I dwell in the midst of them all; I now, therefore, have come down unto thee to declare unto thee the works which my hands have made, wherein my wisdom excelleth them all, for I rule in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath, in all wisdom and prudence, over all the intelligences thine eyes have seen from the beginning; I came down in the beginning in the midst of all the intelligences thou hast seen (Abraham 3:21). http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr/3.21-22?lang=eng
I am Atum, when I was alone in Nun [the encircling waters], (but) I am Re when he appeared at the moment when he began to govern that which he created (Book of the Dead, chapter 17, quoted in Francoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 49).
I am struck by how forcefully the Lord repeats the words I and all in Abraham 3:21, a repetition recalling the mysterious expression hen kai pan (One and All) that figures so largely in historical understanding of the Divine in Egypt. Professor Erik Hornung's revolutionary work on Egyptian conceptions of deity bears the title: The One and the Many. (Perhaps it should be titled, The One and the All.)
The phrase hen kai pan describes the Eternal Round of the ourobouros, the serpent devouring its own tail, an ancient Egyptian motif--even as it also recalls the round of the hypocephalus. Note the emphasis on the idea of the all-encompassing circle in verse 21, the circle of intelligences and of Divine intelligence: The Book of Abraham certainly earns its hermetic designation. Or consider how the Book of Abraham, while introducing a stunned 19th century readership to the notion of a plurality of gods and of divine intelligences, at once insists on remaining fundamentally--Abrahamically--monotheistic. Hen kai pan. (See Jan Assmann's Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism; Nibley and Rhodes also discuss the ourobouros in One Eternal Round.)
"I came down in the beginning"--the words accord with the teachings of both the Book of the Dead and the round hypocephalus. The hypocephalus depicts and describes coming and going between the worlds, as we shall see.
On the rim of the hypocephalus we find the words: jnk Db3.ty m Hw.t bnbn m jwnw q3 3x zp 2 (I am the Djebaty--the one of the Djeba--in the House of the Benben in Heliopolis, On High, On High; Glorious; Glorious). The first lesson in reading Facsimile 2 centers around that one title: Djebaty. Hugh Nibley, who calls it "perhaps the most significant word on the Joseph Smith hypocephalus," pauses long over that significant word until the lesson is learned, the lesson of many meanings, many shades of meaning.
Djebaty bespeaks mystery: Djebat "is the name of a place or a building," a "dwelling of the gods, Palace, Chapel," as also box or chest. Djebaty (lit. the one of the Djebat) is the relational (nisba) form ending in -y, and, says Conrad Leemans, signals "both a divine person and a personified object." Djebat, continues Nibley: "is also the name of the ancient city of Edfu to which the hypocephali properly belong, according to Speleers." Indeed the hypocephali "invoke and represent the Sun of Edfu, considered from of old 'the most perfect form of cosmic energy'" (Hugh Nibley, "The Three Facsimilies from the Book of Abraham," 1980, citing Louis Speleers, Catalogue des intailles et empreintes orientales des Musees Royaux de Art et de Histoire, Supplement, Bruxelles, 1943; Hugh Nibley and Michael Rhodes, One Eternal Round, 335 [and section headings: 'Between Heaven and Earth,' 335-340, and 'The Ceremonial Complex,' 340-341], quoting Conrad Leemans, "Hypocephale egyptien du Musee Royal Neerlandais d'Antiquites a Leide," in Actes du sixieme Congres Internationale des Orientalistes, 1885, 125-26, italics added).
To the many possible readings of Db3.ty, several of which point to the nature and roles of the cosmic deity, I add still another. Because Db3 (Djeba), at Edfu, can also refer to the reed that springs from the primeval mound, we could also translate Db3.ty as "the one of the primeval reed," that is, "the one of the primeval resting place." All this suggests the descent of the Creator at the beginning: "I came down in the beginning." The Edfu cosmology, in fact, yields two words (nbi.t, Db3) for the reed "upon which the first Falcon deity might perch" (David Klotz, Adoration of the Ram, 106). And such sacred writings, it should be remembered, are indeed "to be found in the temple of God," being literally engraven on the walls of Edfu Temple.
But what has a reed perch to do with the House of the Benben in Heliopolis?
I was alone together with Nun in inertness,
I not having found a place to sit or to stand.
Heliopolis not having been founded so I might be there,
The Papyrus Stalk (w3D) not having been bound so I might sit upon it.
(Great Amun Hymn cited in Adoration of the Ram, 106)
W3D, by the way, appears in the central panel of another hypocephalus where four baboons offer what appear to be two lotuses and two papyrus stalks to a two-headed ram in the freshness of morning. The same panel on that very same hypocephalus (Turin 2333), yet bright with reds and greens, also features a heron or two on a perch! The heron, my favorite bird, is the bennu-bird, and naturally also suggests the Benben-house of Heliopolis. The perching heron signifies the seasonal flood: it rests on a perch while the flood inundates the land below. "Perhaps in a sense," says Professor Stephen Quirke, "the benu means the shining [Eg. wbn] of the sun at the water, on the first moment of creation." "The benu presides over the flood," over the creation of the world (The Cult of Ra: Sun Worship in Ancient Egypt, 29). Should we consider for a moment the designation db3.tj in the sense of the "one of the reed perch," we thus find the Shining at the Water, the Presiding Power who descends in glory to unlock and set in motion the cascade of teeming creation.
Returning to Turin 2333, we first find, on the far-left side of the panel, what apparently is the heron on its traditional three-pointed perch; then, just to the right, the heron again (this time clearly) on a much larger perch, a three-pronged spear topped by a r3-sign; finally, on the opposite end, we find another three-pronged sign topped by a spear point, a sign of the East. These symbols signal time and place and action. Together, perching birds and sprouts and flowers tell one unfolding story of creation.
In the Great Amun Hymn the foundation of Heliopolis and the up-springing of the Perch go together. Egyptologists explain Heliopolis as being, primarily, a place in the heavens, even the Celestial Heliopolis (Dietrich Raue, Heliopolis und das Haus des Re, 1999). Perhaps Heliopolis spans heaven and earth, like a bridge. It thus becomes a middle place, a landing--suspended like Babel's Tower--between the worlds. The House of the Benben, as the place of the benben-stone, a pillar, is, in fact, also the place of the perch. No wonder the god is described on the hypocephalus rim as doubly lofty, even exalted (q3j), as well as doubly glorious. The descending god, alighting on his Reed or Pillar or Stalk, brightens the new creation, the first creation, with a shock of light. Descent is sunrise! Again, the hieroglyph of the heron on a perch not only denotes the inundation (imHw; b'H; also nTr), it also connotes a veritable flood of light. (So also is the Pearl of Great Price "a veritable flood of light.") Doubly exalted, doubly glorious Kolob bathes the worlds in cascading apportionment.
