BYU-Hawaii Religion professor Aaron Schade showed Honors students in their October 18 colloquium how scholars relate ancient texts and inscriptions to scriptural connections.
"I study ancient texts and scriptures, specifically in Semitic languages," said Dr. Schade, who currently teaches Old Testament classes. More specifically, he said he studied northwest Semitic languages including Canaanite, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician and Moabite. "It's not only understanding what the languages say, but what they mean."
Dr. Schade explained that writing started with "a series of symbols that represented language. As language developed, we shifted from pictographic representations and eventually through time into a more linear script."
"When we actually see a text, we get to ‘hear' what people thought. But the big question is, how do we interpret that?" he said, pointing out that ancient texts often consisted of "line after line of characters, with no breaks. We had to figure out how sentences formed, and how they worked together." He added that text-level syntax "can help clarify different portions of a text, bring out different meanings, and assist in the interpretation."
Dr. Schade said scholars use "shifts between word order to help mark the beginning of sentences" in such cases, whereas a shift to another word order might suggest "this is the beginning of new paragraph. Within those paragraphs we can begin to look for literary structure," such as chiasm — a reciprocal pattern of paired parallel or opposing thoughts commonly used in ancient Semitic texts, including the scriptures.
He next used the example of how an inscription found on a Phoenician sarcophagus was used to correctly date it. "When it was first discovered, most people dated it to the twelfth century BC," because other artifacts found with it. "However, after looking at the Phoenician text, and based on paleographic considerations, it was dated to the 10th century. The conclusion was it was manufactured in the 12th century, and reused in the 10th."
Dr. Schade said a sarcophagus could also be symbolic of an "egg that would give you rebirth into a new existence. Now, when you look at that, we can tell they believed in the concept of an after-life."
Another example clarified a scholarly debate over whether one letter in the ancient source text of 2 Kings chapter 3 — which describes the Moabite king, Mesha, who sacrificed his son to his pagan god to prevent the Israelites from overrunning him — should cause the word to be interpreted as a form of the verb "to be" or "having to do with an offering."
Using epistrophe — where a sequence of events in ancient texts repeat themselves, almost in the same order — to further analyze the ancient text, Dr. Schade showed the letter in question "was unequivocally related to the word devote" because of the identical parallelism. He added that a "Ugaritic text actually shows you how to perform the ritual" King Mesha used in sacrificing his son.
Dr. Schade then discussed how some of these techniques apply to Genesis 1 verse 26. "There's been a lot of theological debate: What does it mean to be created in the image of God, the likeness of God? When you look back at the earliest depictions of God, and these two words used in the texts," he said, "they almost always refer...in context to the physical image and likeness" of a king.
"It's not until the Nicene Creed in the 4th century AD that we read of Jesus being "from the substance of the Father," Dr. Schade continued, pointing out that approximately two centuries earlier Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) wrote, "men are gods, and gods are men."
"It's not until later Jewish thought, from people like Maimonides, that it was wrong to believe in a god who had a body," he said. "In the ancient context, there was no way to confuse that these two words referred to [other than] a physical body."
Dr. Schade said his studies have also shown it was "feasible for the Nephites to write on metal plates. As early as the 9th century BC we begin to see texts written on metal plates." He also showed a picture of a stone box from the same period used to store texts.
When an Honors student asked him about the "reformed Egyptian" the Nephites used in their writing, Dr. Schade replied nobody knows what it was for sure, but it might have been "a semi-cursive form of Egyptian hieratic, because they could use several characters or letters in certain contexts."
"Why would they be using this Egyptian?" he asked in turn; and then he cited evidence to show there was a significant Egyptian population living in the Kingdom of Judah during Lehi's days. "It becomes very feasible for someone like Lehi and Nephi to write these languages. This is not a stretch of the imagination that Lehi and his family could do this."
"There are a lot of things you can find when you study ancient texts," Dr. Schade said. "Everything that I study has a context, historically. That's how I try to augment my studies of the scriptures. Obviously, religion is faith-based. However, by studying history and language, and how language conveys thoughts, we can gain a better understanding of what scriptures say."