Sunday, July 22, 2018

Did Jaredites Survive Their Final Battle? – Part II

Continuing with the theorist view of Hugh Nibley, John L. Sorenson, John A. Tvedtnes and others, which holds that some Jaredites survived the final battle that destroyed their kingdom. However, we know differently because Ether tells us that “all the people upon the face of the land were shedding blood” (Ether 13:31), and “the people began to flock together in armies, throughout all the face of the land” (Ether 14:19), and “that they did gather together all the people upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save it was Ether” (Ether 15:12, emphasis added).
The Jaredites gathered everyone, save Ether, into their final war

Ether then goes on to tell us: “Wherefore, they were for the space of four years gathering together the people, that they might get all who were upon the face of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it was possible that they could receive. And it came to pass that when they were all gathered together, everyone to the army which he would, with their wives and their children -- both men women and children being armed with weapons of war, having shields, and breastplates, and head-plates, and being clothed after the manner of war—they did march forth one against another to battle” (Ether 15:14-15, emphasis added).
    Still, Nibley persists in his own beliefs, claiming that “every soul” did not mean “every soul.” He defends his stance by stating: “Did not Ether prophesy that 'every soul should be destroyed save it were only Coriantumr?' (Ether 13:21). Every soul of what?”
    One might answer that every soul of the Jaredites, but that thought seems lost on Nibley who wants to insist that the scriptural record does not mean what it says. He adds, “Ether himself, hiding out in a cave, was not included in the number, and neither were other inhabitants of the continent—Nephites, Lamanites, and Mulekites that were actually living here at the time of the Jaredite destruction.”
    Here again we see the assumptive nature of Nibley’s thinking. First of all, the record clearly states that Ether was not included in this “all the people” (Ether 15:12). Secondly, we have no knowledge that the Mulekites or Nephites and Lamanites had reached the Land of Promise prior to the final destruction of the Jaredites. But that is not all, for Nibley goes on to add abut other surviving Jaredites: “Neither were renegade Jaredites, wandering far and wide beyond the confines of the kingdom.” What renegade Jaredites wandering far and wide?
    Now, there is no mention anywhere in the scriptural record of renegade Jaredites wandering far and wide beyond the confines of the kingdom—that is pure speculation on Nibley’s part. Nibley goes on to add about what he believes would have been numerous Jaredite remnants.
    But Nibley is not alone in his speculative thinking. James Lee Warr, a Central America theorist, states of the Jaredites: “One of the problems facing Book of Mormon archaeology is the fact that the civilizations of the Maya, Aztec and other pre-Columbian cultures were at their zenith many years after the extermination of the Nephites. If we are focusing on the archaeological ruins of these civilizations, they don't seem to fit Book of Mormon history.” But that does not stop Warr, he decides to make these Jaredite remnants a new people, which he calls Neo-Jaredites (meaning new Jaredites), stating: “I contend that they were not related to the Nephite history, nor were they the work of true Lamanites.
“It is my opinion that the early Formative Period or Olmec Era ruins were built by the Jaredite peoples of the Book of Ether, but the later ruins (Maya, etc.) were built by Jaredite remnants and others, who followed the Jaredite tradition. I will call these people neo-Jaredites—being any of those heterogenous groups of people, following the terminal Jaredite wars (about 300 B.C.) who admired, conserved and followed the ancient Jaredite traditions.
    Warr also goes on to claim that these neo-Jaredites were actualy the Gadianton
Robbers, when he states: “These neo-Jaredites were involved in ceremonies that were of ancient date and had been passed down from the time of Cain. They included oaths, blood offerings, secret signs, execution of those who violated these oaths by beheading, gaining power and wealth through assassination, worshiping the god of the underworld, and swearing oaths by heaven and earth and by one’s own head (3 Nephi 12:33-36; Ether 8:13-14), and were likely sealed by blood. These were the groups termed “Robbers” in the Book of Mormon (Helsmsn 2:10; 6:20; 7:4; Mormon 8:9). They successfully recruited others by flattering them with vanities, encouraging them to become part of their "elite" group, bribing them with their ill-gotten gain, or appealing to their greed and lust for power. They felt that their works were “good; and...of ancient date and they had been handed down to them” from the ancients. (3 Nephi 3:9).”

