Implausibilities and Anachronisms

Critics of the Book of Mormon have traditionally sought elements in the text that would prove it to be a product of the nineteenth century. They have hoped, for example, to find anachronisms, items wrongly inserted into a purportedly ancient story by an ignorant or careless modern author. They have looked for implausible stories that would indicate that the Book of Mormon cannot really be reporting eyewitness accounts of real events.

A Man Named Alma?

The presence of the name Alma in the Book of Mormon, attached to an important prophet and his equally important son, has occasioned considerable merriment among certain critics of the book. Alma, they gleefully point out, is a woman’s name, and is not of Hebrew, but of Latin origin. Many people are likely to be familiar with it in the phrase alma mater, which means something like “foster mother” or “bounteous mother” and refers to a benevolent or protective institution (most often, nowadays, a college or university). However, during the archaeological season of 1960-61, while he was excavating in the Judean caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea near En-Gedi, the eminent Israeli scholar Yigael Yadin found an interesting document from the early second century A.D. that not only destroys the objection of the critics, but furnishes striking support for the Book of Mormon. During the second Jewish revolt against Rome, the leader of that revolt, Shimeon Bar-Kokhba (or Bar-Kosiba), had nationalized some of the real estate around the northwestern shores of the Dead Sea. Professor Yadin discovered a land deed bearing the names of four people who had leased nationalized property under Bar-Kokhba and wanted to set down with more precision the perimeters of each of their holdings. One of those four was “Alma, son of Yehudah.” What this find means is that, although Joseph Smith, if he had known the word Alma at all, would have known it as a Latinate woman’s name, recently unearthed evidence that he could never have encountered demonstrates Alma to be an authentically ancient Semitic masculine personal name, just as the Book of Mormon presents it.

Was There (Chuckle French of the Plates?

Another popular claim among critics of the Book of Mormon has alleged that the occurrence of the world adieu at Jacob 7:27 is anachronistic, that it does not belong in the period where Joseph Smith seems to place it. French didn’t exist in the sixth century B.C., they point out, So why does French show up in the Book of Mormon? But, of course, what this argument fails to notice is that the Book of Mormon, as we have it today, purports to be a translation. Therefore, it stands to reason that the language into which the Book of Mormon has been rendered is not that form which, according to its own claims, it was translated. The language of the Book of Mormon is, necessarily, the language of its translator, Joseph smith. There is nothing mysterious about this. The presence of adieu in the modern English Book of Mormon no more implies the existence of French on the plates than the occurrence of the words in the beginning indicates the existence of English in the original Hebrew text of Genesis 1. And it is doubtful, by the way that the extremely unsophisticated Joseph Smith of 1829-30 was even aware that adieu was French. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has been a common one in English since at least 1374. It is included in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford American Dictionary, as well as, most importantly, Noah Websters’ 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. It was simply a word that Joseph knew; he could just as easily and justifiably have been used ciao, auf Wiedersehen, or sayonara if those words had formed part of the functioning vocabulary he shared with his audience.

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Archaeology and History

Critics frequently charge that there is no archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon. Many critics point to a supposed contrast between the Book of Mormon and the Bible, claiming that, while the former has been devastated by archaeological research, the latter has been vindicated or even proven by recent scholarly work. Such assertions are typically made in virtual or entire ignorance of recent work on the archaeology and geography of the Book of Mormon. Yet the seminal studies done by John L. Sorenson and others have established a highly plausible ancient American setting for the Book of Mormon, and the research of Warren and Michaela Aston appears to have identified believable Lehite locations on the Arabian peninsula. Furthermore, conservative protestant critics of the Book of Mormon have invariably tended both to exaggerate its archaeological weakness and to overstate, often grossly, the extent to which archaeological research supports the biblical narrative.