The Djeba at Edfu can in fact be any "solid element," however seeming fine: "In certain cases," we are told, "the name of the solid element that appeared at the beginning served as a support and justification for the sacred etymology that explained the name of the temple or its city: thus Edfu, Djeba, which derived from the name of the 'floater' (djeba) that drifted on the waters there" (Francoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 51; cf. what Nibley says about the Latin word fundamentum). The floater described here is a reed floater, a touch of element at odds with chaotic swirl. At Esna, the place of resting becomes "a platform of land (set) in the midst of the initial waters, that I might lean [rest] on it!" (Ibid, 51). The Djeba is, then, any place, however tenuous seeming, upon which the Creator descends to begin to govern that which he created. The later temple at Edfu (or Djeba) thus also becomes the place of universal governance, the "temple of the world" ("Egypt is the temple of the world").
Djeba also signifies the bright harpoon of Horus, a most sacred object, that bespeaks both possession and victory. (No surprise, then, to spy Horus with his spear on the lower half of Turin 2333, and elsewhere.) "Descent, in Afroasiatic semantics, connotes 'battle': it is the swift descent upon an enemy, with ringing battle-cry. And the descent (or attack) stirs the hidden, passive depths into action" (Val Sederholm, Papyrus British Museum 10808 and Its Cultural and Religious Setting, 78).
Db3.ty, which famously denotes Osiris in his coffin, box, or shrine (all Djeba), at the nadir of all things, may therefore at once signify, in a "coincidence of opposites," "the one of the lofty reed perch" or "he who pertains to the reed perch." The United-Ba of Re and Osiris, who takes the form of the Ram of Mendes, linked as he is to the Cosmic Amun, becomes the "ultimate, transcendent deity, residing simultaneously in heaven and earth" (David Klotz, Adoration of the Ram, 168). "The key theological concern of later Egyptian religion [is] the solar-Osirian opposition. The opposition, the balancing of the poles of the universe, also holds the key to the workings of life in all three of its manifest (or hidden) realms: heaven, earth (or temple) and Netherworld. Re and Osiris meet, in a moment of awful suspense, in order to reconcile life's contrarieties and ensure its continual renewal. In response to the mighty shout of joy that follows in the wake of the sun, the cold, hidden world of death stirs inwardly into blossom" (Papyrus British Museum 10808, 77).
The reed marks both place and moment of descent; it marks the holy moment of investiture, of inhabitation, of enlivening, even an at-one-ment of worlds above and below (see Papyrus British Museum 10808, 66). "I came down in the beginning in the midst of all the intelligences (Eg. 3x.w)": I came down to earth, to the primeval hill, to the First Creation, as Tatenen, as Shepsi, as Amun, the Cosmic Creative god. And--I came down, as Re, to hear the words of Osiris. At Hibis the Mendesian Ram, our Kolob ram, bears the epithet sDm-wrj, the Great Listener (Klotz, Adoration of the Ram, 170; "to hear the words of Osiris": on the right-hand panel of Facsimile 2, as now reconstructed, Re descends to hear Osiris' petition). The Mendesian Ram thus also belongs to the theme of "personal piety" in New Kingdom Egypt and later; the fourfaced Ram is the Listener who hears and answers prayers.
Tatenen? Shepsi? David Klotz (Adoration of the Ram, 78, 100-101) reminds us that the hieroglyphic sign for Sps (noble) or Shepsi (the Noble one), in its Late Period form, may also be read as Tnn (distinguished) or t3-Tnn (Tatenen, the creator associated with the primeval mound, as "distinguished earth"). And if it may so be read, it must be so read: so the rule in Egyptian. (The two high feathers of the noble on this sign link it also, to be sure, with figure 2, Oliblish.) A prayer beginning with the invocation "O netjer Shepsi (Tatanen) in the Zep Tepi" (O Noble God in the First Time--the pregnant moment of Descent) resounds with the mythological and ritual depths of Hermopolitan cosmology; for it is in Hermopolis that Shepsi names the creative solar god, later also associated with the Cosmic Amun. (One Eternal Round treats the symbolism of Tatenen's crown as worn by Oliblish.)
The hypocephalus enfolds a book of prayer. And prayer sets the entire cosmic circle into motion--brings it into reach of hands--then Osiris finds rescue in his ultimate extremity. In the most sacred panel of all--the Prophet Joseph refuses to interpret it--prayer bids resurrection: "May the ba of Osiris live." The ordinance, says Joseph, "cannot be revealed to the world"; the panel of hieroglyphs, which we so facilely render into our own idiom by appealing to a lexicon, nevertheless "contains writings" beyond our ability to unpack (Explanation no. 8). The Prophet's language calls to mind John 21:25, the final doctrine of the apostle about how darkness comprehendeth not the light: "I suppose that even the world [ton kosmon] itself could not contain the books that should be written." Here is the ultimate outcome of there being no room in the inn.
Book of Abraham Facsimile 2 contains the world itself--the All--in its circle. Yet the panels and rim hold but seeming wisps of text. Who shall unravel them into that coherent whole imaged by the hypocephalus itself? Given the packed synthetic grammar as also the broadly allusive quality of these writings, writings which bind the secret cosmogonic fullness of one ancient religious center to another in crisp one liners, only a fool would claim competency. The very simplicity of the signs and the ease of dictionary translation become a double barrier that fences the kernel of meaning from view. Such matters ultimately require a divine touch and a seeric insight, a Zaphnath-Paaneah, Joseph.
And the Prophet Joseph both confirms our hopes, even as he holds forth yet more to come. Abraham's book opens with the blazing descent as divine rescue from the sacrifical altar--Abraham's petition has been heard. The petition, as Abraham gradually comes to realize, but echoes those of other worlds in which intelligences carefully sought, in repeated and earnest petition, ever greater light and knowledge. Thus, in the final chapter of his little book, Abraham's creation account beautifully and properly (re-)opens with the bright descent from world to world to world: "I came down in the beginning in the midst of all the intelligences." Then, Abraham narrates: "And there stood one among them that was like
unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for
there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell" (3:24).
Notes
One wonders whether Zaphnath-Paaneah might not signify: db3 nTr p3 'anx, the one who the god, the Living One, clothes (with office, honor, endowment, dignities). The god, the Living One, could refer to Osiris or even to the king himself. I do not believe anyone has suggested such an interpretation of the name, but it works. After all Hebrew Zp matches perfectly Eg. Db. Db' signifies ring or seal: the seal of God, the Living One. I like the reading: Pharaoh calls Joseph "the one clothed with honor of office by the god, the Living One."
Friday, April 20, 2012
An Egyptologist Looks at Book of Abraham Facsimile 2: The August God and the "noble and great ones"
I have recently looked at Professor Robert K. Ritner's attempt to translate Facsimile 2 of the Book of Abraham (The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition, "Hypocephalus of Sheshonq," 215-226). Among other useful observations, Professor Ritner reads the sign found in figure 12 not as sDr.w (asleep) but Sps (noble). Upon reexamination of the sign, I concur. Close comparison of the Church Historian's copy and of Hedlock against other hypocephali, which often speak of the "noble god," shows that the upper half of the Sps sign had been partially rubbed away or torn. So much for my wonderful ideas in an earlier post ("Book of Abraham Facsimile 2: A New Reading") about Kolob as the god asleep in the zp tpj. "Twixt wake and sleep," Kolob stands awake.
Getting things wrong is what it's all about--what learning is all about. We should be profoundly grateful for any new knowledge about Facsimile 2 of the sacred Book of Abraham, and, in this case, the new reading of the sign has enormous significance.
