The Origin of the Book of Abraham
The Book of Abraham is Mormon scripture translated by Joseph Smith from Egyptian papyri acquired in Kirtland in 1835. When it was first published in 1842, it contained the following explanation, which is still present in slightly modified form in the current edition of the Pearl of Great Price:
A translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands, from the Catacombs of Egypt, purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus.
When Joseph had translated the Book of Mormon from “Reformed Egyptian” a few years previously, Egyptian was a tantalizingly exotic language. It had thousands of years of history and connections to the Old Testament narrative, but it remained completely untranslatable. This was still the case for Joseph in frontier America in 1835. It would remain a mystery until Champollion’s notes on his translations based on the Rosetta Stone were published, in French, after his death. By the time American Egyptologists were competent to check Joseph’s work, the papyri were believed to have been lost in the Chicago fire of 1871.
Thus, for years, Joseph’s claim to have translated the Book of Abraham by the power of God was as unverifiable as his claim to have translated the Book of Mormon itself, whose source text on gold plates was said to have been reclaimed by its guardian angel, Moroni.
The papyrus is shown not to match Joseph’s translation
But in 1967, the Kirtland papyri resurfaced, and the papyrus corresponding to the Book of Abraham was shown to be a funeral text called the Book of Breathing, or to use the name of its owner as its first translator did, the Breathing Permit of Hor. Subsequent studies have enhanced this translation and reinforced the conclusion that it bears no relation to the text of the Book of Abraham.
By 1988, these findings were beginning to come to the awareness of Church members, and BYU professor Michael Rhodes wrote a defense of the Book of Abraham for the Ensign:
One explanation is that it may have been taken from a different portion of the papyrus rolls in Joseph Smith’s possession. In other words, we don’t have all the papyri Joseph Smith had — and what we do have is obviously not the text of the book of Abraham…
A second explanation takes into consideration what Joseph Smith meant by the word translation… Instead of making a literal translation, as scholars would use the term, he used the Urim and Thummim as a means of receiving revelation…. This explanation would mean that Joseph Smith received the text of our present book of Abraham the same way he received the translation of the parchment of John the Revelator — he did not even need the actual text in front of him.
(Four years later, Rhodes went on to author an article on “Facsimiles From the Book of Abraham” for the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, which at the time of writing is still current. In this, Rhodes concluded that “the Prophet’s explanations of each of the facsimiles accord with present understanding of Egyptian religious practices.” Given his understanding of the Egyptian text behind it, it’s difficult to construe this as other than deliberately misleading. For an in depth look at the facsimiles, see Stephen Thompson, “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham.” For a tongue-in-cheek but accurate summary, see Bart Pascoal, “A Rare Copy of Joseph Smith’s Egyptology 101 Final Examination.”)
Rhodes’s two possible explanations for the discrepancy — either the Book of Abraham was on part of the papyrus that is still missing today, or the papyrus was a “catalyst” for God to reveal something completely different — are still in use today in the Church’s official essay on the topic. But do they hold up under scrutiny?
Was the Book of Abraham on a still-missing piece of papyrus?
This hypothesis is one that we can directly check from the physical evidence. Andrew Cook and Christopher Smith explain in “The Original Length of the Scroll of Hor,”
The Book of Abraham translation contains 5,506 English words. The hieratic text in the instructions column of the Document of Breathing translates to ~97 English words. This column is ~9 cm wide. Hence, if the Book of Abraham were written on the scroll in the same hieratic font as this portion of the Document of Breathing, it would have taken up ~9(5,506/97)=~511 cm of papyrus. Since the Book of Abraham translation is incomplete, the actual space required for a hieratic original would presumably have been even longer.
Cook and Smith examined the papyri in the Church History Library in Salt Lake City and analyzed the repeating patterns left by Michael Chandler’s hasty removal of the papyrus from its case. These patterns allow us to reconstruct how tightly the outer papyrus (whose fragments we have) were originally wound, and thus give us a maximum bound on how much missing papyrus could have also been wound in the interior.
