Kurt Manwaring has published an interview with Matthew Grey, over on his site, From the Desk. Grey earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. An excerpt from Manwaring’s site on Joseph Smith, translation and Hebrew is posted below; click over to From the Desk to read the rest!

Why did Joseph Smith assume he could gain insights into the Egyptian language and Book of Abraham by studying Hebrew?

Matthew Grey: There is evidence that many early Latter-day Saints—including Joseph Smith, W.W. Phelps, and Oliver Cowdery—naturally adopted some of the assumptions circulating in their nineteenth century intellectual climate, including the common views mentioned above that supernatural means were necessary to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and/or that Egyptian was a linguistic system related to Hebrew (both having descended from the original “pure language” of humanity) that could be illuminated through Hebraic insights.

These beliefs among Latter-day Saints were reflected in the translation of the Book of Mormon, which was originally written in a language understood to be an amalgamation of Hebrew and Egyptian (cf. 1 Nephi 1:2 and Mosiah 1:4); in their impression that the characters on the Egyptian papyri they acquired in 1835 resembled Hebrew letters; and in their efforts in mid-late 1835 to create the Egyptian alphabet documents, which contain slight traces of Hebrew letters and concepts as they understood them.

Therefore, even though scholars would approach these issues differently in the twenty-first century, it would have been natural in the early nineteenth century for Joseph Smith and his associates to view Hebrew as a valuable resource in their efforts to work with the Egyptian papyri.

Based on these observations and the extant evidence, it seems that this is why, shortly after the papyri arrived in Kirtland in the summer of 1835, Joseph started making arrangements for an academic Hebrew class to be taught in the local school later that year. (Because of difficulties finding a proper teacher, formal Hebrew coursework would not actually commence in Kirtland until January 1836.)

It was an initiative that Joseph believed would both benefit the ministry of Latter-day Saint leaders and help facilitate his own ongoing work with the Book of Abraham.