Sps instead of sDr? I had wondered about the same thing, yet strongly resisted the idea. In place of j nTr Spsj m zp tpj (O noble god in the first time), I had read--concurring with earlier translations and in light of my wonderful theory--j nTr sDr m zp tpj (O god sleeping in the first time). Besides, the -s that confirms the reading Sps had either been partly erased or is not clear from the original copy of the hypocephalus: Sps + s = Sps. So thanks to Dr. Ritner!
We must consider m zp tpj (in the first moment), in this case, to mean the same as hrw pn nj msw.t=f (this day of his birth ~ sunrise ~ in the first moment), as found on another hypocephalus. In other words, the appeal to a "princely, exalted, lordly, noble, high-ranking god (manifest) in the First Moment" is an appeal to the most exalted entity among the "noble and great ones," one whose descending brightness and brilliance fill the entire universe with light and life. He is thus also lord of heaven, earth, netherworld, waters, mountains, etc, with power to enliven the Osirian Ba. According to the Prophet Joseph, Figure 1 (Kolob) signifies "the first creation" and is also "First in government." If nTr Spsj speaks of a princely, or principal, governing god, then m zp tpj, "in the first time," matches "the first creation."
How nicely everything matches up. The third chapter of Abraham records the vision of Kolob and the stars--thus matching Facsimile 2--and Abraham 3:22 goes on to speak of the "noble and great ones" at the morn of creation (m zp tpj). Should we then be surprised to find on Facsimile 2 a pairing of the same words: "great" and "noble"? On the left-hand panel we read both j nTr Spsj (O noble god; Leiden AMS 62: O noble ba-spirit) and nTr a3 (great god) on the right: j nTr pf a3 (O this great god). How closely "noble" and "great" belong together in these texts is made clear by the wording of the left-hand panels on Leiden AMS 62. The prayer found thereon matches that of Facsimile 2, with one exception. The prayer begins: j nTr pf Spsj instead of a3. Abraham, we are told, stood among those who qualified as both Sps and a3--and so does his restored book of scripture stand among the records of antiquity.
To find "noble and great" as yoke-fellows not on the hypocephali alone but also in Abraham chapter 3 is what Hugh Nibley would call a "direct hit" for the Book of Abraham. The translation of Abraham 3:22 thus partakes of "the specific and the peculiar" (another phrase from Nibley), which means not only specific to the culture and language but peculiar to a specific kind of document and to a specific theme. (The principal theme of Abraham 3 is the nature of greatness and rank.)
And since we are talking about the hypocephalus, a specific document, or collection of documents, let us also remember how Joseph Smith, in his last doctrinal discourse, June 16, 1844, spoke specifically about translating Abraham Chapter 3 from " the papyrus now in my house." The translation "noble and great" derives from both the hieroglyphic and hieratic writings found directly on papyri in Joseph's keeping (Andrew E. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook (eds), The Words of Joseph Smith, 380). The panels on Facsimile 2 make the matter clear.
I note of late a faddish skepticism about the Book of Abraham. I meet such intellectual posing, such prompt dismissal, with wonder.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr?lang=eng
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr/fac-2?lang=eng
Getting things wrong is what it's all about--what learning is all about. We should be profoundly grateful for any new knowledge about Facsimile 2 of the sacred Book of Abraham, and, in this case, the new reading of the sign has enormous significance.
Sps instead of sDr? I had wondered about the same thing, yet strongly resisted the idea. In place of j nTr Spsj m zp tpj (O noble god in the first time), I had read--concurring with earlier translations and in light of my wonderful theory--j nTr sDr m zp tpj (O god sleeping in the first time). Besides, the -s that confirms the reading Sps had either been partly erased or is not clear from the original copy of the hypocephalus: Sps + s = Sps. So thanks to Dr. Ritner!
We must consider m zp tpj (in the first moment), in this case, to mean the same as hrw pn nj msw.t=f (this day of his birth ~ sunrise ~ in the first moment), as found on another hypocephalus. In other words, the appeal to a "princely, exalted, lordly, noble, high-ranking god (manifest) in the First Moment" is an appeal to the most exalted entity among the "noble and great ones," one whose descending brightness and brilliance fill the entire universe with light and life. He is thus also lord of heaven, earth, netherworld, waters, mountains, etc, with power to enliven the Osirian Ba. According to the Prophet Joseph, Figure 1 (Kolob) signifies "the first creation" and is also "First in government." If nTr Spsj speaks of a princely, or principal, governing god, then m zp tpj, "in the first time," matches "the first creation."
How nicely everything matches up. The third chapter of Abraham records the vision of Kolob and the stars--thus matching Facsimile 2--and Abraham 3:22 goes on to speak of the "noble and great ones" at the morn of creation (m zp tpj). Should we then be surprised to find on Facsimile 2 a pairing of the same words: "great" and "noble"? On the left-hand panel we read both j nTr Spsj (O noble god; Leiden AMS 62: O noble ba-spirit) and nTr a3 (great god) on the right: j nTr pf a3 (O this great god). How closely "noble" and "great" belong together in these texts is made clear by the wording of the left-hand panels on Leiden AMS 62. The prayer found thereon matches that of Facsimile 2, with one exception. The prayer begins: j nTr pf Spsj instead of a3. Abraham, we are told, stood among those who qualified as both Sps and a3--and so does his restored book of scripture stand among the records of antiquity.
To find "noble and great" as yoke-fellows not on the hypocephali alone but also in Abraham chapter 3 is what Hugh Nibley would call a "direct hit" for the Book of Abraham. The translation of Abraham 3:22 thus partakes of "the specific and the peculiar" (another phrase from Nibley), which means not only specific to the culture and language but peculiar to a specific kind of document and to a specific theme. (The principal theme of Abraham 3 is the nature of greatness and rank.)
And since we are talking about the hypocephalus, a specific document, or collection of documents, let us also remember how Joseph Smith, in his last doctrinal discourse, June 16, 1844, spoke specifically about translating Abraham Chapter 3 from " the papyrus now in my house." The translation "noble and great" derives from both the hieroglyphic and hieratic writings found directly on papyri in Joseph's keeping (Andrew E. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook (eds), The Words of Joseph Smith, 380). The panels on Facsimile 2 make the matter clear.
I note of late a faddish skepticism about the Book of Abraham. I meet such intellectual posing, such prompt dismissal, with wonder.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr?lang=eng
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr/fac-2?lang=eng
Friday, March 9, 2012
What is it like to do baptisms for the dead in the Temple?
So what is it really like to perform proxy ordinances in the Salt Lake Temple? It's not a simple matter to explain--and yet it is all quite simple.
How can one speak the love that suddenly engulfs the heart for progenitors long deceased? We know there is no death. There is no death as the world understands death. Our ancestors live on. We shall meet.
But this much we can explain: we descend into a large round basin of water and are immersed for another in the name of Jesus Christ (see 3 Nephi 11:23, 27). After changing into dry clothing, we enter a nearby room, where two bearers of the Melchizedek Priesthood place their hands on our heads and in the name of Jesus Christ confirm us, for another, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost. Taken together, immersion and confirmation make up one act of baptism, the legal gateway into the Kingdom of God. Even Jesus Christ received the ordinance of baptism; the Holy Ghost descended like a dove.
