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Anachronisms & Source Texts ​

The claim:

"86% of Book of Abraham chapters 2, 4, and 5 are King James Version Genesis chapters 1, 2, 11, and 12. Sixty-six out of seventy-seven verses are quotations or close paraphrases of King James Version wording."[1]

"Why are there anachronisms in the Book of Abraham? For example, the terms Chaldeans, Egyptus, and Pharaoh are all anachronistic."[2]

"There is a book published in 1829 by Thomas Dick entitled The Philosophy of a Future State. Joseph Smith owned a copy of the book and Oliver Cowdery quoted some lengthy excerpts from the book in the December 1836 Messenger and Advocate."[3]

Underneath the numbers, these three quotes are one accusation worded three ways. The Book of Abraham, the CES Letter says, reads like a product of Joseph Smith's own century. Too much of it sounds like the King James Bible. Some of its names belong to centuries after Abraham lived. Its ideas look borrowed from a book Joseph happened to own. Put the three together and the intended conclusion is hard to miss: Joseph stitched the text together out of materials lying around his own time and pinned the result on Abraham.

Two of these criticisms have a real point inside them. Yes, long stretches of the Book of Abraham are worded like King James Genesis. Yes, a couple of its terms are later than Abraham's lifetime. Those facts are not in dispute here. But each charge, once you actually walk through it, either dissolves into something that would also condemn the Bible, or runs straight into a wall of dates the fabrication story cannot climb. And buried in the same text is a single word that the critics tend not to mention, because it cuts the other way.

(Two sister questions sit next door and are answered on their own pages. Whether the surviving scraps of papyrus are the thing Joseph translated from, and how he "translated" at all, belongs to the Papyri page. The three printed pictures at the front of the book, and Joseph's labels on them, belong to the Facsimiles page. This page stays on the words of the text itself.)

Start with the word they leave out ​

The cleanest way into this is a place name the CES Letter never raises: Olishem.

Abraham 1:10 sets a scene of attempted sacrifice "at the head of the plain of Olishem." That name is in no Bible. It is in no atlas Joseph Smith could have opened, no nineteenth-century commentary, nothing in his world. If he were inventing exotic-sounding geography, Olishem is the kind of word he would have had to make up from nothing.

Then the ground gave it back. In 1974, archaeologists in northern Iraq dug up a copper statue base carved with the inscriptions of Naram-Sin, a king of Akkad who ruled around 2250 BC. One of those inscriptions records a military campaign reaching a town called Ulisum, in roughly the right region for Abraham's story.[4] The match in sound is close, and standard Semitic shifts between the two writing systems make it closer.

Then the dates close in. The writing those inscriptions are carved in, cuneiform, could not be read at all in Joseph's lifetime. Scholars did not crack it with confidence until 1857, thirteen years after Joseph was killed.[5] So even if a copy of that exact statue had somehow been sitting on Joseph's desk in 1835, he could no more have read Ulisum off it than you could read a page of unmarked Morse code. The inscription was published in 1976; in 2013, Turkish excavators tied Ulisum to a specific mound near the Syria border.[6] [7]

This is not a closed case, and it should not be sold as one. The scholars who argue for it call the identification supported but not yet settled, because the wider field has not weighed in heavily.[7:1] Fair enough. But notice the shape of it: a real town, in the right era, in the right region, named in a script no one on earth could read until well after Joseph was dead. A man making up place names does not luck into one like that.

"Anachronism" is a charge that also convicts Genesis ​

On to the named anachronisms. The CES Letter lists three terms it says are too modern for Abraham: Chaldeans, Pharaoh, and Egyptus. Two of the three deserve a straight concession. So rather than defend every syllable, point at the Bible, which does the very same thing, and which no one calls a fraud for it.

