Nephi’s Heritage
[Recurrent Scenarios]
[Egyptian Language Evolves]
[Nibley Summarizes Early History]
15 The Book of Mormon is an inexhaustible encyclopedia of knowledge, so it would take us forever to get through it. But there are certain things we must notice at the beginning to get off on the right foot. These are things that concern us. We think today, as never before, in terms of world politics. The opening of the Book of Mormon concerns our people (I mean that literally, biologically), and it concerns also our world, the world we live in. So this is going to take a historical resume of some sort.
15 1 Nephi 1:1 It starts out by saying, “I, Nephi.” You notice it is an autobiography, “I, Nephi.” Now, at this time the only style of writing was autobiographical. Everybody wrote autobiographies, and there’s a great autobiographical literature in Egyptian. There are some famous autobiographies, and we will refer to some because they are so very close to the Book of Mormon. They take place in Palestine, even at this time. Well, “ And Nephi started out saying, “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents.” Then Kai goes on to talk about himself here. Incidentally, I notice he referred to himself down here as HD-HR (white of countenance), NFR BL T (excellent of character), PHS H T (clean of body and in moral habits). And he shunned everything that was SNK-WT The word is very interesting. It means “black of countenance,” and it also means “greed or anything that is evil.” Notice, in the Book of Mormon, that peculiar thing: “a white and delightsome people” and “a dark and loathsome people.” It doesn’t refer to skin color at all, but there’s a lot about race in the Book of Mormon. That comes in here already; we can see that. But here, you notice he used those peculiar terms. He was HD-HR. He has a picture of a white face (white of countenance). And he was clean of body, and he eschewed snk-wt (what is greedy or what is dark of countenance).
16,17 1 Nephi 1:1-3 We have hundreds of these autobiographies, but also literary biographies. The You’ll notice the very strong Egyptian note here in the Book of Mormon. Nephi’s writing in the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians. That is referred to again and again. So this background of the autobiography is a very interesting thing. We have a lot of this in the Book of Mormon too. And Nephi is talking about his goodly parents. Notice, what do goodly parents do? They teach you: “Therefore I was taught [this is a very interesting thing; the greatest favor he could have was great knowledge of the mysteries of God] somewhat in all the learning of my father.” That means the standard education—the going culture of the time. Verses two, three, four, five, six, etc. will do the same thing. Notice, they always mentioned having suffered many afflictions. Well, the purpose of writing a story (whether it’s A Thousand and One Nights, or anything else) is to tell what the hero has to go through. That’s the way the Book of Mormon starts out [being led to the Promised Land]. This leads us to a very interesting phenomenon that we find in the Book of Mormon and everywhere else. That is what I call the recurrent scenario. The same things are happening all the time, and you will find them happening all the time in the Book of Mormon. This is a very good check, a very good control on things (the recurrent scenario) because things do recur at various levels. Well, we have plenty of chance to recur to that theme.
17 1 Nephi 1; Moses 1:41 Let’s go back here: “Nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord.” Notice, in spite of all their sufferings, they were highly favored, and they end up usually happily (they get their promised land). “Having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore . ..” This is an extremely interesting use of the word “mysteries” here. What were the mysteries? These were the mysteries of God. Well, at this time (around 600 B.C.; tomorrow we will refer more to the cultural history of it) this word “mystery” spread everywhere. Of course, this is the Greek word “mysterion.” It means “a thing that you don’t talk about.” A mystery is a thing you cannot find out or learn about by your own resources. Since it’s a thing you can’t possibly find out for yourself, it must have been revealed—either as a primordial revelation in the beginning and handed down, or it has been revealed to you or somebody else. And when you hear about it, you are always warned, “Don’t talk about these things.” This is a typical mystery when Moses talks with God face to face in the final words of Moses (Moses 1:41). “And in a day when the children of men shall esteem my words as naught... they shall be had again among the children of men—among as many as shall believe” (meanwhile, you keep this very secret). The mysteries are always handed down secretly.
