Abstract: Contemporary Palestinian archaeology has produced two major threats to traditional interpretations of the history of ancient Israel. The first threat, which derives from scientific discomfort with the exodus story as an explanation for the sudden population expansion in southern Palestine at the beginning of the Iron Age (c. 1200 bce), has led to a wide variety of theories about how these Israelites could have been drawn from existing populations in the general area. This challenge is answerable in ways that preserve the exodus account, which is fundamental to the Book of Mormon as well as the Bible. The second threat is the glaring mismatch between the biblical glorification of David and Solomon’s “empire” and disparagement of the northern kingdom combined with the archaeological finding that the cities of the northern kingdom were far larger and more advanced than Jerusalem and the south. This discrepancy between archaeology and the biblical record provided support for the widely embraced theory that everything from Genesis through Kings had been revised to promote the political and religious preeminence of Judah above the other tribes. This second challenge does fit the archaeology and contemporary textual interpretations. But it also provides stronger grounding for the hypothesis that Nephi’s Brass Plates could have been produced by an ancient Manassite scribal school of which he and his father were highly trained members, and which may have been out of sync with the Jewish scribal schools and the elders of Jerusalem.

.chiasm-b {padding-left: 2em;} .chiasm-c {padding-left: 4em;} .chiasm-d {padding-left: 6em;} .chiasm-e {padding-left: 8em;} .chiasm-f {padding-left: 10em;} .chiasm-g {padding-left: 12em;}

In previous papers I have argued that, in the historical and cultural context of late seventh-century bce Jerusalem, Lehi and Nephi would have been seen as highly trained scribes belonging to a Manassite scribal school,1 and that the Brass Plates could have been understood as a recent project designed to preserve the Abrahamic/Manassite tradition of [Page 112]history and scripture in the Egyptian language in the face of the newly undertaken Judahite version (that would eventually result in the Hebrew Bible).2 Those three papers incorporated numerous relevant findings from modern archaeology, while largely ignoring an important dimension of contemporary archaeological interpretations that would flatly dismiss the Book of Mormon account of the history of ancient Israel. While modern archaeology has not produced a clearly documented or even unified alternative history to the traditional biblical version, it has staked out important claims about the origins of the ethnic people of Israel that directly challenge the perspectives that are fundamental to both the biblical and the Book of Mormon accounts. But all such claims are based on interpretations of artifacts. In this paper I will first discuss those interpretations and their alternatives to demonstrate the continuing plausibility of the Book of Mormon’s account of Nephi’s Brass Plates. Secondly, I will explore archaeological discoveries in the northern kingdom that possibly support or give helpful insight to my hypothesized Manassite s...