And also about darkness, for we live in dark times. In former dispensations, the LORD saw fit in His providence to send light unto the sons of Adam that they might glide above the darkness of their times and become partakers of His light. We may only pray for such grace at time when dark money makes presidents out of shady businessmen who threaten to use the glint of a thousand suns to plunge the sons of Adam into suicidal darkness. I, for one, pray that the LORD soon shine His countenance upon us.
It was the fear of months of darkness in a submarine—probably a metaphor for the darkness of his own soul—that sent Jared's Brother to Jehovah, who asked the preexistent LORD to rub off some of His light by fondling Jared's Brother's rocks. That intimate encounter between Mr. M. Moriancumr and the LORD was in fact the high point of Jaredite civilization, which is defined after that point by no other narrative than that of a headlong decline from light into darkness.
The Jaredites yet remain very dark to us today, not least to scholars working in the exciting but often opaque field of Jaredite Studies. There is a great deal of darkness surrounding the Jaredites, but there is a considerable amount of darkness enshrouding the word "Gazelem." With my little contribution to Jaredite Studies here, I hope to add some further light and knowledge.
About 73 BCE, according to the chapter heading of Alma 37 (see here), the aging prophet and former apostate enjoined it upon his son Helaman to take charge of the prophetic memorabilia in his possession: the archives of the Nephites and the magical objects that accompanied them. A controlling metaphor of his discussion with Helaman is the contrast between lightness and darkness, and his prophetic charge to his son is that he must keep the commandments exactly in his capacity of official historian, lest their civilization decline as the Jaredites' had. It is here where we learn that in the archives were 24 plates containing Jaredite oracles, which Alma quotes from directly:
Moroni (quoting President Alma B. Alma) wrote:Therefore I command you, my son Helaman, that ye be diligent in fulfilling all my words, and that ye be diligent in keeping the commandments of God as they are written. And now, I will speak unto you concerning those twenty-four plates, that ye keep them, that the mysteries and the works of darkness, and their secret works, or the secret works of those people who have been destroyed, may be made manifest unto this people; yea, all their murders, and robbings, and their plunderings, and all their wickedness and abominations, may be made manifest unto this people; yea, and that ye preserve these interpreters. For behold, the Lord saw that his people began to work in darkness, yea, work secret murders and abominations; therefore the Lord said, if they did not repent they should be destroyed from off the face of the earth. And the Lord said: "I will prepare unto my servant Gazelem, a stone, which shall shine forth in darkness unto light, that I may discover unto my people who serve me, that I may discover unto them the works of their brethren, yea, their secret works, their works of darkness, and their wickedness and abominations." And now, my son, these interpreters were prepared that the word of God might be fulfilled, which he spake, saying: "I will bring forth out of darkness unto light all their secret works and their abominations; and except they repent I will destroy them from off the face of the earth; and I will bring to light all their secrets and abominations, unto every nation that shall hereafter possess the land." And now, my son, we see that they did not repent; therefore they have been destroyed, and thus far the word of God has been fulfilled; yea, their secret abominations have been brought out of darkness and made known unto us.
Scholars in Jaredite Studies have wrestled with the meaning and provenance of the word "Gazelem" for over a century (a summary of those findings can be seen here). The crux of the issue has been whether or not "Gazelem" refers to the servant, and is therefore a personal name, or to the stone. A dentist has recently argued that Gazelem was a Jaredite prophet (I hope, by the way, that he will reciprocate my close reading of his study by reading my forthcoming article in the Journal of Amateur Dentistry, "Language, Tooth, and Logic: A Historical-Linguistic Approach to Periodontal Disease"). This is against the grain of tradition going back to Nibley, who argued that the word refers to the stone and has good provenance in Northwest Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic. For both, the root g-z-r is used to construct verbs for cutting and nouns with the idea of separation: Hebrew gāzar, "to cut" and Aramaic gzīrāᵓ, "a hewn stone." And Val Sederholm further connects it with the Egyptian verbal root ḏ-s-r, which likewise contains the notion of cutting of separation is possibly related to Semitic g-z-r. The linguistic evidence therefore suggests that "Gazelem" is not person but rather a stone of some kind, and it has the advantage of the text, which is after all about a magical stone that can reveal evil deeds by extracting them from darkness and bringing them to light before the people.