17,18 1Nephi 1:1,2 At this particular time everywhere in the world there were cults and sects springing up and spreading, all connected with each other in a very interesting way. These were the mysteries. Everybody wanted to get in on them, but you had to be initiated to get in on them. Well, he is talking about the mysteries of God in their proper sense here. The mysteries of godliness are what we learn in the temple and in the gospel. He said, “I make a record of my proceedings of my days.” So Nephi said an interesting thing here, “Yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days [of what I’ve been through].” Having been through the mysteries of God, I’m under obligation to preserve that knowledge.
18 1 Nephi 1:2 Then he says, “in the language of my father.” He uses language throughout. It’s used very often in the Book of Mormon in these earlier books, especially by Nephi, as meaning the manner of speech and the message delivered. This was his language; it means this was the message he delivered. The other meaning of language is, of course, tongue or speech. It’s very interesting that the Egyptian word for it is just a picture of a mouth, and it’s as broad as you can possibly imagine. It means language, it means speech, it means utterance. It can mean a chapter. No two people translate it alike when it appears in the Book of the Dead. Does it mean a spell? Does it mean a chapter? Does it mean a recitation? Speak the following words? All it is is a picture of a mouth with a stroke under it. But you can’t get away from this very odd thing, “the language of the Egyptians,” because the book recurs to it on a number of occasions. What would they be doing with the language of the Egyptians? This is the subject of our theme now. Incidentally, at that very time (the generation that Lehi was living) was the time that Reformed Egyptian (Demotic) became the official government language. In the twenty-sixth dynasty, the time of Semiticus II and of Lehi, it became the official way of writing. It was this new reformed type of Egyptian known as Demotic. And at the very same time, the priests who used to be in the former royal court at Napata fled farther to Meroe. There they produced a new type of Egyptian at this time which was Meroitic (I’ve got a picture of it here). When you compare the Anthon transcripts with Meroitic, it’s very impressive. In fact, Brother Bushman back at Brown University (which is one of the four universities in the country where Egyptian has always been a big thing), showed them the Anthon transcript, and Parker immediately recognized them as Meroitic. He said, “They’re the closest thing you can get to Meroitic.” Here are the Anthon transcripts, and here’s Meroitic. (You can’t see them; they’re too small; I guess we should have slides, or something like that.) This is the new Egyptian which was invented way up the Nile, way up in Meroe, which is even south of Napata. That’s the Nubian kingdom. It’s very interesting that so many Book of Mormon names come from way up there. In a minute maybe we will see why that is.
19 But the point is that Palestine was Egyptian at that time. It always had been; it always would be. Of course, Egyptian is a Semitic language with much the same words, the same counting, that you have in Hebrew.
20,21 We’ve got to get some Jews in the picture. Remember, Abraham came to Egypt, and this is Abraham’s Pharaoh. (Nearly all people say he is, but I would argue about it. Argue about everything; that’s the name of the game.) But Abraham came. Then he had Isaac, and Isaac stayed in Egypt a while. His sons went down to Egypt. Because Jacob’s son, Joseph, went to Egypt, he went to Egypt. Whom did Joseph marry? (I suppose we should ask questions and all that sort of thing.) He married Asenath, and this takes us right into the Book of Mormon. Asenath had two sons, you know. One of them was Manasseh, and the Book of Mormon tells us that Lehi was a direct descendant of Manasseh. The other was Ephraim of whom we claim to be descendants. They were the sons of this Asenath who was the daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis. Jacob set up columns like that when he was in Palestine. But Jacob came down, as I said, and his son Joseph became the vizier of Egypt, the second most important man to Pharaoh. Joseph married Asenath, who was the daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis and a direct descendant of Ham. And we are descendants of Ephraim, while Lehi’s people are descendants of Manasseh. So we are getting into the picture right at the beginning here. It’s very important how these things all tie up together.
22 All the cities had names similar to their names today. Beirut was called Bayrut (it hasn’t changed much). And there were the same riots in the streets that there are today. The picture does not change; this is the point. As Heraclitus (the greatest of the really early Greek philosophers) says, “A man’s character is his fate.” You determine what happens to you. It’s your character that will decide that. It’s the same thing: Whether people have riots or not is built into them. It’s built into their characters and their culture. And it is a two-way sort of thing. The culture will reinforce the character, and the character will reinforce the culture. If you once start fighting, it mounts exponentially and you end up being wiped out.