I cull the following description from my own journal.
How can one speak the love that suddenly engulfs the heart for progenitors long deceased? We know there is no death. There is no death as the world understands death. Our ancestors live on. We shall meet.
But this much we can explain: we descend into a large round basin of water and are immersed for another in the name of Jesus Christ (see 3 Nephi 11:23, 27). After changing into dry clothing, we enter a nearby room, where two bearers of the Melchizedek Priesthood place their hands on our heads and in the name of Jesus Christ confirm us, for another, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost. Taken together, immersion and confirmation make up one act of baptism, the legal gateway into the Kingdom of God. Even Jesus Christ received the ordinance of baptism; the Holy Ghost descended like a dove.
I cull the following description from my own journal.
November 10, 2006
Today in the baptistry of the Salt Lake Temple I participated both as proxy and as officiator in baptisms and voice in confirmations. A mother and little girl came into the baptistry office and disappeared down the hall. They walked around a bit. They came into the confirmation room where I was to act as voice in the confirmation of my Danish ancestors. I asked the little girl her name. “Leah.” She was Leah Jeppsen and had long yellow hair and cherry-red cheeks and a light in her eyes. It was her 12th birthday and the first time she had come to the House of the Lord. After she was confirmed, her mother said to her: “Now you’ve done temple work.” A beautiful day.
Proxy, Parable, and Priesthood: Official Declarations 1 and 2. The Doctrines of Baptism for the Dead and of Priesthood: A Shaft of Light from the Throne of God to our Hearts
I. Proxy, Parable, and Priesthood
Doctrine and Covenants, Official Declarations 1 and 2
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od?lang=eng
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/2?lang=eng
Doctrine and Covenants, Official Declarations 1 and 2
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od?lang=eng
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/2?lang=eng
What was true in 1890 stands true today. Let us, then, duly liken the word of scripture given to yesterday’s prophet unto ourselves. To liken is to think "para-bolically": it is to make parables--and it is for those with ears to hear, to hear.
(Private members of the Church may dream in parables but must never shove hands at the ox-borne ark.)
“Press dispatches having been sent for political purposes, from Salt Lake City, which have been widely published, to the effect that [certain parties] “in their recent report to” [other parties] “allege that [baptisms for the dead for unauthorized persons] have been contracted” “during the past year.”
“I, therefore, as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, do hereby, in the most solemn manner, declare that these charges are false. We are not teaching [members to perform unauthorized or celebrity baptisms nor endorsing doctrines having to do with the history of priesthood availability], nor permitting [that is to say, authorizing] any person to enter into its practice.”
“I hereby declare my [continued commitment or] intention to submit to those [agreements and policies already contracted], and to use [technology and] my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.”
Again: “Whatever was done in this matter was without my knowledge.” “There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably [note the word well] construed to inculcate or encourage [such baptisms or any doctrinal speculation about priesthood availability], and when any [member] of the Church has used language which appeared to convey any such teaching, he has been promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from [participating in unauthorized baptisms or teachings].”
Following the signature of Wilford Woodruff to this official declaration, we further learn that the living President of the Church of Jesus Christ is “the only man on the earth at the present time who holds the keys of the sealing ordinances.” Any baptism, confirmation, ordination, endowment, sealing, or even teaching, of which the living Prophet does not approve, and so approving duly confirm or seal, “are of no efficacy, virtue, or force."
For: “All covenants, contracts, bonds, obligations, oaths, vows, performances, connections, associations, and expectations, that are not made, entered into, and sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, of him who is anointed. . . are of no efficacy, virtue, or force in or after the resurrection from the dead ” (Doctrine and Covenants 132:7). President Thomas S. Monson holds the keys of the sealing ordinances today.
For: “All covenants, contracts, bonds, obligations, oaths, vows, performances, connections, associations, and expectations, that are not made, entered into, and sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, of him who is anointed. . . are of no efficacy, virtue, or force in or after the resurrection from the dead ” (Doctrine and Covenants 132:7). President Thomas S. Monson holds the keys of the sealing ordinances today.
Three pointed questions logically follow:
Will I accept of an offering, saith the Lord, that is not made in my name?
Or will I receive at your hands that which I have not appointed?
And will I appoint unto you, saith the Lord, except it be by law, even as I and my Father ordained unto you, before the world was?
The conclusion is clear: "For whatsoever things remain are by me; and whatsoever things are not by me shall be shaken and destroyed" (Doctrine and Covenants 132: 9-11; 14, http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/132?lang=eng).
Let go the parable and turn to the words of the very same prophet of yesterday, the same prophet who dedicated the Salt Lake Temple on April 6, 1893.
Upon first learning of the doctrine of baptism for the dead, Wilford Woodruff wrote:
“It was like a shaft of light from the throne of God to our hearts. It opened a field wide as eternity to our minds.”
“It appeared to me that the God who revealed that principle unto man was wise, just and true, possessed both the best of attributes and good sense and knowledge. I felt he was consistent with both love, mercy, justice and judgment, and I felt to love the Lord more than ever before in my life. . . . I felt to say hallelujah when the revelation came forth revealing to us baptism for the dead.”
“The first thing that entered into my mind was that I had a mother in the spirit world. She died when I was 14 months old. I never knew [my] mother” (Teachings of Presidents of the Church--Wilford Woodruff, 185: http://www.lds.org/manual/teachings-wilford-woodruff/chapter-18?lang=eng).
III. The 1978 Revelation on Priesthood: A "Fully Sufficient Answer"
We turn now to 4 May 1978 and 1 June 1978 and to the matter of Official Declaration 2, the Revelation on Priesthood:
"At the end of the joint meeting of the Presidency and Twelve on May 4 [1978], when the priesthood policy was discussed, [Elder] LeGrand Richards asked permission to make a statement. He then reported:
'I saw during the meeting a man seated in a chair above the organ, bearded and dressed in white, having the appearance of Wilford Woodruff. . . . I am not a visionary man. . . . This was not imagination. . . . It might be that I was privileged to see him because I am the only one here who had seen President Woodruff in person.' "
1 June 1978, following the Revelation on Priesthood (Declaration 2):
"President Kimball also later said, I felt an overwhelming spirit there, a rushing flood of unity such as we had never had before.' And he knew that the fully sufficient answer had come.
Emotion overflowed as the group lingered. When someone reminded President Kimball of the earlier appearance of Wilford Woodruff to LeGrand Richards in the room, Spencer said he thought it natural: 'President Woodruff would have been very much interested, because he went through something of the same sort of experience' with the Manifesto" (Edward L. Kimball, BYU Studies, "Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood," 52-3; 59).
President Woodruff's favorite hymn was "God Moves in a Mysterious Way," which includes the following thoughts:
Ye fearful Saints, fresh courage take;
The Clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan his works in vain;
God is his own interpreter,
And he will make it plain.
We need not apologize for God's mysterious ways, however embarrassing these may prove to us. Better to suffer so, than to make of God's ways a trivial journey.
