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Did Lehi Just Quote Shakespeare? No...This Idea is Dumb

Research by Kerry A. Shirts

B.H. Roberts noted long ago the main problem with this argument. Lehi is closer to Job than to Shakespeare:

"Now the fact is there are two passages in Job which could easily have supplied both Shakespeare and Lehi with the idea of that country "from whose bourn no traveler returns." That this may appear I give the passages from Shakespeare, Job and Lehi. It should be remembered always that the Nephites had the Jewish scriptures with them, including the book of Job; hence Lehi could have obtained his idea from the same source whence Shakespeare obtained his.

Shakespeare: "That undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns."

Job: "Let me alone that I may take comfort a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death." (Job x: 20, 21.) "When a few years are come, then I shall go the way whence I shall not return." (Job xvi: 22.)

Lehi: "Hear the words of a parent whose limbs ye must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave from whence no traveler can return."

It will be observed that the passage from the Book of Mormon follows Job more closely than it does Shakespeare both in thought and diction; and this for the reason, doubtless, that Lehi had been impressed with Job's idea of going to the land whence he would not return, and Joseph Smith, being familiar with Job, and very likely not familiar with Shakespeare, when he came to Lehi's thought, expressed it nearly in Job's phraseology.

The Unknown has certainly plunged into the fog respecting his alleged connection between Nephi and Shakespeare, and by some sort of mental contortion utterly inexplicable, has arrived at the conclusion that we must suppose that Nephi had a copy of our English Bible as well as the Jewish scriptures, and also a copy of Shakespeare, in order to account for the passage in the Book of Mormon which he alleges is a quotation from the English poet. I must come to the rescue of the Unknown in this matter: I begin to have some degree of commiseration for him in his mental struggle to comprehend even this very simple matter. Attend, then: Lehi lived in Judea in the seventh and sixth century, B.C. He was acquainted with the Hebrew scriptures, including the book of Job, and when he departed from Jerusalem for the western world his colony took with them those same scriptures. Through them he became familiar in the Hebrew with Job's--"Let me alone, that I may take comfort a little before I go whence I shall not return." Also Job's--"When a few years are come, then I shall go the way whence I shall not return." When Lehi's own hour of departure hence had come, impressed with this solemn thought of Job's, he gave expression to it in Hebrew. The saying was recorded by his son Nephi in the Egyptian characters employed by him in making his record. Observe that we have traced these ideas of the "land whence I shall not return" into the Nephite records without the aid of the English Bible or Shakespeare. When Joseph Smith came to this thought in Nephi, the thought, mark you, he translated it into the English, and being familiar with the book of Job, his translation followed somewhat the phraseology of Job in our English version. Shakespeare nowhere appears in all this, and if he did, if Joseph Smith had expressed this old Hebrew and Nephite thought in Shakespeare's exact phraseology instead of that of our English version of Job, it would have been no valid objection to the Book of Mormon, for Shakespeare died in 1616, and the English version of the Bible was published in 1611, only five years before the poet's death! Are we to infer from this that "M" thinks Shakespeare had no English Bible from which to paraphrase this passage? If so--and I can see nothing else in his reference to these dates--then I would inform the gentleman that as there were brave men before Agamenon, so were there English Bibles before the 1611 edition; Wycliff's English Bible, 1380-1384; Tyndale's English translation, 1530; Miles Coverdale's English translation, 1535, dedicated to Henry VIII, and for a time issued under the royal sanction. From any of these versions Shakespeare could have paraphrased Job's words.

(B. H. Roberts, Defense of the Faith and the Saints, Vol.1, p.332-3)

Matt Roper discussing the Tanner's methodology has demonstrated how they cheat with the LDS sources, even to pretending that Sidney B. Sperry admitted it was alright to use Shakespeare as the BofM quoted from it! Sperry said nothing even remotely close to this.

Matthew Roper, in ("Journal of Book of Mormon Studies," Vol. 2, #2, p. 190.)