    Now, in addition to these (and many others), we have John L. Sorenson, in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism (p192), suggesting that "it is plausible that several remote groups also could have survived to meld unnoticed by historians into the successor Mulekite and Lamanite populations." He also adds another purely speculative idea when he writes: “It is a safe presumption, however, that some groups existing at the time when the armies referred to in Ether 15 were destroyed simply refused to participate in the suicidal madness of Coriantumr and Shiz. They would have ensured their own survival by staying home and minding their meek business in this or that corner of the land. Such minor peoples might hardly even have noted the distant slaughter of the dynasts, so absorbed would they have been in their local affairs.”
    It seems odd to suggest that some Jaredites were so absorbed in their personal activities that they hardly would have noted the wars going on around them—after all, wars the size of those described by Ether have a wide-spreading and long-lasting effect on all people. While America, because of sheer distance, was not affected by Nazi Germany’s attack of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands, by the time they moved on France and Britain, this country was heavily involved and affected financially, and eventually brought into the war. At that time, though the continental U.S. was not directly involved in any fighting, the nation was heavily involved politically and through higher taxes, and everyone was involved in preparation, sacrifice, rationing, labor, price-controls, security, service and numerous other controls.
    The fact that the Jaredies spent four years getting “all who were upon the face of the land” (Ether 15:14) seems to have no meaning to these theorists. They have their own viewpoint and it simply does not matter what Ether, Moroni or any other writer of the Book of Mormon states, if it is contrary to their personal viewpoint, they either ignore it or try to discredit it.
This is easily seen in the word “all,” which in 1828 meant “every one, the whole number; the whole quantity, the whole or entire thing; wholly, completely, entirely, the whole number as “all the men.” There is simply no way the word “all” can be ignored or lessened from the meaning of the word Joseph Smith used to describe the Jaredites, as in “all the people in all the land.”
    Yet, Sorenson goes on to claim: “The likelihood is that more than a few such groups continued past the time of the 'final destruction' of the armies at the hill Ramah, and some could well have been living in the land southward as Nephi and Laman built up their small colonies.” 
    Another theorist, John A. Tvedtnes of the University of Utah and a senior resident scholar at the Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts at BYU, has stated on Jaredite remnants: "I have long believed that some Jaredites survived the last great battles of their civilization and that it was the civilization itself that was destroyed, not every single Jaredite.”
    It seems to these theorists that the actual wordage of the scriptural record is meaningless regarding this matter. He goes on to claim that the continued Jaredite existence is evidenced mostly by the existence of Jaredite names in the Nephite population, proposing that the proper names of the Jaredites as recorded in the Book of Mormon were drawn from the Akkadian and Sumerian languages, confirming the Mesopo­tamian origin of that earlier people. Robert F. Smith of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute has shown where some Book of Mormon names compare not only to Hebrew and Egyptian, but also Akkadian and Sumerian.
(See the next post, “Did Jaredites Survive Their Final Battle? – Part III,” to see what connection all these languages had with the Jaredites and Nephites)

16 comments:

  1. I have a friend who is a Jewish rabbi that believes the bible is mostly myth. He is a very liberal Jew. The thing is, where is the line between belief and denial? I see what these scholars at BYU are doing is actually a denial of the power of God. This is really quite disturbing when you think about it.

    The scriptures are clear when they tell us that every single Jaredite died except for Coriantumr. By telling me that he was not the last one to me is denial. Telling me that there was no change in the landscape at the time of Christ is denial. Telling me that the earth is old and you believe in Evolution instead of Creation by God is denial. Where is the line?

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    1. It seems more and more popular in apologetics to "apologize" rather than defend religious belief. By that, I mean that the faith-based scholarly and scientific communities would rather find ways for mutually exclusive ideas to coexist within our education and belief system, rather than argue in defense of a truth that contradicts the status quo. The fear of the great and spacious building is real. Many choose to abandon faith, or at least ignore contradictions, rather than look "stupid" or "uneducated" to the seemingly brilliant disciples of the philosophies of men.

      But the great and spacious building will fall.

      That may sound a bit dramatic, but I firmly believe that we're being told by our prophets to read the Book of Mormon more fervently these days because we've been content to look to the world for answers. We'd rather have somebody else tell us the meaning of things than look at it ourselves and experiment upon the word.

