Hebraisms in the Allegory of the Olive Tree.

 This week in Come Follow Me, we read the longest chapter in the Book of Mormon, Jacob 5, which contains the allegory of the olive tree.   This allegory has been extensively studied and analyzed.  Some people talk about how it represents the history of the House of Israel.  Others talk about how is demonstrates the Lord's untiring efforts to help and save his people. I think these are the most important interpretations of the allegory, but they have already been thoroughly explored.

I decided to take a historical/linguistical approach to the allegory for this blog post.  I am assuming here that this allegory is what Jacob stated it is, a copy of an allegory written by an ancient prophet named Zenos. I am also assuming it was written in Hebrew on the Brass Plates.  Here are a few guesses/observations I have about Zenos and his allegory.

First of all Zenos.  If I were guessing I would say that Zenos was probably a Greek convert to the Jewish faith , a kind of Jewish "Samuel the Lamanite". My only evidence for this is his name. Zenos, means "foreigner" ξένος in Greek.  In 600 BC, Greece had not yet become the world power it would 200 years later under Alexander the Great, but it was still a major player in the region. If a Greek converted to Judaism, and lived in Jerusalem, it seems probable to me that people might call him Zenos.  That might also explain why none of his prophecies or writing have survived except in the Book of Mormon.  Jewish people might not make an effort to preserve the writings of a non-Israelite, especially if his allegory suggested that they were rotten at the core.

Second, one of my podcasters observed that Jacob specifically mentions that the top of the tree was dying. The top of a tree was called its "head" or רֹאשׁ in Hebrew and this is also a term used to denote the leadership of the church.  No one understood better than the descendants of Lehi, that the leadership of the church in Jerusalem was becoming corrupt.  They had sought to kill Lehi, after all. 

Third, I was interested in the question why the olive orchard is called a vineyard in this allegory.  I wondered if orchard and vineyard were the same word in Hebrew, but no, there are two separate words.  orchards is גנות and vineyard is כרם.  Then I decided to look up each instance of each word to see how they are used.  גנות, orchard, is only used eleven times in the Old Testament and it sometimes also denotes a garden, or a cultivated area that was a pleasant place to hang out. Vineyard is כרם and it appears about 80 times in the Old Testament. In most of those cases it really does mean vineyard, i.e. a place to grow grapes for wine, rather than on olive grove. There is even one verse that mentions an orchard, a vineyard, fig trees, and olive trees in the same verse (Amos 4:9) so vineyard doesn't seem to be a general term.  

Giving up, I googled "vineyard vs orchard in the book of Jacob."  It turns out someone from Book of Mormon Central, John A. Tevdtnes,  had the same question as I did.  He did some linguistical digging and brings in a bunch of other ancient languages to show why the word for vineyard might have been used to describe this olive orchard. The article is interesting and very technical, but I thought maybe he was trying a bit too hard.  I think what is most likely is that Joseph Smith had read the Old Testament enough to sense that vineyard was a much more common word in the Old Testament, so that was the one that came to mind as he was translating the allegory.