This was fun just to show how insipidly stupid anti-Mormons' arguemtns can be. What, don't they think we are going to look into their quotes, especially when they have an obvious agenda and they quote our own Mormon scholars to us??? Such is the redundant, abject, moronic, lame, misquoting of the anti's powerhouses Jerald and Sandra Tanner. With such Methodology I could prove Peti-Bacsi's own God the Pink Unicorn in the Bible. Can we being to have a little honesty at all? If the anti's have nothing but lies to refute Mormonism with, then I claim that they HAVE NOTHING to offer in return.

Franklin Harris noted in his book, "The Book of Mormon: Messages and Evidence" p. 113f,

Alexander Campbell referred to a quotation from Shakespeare. This has been repeated by many others including John Hyde, Jr, T. B. H. Stenhouse, M. T. Lamb, W. A. Linn, and G. B. Arbaugh.

Let us compare three verses from Job in the Old Testament with Lehi in the Book of Mormon and with Shakespeare.

Job 10:20–21: "Let me alone that I may take comfort a little before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death," and 16:22, "When a few years are come, then I shall go the way whence I shall not return."

Lehi (2 Ne. 1:14) expresses the idea as: "Hear the words of a trembling parent whose limbs you must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave, from whence no traveler can return."

Shakespeare: "The undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns." Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1.

It appears that Lehi is more like Job than Shakespeare. Since Lehi studied Old Testament records and Shakespeare was familiar with the Bible, it seems likely that they took their common inspiration from Job. Joseph Smith may have been familiar with Job but it is unlikely that he was familiar with Shakespeare.

Hugh Nibley has simply destroyed this argument from another tack than Roberts and Harris, who already showed how silly the argument was in the first place!

(Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol.6, Part.7, Ch.21, p.277)

No passage in the Book of Mormon has been more often singled out for attack than Lehi's description of himself as one "whose limbs ye must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave, from whence no traveler can return" (2 Nephi 1:14). This passage has inspired scathing descriptions of the Book of Mormon as a mass of stolen quotations "from Shakespeare and other English poets." Lehi does not quote Hamlet directly, to be sure, for he does not talk of "that undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns," but simply speaks of "the cold and silent grave, from whence no traveler can return." In mentioning the grave, the eloquent old man cannot resist the inevitable "cold and silent" nor the equally inevitable tag about the traveler--a device that, with all respect to Shakespeare, Lehi's own contemporaries made constant use of. Long ago Friedrich Delitzsch wrote a classic work on ancient Oriental ideas about death and afterlife, and a fitting title of his book was Das Land ohne Heimkehr--"The Land of No Return." In the story of Ishtar's descent to the underworld, the lady goes to the irsit la tari, "the land of no return." She visits "the dark house from which no one ever comes out again" and travels along "the road on which there is no turning back." A recent study of Sumerian and Akkadian names for the world of the dead lists prominently "the hole, the earth, the land of no return, the path of no turning back, the road whose course never turns back, the distant land, etc." A recently discovered fragment speaks of the grave as "the house of Irkallu, where those who have come to it are without return. . . . A place whose dead are cast in the dust, in the direction of darkness . . . [going] to the place where they who came to it are without return." This is a good deal closer to Lehi's language than Shakespeare is. The same sentiments are found in Egyptian literature, as in a popular song which tells how "the gods that were aforetime rest in their pyramids. . . . None cometh again from thence that he may tell of their state. . . . Lo, none may take his goods with him, and none that hath gone may come again." A literary text reports: "The mockers say, `The house of the inhabitants of the Land of the West is deep and dark; it has no door and no window. . . . There the sun never rises but they lie forever in the dark.' "

Shakespeare should sue; but Lehi, a lover of poetic imagery and high-flown speech, can hardly be denied the luxury of speaking as he was supposed to speak. The ideas to which he here gives such familiar and conventional expression are actually not his own ideas about life after death--nor Nephi's nor Joseph Smith's, for that matter, but they are the ideas which any eloquent man of Lehi's day, with a sound literary education such as Lehi had, would be expected and required to use. And so the most popular and obvious charge of fraud against the Book of Mormon has backfired.