Young Joseph Smith struggled for two years prior to receiving the First Vision, and was "upbraided not." And the long pleadings for knowledge about the priesthood chastened the prophetic soul of President Spencer W. Kimball. Yet the revelation came not as a rebuke: Official Declaration 2 speaks five times of blessings; it speaks of privileges and promises and temples. No one was chastened; though--as ever--our ignorance was replaced with added light.
“The first thing that entered into my mind was that I had a mother in the spirit world. She died when I was 14 months old. I never knew [my] mother” (Teachings of Presidents of the Church--Wilford Woodruff, 185: http://www.lds.org/manual/teachings-wilford-woodruff/chapter-18?lang=eng).
III. The 1978 Revelation on Priesthood: A "Fully Sufficient Answer"
We turn now to 4 May 1978 and 1 June 1978 and to the matter of Official Declaration 2, the Revelation on Priesthood:
"At the end of the joint meeting of the Presidency and Twelve on May 4 [1978], when the priesthood policy was discussed, [Elder] LeGrand Richards asked permission to make a statement. He then reported:
'I saw during the meeting a man seated in a chair above the organ, bearded and dressed in white, having the appearance of Wilford Woodruff. . . . I am not a visionary man. . . . This was not imagination. . . . It might be that I was privileged to see him because I am the only one here who had seen President Woodruff in person.' "
"President Kimball also later said, I felt an overwhelming spirit there, a rushing flood of unity such as we had never had before.' And he knew that the fully sufficient answer had come.
Emotion overflowed as the group lingered. When someone reminded President Kimball of the earlier appearance of Wilford Woodruff to LeGrand Richards in the room, Spencer said he thought it natural: 'President Woodruff would have been very much interested, because he went through something of the same sort of experience' with the Manifesto" (Edward L. Kimball, BYU Studies, "Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood," 52-3; 59).
President Woodruff's favorite hymn was "God Moves in a Mysterious Way," which includes the following thoughts:
Ye fearful Saints, fresh courage take;
The Clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan his works in vain;
God is his own interpreter,
And he will make it plain.
We need not apologize for God's mysterious ways, however embarrassing these may prove to us. Better to suffer so, than to make of God's ways a trivial journey.
Young Joseph Smith struggled for two years prior to receiving the First Vision, and was "upbraided not." And the long pleadings for knowledge about the priesthood chastened the prophetic soul of President Spencer W. Kimball. Yet the revelation came not as a rebuke: Official Declaration 2 speaks five times of blessings; it speaks of privileges and promises and temples. No one was chastened; though--as ever--our ignorance was replaced with added light.
Notes
I do not propose to speak to the history of plural marriage nor of the role of the Manifesto (Official Declaration 1) in ending the practice. The above remarks contemplate the doctrine of the keys of the sealing power, whereby approved ordinances alone are made binding and efficacious by the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Even then, the recipient of the sacrament retains full right of reception or refusal.) All other ordinances, no matter where performed or by whom--and no matter the temporary record--are illegal, null, and void in the sight of the Church and in the sight of God. An attempted baptism for the dead becomes a far different thing than an offering or a record "worthy of all acceptation" (Doctrine and Covenants 128:24).
Initial misunderstandings are only to be expected, but for writers, possibly through neglect of accessible sources, to continue to ignore the plain doctrines about priesthood keys, sealing powers, baptisms, and "a house of order" becomes tantamount to misrepresentation.
The readily available revelations published by the Prophet Joseph Smith over 150 years ago that have bearing on proxy work, or baptism for the dead include: Doctrine and Covenants 110, 124, 127, 128, 132, 137 (and 138: President Joseph F. Smith). See also 1 Corinthians 15:29, the Pauline basis for proxy baptism. Recent articles in the Deseret News treat the latest statements by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about unauthorized baptisms for the dead, including facts about the latest technology to block illegal submissions of names. The real news, of course, is that the dead live on in a world of eternal opportunity and that God continues to speak through His authorized servants today.
The Latter-day Saint people, who overflow with all but boundless admiration for our Jewish brothers and sisters, are outraged by unauthorized baptisms for the dead. Besides, such illegal actions (and by illegal I mean actions which invoke God's name and authority in vain), instantaneously become yet another club for our non-Jewish critics with which to beat us over the head. The following articles show some understanding of Mormon doctrine within the American Jewish community:
"Outraged by Mormon Proxy Baptism? Not this Jew," 29 Feb. 2010, patriotpost.us
I do not propose to speak to the history of plural marriage nor of the role of the Manifesto (Official Declaration 1) in ending the practice. The above remarks contemplate the doctrine of the keys of the sealing power, whereby approved ordinances alone are made binding and efficacious by the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Even then, the recipient of the sacrament retains full right of reception or refusal.) All other ordinances, no matter where performed or by whom--and no matter the temporary record--are illegal, null, and void in the sight of the Church and in the sight of God. An attempted baptism for the dead becomes a far different thing than an offering or a record "worthy of all acceptation" (Doctrine and Covenants 128:24).
Initial misunderstandings are only to be expected, but for writers, possibly through neglect of accessible sources, to continue to ignore the plain doctrines about priesthood keys, sealing powers, baptisms, and "a house of order" becomes tantamount to misrepresentation.
The readily available revelations published by the Prophet Joseph Smith over 150 years ago that have bearing on proxy work, or baptism for the dead include: Doctrine and Covenants 110, 124, 127, 128, 132, 137 (and 138: President Joseph F. Smith). See also 1 Corinthians 15:29, the Pauline basis for proxy baptism. Recent articles in the Deseret News treat the latest statements by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about unauthorized baptisms for the dead, including facts about the latest technology to block illegal submissions of names. The real news, of course, is that the dead live on in a world of eternal opportunity and that God continues to speak through His authorized servants today.
The Latter-day Saint people, who overflow with all but boundless admiration for our Jewish brothers and sisters, are outraged by unauthorized baptisms for the dead. Besides, such illegal actions (and by illegal I mean actions which invoke God's name and authority in vain), instantaneously become yet another club for our non-Jewish critics with which to beat us over the head. The following articles show some understanding of Mormon doctrine within the American Jewish community:
"Outraged by Mormon Proxy Baptism? Not this Jew," 29 Feb. 2010, patriotpost.us
Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, 29 Feb. 2012, "Mormon Ritual is no Threat to Jews."
Thursday, December 8, 2011
The Book of Abraham: Case Closed (Or, Sarah to the Rescue)
What Hugh Nibley Meant (about the Book of Breathings). Or, How Sarah Puts the Crowning Touch on the Revealed Book of Abraham
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr?lang=eng
I
"Since the beginning," writes Hugh Nibley in 2001, "the Pearl of Great Price has been waiting in the wings, held in reserve for a special time. It would seem that time is now, for within a decade of the publication of the Joseph Smith Papyri in 1968 (after their rediscovery in 1967), strange and portentous things have happened" ("Approach to John Gee, Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri," FARMS Review 13:2 (2001), 63-4). Too modest to include his own work among these "portentous things," another's lips will now praise.
