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The Unknown Abraham

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The Unknown Abraham 6 The Unknown Abraham Neglected Evidence Until now, all discussions of the authenticity of the Book of Abraham have been based on the assumption that we have to deal with only two really important sources of infor- mation: the Book of Abraham and the papyri.1 Everyone, it would seem, has taken for granted that if we know what the papyri really say, we are in a position to pass judgment on the authenticity of the Book of Abraham—a proposition dili- gently cultivated by some who have assumed that a knowl- edge of Egyptian qualifies one to pass judgment on matters that lie completely outside the field. Such a case might stand up if Joseph Smith had specifically designated particular papyri as the source of his information, but he never did so. Professor Klaus Baer begins and ends his exceedingly valu- able study with the assertion that Joseph Smith thought he was actually translating the so-called “Breathing Permit.” 2 Such testimony would not hold up for three minutes in any “Part 7: The Unknown Abraham” originally appeared in the series “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” in IE 72 (January 1969): 26–33; (February 1969): 64– 67; (March 1969): 76, 79–80, 82, 84; (April 1969): 66–72; May 1969): 87–89. 1. See above, in this volume, CWHN 18:49–68. 2. Klaus Baer, “The Breathing Permit of Hôr,” Dialogue 3/3 (1968): 111, 133. 375 376 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM court of law. The only evidence for what the Prophet thought is the arrangement side by side of very brief Egyptian sym- bols and some lengthy sections of the Book of Abraham, which has led some to the hasty conclusion that the one col- umn is a would-be translation of the other. But the strange juxtaposition of the two texts is itself the best refutation of the argument that it is supposed to present: everyone we know who has ever looked at the two columns (and that includes many a puzzled student long before anybody knew what the Egyptian characters really meant) has been satis- fied that the one could not by any effort of the imagination be a translation of the other. But what Mormon ever said it was? The opposition simply assumed it in the face of the clearest evidence to the contrary; and on their own assump- tion, to which a knowledge of Egyptian has no relevance whatever, they have declared the Book of Abraham a fraud. Fortunately we have much broader and firmer grounds for testing the Book of Abraham than parapsychological reconstructions of schemes and devices 140 years old. Those grounds are furnished by a wealth of apocryphal sources, mostly Jewish, and an impressive mass of Egyptian and classical references and archaeological material to back them up. The nature of these sources will become evident in the course of discussion, but it will be well to point out some significant aspects of their study at the outset. 1. It is now fairly certain not only that the Bible account of Abraham’s life is very sketchy indeed but also that there existed anciently much fuller written records of his activ- ity. As Father Roland de Vaux noted in an important study, “We could never write a historical biography of Abraham . nor even write a real history of the patriarchal period” on the evidence supplied by the Bible alone.3 “There is, strictly speaking,” wrote Frederick J. Foakes-Jackson years ago, “no material for a connected biography of Abraham, the 3. Roland de Vaux, “Les patriarches Hébreux et l’histoire,” Revue biblique 72 (1965): 27–28. THE UNKNOWN ABRAHAM 377 records being taken from a variety of sources.” 4 It is those lost sources that make up the records to which we referred above: Theodor Böhl observed that there is obviously a vast body of source material behind the history of Abraham, but that it is nearly all lost.5 The discovery of the so-called Gene- sis Apocryphon among the Dead Sea Scrolls not only con- firms the existence of a very ancient nonbiblical history of Abraham, but also gives us a peep into its contents, which present really surprising parallels to the Book of Abra- ham.6 The world is now willing to accept a proposition that it denounced as blasphemous in Joseph Smith’s day: “We must not lose sight of the fact,” wrote Geo Widengren, “that the Old Testament, as it is handed down to us in the Jewish Canon, is only part—we do not even know if the greater part—of Israel’s national literature.” 7 2. Both the biblical and apocryphal stories of Abraham contain at least kernels of historical truth. The character 4. Frederick J. Foakes-Jackson, The Biblical History of the Hebrews (Cambridge: Heffer and Sons, 1917) , 22. 5. F. M. Theodor de Liagre Böhl, “Babel und Bibel (II) ,” JEOL 17 (1963): 126. 6. Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin, eds., A Genesis Apocryphon (Je- rusalem: Hebrew University, 1956) , 23: “The scroll explains the story of Sarai and the King of Egypt in a manner different from that of all the midrashim on the subject. This interesting legend which is not found in Midrashic or Apocryphal literature and of which there is no other ver- sion known to us, should be studied very thoroughly.” Coming from the same Essene and Ebionite environment as the Dead Sea Scrolls are the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Testament of Abraham; also first appearing in this century are the Cave of Treasures and the writings on Abraham by Ka’b el-Ahbar. First published in 1956 in Adolph Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 6 vols. in 2 (1853–77; reprint, Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1967) , are the 0DþDVH Abraham Abinu, an important midrash on Abraham our Father (1: 25–34; 2: 118–19) , and a History of Abraham from the Pentateuch commentary of Bekhayi ben Ashi. 7. Geo Widengren, “Early Hebrew Myths and Their Interpretation,” in Myth, Ritual and Kingship: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Kingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, ed. Samuel H. Hooke (Oxford: Clar- endon University Press, 1958) , 158. 378 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM of Abraham is so vivid and clear-cut in both traditions, according to Otto Eissfeldt, that he must have been a his- torical personage.8 While “the nineteenth century excluded the possibility that the man Abram or Abraham could have been a real historical person,” wrote Martin Buber, today “everyone sees . a living person,” whose true history, how- ever, “science, lacking other evidence, will only be able to surmise.” 9 Gerhard von Rad describes this peculiar state of things, which leaves us in the position of the medieval schoolmen, who were completely certain that God is, but completely uncertain as to what he is: so it is with Abraham today—in spite of the unprecedented progress of modern archaeology, there is still complete disagreement as to the historical reality underlying the patriarchal narratives.10 Yet there is no more any doubt that there was and is a historical reality. In a study of “the legend of Abraham,” Marcel Mauss concluded that “a number of scholars are beginning to rec- ognize historical foundations to important parts of the tra- dition.” 11 Today there are at last enough documents in the apocryphal area to be checked against each other so that the resemblances and differences among them really add up to something. Even apparent contradictions are now construc- tive, as William F. Albright has pointed out: “reconstructing history is quite impossible unless we have different views of just what happened at given times and different reactions of contemporaries or successors. Minor discrepancies do 8. Otto Eissfeldt, “Achronische, anachronische und synchronische Elemente in der Genesis,” JEOL 17 (1963): 160. 9. Martin Buber, “Abraham the Seer,” Judaism 5 (1956): 291–92. By the time of World War I, “practically all scholars of standing in Europe and America considered these stories fictitious.” Siegfried H. Horn, “Recent Illumination of the Old Testament,” Christianity Today 12/19 (1968): 925. 10. Gerhard von Rad, “History and the Patriarchs,” Expository Times 72 (1961): 213–16. 11. Marcel Mauss, “Critique interne de la ‘Legende d’Abraham,’ ” REJ 82 (1926): 35. THE UNKNOWN ABRAHAM 379 not invalidate historicity; they are necessary concomitants of any true history of man.” 12 3. Taken as a whole, the apocryphal accounts of Abraham —whether in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, Old Slavonic, etc., and whether recorded in manuscripts of early or later date—agree in telling essentially the same story. This story is not found in the Bible, but is found in the Book of Abraham— which means that our next point is very important. 4. Joseph Smith knew nothing about these extracanoni- cal sources for the life of Abraham. They were not accessible to him: E. A. Wallis Budge made the significant remark that “the letter press [in the Book of Abraham] is as idiotic as the pictures, and is clearly based on the Bible and some of the Old Testament Apocryphal histories.” 13 But what could Joseph Smith have known about Old Testament apocryphal histories? Budge was possibly the greatest authority on apoc- rypha of his day, but that was because he spent his days, mostly in the British Museum, among original manuscripts to which nobody else had access. There were indeed a num- ber of important apocrypha published in Budge’s day—but in the 1830s? 14 Who has access to the apocryphal Abraham materials even today? The first important collection of them was Adolph Jellinek’s Bet ha-Midrasch, first published in 1856, and so rare that we had never seen a copy of it until its reprinting in Israel in 1967.
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