Warfare

Military history is one area where recent research has clearly tended to support the Book of Mormon. Yet this was not always the case. For many years, scholars argued that, essentially, no warfare existed in Mesoamerica, that no fortifications and certainly no armor existed as described in the Book of Mormon. The Maya, announces one Book of Mormon critic, “were on the whole a peaceful people. Their ceremonial centres had no fortifications, and were for the most part located in places incapable of defense.” Accordingly, he says, the Book of Mormon simply does not fit ancient America. But this rosy picture of an idyllic ancient Mesoamerica can no longer be seriously maintained. Still, some critics seem unaware of the overwhelming evidence now available for “the state of war that existed constantly among many Maya cities. The modern myth that the Maya were a peace-loving, gentle people who only tended their milpas and followed the stars has fallen with a thunderous crash.” As the Yale Mayanist Michael D. Coe puts it, “The Maya were obsessed with war. The Annals of the Cakchiquels and the Popul Vuh speak of little but intertribal conflict among the highlanders, while the sixteen states of Yucatán were constantly battling with each other over boundaries and lineage honour. To this sanguinary record we must add the testimony of the Classic monuments and their inscriptions. Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller’s important book The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and ritual in Maya art shows beyond dispute that the Maya must be ranked among the most bloodthirsty people in world history.

Plants and Animals

The Book of Mormon has likewise been criticized on the grounds that its portrayal of the flora and fauna, the plants and animals, of the New World, is inaccurate. As one vocal critic exclaims, “barley never grew in the New world before the white man brought it here!” (The existence of pre-Columbian American barley, incidentally, was revealed by archaeologist in 1983). Another, in a memorable formulation, points to the Book of Mormon’s “botanically unverifiable animals.” However, such critics appear to have been left behind by current research, as surveyed, or instance, in John L. Sorenson’s work on animals and the Book of Mormon. Professor Sorenson demonstrates that naming conventions for animals and plants are far more varied from culture to culture—and are far more complex—than Book of Mormon skeptics assume, and that simplistic readings of the Nephite records are, thus, deeply misleading. He even shows that the horse and the elephant may well have survived into historic times in the Americas, contrary to common opinion. Though questions and problems remain, as they do in connection with every subject in antiquity, believers in the Book of Mormon have solid reasons for regarding the book as biologically reasonable.

Metals

Similarly, critics of the Book of Mormon have alleged that the metals it mentions have not been found in Mesoamerica, and presumably did not exist there in pre-Columbian times. But their criticisms typically manifest an oversimple reading of both the Book of Mormon and ancient America, as well as a too-simple (“common sense”) way of looking at the anthropology and onomasticon of historical metallurgy. Fortunately, the important studies of John L. Sorenson have again greatly deepened our understanding of the issues, demonstrating in the process that there is plenty of room in Mesoamerica for the claims of Book of Mormon. Metal use among pre-Columbian Americans appears to be much earlier than conventional wisdom has believed. What is more, the “golden plates” from which Joseph Smith declared he had translated the Book of Mormon can be persuasively argued to represent an authentically ancient American alloy known as tumbaga.

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Nephite Money

On a more tangible topic, many critics of the Book of Mormon have decided that the book describes “a complex system of coinage” among the Nephites, and these critics have derided it because no such coins have been found by archaeologists. It is quite true that there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of Book of Mormon coins—not even in the Book of Mormon itself. The text of the Book of Mormon never mentions the word coin, nor any variant of it. The reference to “Nephite coinage” in the chapter heading to Alma 11 is not part of the original text and is almost certainly mistaken. (It represents the same unexamined modern assumption—that money equals coins or currency or both—that misleads the critics.) Alma 11 probably refers to standardized weights of metal—a historical step toward coinage, but not yet the real thing. So Latter-day Saint scholars would be surprised as anybody if we were someday to find a cache of “Book of Mormon coins.”

But the instance of “coinage” brings up a very important point. Time after time, critics of the Book of Mormon have punished the Book of Mormon on the basis of straw men of their own invention. They have imposed upon it claims it does not itself make and have then professed to have disproved it because it fails to deliver things it never pretended to deliver. However, it is not only critics of the Book of Mormon who have frequently misread the Nephite record; believers too have often carelessly construed its statements on geography and other issues, thereby setting themselves up for attacks from anti-Mormons. We must be perpetually vigilant against entrapping ourselves within pseudoproblems of their own devising.