ALMA 7.

10

THE BOOK OF ALMA

10 And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of

The verse, Alma 7:10, has been repeatedly pointed out as an error on the part of Joseph Smith in which it is
believed he misidentified the place where Jesus was born. One of these is the Anti-Mormon Ministry,
"Mormonism Research Ministry" [MRM] that says:

In the early 1990s we wrote two articles and an unpublished manuscript about the mistake that we believe
Joseph Smith made in the Book of Mormon regarding the origin of Jesus' birth. We received immediate
feedback from the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), an organization based
at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, telling us that our research was flawed. Several criticisms
were published by the group, including a paper by Daniel Peterson, William Hamblin, and Matthew Roper
in 1995 entitled "On Alma 7:10 and the Birthplace of Jesus Christ."

It is obvious that this is a very sensitive issue with these Mormons. According to them, Alma was referring
to the surrounding area of Jerusalem and not the city itself. They insist that Alma was a real person, so to
credit him with saying that Christ would someday be born in Jerusalem and not in Bethlehem would be a
serious faux pas. To say otherwise casts doubt upon the historicity of Mormonism's sacred Book of
Mormon. [...]

Professional Anti-Mormon Bill McKeever also believes Joseph Smith made a 'slip of the pen,' in "The
Land of Jerusalem" and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In an article entitled Mounting Evidence for the Book of Mormon, Dr. Daniel Peterson from BYU states,

"Alma 7:10 predicts that Jesus 'shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers.' Is
this a mistake?

Everyone knows that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not in Jerusalem. But it is now plain from modern
evidence that Bethlehem could be, and indeed was, regarded anciently as a town in the 'land of
Jerusalem.' A recently released text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example – a text claiming origin in
Jeremiah's days (and therefore Lehi's) – says that the Jews of that period were "taken captive from the land
of Jerusalem…

Joseph Smith could not have learned this from the Bible, though, for no such language appears in it"
(Ensign, January, 2000, p. 22).

Bill McKeever continues,

Does modern evidence vindicate Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon as Dr. Peterson claims? Do the
Dead Sea Scrolls lend credibility to Joseph Smith's claim of prophet? Though Dr. Peterson makes mention
of the pseudo-Jeremias scroll in footnote 40, he does not quote the fragment at length. When the fragment
is examined in more detail we find that it does not mention Bethlehem or speaks of Jesus' birth.

We also find that the phrase "land of Jerusalem" used in this scroll is probably not a reference at all to the
surrounding region of Jerusalem, but a reference to the actual city.[...]
If Mormons choose to point to Pseudo-Jeremiah as proof that the land of Jerusalem is a common ancient
expression, they should also concede that this is a reference to the city and not a reference to a land region
that would somehow include the town of Bethlehem.

Without getting ourselves hot under the collar it is obvious that neither of these two ministries have thought
this through very well. Had they done so they would have recognised that the quote Peterson supplies from
Deutero-Jeremiah employs a phrase that was common when speaking of Jerusalem and its environs at the
time the scroll was written. That would make it a common phrase that was understood and used to
designate the Geographical Area around Jerusalem, and was not restricted to the City of Jerusalem alone.

McKeever's complaint that this document does not speak of the birth of Jesus is a smokescreen, for the
point is only that the term, 'the land of Jerusalem' was in use before the Book of Mormon was translated by
Joseph Smith.

Therefore, if it can be shown that the term for the region round and about the actual city of Jerusalem itself
was commonly referred to as 'the land of Jerusalem,' then Alma 7:10 and Joseph Smith are vindicated and
Anti-Mormons must find a different tree on which to sharpen their claws.

What is known that supports Alma's use of the term 'land of Jerusalem' to identify an area greater than the
city of Jerusalem alone? Daniel Peterson writes:

The so-called "Amarna letters" (fourteenth century B.C.) likewise use the phrase. [1] Indeed, the Amarna
letters also allude to "a town of the land of Jerusalem, Bit-Lahmi by name," which W. F. Albright regarded
as "an almost certain reference to the town of Bethlehem." [2] This is interesting evidence, which goes
some distance in establishing the plausibility of Alma's prophecy, since it gives us a glimpse of an ancient
administrative arrangement in the vicinity of Jerusalem. It shows, from an ancient perspective, that it was
possible to conceptualize the regions surrounding a major city, including its dependent villages, as "the
land of" that city. And it demonstrates, furthermore, that Bethlehem itself was, at least at one point,
anciently regarded as a part of Jerusalem's land, exactly as it is in the Book of Mormon.

However, at least one vocal critic of the Book of Mormon contends that the Amarna letters are far too old
to be relevant to Lehi's Jerusalem in the early sixth century. "It would," he declares, "be like using a letter
from King George III to prove the United States could still be rightly called the colonies." [3] This
overstates the case, but his demand that we look at the Bible and other contemporary evidence is certainly
not without merit. [4]

Peterson's Notes

1. See Walter Harrelson, "Shechem in Extra- Biblical References," The Biblical Archaeologist 20 (1957):
4, 6—7.

2. See James B. Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 1:274;
also Yohanan Aharoni and Michael Avi-Yonah, eds., The Macmillan Bible Atlas, rev. ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1977), map 39.

Hugh Nibley drew our attention to the Amarna letters years ago. See Nibley, An Approach to the Book of
Mormon, 100—102. Nibley's references are to the Amarna letters, tablets 287.25 = "the land of the city of
Jerusalem ([a-]mur mat u-ru-sa-lim an-n[i-] ta)"; 46, 61, 63 = "lands [matat] of Jerusalem"; 290:15—16,
which discuss "a city of the land of Jerusalem, whose name is bit- ninib."

