Hi Jeanie

Jeanie: Two references that explain the reason..... nothing suspicious to me.
The two passages you site state that he learned Egyptian but in his time it appears very very unlikely that he would have. It was a language virtually among the Israelites of 600BCE as far as we can tell and even if some did (there’s no evidence that any did but for arguments sake) why would he chose a language that only he among his people could read if he was recording this stuff for posterity or even as a memory prompter?

R2: It’s still hard to explain that Nephi quotes in around 590 BCE from a book that was not written till almost 200 years later. Malachi was written around 420 BCE.
Jeanie: The only scripture I'm aware of them quoting is from Isaiah.....
2 Nephi 22:15 is virtually word for word Malachi 4:1

Jeanie: It wasn't from the Book of Mormon (chapter and verse). Just referring to the ruins....probably stated poorly. (I'm sure you know something about that you'll refute... : ) Here, I;ll refute myself. Actually when I referred to people we didn't know of, its more civilizatoins...like ancient ones. Discovered in Peru, The Mayas, Aztecs.
That sounds like a stretch. It’s easy for a book to vaguely mention other people’s but you can’t then, rationally, stretch that to include any specific other people’s that are discovered. It needs to be specific to count for anything or he may have been talking about anyone.

By the way I’m just a few years younger than you. I remember the songs of 73 though not that one off the top of my head.

I also looked up "cockatrice’s, dragons, satyrs, fiery flying serpents" in 2nd Nephi and that is all from where he is quoting from Isaiah... (Chs. 11 & 15, etc.) That's the hardest part to get through in the Book of Mormon.... It is mostly talking about the coming Millenial reign. Isaiah is a hard book to understand... very symbolic.
Yes symbolic use of mystical creatures as if they really existed quoted from another book as if it were speaking the absolute truth. For me this still doesn’t answer why these creature are in the book. If they are not real, and I strongly suspect that they are not, why include them in a book that is supposed to speak god’s truth? Why would an angle related myth to Joseph Smith to be included in TboM, why not stick to truth so later readers would have one more clue to the validity of it?

All the best Jeanie

Russell