22,23 The next wave of this, less than a century later, are the famous peoples of the sea, or the sea people. They were western Mediterraneans, and they came from as far away as France, Central Europe, etc. We have a very interesting writing on that (a Central European thing) recently. But these are called “the people of the sea.” They came in around 1200 B.C., and they destroyed the whole world here. This is what happened. There was a great Hittite empire. Remember, Abraham was concerned that his sons not marry Hittite daughters, but they married them anyway. What did the Hittites speak? They spoke a language like Welsh, very close to our own language. The Minoans over here and the Greeks on the mainland, the Mycenaeans, were speaking something that you would almost recognize as English. At the same time here, the Medes and Persians way up here were still savage tribes (they haven’t become dangerous yet, but they would soon enough). They had a language closest of all to English. Anyway, the sea people came in, and they went by the name of Shardanu, which were the people from Sardinia; Siculi (the Sicels) the people from Sicilia; the Tyrrhenians which are related to the Etruscans of Italy. We have their blood in our veins, every one of us. They were a great mix of people. They weren’t really sea people, but they were described as coming along the coast both ways (a squeeze play) carrying their wagons, their children, and all their possessions on these big lumbering ox carts, while the ships accompanied them by sea. Later in the eleventh and tenth centuries the Vikings did the same thing in the North. They advanced the same way. The Vikings advanced more by land than by sea actually, though they were the great sea rovers, as we know. These sea people moved in, and they destroyed the Hittite Empire. It disappeared all of a sudden. It was a great rival of Egypt up until then. Egypt was driven out and didn’t have anything to do here. This broke up into a lot of little kingdoms (you can see this already happening). This was the sea people in 1200 B.C. Everything changed when they came in, and the story really begins there as far as Lehi is concerned.
26,27 Now it was time for the big powers to get in with everything weakened here. The Egyptian Empire and the Hittite Empire were out. They had been great, mighty and huge. By 1200 B.C. they were finished (the fall of Troy is supposed to be 1174). The Egyptians were out, so it was a chance for the ambitious Orientals to move in on the scene. That, of course, was the Assyrians. They were uncompromising, cruel absolutists. They had certain virtues, great artistic gifts, etc., but they believed in absolute monarchy with a vengeance. They were notoriously cruel in advancing. So the Assyrians moved in, and in 722 B.C. they took Jerusalem (they had taken Israel already). That was Sargon of Nineveh, capital of Assyria, who came in there. Now he had taken all Israel, all Palestine, who could save Egypt from Sargon. It was Taharka who moved up there. Taharka was a black and a great ruler. He moved up with an army from Nubia, and he reoccupied Thebes and Memphis. Memphis was the nearest to Heliopolis. Memphis was the ancient capital, and Heliopolis the sacred capital. Thebes had been the political capital most of the time. Taharka moved up and took everything over again. He was in Thebes in 790 B.C.
27 This takes us up to Lehi now. In the west delta here at Sais (this is Tanis where the desert kings were) was a prince called Necho. He ruled, and he was going to make himself very strong. The best way for him to make himself strong would be to join up with the Assyrians, which he did. Now you have Necho on the Assyrian side. When the Assyrians were smashed, he would change sides.
27 From this time all the Egyptian armies were Greek. Palestine, including Jerusalem, was swarming with Greeks. You’ll find Greek names in the Book of Mormon (you should) because they were popular at this time. The Jews were always willing to adopt foreign names.
28 Now we have the situation that’s set up in the Book of Mormon for the big squeeze-play. Is it going to be Asia? Is it going to be Egypt? Is it going to be the East, the Babylonian Empire, or is it going to be Egyptian? Lehi’s family were split down the center as to which side to follow. You can see the situation here, all these shifting loyalties, etc. Overnight, a battle can change the whole picture, and you can be in grave jeopardy where you were on top of the world the day before. So there was this great tension. It’s typical of the Middle East as it has always been. I forgot to mention the geographical significance of the Middle East as the cockpit of the world, but we can mention that in passing the next time.