      Personally, I believe that Noah's flood and the Book of Mormon cataclysm at the time of Christ's death act as perfect examples of a scriptural belief litmus test. If you accept them as true events, then you've consequently denied uniformitarian science and philosophy. But the majority of believers would rather downplay those events or apologize for them by somehow fitting them into a uniformitarian world than erase the chalkboard and look for real answers. The same applies to these discussions of whether or not Jaredites were all destroyed. Some people would rather squeeze the story into a framework that fits their notion of the world than take the scriptures at their word.

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  2. Part of the problem stems from those involved in the sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology, and geology, where certain dogmas are learned and accepted by many, if not most, students in their growing years in college. Then they become professors and are forced to think along those lines since that is what all their schooling, training, degrees, and income are based upon.
    Naturally, when they write books or articles, they do so to those like themselves, that is, people who are also schooled in the academic approach to whatever field they are writing about, such as Anthropologists writing about the study of humans and human behavior and societies in the past and present—filling their articles with anthropological terms, and not common knowledge terms, such as “pre-ceramic period,” “classic period,” “post-classic,” “Mesolithic,” “Neolithic,” “Archaic,” “early intermediate,” “middle horizon,” “late intermediate,” “protohistory,” “postmodern,” etc.
    It seems they have been doing this for so long, that they have lost sight of other, more simple, yet more meaningful parts of the history of whoever they are writing about, whether found in Europe, Asia, Middle East, or the Americas.
    Somewhere along the way, they eliminate their reliance upon and their discussion of, those areas of human behavior and history regarding religion, or actual history, such as “evolution” opposed to “creationism,” or “Classical Antiquity,” as opposed to saying “the Greco-Roman world.”
    If you read John L. Sorenson’s works, especially his first, it is not difficult to see that his writing was to other anthropologists/archaeologists, and not to the membership of the church, or those inquiring about it or interested in it. It was, as most of these works are, an academic work and not truly an informative one.
    Thus, they use dates, time frames, historical data, etc., from historical works, rather than those of the scriptural record, either Bible or Book of Mormon. I think the denial you speak of is more to hiding or subordinating personal opinions of religion or religious-directed views to those of their field of science. Thus we have a 4.55 billion year old Earth, Carbon-14 dating, and academic terminology for all things that, in the end, almost eliminates all consideration of what the Lord has said, done, and taught on any subject whatsoever. This, in turn, blends history written by men with history written by prophets on an equal level, if not tilted toward the former.

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    1. Exactly. We have walked for so long down a road that has been paved, in many cases, by incorrect teachings and assumptions about our world, that it takes a huge paradigm shift to reverse and head back.

      Most of us are unaware that we're headed away from truth. After all, it's what we're taught in school as children and it's what we reinforce to each other as adults. Most of my life I took what I was told in school at face value, and if it didn't seem to mesh with my religious belief, I just wrote it off as a "mystery" while defaulting to the textbook answers.

      I've decided that from now on, if I understand something incorrectly, I would rather err on the side of faith in God. I'd rather say, "oops, I didn't understand that correctly" while confessing God's hand in His work, than say that I was content to go with whatever made me feel more accepted by mainstream academia.

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    2. Del, in more specific reply to your comment, in academia (particularly sciences) ideas, discoveries, and theories are subject to a powerful peer review process. That process is presented as a way to avoid error in method or logic, etc. But since all "peers" already adhere to a single line of thought, having risen through the same system, peer review becomes a way of silencing dissidents. That is why creationist views will not pass peer review and make it to scientific publication (just ask ICR). Peer review has an unfortunate side effect of maintaining dogma rather than welcoming discovery.

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    3. Very true Todd. So, I have to ask the obvious question. Why doesn't BYU do what the Christians have done and throw off the secular learning as imposed by their humanistic, secular brethren and do something like what ICR is doing? BYU and other school that teach secular learning actually is impeding progress in the area of science. The same is true of Evolution and old-earth uniformatarism. This is all taught at BYU. This is a Church school and one of the very reasons it was created was to teach truth instead of the dogma of the secularists. BYU isn’t doing that.

      This is true of BOM archaeology as well by accepting the Meso-American theory. BTW, I talked to a fellow about this and the very reason he accepts the Meso model is because there was no change to the geography as we suggest in the South American model. The reason BYU will never accept the South American model is because of their belief that there have been no catastrophic changes to the earth in a short period of time as described in the BOM in the South American model. I find it very unfortunate because so many members are being indoctrinated in the false ideas of this world and not the truth as contained in scripture.