Samuel A. B. Mercer, The Tell el-Amarna Tablets (Toronto: Macmillan, 1939), 722 n. L16, speculated that
it might be possible to read this as "Bethlehem." Transliteration and translation can be found on pp. 710—
11, 722 of Mercer's book. The preferred translation is now William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992)
3. Bill McKeever, "Problems," Mormonism Researched (Winter 1992): 4. (A longer, unpublished article on
the same subject, bearing the same title, was produced by McKeever in 1992, in conjunction with one Eric
Johnson. When referred to, this unpublished version will be distinguished from the published article by
Johnson's name and by the designation "Long Text.")

McKeever's claim that Nibley left out "very pertinent information" concerning the origin and date of the
Amarna letters (p. 3) is, by the way, manifestly false. Nibley accurately describes the nature of the Amarna
letters on p. 469 n. 16 of An Approach to the Book of Mormon, referencing material in his original
discussion on p. 101: "The Amarna Letters are the actual documents of the official correspondence between
the Egyptian Government and the rulers of the various principalities of Palestine and Syria about 1400
B.C., at the very time the Hebrews were entering Palestine.

They were found on day tablets at El-Amarna on the middle Mile in 1887." In this passage, Nibley refers to
everything McKeever claims he "left out," including: the date, "1400 B.C."; that they were by "Palestinian
chieftain[s]"; that they were "not of Hebrew ancestry"; and that they were written to "the Pharaoh of Egypt"
(see McKeever, "Problems," 3).

Perhaps McKeever should not have "invite[d] [his] readers to check [his] sources for context accuracy" (p.
3). Certainly he has not accurately presented the context of Nibley's argument.

4. His own examination of the biblical evidence, however, is largely without merit. First of all, in order to
show that the term "land of Jerusalem" was not current in biblical times, he must examine every text and
every utterance from that period. But most texts and virtually all human utterances vanish without a trace,
even from the modern period. He must prove a negative, but since almost none of the relevant ancient
evidence survives, he can never reach certainty. Moreover, when he tries to establish a "biblical" usage-
pattern for the phrase "at Jerusalem," his statistically problematic five samples extend from the original
Hebrew text of 1 Kings 12:27 to the original Greek text of John 10:22, as if there were some "scriptural"
style of preposition use that transcends difference not only of languages but of language families and that
necessarily remains unchanged over the course of many centuries.

See McKeever and Johnson, "Problems in 'the Land of' Jerusalem" (Long Text), 3. On pp. 4—6, McKeever
and Johnson show remarkable ability to read their assumptions into the evidence of the Book of Mormon,
taking a number of texts as supporting their position which actually do nothing of the kind.

Reading through the Tell-el-Amarna letters I chanced to read the very phrase disputed by Bill McKeever
and other uninformed Anti-Mormons. It was a reference I had not seen used in discussions of this subject
but one that puts Alma's usage of the term and its meaning beyond dispute of any intellect that functions
normally, regardless of its stand on the divine inspiration of the Book of Mormon and its common use in
the ancient world of the Old Testament.

In Edward Jones' book, "Discoveries and Documents," the one-time Principal of the Congregational
College, Manchester, England, which was published by the Epworth Press of London, 1974, under the
imprimatur of The Methodist Publishing House, Wimbledon, I was delighted to find a letter from Prince
Abdu-Heba of Jerusalem importuning the King of Egypt for military aid against the 'Apiru people. It reads:

"To the king, my lord, say: Thus 'Abdu-Heba, thy servant.

At the two feet of the king, my lord, seven times and seven times I fall. Behold the deed which Milkilu and
Shurwardata did to the land of the king, my lord!

They rushed troops of Gezer, troops of Gath, and troops of Keilah; they took the land of Rubutu; the land
of the king went over to the 'Apiru people.

But now EVEN A TOWN OF THE LAND OF JERUSALEM, BIT LAHMI BY NAME, A TOWN
BELONGING TO THE KING HAS GONE OVER TO THE SIDE OF THE PEOPLE OF KEILAH.
Let my king hearken to 'Abdu-Heb, thy servant,and let him send archers to recover the royal land for the
king! But if there are no archers, the land of the king will pass over to the 'Apiru people [EA No. 290,
ANET, p. 489].

The sentence that arrested my attention is "But now even a town of the land of Jerusalem, Bit Lahmi by
name, has gone over to the side of Keilah."

"Hugh Nibley showed in 1957 that one of the Amarna letters, written in the 13th century B.C. and
discovered in 1887, recounted the capture of "a city of the land of Jerusalem, Bet-Ninib" (CWHN 6:101
[Note from J.L.: CWHN = The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley. Volume 6 is An Approach to the Book of
Mormon]).

The Tell-el-Amarna Letters were written during the period 1417-1362. Their main content is diplomatic
correspondence between Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV in their relationships with the kings of the city-
states of Western Asia, including Syria and Palestine, especially in the last 20 years of this period.

If there was ever any doubt that 'the land of Jerusalem' was a term used to include the village of Bethlehem,
there can be no such doubt any longer. The Reverend Doctor Jones entertained none when he wrote:

"We should note too that we have in these letters the first non-biblical reference to Jerusalem, and in this
particular letter we have as well, in the word Bit-Lahmi, the first recorded reference to Bethlehem."

While this intelligence will obviously prove a bitter disappointment to the brigade of finger pointing Anti-
Mormons, it comes from an unimpeachable source and overcomes McKeever's petty objection that the
Nibley offering made no mention of Bethlehem.

In doing so, McKeever neatly sidesteps the ancient usage of the term 'Land of Jerusalem to identify the
region round about Jerusalem as an ancient and authentic usage, as held in the Book of Mormon.

Alma 7:10 stands, it's vindication complete and beyond further attack.