After a detailed, computer-aided analysis, they conclude,
[N]o more than 56 cm of papyrus can be missing from the scroll’s interior. [I.e., only about 10% of what would be required for the text of the Book of Abraham.]
Shortly after the papyri were recovered by the LDS Church, Klaus Baer estimated the original length of the Hor scroll to have been 150–155 cm... This agrees remarkably well with the [missing] 56 cm obtained from our winding analysis…
They also reject the possibility that we’re looking at the wrong scroll entirely:
The lack of sufficient space on the Hor scroll raises the question of whether the Book of Abraham source text might have been on another scroll or fragment in the original collection. This appears unlikely, since the canonized Book of Abraham text specifically places the introductory vignette of the Hor Document of Breathing at its “commencement” (Abr. 1:12, 14). Moreover, the most reliable nineteenth-century eyewitnesses spoke of only two intact scrolls in Joseph Smith’s collection: the scrolls of Hor and Tshenmin. It is clear from the witnesses’ descriptions of the scrolls that the former was believed to contain the Book of Abraham, and the latter the Book of Joseph.
Cook and Smith’s work was published in 2010, so it would not have been available to Rhodes in 1988. It was available, and ignored, by the anonymous authors of the official Church essay in 2014.
Was the papyrus a catalyst for direct inspiration from God?
The hypothesis that the papyrus could have served as a catalyst for God to reveal a completely different scripture initially seems unfalsifiable. Who can say what tools God may use or how He may proclaim His word?
But we have a crucial piece of evidence as to how Joseph produced the Book of Abraham: the Egyptian alphabets recorded by Joseph and his scribes. These include W.W. Phelps’s Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, or GAEL, and similar, shorter Alphabets from Phelps, Oliver Cowdery, and Joseph Smith himself.
Joseph’s explanations for both Book of Mormon characters and the Book of Abraham showed that he subscribed to the nineteenth century belief that hieroglyphs were an ideographic script, from which a correct “alphabet” would allow more or less mechanical translation from Egyptian into English.
In the GAEL, Joseph had Phelps reproduce characters from the Breathings scroll, along with his translation:
This is called Za Ki-oan hiash, or chal sidon hiash. This character is in the fifth degree, independent and arbitrary. It may be preserved in the fifth degree while it stands independent and arbitrary: That is, without a straight mark inserted above or below it. By inserting a straight mark over it thus, (2) it increases its signification five degrees: by inserting two straight lines, thus: (3) its signification is increased five times more. By inserting three straight lines thus (4) its signification is again increased five times more than the last…
We also see annotations in the margins of the Book of Abraham translation manuscript corresponding to characters from the GAEL.
At face value, this shows that in writing the Book, Joseph was attempting an actual translation from the papyrus. But starting with Hugh Nibley, apologists have argued that the GAEL derives from the Book of Abraham, rather than the other way around: perhaps, they suggest, Joseph’s scribes created the GAEL in a misguided effort to understand Egyptian from the finished translation.
We have two categories of evidence that demonstrate this is not the case. First, we have records from Joseph and his scribes showing that the GAEL was created before the Book of Abraham, rather than the other way around. Christopher Smith explains in “The Dependence of Abraham 1:1–3 on the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar:”
Against these views [of Nibley et al], mention may be made [of] the entry in the Documentary History of the Church that says Joseph Smith spent the latter part of July, 1835 “translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham.”
Smith also notes the October 1, 1835 entry in Joseph’s journal:
This afternoon labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with brothers O[liver] Cowdery and W[illiam] W. Phelps: The system of astronomy was unfolded.
Smith continues,
[Joseph] was certainly proud enough of the Alphabet and Grammar manuscripts to exhibit them to visitors. A November 17, 1835 diary entry says that on that day he exhibited the Alphabet to “Mr. [Erastus] Holmes and some others.” In Nauvoo, Smith allowed W. W. Phelps to quote the GAEL in ghostwritten publications as evidence of the prophet’s linguistic prowess. Smith in fact was so pleased with these demonstrations that he contemplated the Grammar’s publication.
