One of the standard chestnuts used by critics is that the Book of Mormon cannot be true because it talks of coins in Alma 11, and everyone knows that there have never been any coins discovered from the civilizations purportedly described in the book.
It apparently doesn’t matter to the critics that the actual text of Alma 11 never talks of coins, and the words coin, coins, or coinage never appear once in the book. This canard continues to appear in newer attacks on the Church, including recent videos from Living Hope Ministries.
Tyler Livingston of FAIR has recently finished putting together a short video on this topic. I hope you find it interesting.
Excellent post, and congrats on the new blog. I really, *really* like that video format – good length, good information, good to put a face behind a name.
Amid all the hubbub of people chattering about the Doubleday edition of the Book of Mormon changing the introduction from “primary” to “among the” regarding the Lamanites, no one seemed to bother to notice that the heading the Alma 11 was also changed: from “Nephite Coinage” to “Nephite Monetary System.”
We should expect to see this change in all future printings of the Book of Mormon.
Glad to see you on-line with a blog and still on-line otherwise.
Best,
Steve
I have to agree with Marc. I enjoyed the video format.
Excellent first post. I really enjoyed the video. Welcome to the bloggernacle, and I’ll be a regular visitor.
Few Evangelical ministers would assert that the footnotes I read in the “New International Version Study Bible” are to be given the same weight as the actual scriptural text itself. Why do they insist that the headers to the chapters in the Book of Mormon be given such weight?
KC, thanks for the awesome information! I remember when the word change to the
Introduction first broke in a big way, someone mentioned another such change,
although I can’t remember offhand what it was. Perhaps there area few other
gems hidden in the Doubleday edition. (I have to admit I don’t own one.)
It might be worthwhile for someone to take a look and see whether they can catalog all such
changes.
K.C. #2:
That’s an interesting change, and a welcome one. However, it’s still incorrect: Alma 11 is describing a system of weights and measures, not a “monetary system”. In ancient pre-coin cultures, standardized weights were used to measure grain in exchange for services.
John Welch wrote a paper about this for FARMS over 20 years ago. Here’s the most recent version:
http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/display.php?table=jbms&id=198
I was surprised that the issue of the 1828 dictionary definition of “piece” was never addressed? I’m not an expert on the language of the time, but how do I know you’re not anachronistically reading “piece” into Joseph Smith’s time?
To what are you referring, Aaron? Is this a specific verse you are questioning?
I believe he’s referring to Alma 11:4—
The contention that these “pieces” refer to coins is blunted by the fact that in the very same verse the author refers to “measure[s]”, which is consistent with the argument that the “pieces” are weights used to measure amounts of grain, as indicated in verses 7 and 15.
You can read Webster’s 1828 dictionary entry for “piece” here. Note that its use for describing coins is all the way down in definition 8, while definitions 1 through 4 include a single item as part of a group, again consistent with a group of weights of varying heaviness.
All of this begs the question: Even allowing for ‘piece’ to mean a standardized weight of measurement (and the argument seems compelling enough to me at first blush), aren’t you right back where you started from? Has anybody dug up any ancient weights in the Americas? Especially any made of gold or silver? Attempting to explain away the absence of coins by substituting something that’s equally absent from the archaeological record doesn’t make any sense to me.
Nobody in the video mentions weights being discovered, Welch doesn’t mention any having been discovered in his article (linked in comment #8), and no other commenters have mentioned it. Am I really the first person to have considered this question?
Answering my own question…
http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?table=jbms&id=199
In this article, Welch mentions several possibilities, but basically says no, there’s no objective evidence for weights and measures used in ancient mesoamerica. He advocates a kind of wait and see approach.
So I ask again, aren’t you right back where you started from?
Terribly sorry to triple post, but I just want to clarify that, while I do consider myself one of the church’s critics, I’m not among those who claim the Book of Mormon “cannot be true because it talks of coins [or weights, or any other kind of ‘pieces’]”. I consider this issue so tangential to the whole topic of Book of Mormon veracity that I deliberated for a few hours before deciding to comment here at all.
Finding an ancient mesoamerican weight or even a coin wouldn’t immediately prove to me that the Book of Mormon is true and the absence of said doesn’t prove to me that it’s false. I realize no one here is implying that coins or weights are more important than a careful consideration of the doctrinal claims of the Book of Mormon, but I didn’t want anyone else to think I was implying that either.
The search for “weights” simply continues to assume a different standard for what was happening. The system sounds like a standardized quantity because we assume that there must have been one that supplied the reasoning behind the system.
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing just what was measured. Was it ore or refined metal? Was it worked metal? There is no way to know what the item was being measured, so there is no way to know what to look for to find any kind of standard unit for a measure.
We do know that later documents do indicate that there were some items that had relative exchange value – a certain number of blankets, a measure of corn, a collection of feathers. There was a perceptual link among them, but the units were not always something that we can reproduce – for example, when the measure was simply a count.
One of the things I find interesting about the list is that the “measures” differ depending upon what is being measured. Words that measure gold are different from words that measure silver – even though they could be exchanged for the same measures of grain. That sounds like counts in Maya languages, where different shapes are counted differently. I don’t specifically know of material rather than shape, but the concept is the same.
Unfortunately, the ultimate answer to the Alma 11 list depends on how you come to the text. If you come to the text as an ancient text, then the very reason for having the list is because it is unusual and therefore we shouldn’t expect to find them – because Mormon had to explain it and clearly assumed his readers wouldn’t understand. In virtually every other case, the evidence suggests that while Mormon wrote for a future audience, he assumed that the future audience would be people just like him who understood his world. There is very little of this kind of explanation of overt culture in the whole of the Book of Mormon, reinforcing the idea that we get this because it was considered uncommon.