As shown in the last post, Joseph knew exactly what corn, wheat and barley were, and if a word to translate was one of these, he would have translated it as corn, wheat, or barley. It did not matter whether the word was originally Akkadian, Hebrew, or Egyptian—when Joseph saw the word, it was written in Reformed Egyptian and he translated that into English with the help of the Spirit, who acknowledged the accuracy of the word. In the case of “sheum” and “neas,” Joseph obviously could not obtain a picture of the grain in his mind—and just as obviously, it would have been outside his realm of knowledge (not the word, but the meaning).
Gwenith, tritiko, weess, frumento, pšenice, nisu, gandum, terigu, trigo, weit, tarwe, hvete, bugday, nu, frumento, grano, grau, s blat, pszenica, froment, pšenični, žito, weizen and numerous other languages all show different words meaning the same thing—wheat. It does not matter what language a word is in, all that matters is how it translates into English. If “yatraq” means wheat in its original language, we do not translate it into English as “barley” or “corn” or “automobile.” And certainly, Joseph Smith, working under the direction of the Spirit, would not have mistranslated a word into something other than its English equivalent—and where he did not understand the word in English, he used the original word appearing on the record, as in “sheum,” “neas,” “ziff,” “curelom,” and “cummom.”
While Sorenson claims that “sheum” in original Akkadian, meant barley (Old Assyrian wheat), taken from the word “s(he)e’um,”, scholars have recently brought such lexicon description into question. Livingstone, as an example, has shown that u’um was a Babylonian word for barley, and that “If this [u'um] was the common word in Babylonian then it is more than likely that it also existed in Old Akkadian and could then have existed along with se, 'barley', as a loanword in Sumerian. ... In summary, the evidence allows but does not require the existence of a word se'um, 'barley'. It does, however, manifestly require the existence of a word u'um.”First of all, “Old Assyrian Wheat” existed alongside “Old Barley” in the Assyrian Empire. In fact, Aprin, Brothwell and Contenaur all write about food and everyday life in ancient Babylon and Assyria, and conclude: “barley and wheat are the cereals that occur most persistently in Mesopotamian archaeological sites.”
It is doubtful, as Sorenson claims, that a word for “barley” in one language became the same word for “wheat” from another language. Especially when these two crops were well known to both languages and civilizations. In fact in Jarmo, an archeological site located in northern Iraq on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains that was, for a long time known as the oldest agricultural community in the world, dating back to 7000 BC., and, according to the American Anthropologist, the use of barley and emmer wheat were well known along with lentils and peas.
The problem is, when we start playing around with ancient words in distant languages to try and prove something used in English today, we often run afoul of fact (and fiction). First of all, we do not know that barley and wheat were the same thing in ancient Akkadian, in ancient Mesopotamia, or in modern terms. Nor does it matter. The word “sheum” was not barley or wheat, for it is used in the scriptural record along with barley and wheat. “And we began to till the ground, yea, even with all manner of seeds, with seeds of corn, and of wheat, and of barley, and with neas, and with sheum, and with seeds of all manner of fruits” (Mosiah 9:9). What Sorenson claims, is that this sentence should be rendered “with seeds of corn, and of wheat, and of BARLEY, and with neas, and with BARLEY, and with seeds of all manner of fruits.” Obviously, such an idea is ludicrous.
(See the next post, “Sheum in Ancient Times, Part III,” for more on the meaning and product the Nephites called sheum and where it is found today and what grain we know it to be today)
No comments:
Post a Comment