The Pearl of Great Price was indeed held in reserve for a special time, the lifetime of a special man, who, even beyond his lifetime, "being dead yet speaketh." So wrote President John Taylor of Parley P. Pratt; now, five years after Brother Nibley's call to "that near-touching land," we learn with joy from his encyclopaedic study of Book of Abraham Facsimile 2, One Eternal Round. The work also brings to a round, full circle, the flurry of criticism encompassing the Book of Abraham: "Come, lay your books and papers by": "The teacher's work is done."
If there ever was a time to discover what Hugh Nibley has to teach us about books of Enoch, Moses, and Abraham, it would seem that time is now.
Things really got going in 1976 with Hugh Nibley's publication of The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment. The volume advanced the once unwelcome thesis that the Book of Breathings, following the pattern of prior Egyptian funerary writings (like the Book of the Dead and the Netherworld Books), constitutes, in theme and structure, a ceremony of initiation. Nibley further showed how the Book of Breathings finds parallels in both early Jewish and Christian texts. Although nearly ignored in bibliography, Hugh Nibley's work made its rounds and proved revolutionary among students of Ancient Egyptian religion. (The official annual notice of egyptological bibliography, while praising the work, cautions readers about some of its "Mormon" ideas.)
Today studies about initiation and mystery meet with greater acceptance. A good introduction to the evidence appears in Heidelberg Professor Jan Assmann's Tod und Jenseits im Alten Aegypten [Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt]. I can't say how diligently Professor Assmann has studied Nibley's work--the theme of initiation (if not salvation!) is now in the air and very popular--but the two volumes do make for powerful bookends. Given the profound influence of Hugh Nibley's thorough work, an influence only at its first stages, I may be excused for putting forward some of his ideas in my own words in what now follows.
II
According to the Book of the Dead Chapter 162, the purpose of the hypocephalus (Book of Abraham, Facsimile 2) is "to spark a flame under the head" of the deceased. Because the verb bz (to spark a flame) matches the word for initiation (bz) into the mysterious workings of the divine order, we may safely conclude that the hypocephalus, like the Book of Breathings, has to do with initiation (see Nibley and Rhodes, One Eternal Round). As recent studies show, the head of the mummy now corresponds to the sun: the spark blazes into a corona of eternal glory. The hypocephalus symbolizes a new head, and thus a new divine life, for the deceased. Osiris so-and-so, the deceased, finds transformation as enthroned Osiris wearing the Atef Crown, a crown of light, often decorated with solar globes. No wonder Facsimile 1 (which shows the stirring to life of the one on the lion couch), attached as it is to a Book of Breathings, is followed--but only in the inspired Book of Abraham!--by the hypocephalus (as Facsimile 2). And no wonder Facsimile 3, which shows the initiand seated on a throne (according to Brother Joseph) and crowned with the Atef, is preceded--but only in the inspired Book of Abraham--by the hypocephalus. Did the Book of Breathings owned by Joseph Smith feature a hypocephalus? Nibley apparently thought so; at any rate, he saw in the three facsimiles the three stages of progression: death, transformation, glory. The Prophet Joseph Smith does well to place the hypocephalus in the middle, as if to signal the means by which the sacrifical victim, or the deceased, is raised to divine glory. The very intricacy of the hypocephalus, as cosmic chart--so Joseph Smith--evokes the Greek idea of the labyrinth in which the hero journeys round and through an intricate maze.
The round hypocephalus also represents the iris-and-pupil of the Wedjat Eye, and it is the brilliant Wedjat Eye that serves as focus of the life-giving spark (Hugh Nibley and Michael Rhodes, One Eternal Round, 233). The text on the hypocephalus, we should say the text in the Wedjat Eye, is a prayer calling on the "noble" and "great" god, the Ba of bas (Soul of souls, or Power of powers), to descend and rescue Osiris so-and-so in his hour of extremity--another link to Facsimile 1. Facsimile 1 depicts the stirring of the deceased, with hands uplifted to the descending ba.
The Wedjat Eye, in the Prophet Joseph's Explanation of Facsimile 2, also serves as a grand key for unlocking the heavens, a key revealed to all the Hebrew patriarchs. Does the idea recall the Egyptian rites of royal or priestly initiation (bz)? In Ancient Egypt the king alone was permitted to hear and to know the secret words and to navigate and thus to know the hidden nature of the heavens and the netherworld. This knowledge, which embraces astronomy and cosmology, constituted his right to the throne--again Facsimile 3, where the figure on the throne reasons "upon the principles of Astronomy, in the king's court." The setting is significant: teaching the arcane mysteries of astronomy is, properly, a royal prerogative, and one rightly belonging to the "king's court" alone. The Atef crown, says Joseph Smith, "represents the Priesthood," that is, the king as priest. The secrets of the universe remain locked within the royal enclosure and reserved for momentous occasions. The Middle Kingdom (or earlier) text known as "King as Priest of the Sun" sets forth, though discretely, the secret words and cosmic knowledge vouchsafed to the king: see Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt). All these things belong to what Professor John Baines describes as the decorum: the royal protocol into which only kings and priests may be initiated.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr?lang=eng
I
"Since the beginning," writes Hugh Nibley in 2001, "the Pearl of Great Price has been waiting in the wings, held in reserve for a special time. It would seem that time is now, for within a decade of the publication of the Joseph Smith Papyri in 1968 (after their rediscovery in 1967), strange and portentous things have happened" ("Approach to John Gee, Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri," FARMS Review 13:2 (2001), 63-4). Too modest to include his own work among these "portentous things," another's lips will now praise.
The Pearl of Great Price was indeed held in reserve for a special time, the lifetime of a special man, who, even beyond his lifetime, "being dead yet speaketh." So wrote President John Taylor of Parley P. Pratt; now, five years after Brother Nibley's call to "that near-touching land," we learn with joy from his encyclopaedic study of Book of Abraham Facsimile 2, One Eternal Round. The work also brings to a round, full circle, the flurry of criticism encompassing the Book of Abraham: "Come, lay your books and papers by": "The teacher's work is done."
If there ever was a time to discover what Hugh Nibley has to teach us about books of Enoch, Moses, and Abraham, it would seem that time is now.
Things really got going in 1976 with Hugh Nibley's publication of The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment. The volume advanced the once unwelcome thesis that the Book of Breathings, following the pattern of prior Egyptian funerary writings (like the Book of the Dead and the Netherworld Books), constitutes, in theme and structure, a ceremony of initiation. Nibley further showed how the Book of Breathings finds parallels in both early Jewish and Christian texts. Although nearly ignored in bibliography, Hugh Nibley's work made its rounds and proved revolutionary among students of Ancient Egyptian religion. (The official annual notice of egyptological bibliography, while praising the work, cautions readers about some of its "Mormon" ideas.)
Today studies about initiation and mystery meet with greater acceptance. A good introduction to the evidence appears in Heidelberg Professor Jan Assmann's Tod und Jenseits im Alten Aegypten [Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt]. I can't say how diligently Professor Assmann has studied Nibley's work--the theme of initiation (if not salvation!) is now in the air and very popular--but the two volumes do make for powerful bookends. Given the profound influence of Hugh Nibley's thorough work, an influence only at its first stages, I may be excused for putting forward some of his ideas in my own words in what now follows.