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    4. iterry, I am never going to be very critical of BYU as an institution. I went there. I loved it. It is hard to find a university setting where you are required to study the scriptures, where every class begins with prayer no matter the subject, and where such wonderful devotionals are held regularly. But as Del said, they do dispense degrees, and to do that, they must meet educational criteria.

      ICR, on the other hand, is not a university and does not dispense degrees. They are a ministry-- a research and educational ministry, but not a school. The scientists who work for them all obtained degrees in other, accredited universities.

      It would be interesting to see a somewhat independent, faith-based organization of LDS members who research and study and share, much like the original F.A.R.M.S. did, back in the day. I don't believe they were officially working under the BYU umbrella for a lot of years, though professors used it to share their research in relationship to the Book of Mormon. At least that's how I understood it back in the day when I used to subscribe to their periodicals.

      Anyway, I think the best thing to learn in any university is how to learn. We don't need to take everything we're taught at face value, but should strive to go on investigating, studying, and learning, far beyond the years of our formal education.

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    5. I agree with that Todd. I think BYU does some very good things. But it does some extremely awful things too and this is one of them. My uncle tried to get a book published along the Wasatch Front on the subject of Evolution. He couldn't get a publisher such as Deseret Book to publish the thing because people weren't interested here. Now why is that? As I said, there are thousands of grads from BYU who have been indoctrinated in the secular beliefs. I'm not critical of them for the things they do right. I am critical of the things that are not correct.

      ICR does indeed have a teaching arm. You can receive a Master degree in Astro/Geophysics, Biology, Geology and Science Education. This is all done from a Creationist point of view. Online/youtube you can find a court case where a ICR grad was fired from his job as head of a California lab for finding soft Dinosaur tissue in fossils. This has caused a firestorm through the secular teaching community. He won the court case against the school who fired him.

      So please don't get me wrong Todd, I like BYU, but I think what they are doing in this area is completely wrong and not supported in anyway in the standard LDS scriptures.

      Del has done a wonderful job of pointing out the flaws in their thinking. As I mentioned, because of their bias they will never accept the South American model for the Book of Mormon. That's a tragedy because so many people will not learn the truth in not only the BOM geography but many other aspects such as the truth about the Creation of man and this earth.

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  3. Todd: Your comment is probably the biggest drawback any academician faces in being published and what he is "allowed" to publish. It is also the reason why I was mentioning that academicians write to other academicians, even if they are selling a book on an open market to the public.

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  4. iterry: What you say is very true. It might be of interest to know, however, that the reason I was given many years ago when questioning this very issue, particularly on the subject of evolution being taught at BYU, is that the university is accredited, which means it receives assurance, which is provided to all who attend, that the services and operations of post-secondary educational institutions or programs are evaluated by an external body to determine if applicable standards are met. If standards are met, accredited status is granted by the agency, and the attendee or the graduation of any accredited college course, is standard and one’s degree from BYU is the same on that subject as a degree from any other accredited university.
    No single University can either stray from those standards, or can set their own standards, and be accredited. That is why certain degrees from certain schools carry more weight in the market place than from others that, in some cases, are not accredited. BYU is a Church school, but its purpose, like the vast majority of post-secondary education institutions, is to provide acceptable education to a student that would allow him/her to compete fairly in the open market for the use of his talents, abilities, skills, and education levels. On that basis, the problem lies in the accreditation process and agency, not with the University.

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    1. Excellent points Del. Recently I read something online about this between FairMormon and someone asking this very question. The exchange took place back in 2008. FairM danced all over the place trying to make the point that the Church leaders approved the teaching of these false philosophies. The only answer is as you stated that the reason for it is so that they have acceptance of the world so that their students can get jobs. Problem is though they have poisoned the minds of thousands of students and indoctrinated them into accepting these false beliefs. Quite sad. Oh I found the article if you want to read it. https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Question:_Why_is_evolution_allowed_to_be_taught_at_BYU%3F

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  5. I guess the point is, that academic truth and spiritual truth are not the same in all cases, and especially in your illustration above. Thus, man is faced with either being self-taught (after school) and self-educated throughout life, growing in truth and light--what the Lord has promised each of us as we continued to grow and develop ourselves and our minds--or he slides into the academic truths of the world, and misses out on the important and interesting aspects of a life far beyond what academicians can visualize and, therefore, teach.

