[wl]

> as ancient Hebrews would sometimes write in Egyptian characters when enscribing was difficult (metal plates!) because the Egyptian script was more concise.

That’s almost complete nonsense. You give me a chisel and I’ll carve Hebrew in Aramaic square script or paleo-Hebrew much faster than hieroglyphs. A angular hieratic might be a draw, but that’d also be needlessly complicated. The small part that’s not nonsense: some early Semitic texts are written in a simplified form of hieroglyphs that would later evolve into the alphabets we use today, including the usual scripts used to write Hebrew. But those writings weren’t any more concise by using simplified hieroglyphs verses another script.

This Mormon Sunday-school myth is born out of a misunderstanding of how Egyptian hieroglyphs work that impeded their decipherment from late antiquity until the early 1800’s. Namely, that hieroglyphs were some deep allegorical language where a single symbol could be emblematic of entire sentences or more. Joseph Smith apparently believed this, as evidenced by his attempts to translate Egyptian funerary texts as “The Book of Abraham.” We have interlinear manuscripts showing him translating entire sentences and paragraphs from single symbols.

This misunderstanding is further reflected in 1 Nephi 1:2, “I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.” There are ways to read that line that don’t implicate the widespread misunderstanding of how hieroglyphs work, but the misunderstanding is the one that was generally held at the time the Book of Mormon was published and continuing to today.