Again and again Nibley has demonstrated this argument to be without value, and again and again, critics bring it up, only because they are BANKRUPT AND HAVE NOTHING BETTER. What a compliment to Joseph Smith!

(Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol.8, Ch.3, p.90 - p.91)

Lehi and Shakespeare. The only rival of the "faith-is-things-which-are-hoped-for" passage as a target for critics is Lehi's description of himself as one "whose limbs ye must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave, from whence no traveler can return" (2 Nephi 1:14). This is the passage--the lone passage--that has inspired those scathing descriptions of the Book of Mormon as a mass of stolen quotations from "Shakespeare and other English poets." Lehi does not quote Hamlet directly, to be sure, for he does not talk of "that undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns," but simply speaks of "the cold and silent grave, from whence no traveler can return." In mentioning the grave, the eloquent old man cannot resist the inevitable "cold and silent," nor the equally inevitable tag about the traveler--a tag so inevitable that not only Shakespeare but also Lehi's own contemporaries made constant use of it!

Long ago Friedrich Delitzsch wrote a classic work on the Babylonian and Assyrian, i.e., the common Near Eastern, ideas about death and the beyond. And what was the title of his book? Das Land ohne Heimkehr--"the Land of No Return." In the story of Ishtar's descent to the underworld, the lady goes to the irsit la tari, "the land of no return" (where tari may be the same root as that used in our own "re-turn"). She visits "the dark house from which no one ever comes out again" and travels along "the road on which there is no turning back." Someone is plagiarizing like mad, for these are the most obvious variations on the Hamlet theme--even more obvious than Lehi's! Recently Tallquist has made a thorough study of Sumerian and Akkadian names for the world of the dead; conspicuous among these are "the hole," "the earth," "the land of no return," "the city of no return," "the path of no turning back," "the road whose course never turns back," "the distant land," "the steppe," "the desert," and so on. Shakespeare should sue. In Lehi in the Desert we had occasion to note more than once that Lehi loved poetic discourse and high-flown speech, was proud of his sound literary education, and was much given to recitation. Since custom sanctioned and expected the use of such terms as he employed in speaking of the grave, it is hard to deny him the luxury of speaking as he was supposed to speak. Especially significant is the fact that the ideas to which the aged Lehi here gives such moving expression by no means reflect either his own (or Mormon's or Joseph Smith's!) ideas as to what the afterlife is really like. That shows that he is indulging in a strictly conventional and normal bit of educated eloquence, as old men are wont to. If he had a weakness for paraphrasing Hamlet's soliloquy when speaking about death, so did all his contemporaries!

The Land of No Return, long viewed as the fatal blunder of the Book of Mormon by the oracles of the English Department, hardly deserves mention, since there is nothing the least bit peculiar about it. It is a commonplace in the literature of the whole Near East from the earliest times to the present. We pointed out years ago that Lehi's use of the expression is strictly formulaic and did not necessarily reflect his real belief about death at all. An interesting confirmation of this is to be found on early Christian and Jewish epitaphs, wherein the pious dead are described as "sleeping their last sleep," a thing which the authors of the epitaphs, as J. Frey observes, did not believe for a minute. The "land of no return" is, however, a good illustration of the pitfalls of impulsive criticism. Even English majors should know that it does not have to come from Shakespeare. The most famous poem of Catullus, on the death of his lady's pet sparrow, contains a couplet that is nearer to Lehi's language than Shakespeare's: Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum, Illuc unde negant redire quemquam. Which Lord Bryon rendered: "Now having pass'd the gloomy bourn from whence he never can return."

Will the critics update? They haven't yet, but what fun it is to show how desparately banal their arguments against the Book of Mormon are. I mean? Is this all they got?