Take Chaldeans. The earliest hard evidence for that people as a named group is around the ninth century BC, a thousand years or more after Abraham.[8] So when Abraham 1:1 places him "in the land of the Chaldeans," the term is later than the man. The leading Latter-day Saint scholar on this point concedes it without flinching: read strictly, it looks anachronistic, and that is a real wrinkle in the book.[8:1]

But open your Bible to Genesis 11:31 and there it is again: Terah leaves "Ur of the Chaldees." Same later term, same ancient man, same supposed problem, sitting in the book of Genesis that the CES Letter treats as authentically old. The pattern runs all through the Hebrew Bible. Genesis calls Egypt's king "Pharaoh" centuries before that word was used as a royal title. It names the "Philistines" in Abraham's day, though that people did not arrive in the region until roughly 1175 BC. It calls a city "Dan" in Genesis 14, although the city was not renamed Dan until generations later.

TermIn GenesisFirst actually attested
Pharaoh (as a title)Genesis 12, 39–50as a royal title around 1350 BC
ChaldeansGenesis 11, 15around the 9th century BC
PhilistinesGenesis 21, 26arrived in the region around 1175 BC
Dan (as a place)Genesis 14:14renamed only generations later

This is just how old texts reach us. They pass through generations of scribes, and the scribes naturally use the names their own readers know. When Joseph Smith rendered the Book of Abraham into English, he did the same thing the King James translators did with Genesis: he reached for the familiar word. If "a later name proves forgery" disqualifies the Book of Abraham, it disqualifies Genesis in the same breath, and the critic is left throwing out the Bible to get at Joseph Smith. The Book of Abraham gets the same charity Genesis already gets, or the rule was never an even-handed one to begin with. (Egyptus has an even sharper twist, because the earliest manuscripts read a different, Egyptian-looking name entirely; that one is in the in-depth version.)

And there is a reward hiding behind the concession. Concede that Chaldeans is a translator's later word, and you can still ask what geography the book actually points to. The Book of Abraham puts Abraham's homeland in the north, in upper Syria near Haran, not at the famous southern Ur that most people picture.[8:2] That northern setting fits Genesis 11:31's own travel directions far better, and it lines up with where Olishem turned out to be. The name is updated; the map underneath it is ancient.

The King James wording is expected, not damning ​

The hardest-sounding number in the whole file is the King James one: something like 86% of Abraham chapters 2, 4, and 5 closely tracks the wording of King James Genesis. (A careful recount by Sarah Allen actually puts it nearer 83%, but the difference does not change the point.[9]) If this book is genuinely ancient, the critic asks, why is so much of it phrased in seventeenth-century English?

The parallel is real, and it is substantial. The question is what it means, and the word "paraphrase" quietly hides the thing that matters.

Look at what the Book of Abraham actually does to Genesis where the two run side by side. Far from copying, it rewrites the shared passages, and it rewrites them in one consistent direction.

Genesis 1 (King James)Abraham 4
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth""they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth"
"And God said, Let there be light""And they (the Gods) said: Let there be light"
"And God created man in his own image""And the Gods went down to organize man in their own image"

Two changes happen everywhere in Abraham 4, and neither is random. The single "God" of Genesis becomes plural, "the Gods." And the word "created" becomes "organized," reading the original Hebrew as shaping and ordering rather than making something out of nothing.[10] A lazy copyist does not produce edits like that. They are deliberate and theological, repeated in the same direction on every page, and they match exactly what Joseph Smith taught everywhere else: that the divine council is plural, and that God organized the world from existing material rather than conjuring it from nothing.

And the direction of the rewrite is the quiet vindication. Both of those readings, a plural divine council behind Genesis 1 and "create" meaning "organize," were dismissed in Joseph's day and have since been recovered by mainstream Hebrew Bible scholarship as genuinely ancient features of the text.[10:1] A copyist working from a King James Bible produces King James theology. The Book of Abraham produces a systematically older theology, dressed in King James clothes.

So why the King James clothes at all? Because that is what revealed translation looks like. When God gives an ancient text to people who already know their scriptures in one particular English Bible, the natural thing is to hand it back in the language they trust, and to change the wording only where the meaning genuinely differs. This is the same pattern the Church and its scholars recognize in the Book of Mormon, which paraphrases King James English wherever it quotes Isaiah.[11] You cannot swing the King James argument at the Book of Abraham without hitting the Book of Mormon on the backswing, which is the last thing the CES Letter wants to do. King James phrasing in revealed scripture is the expected result, not the smoking gun.