Smith also covers text-critical evidence from the four Alphabet manuscripts that show that Joseph was the primary author.
The second category of evidence is the Book of Abraham itself. Christopher Smith explains again:
The idea, essentially, is that any single Egyptian character can be broken down into several component parts, each of which is an ideographic lexeme with a distinct sound and meaning. In the translation, one must identify these lexemes and then supply parts of speech between the lexemes in order to connect them together and create a coherent narrative. This is actually quite similar to the method by which Joseph Smith produced some of his other revelations, like D&C 93 — he took phrases and motifs from a variety of biblical passages and pieced them together like a jigsaw puzzle in order to craft his own unique narrative or exposition.
The best evidence for considering the GAEL a modus operandi for translation of part of the Book of Abraham is that this method of composition left its mark on the text itself. In Abraham 1:1–3 we find the prophet’s most explicit and thoroughgoing attempt to derive the Book of Abraham translation from the GAEL. Very few connecting parts of speech are supplied between the lexemes (unit of vocabulary) here; almost every phrase has a correspondent in the Grammar. Material is drawn from all five degrees. This undoubtedly accounts for the choppiness and redundancy of these three verses, which stylistically are very different from the remainder of the Book of Abraham. Verse 3, for example, reads as though it has been cobbled together from a series of dictionary entries…
The stylistic difference from the rest of the book is a sure sign that these three verses are dependent on the GAEL, rather than the other way around. Parts of the remainder of the Book of Abraham text are similarly, albeit more loosely and less explicitly, derived from the GAEL. Abraham 1:23–24, for example, is derived partly from a character identified in the GAEL as Iota toues Zip Zi, there translated as “The land of Egypt which was first discovered by a woman (while underwater) and afterwards settled by her sons she being a daughter of Ham.” Abraham 1:26 is translated largely from a character the Grammar calls Zub Zool eh, there translated with reference to “the days of the first patriarchs In the reign of Adam” and “the blessings of Noah.” But perhaps because of the laboriousness of the process, the initial concerted effort to use the GAEL as a translation key seems quickly to have petered out.
Thus, it is clear that Joseph intended the Book of Abraham to be an accurate translation, in the normal sense of the word, of the Breathings papyrus.
(Could God have revealed the Book of Abraham even while Joseph thought he was translating it from the papyrus? Yes, but now we are positing a “trickster” god who actively misleads his chosen prophet. That is a bridge too far for most Mormons.)
Where does this leave the Book of Abraham?
Understanding that there was no missing papyrus containing the text of the Book of Abraham, and that Joseph was in fact using the papyrus to produce the Book rather than as a catalyst, leaves us with a choice.
One option is to reject it as scripture entirely, which is understandable but extreme.
The other is to categorize it as pseudepigrapha, a work in which Joseph attempted to convey what Abraham would have written if he had been available.
This would leave the Book of Abraham in plenty of scriptural company, alongside examples such as many of the Pauline epistles in the New Testament that were not actually written by Paul. Like these, Joseph’s Book of Abraham offers fertile ground for spiritual insight.
Further Reading
- The official Church essay on the Book of Abraham, and Egyptologist Robert Ritner’s response.
- Edward Ashment, “Reducing dissonance: The Book of Abraham as a case study.” Ashment examines attempts to claim that the Book of Abraham demonstrates knowledge of the ancient world unavailable to Joseph. See also Christopher Woods, “The Practice of Egyptian Religion at ‘Ur of the Chaldees’” in Robert Ritner et al, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition.
- Anthony Hutchinson, “A Mormon Midrash? LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered.” A look at how Joseph’s attempts to “fix” the documentary seams in Genesis evolved in the Books of Moses and Abraham.
- Brent Metcalfe, “The Curious Textual History of ‘Egyptus’ the Wife of Ham.”
- More by Jonathan Ellis.