Surprisingly, the dentist is not concerned with roots, but he is right, however, in pointing out that the Nephites didn't understand much about the Jaredite language. I have argued elsewhere on this board that in fact, the Jaredites spoke an Indo-European language closely related to the very early form of Greek that we see in the Linear B tablets, and to Old Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit, which were roughly contemporaneous languages. The Jaredites, in my view, came from the same wave of immigration that sent Indo-European speakers into Greece, India, and the Iranian plateau. That means, therefore, that a Semitic provenance of the word "Gazelem" is out of the question, and the Aramaic evidence in particular is much too late and therefore useless. There is no reason, as we can infer from the dentist's work, for a Jaredite word to show up here (one reason why he thinks it must be instead a name for a person rather than a thing, which I think is quite sensible).
And yet it is unmistakably Semitic. Recall the second chapter of Daniel (2:27), where Daniel beings to interpret Nebuchadnezzar's dream by pointing out that none of the magicians or diviners (Aramaic:) could understand the king's dream. The Aramaic word for diviners, gāzrīn, is likewise connected to this root g-z-r, because a diviner was someone who could understand a decree of fate (gzārāᵓ), which are unchangeable because they are as if set in stone (in fact, there is verb gzār meaning "to decree" can be found in the eighth century Sefire texts and forms part of the vocabulary of early parts of Jewish oral law and shows up from the Qumran texts to the Babylonian Talmud; see Q4Tob and BTŠab 15.22.b). And what else at a minimum is a decree but a public revelation? Further, it is this same chapter in Daniel (2:45) where we first hear about the prophecy of the LORD's latter-day Church: "a stone was cut (Aramaic: ᵓiṯgezereṯ ᵓeḇen) out [of the mountain] without hands." The connection between the root g-z-r and stones is so strong, and the accumulation of convergences so compelling, that this cannot be a coincidence, as the apologetic logic goes. This must be Semitic. And by the way, there is no way that Joseph Smith could have known any of this.
Yet Alma is clearly quoting from a Jaredite text, so in other words, we have an unnoticed problem here: how did this Semitic word show up in a Jaredite text?
First, though, we need to be clear on the etymology and the meaning, and no previous commentator has offered a convincing one; they have merely proffered some vague resemblances. Some of you will have noticed that there appears to be a discrepancy between the root g-z-r and the name Gazelem...one has the an "r," the other an "l." Previous commentators have skirted the issue, saying only that the kind of consonants that both "l" and "r" are allows some interchange—they are pronounced in a similar part of the mouth and are what linguists call "homorganic"—and this is true. This is why, for example, native Japanese speakers have a difficult time with "l" sound and treat it as an "r." Assuming that the Nephites didn't speak Japanese, however, I think we can explain this with a relatively straightforward way: Gazelem consists not of one word but of three. The first is the Hebrew gǝzērāh, which I think had lost its final vowel by the the time of Alma due to shifting stress patterns in Nephitish, which I will discuss in a future post. It would thus be gǝzēr. The second element is the preposition l-, common to several Semitic languages, which means "to" or "for." Thus we have already gǝzēr l-. The final element is obviously not the dual ending (as has been ridiculously suggested) but rather the Hebrew word ῾am ("people"). The switch from the vowel -e>-a is not a problem, given the fluidity of vowels in Semitic languages, even within Hebrew itself, but compare to this the alternate spelling of the name, Gazelam. The full result is gǝzēr l-῾am, and the homorganic nature of the consonant cluster -rl- lead to assimilation such that we get something like gǝzēll-῾am, which probably came to be interpreted as a single word through a phenomenon well known to linguists, univerbation. That is why Joseph Smith interpreted it as one word in his translation.
The result means something like "a public revelation to the people." At this point, I call your attention back to the narrative context, where Alma quotes the Jaredite oracle. Note that the oracle is controlled by a series of paradoxes: good/evil, light/dark, open/secret. Note especially how strong the emphasis is on the fact that this stone, this revelatory tool, is not for the private use of a prophet translating a record but is rather meant to serve the end of public knowledge:
And now, I will speak unto you concerning those twenty-four plates, that ye keep them, that the mysteries and the works of darkness, and their secret works, or the secret works of those people who have been destroyed, may be made manifest unto this people (Hebrew:῾am...And the Lord said: "I will prepare unto my servant Gazelem, a stone, which shall shine forth in darkness unto light, that I may discover unto my people who serve me, that I may discover unto them the works of their brethren, yea, their secret works, their works of darkness, and their wickedness and abominations." And now, my son, these interpreters were prepared that the word of God might be fulfilled, which he spake, saying: "I will bring forth out of darkness unto light all their secret works and their abominations; and except they repent I will destroy them from off the face of the earth; and I will bring to light all their secrets and abominations, unto every nation that shall hereafter possess the land."
