At the beginning of the Book of Mormon,
Nephi says he’s writing according to “the learning of the Jews
and the language of the Egyptians.”
People have been debating and disputing what this means since the Book of Mormon came off the press.
So today we’re going to take a look at archaeological discoveries made after the Book of Mormon was published,
to see if they can help us
better understand what Nephi meant.
First, let’s talk about Egyptian language.
When most people think of Egyptian,
they imagine
hieroglyphs—small pictures or images
that represented words and sounds in the Egyptian
language.
But people might be surprised to learn that the Egyptians used several other writing systems  as well.
One of these other writing systems was known as hieratic.
This was a more cursive, shorthand script
that was originally related to the hieroglyphs,
but eventually developed its own unique features.
But perhaps the most important thing about
hieratic for our purposes
is that it was also used outside of Egypt.
Throughout the 20th century, archaeologists
working in Israel and Judah uncovered
hundreds of documents that used hieratic Egyptian.
In 2008, German Archeologist Stefan Wimmer
collected and published over 200 examples
of this hieratic writing from 30 different
sites throughout Israel.
Some are written on what scholars call ostraca, which are just broken pieces of pottery with  writing on them.
Others are on papyri, seal impressions, and
weights used in their monetary system.
Most of the time the hieratic writing is mixed
with Hebrew,
but there are some cases where an entire document is in hieratic.
Many of these come from Nephi’s own time,
the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC.
But some are from several hundred years earlier
and this is where it starts to get really interesting.
David Calabro, a scholar of ancient Near Eastern
languages, studied these documents very carefully,
and concluded:
“The Judahite hieratic tradition, developed independently
from contemporary scribal traditions in Egypt,
and must have
diverged from them at an earlier period.”
In other words, by Nephi’s time, scribes
in Judah were writing hieratic differently
than scribes in Egypt.
Some of the differences specifically reflect
the influence of their Hebrew language
on their Egyptian writing.
Because these writings represent a unique
hieratic tradition,
scholars have used various terms to distinguish it from the standard hieratic written in Egypt.
Wimmer called it “Palestinian hieratic,”
and Calabro called it a “Judahite variety of Egyptian script,”
but Nephi’s term works just as well:
that is, it’s the “language of the Egyptians” according to “the learning of the Jews.”
Now, we should understand that most of these
documents are accounting and administrative
documents, so the hieratic signs used in them
are mostly numbers, units of measurement,
and stuff like that.
There’s currently no evidence for Israelites
producing full literary or historical works,
like Nephi’s books, in hieratic.
But after Calabro’s careful study of some
of these hieratic documents, he concluded
“that the hieratic tradition in Judah lasted
in fuller form than only the isolated use
of numbers and units of measurement” and
it “could, at least potentially, have been
put to use for purposes other than simple
accounting,” but “whether this potential
was actually exploited is … unknown in view
of the lack of surviving documents.”
In other words, a book written in “the learning
of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians”
was entirely possible in Nephi’s day—and
in fact, that phrase makes a lot more sense
when we understand the archaeological evidence.