The Thomas Dick parallels point the wrong way ​

The last source-text charge is the most specific. Joseph owned a copy of Thomas Dick's The Philosophy of a Future State (1829). Oliver Cowdery quoted Dick at length in an 1836 Church periodical. And a historian named Klaus Hansen noticed real overlaps between Dick and Joseph's cosmology: eternal matter, many inhabited worlds, "intelligences," a central throne of God.[3:1] [12] The implied verdict is that Joseph lifted his heavens from Dick's book.

The parallels are genuine, so concede them. The trouble for the borrowing story is what happens when you read the rest of Thomas Dick.

A Latter-day Saint scholar, Edward Jones, worked through ten volumes of Dick's writing and found that on nearly every belief Dick cared about most, Joseph taught the opposite.[13] It is hard to overstate how lopsided this is.

TopicThomas Dick believedThe Book of Abraham / Joseph taught
Where matter came fromcreated out of nothing by God"The elements are eternal"; the Gods organized what already existed
What God is likean invisible spirit with no bodyan embodied Father, "flesh and bones as tangible as man's"
How many Godsstrict one-God monotheisma plural council, "the Gods organized..."
Whether humans can become divineflatly impossiblethe whole point of the premortal council

Read that table again. On matter, on the body of God, on the number of Gods, on the destiny of the human soul, Joseph drove a stake through the center of everything Dick held dear. People do not borrow a whole worldview from a book and then reverse the author on every load-bearing belief. A second historian, working independently, reached the same conclusion: the real overlaps are too thin and too generic to carry the weight of "Joseph copied Dick."[14]

The dates finish the argument. Joseph's eternal-matter doctrine is already written down in a revelation dated May 1833.[15] Cowdery did not quote Dick in print until December 1836, more than three years later.[16] You cannot copy in 1833 from a book your associates first cite in 1836. And the few ideas that genuinely do overlap, intelligences, eternal matter, a hierarchy of worlds, were ordinary furniture in the religious writing of the whole era, not anything unique to Dick. Hansen, the man the whole charge rests on, never actually claimed Joseph copied Dick. His careful words were that the similarities "may be more than coincidental."[12:1] The CES Letter quotes the parallels and drops the "may," which makes a cautious scholar sound far surer than he was.

How mediated the text really is ​

This is not the cleanest case in the Church's defense.

The real cost belongs on the table. The Book of Abraham as we read it is genuinely mediated. It comes to us through Joseph Smith's translation work, worded throughout in King James English, with a few terms in it that are later than Abraham, and a published name (Egyptus) that was edited into shape from an earlier manuscript reading. To hold the book as authentic, you do have to accept a looser sense of "translation" than the word might suggest, closer to "revealed through Joseph, with the papyri as the occasion" than to a scholar decoding letters with a dictionary. That is the model the Church's own Gospel Topics essay describes, calling the papyri "an occasion for meditation, reflection, and revelation."[17] It is a real concession, and serious people, including some faithful Latter-day Saint scholars, have moved toward a more critical reading of the book on exactly this point.

What that concession does not do is erase the ancient material. Once you grant that the surface English is Joseph's, the case for something genuinely old underneath has to rest on the things that survive any translation: the place names, the theology, the buried narrative details. And those are precisely where the evidence keeps coming down on Joseph's side. The honest picture is a book with a messier paper trail than the Book of Mormon, holding content that an 1830s farmer had no documented way to reach.

Behind doors he couldn't open ​

Step back and do one thing the CES Letter never invites you to do: notice when the relevant evidence showed up.

Cuneiform was unreadable until 1857.[5:1] The statue with Ulisum carved on it lay buried in Iraqi soil until 1974.[4:1] The ancient Jewish texts that parallel Abraham's story, his father's idols, his near-sacrifice, his vision of the cosmos, reached English readers only starting in 1898, with one of them waiting in a Dead Sea cave until 1947.[18] [19] Every one of those doors opened after Joseph Smith was dead, most of them long after. A book genuinely cobbled together from 1830s materials should score zero behind doors that did not open in the 1830s. This one keeps scoring.