II
According to the Book of the Dead Chapter 162, the purpose of the hypocephalus (Book of Abraham, Facsimile 2) is "to spark a flame under the head" of the deceased. Because the verb bz (to spark a flame) matches the word for initiation (bz) into the mysterious workings of the divine order, we may safely conclude that the hypocephalus, like the Book of Breathings, has to do with initiation (see Nibley and Rhodes, One Eternal Round). As recent studies show, the head of the mummy now corresponds to the sun: the spark blazes into a corona of eternal glory. The hypocephalus symbolizes a new head, and thus a new divine life, for the deceased. Osiris so-and-so, the deceased, finds transformation as enthroned Osiris wearing the Atef Crown, a crown of light, often decorated with solar globes. No wonder Facsimile 1 (which shows the stirring to life of the one on the lion couch), attached as it is to a Book of Breathings, is followed--but only in the inspired Book of Abraham!--by the hypocephalus (as Facsimile 2). And no wonder Facsimile 3, which shows the initiand seated on a throne (according to Brother Joseph) and crowned with the Atef, is preceded--but only in the inspired Book of Abraham--by the hypocephalus. Did the Book of Breathings owned by Joseph Smith feature a hypocephalus? Nibley apparently thought so; at any rate, he saw in the three facsimiles the three stages of progression: death, transformation, glory. The Prophet Joseph Smith does well to place the hypocephalus in the middle, as if to signal the means by which the sacrifical victim, or the deceased, is raised to divine glory. The very intricacy of the hypocephalus, as cosmic chart--so Joseph Smith--evokes the Greek idea of the labyrinth in which the hero journeys round and through an intricate maze.
The round hypocephalus also represents the iris-and-pupil of the Wedjat Eye, and it is the brilliant Wedjat Eye that serves as focus of the life-giving spark (Hugh Nibley and Michael Rhodes, One Eternal Round, 233). The text on the hypocephalus, we should say the text in the Wedjat Eye, is a prayer calling on the "noble" and "great" god, the Ba of bas (Soul of souls, or Power of powers), to descend and rescue Osiris so-and-so in his hour of extremity--another link to Facsimile 1. Facsimile 1 depicts the stirring of the deceased, with hands uplifted to the descending ba.
The Wedjat Eye, in the Prophet Joseph's Explanation of Facsimile 2, also serves as a grand key for unlocking the heavens, a key revealed to all the Hebrew patriarchs. Does the idea recall the Egyptian rites of royal or priestly initiation (bz)? In Ancient Egypt the king alone was permitted to hear and to know the secret words and to navigate and thus to know the hidden nature of the heavens and the netherworld. This knowledge, which embraces astronomy and cosmology, constituted his right to the throne--again Facsimile 3, where the figure on the throne reasons "upon the principles of Astronomy, in the king's court." The setting is significant: teaching the arcane mysteries of astronomy is, properly, a royal prerogative, and one rightly belonging to the "king's court" alone. The Atef crown, says Joseph Smith, "represents the Priesthood," that is, the king as priest. The secrets of the universe remain locked within the royal enclosure and reserved for momentous occasions. The Middle Kingdom (or earlier) text known as "King as Priest of the Sun" sets forth, though discretely, the secret words and cosmic knowledge vouchsafed to the king: see Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt). All these things belong to what Professor John Baines describes as the decorum: the royal protocol into which only kings and priests may be initiated.
That is what Brothers Rhodes and Nibley are trying to express.
Since the Book of Abraham describes both Abraham and his posterity, as also his ancient fathers, as priestly, patriarchal initiands, why should we be startled to find his papyrus roll, written in Egypt, in proximity to a Book of Breathings and assorted chapters from the Book of the Dead (certain scraps of which are now housed in the Church History Library)? And yet it is marvelously startling!
Abraham himself claims to possess--"in mine own hands"--patriarchal records of ancient date (Abraham 1:31). The Theban priesthood in Ptolemaic times included direct line descendants from the royalty and officials of Abraham's day. Is the preservation and copying of the sacred records marking lineage throughout the centuries in any way far-fetched? Certainly not. We know both the family lineage and the high offices held by the fathers and sons of Hor, the owner of the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings. Marc Coenen has reconstructed at least six generations of this important priestly family. Abraham himself is good enough to provide us with a description of a like textual transmission from the ancients: copies, abridgments, and all (Abraham 1:31). That's the pattern.
These records of Abraham and Joseph, along with documents of priestly initiation were passed down, either as one set or as associated documents, from fathers of both royal and priestly blood to their priestly heirs in Ptolemaic Thebes. The Egyptians had libraries--in the House of Life were collected the books of ceremony, cosmology, and initiation--but every indication suggests the Joseph Smith papyri belonged to an assortment of family lineage documents. These records, taken together, thus constituted the very authority that confirmed priests like Hor (the principal actor or initiand of the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings) and his father, Osoroeris, in their offices. Hor, a priest of the Ptolemaic Period, aspires to possess the "greater [and ancient ceremonial] knowledge," even as Abraham himself once sought, and even as Pharaoh, through Abraham, sought. Thus we see "the claim of both the King and the Patriarch to exclusive possession of and access to certain written records that went back to the beginning of time and confirmed his particular claim to legitimacy of priesthood and kingship" (Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 92ff.). To the discerning reader the Book of Abraham narrates not only the stunning travels of the patriarch, it also reveals, with laser-like precision, just how we are to understand all these remnants of papyri that have fallen into "our own hands" today. Case closed.
Latter-day Saint students, running in the track of Professor Marc Coenen's clarifying publications about the ancient owners and dating of the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings (at 200 B.C. "the oldest Book of Breathings text that can be dated"), all take note that Hor's lot in the priesthood includes a rare office associated with Resheph-Min: "Prophet of Min who massacres his enemies." Mention of this office (and of others) appears on the papyrus, just next to the vignette showing Osiris on the lion couch. Does the office somehow correspond to the action depicted on Facsimile 1? Resheph (who dwells in the house of Montu [Manti]), a Canaanite god of war inducted into the Egyptian pantheon, shares an identity in Min, who, in turn, shares a role with Horus as avenger of his father, Osiris. The name of our priest, Hor, is that of Hor, avenger of Osiris. So why not take on Horus' avenging role, which is also the role of Min and of Resheph? Any other likenesses? That the Book of Abraham's violent "god of El-Kenah" bears comparison with Canaan's Resheph, whose name (r-sh-p) bespeaks the vivid lightning and flames of fire, has not escaped the notice of Latter-day Saints! Abraham, the survivor of lightning, flame, and earthquake (see Abraham Chapter One), also escaped Min-Resheph-Hor. Besides, one of Abraham's own descendants, through Ephraim, bears--and here's ritual reversal and the sign of escape--the name Resheph, perhaps now to be understood as descriptive of the God of Israel: "I cause the wind and the fire to be my chariot," Jehovah tells rescued Abraham (Abraham 2:7; see 1 Chronicles 7:25).
