as well. In fact, copper and zinc (the components of brass) remain the favored materials for intaglio plates. How to account for the use of both types of plates, gold and brass?

Here's my theory. In almost all ways, brass plates would be preferable to gold in practical terms. The chief value of gold is (1) that it does not corrode and (2) that it is so expensive as to make the production of unauthorized "fake" gold plates by private citizens impractical. I propose that gold plates were rarely used directly, but were kept (by kings or chief priests) as the "gold standard" guaranteeing the authenticity of all copies. Prints from the gold plates were used to create brass plates, and these brass plates (which were more portable, and of which there could be multiple copies) were used to create the prints in common use. In the event that the gold plates were themselves lost, prints from authenticated brass plates could be used to create a new set of gold plates -- an extremely expensive undertaking beyond the means of anyone outside the kingly or priestly establishment.

Laban was an important man, but not that important."He can command fifty" -- what is that, like a first lieutenant? He was entrusted with a brass-plate copy of the Josephite record, not with the original gold. Given the many centuries separating Joseph from Laban, it seems likely that the gold-plate record was no longer extant. It also appears that Laban or his associates were making brass-plate copies of the words of contemporary prophets, like Jeremiah, who would not yet have reached the stage of being canonized in gold.

Lehi seems to have understood that brass, unlike gold, is not an imperishable medium: "Wherefore, he said that these plates of brass should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time" (1 Ne. 5:19).This reads most naturally as a prophecy that the Brass Plates will be miraculously preserved, and the statement that they should not "be dimmed any more by time" suggests that they had already been considerably dimmed.

So that's my current theory on plates. As I continue to reread the Book of Mormon, with this theory in mind, I'll see if it helps any puzzle pieces fall into place or if it all just ends in a stupor of thought causing me to forget the thing that was wrong.

The question of Lehi's ethnicity

Note: This is a lightly edited repost of something I wrote in 2014.

What was the ethnic background of Lehi? In one sense, the question is easy to answer. Alma 10:3 explicitly states that “Lehi, who came out of the land of Jerusalem, … was a descendant of Manasseh, who was the son of Joseph who was sold into Egypt by the hands of his brethren.”

From this we might assume that Lehi, a descendant of Manasseh who had nevertheless “dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days” (1 Nephi 1:4), was descended from those Manassites who, together with members of the tribes of Ephraim and Simeon, fled from the Northern Kingdom to Jerusalem during the reign of Asa, as described in 2 Chronicles 15.

The strange thing, though, is that Lehi apparently didn’t know he was a descendant of Manasseh. He found this out only after he had left Jerusalem. Having obtained the brass plates from Laban, “Lehi, also found upon the plates of brass a genealogy of his fathers; wherefore he knew that he was a descendant of Joseph, yea, even that Joseph who was the son of Jacob, who was sold into Egypt . . . And thus my father, Lehi, did discover the genealogy of his fathers. And Laban was also a descendant of Joseph, wherefore he and his fathers had kept records” (1 Ne 5:14, 16).

So, leaving aside the actual facts of his ancestry, which were unknown to him, what did Lehi think he was? What ethnicity did he identify with culturally and in practice?

The most obvious guess would be that Lehi thought of himself as a member of the tribe of Judah — as a “Jew,” to use a somewhat anachronistic term. During the 300 or so years separating the time of Lehi from the immigration of his Manassite ancestors into Jerusalem, it seems likely that the Northern immigrants would have become completely assimilated into Judah and lost their distinct tribal identities. Certainly Manasseh was already considered a “lost tribe” by the time of Lehi.

However, there are certain suggestions in the early chapters of the book (prior to the discovery of Lehi’s Manassite ancestry) that Lehi and his family did not self-identify as Jews. Lehi’s son Nephi, referring to his rebellious brothers Laman and Lemuel, says that they “were like unto the Jews who were at Jerusalem, who sought to take away the life of my father” (1 Nephi 2:13). And in the next chapter, as Lehi explains the plan to obtain the brass plates, he says, “Laban hath a record of the Jews and also a genealogy of my forefathers, and they are engraven upon plates of brass” (1 Nephi 3:3). There is more than one way to interpret such passages, but in my opinion the most natural reading is one which implies a distinction between Lehi’s family on the one hand and “the Jews” on the other.

Another possibility which suggests itself is that Lehi was of Egyptian extraction and that, while he lived in Jerusalem and worshiped the Hebrew God, he did not know that he himself had Hebrew blood. It seems probable that some of the Israelites might have “gone native” while in Egypt and have been left behind by the Exodus — and this would have been especially natural for descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh, who were half-Egyptian by blood and could thus have “passed” more readily among the indigenous population.

When Nephi reports the discovery of their genealogy on the brass plates, he never mentions which tribe they belong to, saying simply “it sufficeth me to say that we are descendants of Joseph” (1 Nephi 6:2). Manasseh is only mentioned much later, in passing, by one of Nephi’s distant descendants. But while he displays a rather un-Israelite lack of interest in tribal affiliation, Nephi does make a point of mentioning that his ancestor was “that Joseph who was the son of Jacob, who was sold into Egypt” (1 Nephi 5:14). This emphasis is more consistent with an Egyptian discovering his Hebrew roots than with an Israelite learning that he belonged to a different tribe than he had supposed.

We also know that Lehi spoke and wrote Egyptian as well as Hebrew. Nephi says that his father’s language “consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2). A thousand years after Lehi, his descendants were still using both Egyptian and Hebrew, though in modified form (Mormon 9:32-33). Laban seems also to have had the learning of the Jews via the language of the Egyptians; his brass plates, which included some texts also found in the Old Testament, were written in Egyptian characters (see Mosiah 1:3-4).

Against this Egyptian hypothesis, though, we have the following words of Nephi to his brothers, spoken before they had obtained the brass plates and discovered their Josephite ancestry: “Moses . . . spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither, and our fathers came through . . . the Lord is able to deliver us, even as our fathers, and to destroy Laban, even as the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 4:2-3). It’s hard to reconcile such language with the hypothesis that Nephi was himself an Egyptian.

To summarize the data to be explained:

• Prior to receiving the brass plates, Lehi apparently knew he was an Israelite but did not know to which tribe he belonged. In the Exodus story, the Hebrews, not the Egyptians, were his “fathers.”
• However, he seems not to have considered himself a “Jew.” (Laban’s servant also speaks of “the Jews” as if he were not one of them.)
• Although he did not know his own ancestry, he knew that his kinsman Laban knew. (Was their family history some kind of secret to which Laban was privy but Lehi was not? Why?)
• Even after learning that he was of the tribe of Manasseh, Lehi seems not to have been interested in this specific tribal identity so much as in his status as a descendant of Joseph.
• Egyptian was apparently the main language of both Lehi and Laban, although they also spoke Hebrew (see Mormon 9:33). The fact that Laban’s copy of the writings of Isaiah and other Hebrew prophets was an Egyptian translation is strong evidence that he was more comfortable with Egyptian than Hebrew.

My own best guess would be that Lehi was an Egyptian, but that there was an unsubstantiated family tradition that they were actually of Hebrew blood. (In this he would be similar to the many modern-day Mormons who believe, without direct genealogical evidence, that they are descendants of Ephraim.) What he read on the brass plates was not so much a revelation as a confirmation of what he had already suspected. Why this confirmation was a secret kept by Laban is anyone’s guess.