None of these matches is a knockout by itself, and the book's defenders are the first to say so. But they do not have to be knockouts. They only have to be things Joseph could not have reached, and that pile keeps getting taller, not shorter. A fabrication is supposed to run out of road as scholarship closes in on it. The Book of Abraham keeps finding new road.

And when the technical fog gets thick, as it genuinely does here, it is worth keeping clear about which claims the Restoration actually leans on. The Book of Abraham is a dense, difficult, and deeply rewarding corner of Latter-day Saint scripture, but the faith was never built on it. It was built on the Book of Mormon, and that book asks far less indulgence of a skeptic. A young man with a sixth-grade education talked it out loud, hundreds of pages of it, in something like sixty working days, and almost two centuries later the obvious objection still has no answer: how. You can carry every genuinely hard thing on this page, the King James wording, the late terms, the mediated translation, and still notice that the heaviest part of the prophetic claim is anchored to a book no one has explained away, one that has gotten harder to dismiss the more we have learned, not easier.

Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.

  1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," no. 5, p. 47. ↩︎

  2. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," no. 6, pp. 47–48. ↩︎

  3. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," nos. 8, pp. 48–49. ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. Abdul-Hadi al-Fouadi, "Bassetki Statue with an Old Akkadian Royal Inscription of Naram-Sin of Agade (B.C. 2291–2255)," Sumer 32 (1976): 63–76; Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative entry, https://cdli.earth/publications/1662919. ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. University of Hamburg CSMC, "The Decipherment of Cuneiform Writing," https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/2015-05-08.html (canonical date for the 25 May 1857 Royal Asiatic Society fait accompli). ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. John M. Lundquist, "Was Abraham at Ebla? A Cultural Background of the Book of Abraham," in Studies in Scripture, Volume 2: The Pearl of Great Price, ed. Robert L. Millet and Kent P. Jackson (Salt Lake City: Randall Book, 1985), pp. 225–237. The founding identification of Olishem with Akkadian Ulisum. ↩︎

  7. Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "The Plain of Olishem," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-plain-of-olishem. ↩︎ ↩︎

  8. Stephen O. Smoot, "'In the Land of the Chaldeans': The Search for Abraham's Homeland Revisited," BYU Studies Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2017): 7–37, https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/in-the-land-of-the-chaldeans-the-search-for-abrahams-homeland-revisited. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  9. Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 18," FAIR (20 October 2021), https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2021/10/20/the-ces-letter-rebuttal-part-18. ↩︎

  10. Stephen O. Smoot, "Council, Chaos, and Creation in the Book of Abraham," Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 22, no. 2 (2013): 28–39, https://scripturecentral.org/archive/periodicals/journal-article/council-chaos-and-creation-book-abraham. ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. Royal Skousen, "The Original Language of the Book of Mormon: Upstate New York Dialect, King James English, or Hebrew?" Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3, no. 1 (1994): 28–38; Skousen, "Translating the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript," in Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1997). ↩︎

  12. Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 79–80, 110. ↩︎ ↩︎

  13. Edward T. Jones, "The Theology of Thomas Dick and Its Possible Relationship to that of Joseph Smith" (MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 1969), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4839/. ↩︎

  14. Erich Robert Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). ↩︎

  15. Doctrine and Covenants 93:33–35: "The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy." Revelation given 6 May 1833. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/93. ↩︎

  16. Oliver Cowdery, "Letter from O. Cowdery to W. W. Phelps," Messenger and Advocate 3, no. 3 (December 1836): 423–25. ↩︎

  17. "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham. ↩︎

  18. G. H. Box and J. I. Landsman, The Apocalypse of Abraham (London: SPCK; New York: Macmillan, 1918), https://archive.org/details/apocalypseofabra00boxg. First popular English translation by E. H. Anderson and R. T. Haag was published in Improvement Era (1898). ↩︎

  19. Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin, A Genesis Apocryphon: A Scroll from the Wilderness of Judaea (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1956); the editio princeps of the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen), one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947. ↩︎

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