The etymology I propose 1) accounts for the r/l discrepancy, 2) preserves and confirms the Semitic links of the word, and 3) has the support of the narrative context. What about the final and most difficult problem: how did this Semitic word show up in a Jaredite oracle?
All previous commentators on this topic prior to the humble scholar before you have failed on a microlevel because they have proceeded from the wrong macro-assumptions. Each has treated the word out of its human context. The work at Interpreter has at least shed the light of narrative context on the problem, but it still fails to take account of the fact that we are not only dealing with a language in a text but with a text from a particular social location. In other words, scholars have forgotten that this text, ultimately, was produced through human agency (though obviously under divine inspiration!). But let us recall the social circumstances that gave rise to this text: this was produced in a scribal culture. The narrative context itself is essentially about the transfer of scribal duties, from one scribe to another. Just as the LORD uses men of the dominant profession today—business—to lead His church, so too in antiquity did He draw his leaders the ranks of the professional elite: the scribes.
Everything that we know about the scribal cultures of antiquity explains the problem of a how a Semitic word shows up in a Jaredite text. Scribes spent years of hard laboring mastering the technology of writing, which would have been quite intricate in the case of the Nephites, who were quite conscious of the difficulty of their reformed Egyptian. Add to this, the fact that the native language of a Nephite scribe would have been some admixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Egyptian, and Uto-Aztecan, if we take Brian Stubbs seriously. Most likely, their written language was highly divergent from their written medium (cf. the situation of Arabic today, or that of Latin against the vernaculars of Europe in the Middle Ages, or Sumerian and Standard Babylonian in the Near East in the third and first millennium, respectively, etc.). This would have entailed years of training and apprenticeship from a master scribe, who would have known not only the languages—the Nephite Amtssprache as well as Biblical Hebrew and Jareditish—but also their scripts, including possibly the very unwieldy script used for Demotic Egyptian.
How did one learn these languages though? We know from examples throughout the Near East that apprentice scribes would have bilingual editions of texts at their disposal so that they could compare the language or script they knew with the target language or script. For example, they might have an edition of Gilgamesh in Sumerian and Standard Babylonian. Moreover, they would practice copying from texts (lots of instances of this from Egypt), and we can sometimes see the correcting hand of a teacher in Egyptian and even Greek papyri. We also have annotations of one language superimposed on another for pedagogical purposes: little notes that junior scribes incised (or wrote, as the case may be) to help the remember the meanings of words in the language and script they were trying to learn (an example here is but one of many that shows Old English annotations above Latin words).
We have many such examples of Nephite annotations showing up in the record (senines, cumoms, cureloms, etc.), and the reason why so many of these are untranslated by Joseph Smith is their pedagogical nature eluded him. That is, I submit, what happened with Gazelem as well. A Nephite scribe added a small notation into the text, but as the text was transmitted over the centuries and as the knowledge of Jareditish declined among the Nephite elite (largely due to a collapse of Nephite social institutions in the third and fourth centuries CE), this annotations began to be copied as if it were part of the original text. In other words, Alma never said the Nephitish word "Gazelem" in his recitation of the Jaredite oracle at this point in the text; rather, some scribe wrote the note just above the line to help him remember the meaning of the Jareditish word that Alma had uttered. And because this was a school practice but the Jaredite oracles were not likely a school text (they are holy, after all), we have evidence of this of the decline of Jaredite learning among the Nephite scribal elite as the society drifted into apostasy.
Contrary to all previous commentators on this, there is no profound meaning to unlock behind the word Gazelem. It is mundane scribal practice that, through the ignorance of later scribes, contaminated the ur-text of the Jaredite oracles. It is there in the text because Joseph Smith, in this as in so much else, was unable to tell the difference between the truly profound and the obviously mundane. There is no light to be extracted from the darkness of Joseph Smith's mind.
