I learned my lesson a long time ago. When a friend says, "Hey, Jeff, I have a book I want you to read," the shield goes up, the antenna begin to focus. Either this is a bad book, or it's an awful book. In this case, however, it's just a confusing book. My friend made it clear -- "It has something to do with Jews and Mormons, and I can't figure out what they're trying to say." Okay.

This slim volume follows two independent threads, and weaves in and out of its themes with alarming frequency. The themes: the centrality of moral agency to the God-likeness of the race, and the amazing congruence of the hidden meanings of the Hebrew characters with the teachings of the Restored Gospel, creating interesting parallels between Judaism and Mormonism.

As to the first theme, the book is amazingly good. But as to the second, the book is a hopeless mish-mash of wacky Hebrew and the kinds of conclusions taught by the uninformed, sometimes called "seminary myths."

Let's begin with a stylistic note. The authors MUST have known that readers would not have been able to understand their "exalted" vocabulary. I sympathize with my friend -- some of this stuff is just beyond imagination. An example: in discussing the City of Enoch:

Another characteristic of the City of Enoch was that there were no poor among them. This is not only because the rich shared, but also everyone was industrious: nobody was enervated by sloth and nimiety. The faineant and otiose became extinct, as well as arrivistes, parvenus, and even sinecures: there were no spirits lazier than their bodies. (p. 25)

I fail to see the purpose in writing like this, other than to drive the reader to a dictionary, or at least to a thesaurus. And as the book is not concerned with literacy, I found the style distracting and unnecessary.

Stylistic issues aside, let's look at the two themes, treating "moral agency" first.

The authors devote an amazing five and a half pages, in their chapter "Contradiction and Moral Agency," to listing some of the many contradictions in the Bible, the Latter-day Scriptures, the lives of the worthies of past dispensations and of this dispensation. They are brutal in their analysis. I suspect most readers had never heard of some of these problems. Some may be faith-shaking.

So why detail the problems? Why point to the discrepancies?

The truth is that God is inconsistently consistent in the way he deals with man and he has created a perfectly imperfect world. Why? Contradiction perfects our moral agency and our faith. It allows us to rationalize any behavior and thus the dissolute aspects of human nature and the effluvia and moral terpitude of a sick society spew forth. It is no wonder we live in a world that spawns forth terrorists, commits holocausts, and crucifies our Lord. This is perfect moral agency, even if God does have an acute prescience for how we will act. (p. 35)

Reading on, you come to understand their point, and stand all amazed. Their argument becomes an indictment of the Church's program of presenting somewhat sanitized versions of Church history. Their argument -- if you don't present both sides of an issue, you rob people of the opportunity to make informed choices. And even if they make the wrong choices, this is preferable to not making choices at all.

Rather than presenting leaders who always make right decisions, the authors prefer leaders who make mistakes, who are inconsistent, because, as they say, inconsistency is the mark of a person who fully uses his moral agency, although not always choosing rightly.

Sedition? Heresy? They lay out their argument in a compelling and thought-provoking way. And someone ought to build a counter-argument that is equally persuasive.

Leaving this, we move on to the second theme of the book, and here we run into real trouble. In my worst Kabbalistic nightmares, in my deepest moments of Bible Code-induced depression, I've never read, or heard, anything quite like the Cohen method of scriptural exegesis and linguistic analysis.

A few examples should suffice. Beginning on page 44, the authors discuss what they consider a blatant mistranslation in the book of Revelation. (This follows an amazingly convoluted exposition on how the letter to the Hebrews was mistranslated, piling error upon error in their assumptions/conclusions. It's a masterpiece of muddled thinking, worth studying if only for its value as a primer on how NOT to exegete the Bible.) John, according to the authors, used 666 as the number of the beast in order to confuse his Roman captors. Vav is the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. 666, therefore, is "vav vav vav." And, inasmuch as vav is often transliterated "waw," it is plain to the enlightened mind that "666" is really "www." Ergo, the "mark of the beast" involves buying and selling on the Internet.

They see meaning in every letter, every combination of letters. They dissect words that ought not to be dissected, join ideas that ought not to be joined, and draw conclusions where they should not be drawn. And, all the while, they insist that there are errors in the Bible, not based on any manuscript evidence, but rather on the absence of such codes as they would expect to be there, based on their unique understanding of Scripture!

Their explanation of the word "adieu" is another example. (I cannot reproduce the Hebrew letters, so I use to indicate where they appear in the text.)

...when Joseph Smith translated the stick of Joseph, the French word adieu appeared through the Urim and Thummim (Jacob 7:27). Why a French word? Because on the Gold Plates was probably the encryption , which is transliterated AThIEU, or the French word adieu courtesy of the Hebraic sound shifts in French. You see, the language on the Gold Plates was reformed Egyptian (Morm. 9:32), which is Egyptian characters with Hebrew letters selectively interspersed..." (p. 81-82)

They go on to show how, if one fully parses this Hebrew word that supposedly appeared in Hebrew letters on the Gold plates, one finds a letter pattern that expands into an exposition of the Godhead. And all of this is in the context of the sadly-neglected, but true (in their view), teaching of Anglo-Israelism.

As a final example, chapter three makes comment on the odd spelling of "Wo" in the Book of Mormon. The authors contrive an evil meaning to it all, and find a parallel in "Ho ho ho," the familiar refrain of that wicked old man, Santa Claus.

I wish I had a window into the minds of the authors. How did they arrive at their conclusions? Indeed, what motivated them to write this book? I can see the motivation when it comes to the first theme. They're concerned that agency is being neglected through lack of information and discouragement of dissent. They see agency as that which makes us most like God, and cite such texts as "God repented" in Genesis to demonstrate that even God makes mistakes. Why should we be disturbed when mere mortals err?

But one wonders how they veered so far off the track when discussing Hebrew language, grammar, and its mystical aspects. I suppose that, once one transcends the limitations of textbooks and centuries of scholarship and tradition, there are no limits to the claims one may make. But it was once said of the mystic that "he scaled the highest heights, and plumbed the deepest depths, but he never paid cash." At some point, even the mystic must return to earth and consider the reasonableness, or otherwise, of his claims.

Irving Cohen is known as the "Mormon rabbi," as described on the dust cover. It appears that David Cohen is his son, although this is not made clear.

This book will be of no interest to the person wanting to garner facts. Instead, it lifts the reader from the solid, but predictable, ground of fact and scholarship into the heady mists of speculation and exegetical claptrap. In other words, I loved this book as an example of hallucinogenic nuttiness folded into a Jewish/Mormon context.

After all, in a world filled with boring, predictable books, who can ask for anything more?

Jeff Needle
jeff.needle@general.com