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  6. The Mormon understanding of Creation is significantly different than any other faith. In other faiths an immaterial, inconceivable, eternal "God" outside of time and spaces creates everything out of nothing with blank check powers. So young earth non-Mormons believe that is what happened at the creation of this earth 6000 or so years ago.

    But Mormonism has a vastly different understanding. In the Mormon faith the spirit and physical elements and intelligences are eternal. There is never a creation out of nothing.

    Moses 3:5 makes it clear that the creation account given before that point is the spiritual creation of our earth. There is very little of the physical creation given. But we do know that the matter on our earth has existed somewhere from all eternity in some state.

    The book of Moses also makes it clear that God has created and continues to create worlds like our earth without number. When we look out at the stars, unless our science is way off, the the other solar systems are vast distances away from us, and the light we see from those systems has been traveling for often millions of years before reaching us. The evidence is that creation is very large and very very old.

    Even though I fully accept this earth is a creation, and I wait for further revelation about its physical creation as promised in D&C 121 and other scriptures, I can see why a Mormon believer can believe Mormon scripture and still not reject the science of today.

    I would say Mormon believers are more susceptible to it than non-Mormon believers because of the doctrines of eternalism in Mormonism.

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  7. erichard, yes, I understand completely what you are saying. We are privy to a lot more scripturally revealed information about creation than most of the Christian world. Though I respect and admire ICR for their faith and scientific work, they do have some things fundamentally wrong about the creation of earth. We understand creation as a matter of organization rather than ex nihilo. And yes, the universe has been here a long time.

    However, when talking about the age of the Earth, it gets into rougher waters (pun intended). The creation of Earth is the story described in the scriptures-- the creation of our world and how it fits into that universe. We have the Pearl of Great Price that says great things like: "Now I, Abraham, saw that it was after the Lord’s time, which was after the time of Kolob; for as yet the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning."

    That line alone tells us that ICR is wrong in a 6-earth-day approach to creation as described in the Bible, because "days" were not being described according to Adam's reckoning, since his reckoning had not yet been established up to that point. It was on God's reckoning or timetable, and that was one that had been going a long time before Adam's.

    Where I do take issue and believe that much of the LDS faithful fall too easily into the mainstream is when it comes to our earth being hundreds of millions of years old, according to what uniformitarian geology proclaims. I mentioned that belief in uniformitarian geology and a belief in the flood, or in the Book of Mormon cataclysm, are mutually exclusive, because...well...they are. IF there was a flood that completely covered the earth as described in scripture, then that would have absolutely, without any doubt, changed the landscape in huge ways, and in a hurry. The flooding and subsequent drainage of such an event would carve out landscapes in very short order, and could deposit sediments in colossal degrees, and create fossilization in short order. If the flood happened, then everything upon which the uniformitarian dating of our earth through the geological column is based upon, would be a huge misinterpretation. I wouldn't say it is presented as a "lie" because that implies intentional deception. But it would certainly be a huge misinterpretation of the data.

    Likewise, if the Book of Mormon events happened as described, then mountains can rise to huge heights or can sink into valleys, and the landscape can completely change in a timetable of three hours. That breaks every rule of uniformitarian geology.

    Yet, people of faith are content to downplay those two huge examples of scripturally based catastrophism and accept that "both can be right."

    The usual response to difficult questions in that regard are much like my own used to be: "It doesn't matter how God did it, just that He did." And that is right in a way-- it does not matter in our quest for salvation. But I'm a curious person by nature, and I believe that if you want to know, the doors can and will be opened to you. I simply had stopped knocking for a long time, because I figured that particular door was nailed shut.

    There is science out there that is more catastrophist and much more simple and elegant than a lot of the convoluted scientific dogmas which need to keep coming up with new ways to make old, failed theories work.

    Anyway...I'm just saying that the more I learn, the more excited I am about learning again. And the more I see that faith and science do not need to be at war. If they disagree on any point, then it is one or the other that is wrong or misinterpreting the data. My faith is such that I do not doubt the scriptures. So...in most cases when there is disagreement, I go looking for the scientific explanation that fits, rather than accepting the dichotomy.

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