Though Professor Coenen sees in Facsimile 1 not a scene of sacrifice but one of Osirian resurrection and the conception of Horus (and Osiris not only escapes death, he lives to found a dynasty (to beget an avenging Resheph)--the figure on the vignette that Joseph Smith names the priest of Elkenah, or the priest of Pharaoh (who is thus the priest of the living Horus, the living king), does something recall a surviving bronze figure of "Min who massacres the enemy," "dressed in a short kilt, held up by two bands that cross over the breast and back" (p. 1113). We can add sacrifice to Coenen's picture of Facsimile 1. Sacrifice, resurrection, and conception all form a single constellation--an Osirian constellation--that Facsimile 1 delicately manages to display.
Bibliographical Note: Marc Coenen, "The dating of the Papyri Joseph Smith I, X and XI and Min who massacres his enemies," in Willy Clarysse et al. (eds) Egyptian Religion: The Last Thousand Years II, 1103-14, and esp. pages 1111-3 (Leuven, 1998). A detailed review of the Hor Book of Breathings (or Document of Fellowship) and the nature and historical context of the priestly offices of Hor and Osoroeris, including examples of symbolic slaughter and burning with correspondence to Facsimile 1, is John Gee, "Some Puzzles of the Joseph Smith Papyri," FARMS Review 20:1 (2008), 113-157. Professors Kerry Muhlestein and W.V. Smith have also noted the import for Latter-day Saints of Marc Coenen's breakthrough studies.
III
The Egyptian record attests a symbolic, ceremonial killing of foreigners, at centers like Philae, Edfu, and Karnak, with special maces, swords, and clubs, including "a particular kind of [bladed] mace much resembling in shape the Dd-pillar, the symbol of Osiris' enduring life and dynasty," as also resurrection (Val H. Sederholm, Papyrus British Museum 10808 and Its Cultural and Religious Setting, Leiden: Brill, 2006, 114). How strange that the bladed mace used to kill foreign victims in royal ceremony also symbolizes the perpetuity of the Osirisan dynasty. But the Egyptians are not finished: "The king, playing Horus-Min, cuts off the heads of his father's enemies at the stroke of a pole-axe [or bladed mace, both sword and club]. The special word for killing at Edfu [also Ddj!] alludes to Osiris and the stability of his dynastic line" (Papyrus 10808, 117). Both name, and action, and instrument of sacrifice thus confirm the dynastic line. No sacrifice; no posterity. (That's also the paradox of Abraham and Isaac.) Did the Pharaoh of Abraham's day sacrifice virgins, children, and Abraham himself (as described in Abraham Chapter One) to promote fertility? So Nibley suggests. Did he himself lack an heir? Not until Facsimile 3, the throne scene, do we first encounter the "prince of Pharaoh," in the form of Ma'at. Ma'at represents the return of order to the disjointed world. In the scenario provided by Joseph Smith, we find all the constituent parts of the play.
At Karnak we see paired depictions of Resheph and "the pharaoh stabbing two prisoners kneeling in a metal kettle [for burning] with their arms tied behind their backs in front of [a representation of] 'Min who [massacres] his enemies' " (Coenen, 1113). Why the doppelganger? Does the depiction show Pharaoh as both priest and king? Or does it hint of both king and his priestly representative at work? Pharaoh, twinned with a Canaanite god, here acts in the office of Min who massacres his enemies; and as Pharaoh, so Abraham's "priest of Pharaoh," who is also the priest of the Canaanite god of Elkenah. Also so also Ptolemaic priest Hor. Behind Min "stands a tree on a hill surrounded by a wall," a setting that evokes for any Latter-day Saint student "the hill called Potiphar's Hill, at the head of the plain of Olishem"; the tree (or, Heliopolitan pillar) likewise recalls the sacrifice of the "three virgins" who "would not bow down to worship gods of wood or of stone" (Abraham 1:10-11; Coenen, 1113; for ceremonial hills marked with standing stones see One Eternal Round, 170-3; for another royal massacre and burning of enemies, 179).
By killing the enemies of Osiris, Pharaoh and his designated priest, or double, reverse the enemies' own act of killing Osiris himself, and thus ensure both Osiris' resurrection and Horus' (that is, Pharaoh's) dynastic claims. It bears repeating: As the priest of Min who massacres his enemies, Hor himself becomes Pharaoh's (Horus') stand-in, a role evoking the sacrifice-mad "priest of Pharaoh" in Abraham's account. The role, however essential, is not without its risks. And here's a genuine touch: "And the Lord. . .smote the priest that he died; and there was great mourning in Chaldea, and also in the court of Pharaoh" (Abraham 1:20). "Great mourning" in Pharaoh's court? for a distant priest? To the Egyptian reader, all is clear: by smiting the Pharaoh's ceremonial agent, God has smitten the Pharaoh himself and has also smitten his dynastic line (cf. the slaying of the firstborn in Exodus and the subsequent swallowing up of Pharaoh in the Red Sea). It's the priest's office, as agent, that matters, and the mourning over his death must then match in intensity and cloud of disaster that which prevails at the actual death of a king. One can picture the choking dust storm at Ur sweeping down to Egypt. A panicked herald runs with the news. Mene, Mene: The king must die.
Hugh Nibley makes much of masking, mummery, and substitutes, including the broadly attested rituals of substitute sacrifice. And substitute mourning reflects substitute sacrifice, priest for king--after all, as Nibley notes, the priest also "is slain in [Abraham's] place" (Abraham in Egypt, 26).
Every ceremonial preparation of a mummy for burial follows a similar, Osirian, pattern: a sacrifice "after the manner of the Egyptians"--the Osirian manner. To wrap (wt) is itself both to kill and also to resurrect; for, without wrapping, there can be no subsequent rising (wt resonates with mwt, put to death, die). Addressing "the Asiatic, Libyan, Medjay, and Nubian threat at Egypt's four borders" (matching in exact cardinal order--east, west, north, south--the regional gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, as carefully listed and depicted in the Book of Abraham), the priest intones: "You are the rebels that 'made a wrapping,' 'made a wrapping' Father Osiris. Accordingly, Father Osiris commanded that I, in the form of Mekhenty-Irty [~ Horus], should smite this your enemy" (New Kingdom Netherworld Book of the Night II, 87-8 = Sederholm, Papyrus 10808, 126). Wrapping and killing collapse in one: to wrap the Osirian mummy, the action of Anubis is thus also to kill the god with a knife. "Smite this your enemy" (not simply "smite you") is euphemistic, ironic, delicate: the notion of substitutes runs very deep in the Egyptian sacrificial night.
Danger is everywhere.
The act of sacrifice meets the idea of resurrection; each notionally requires the other. Well-known is that paradox of Osirian ceremony in which the sharp-clawed jackal, Anubis, troubler of desert burials, first cuts into the body, then wraps it, preparatory to resurrection. Facsimile 1 at once, illustrates Osiris' resurrection described in the Book of Breathings and the sacrifice and escape (in token of resurrection) of any Osiris, including the special case of Abraham. Abraham becomes as Osiris, for the Egyptians found in Abraham's heralded escape from sacrificial death a living token or surety of Osirian promise. All this makes of Abraham, to Egyptian eyes, a king, Osiris redivivus. No wonder, "by [jittery] politeness of the king," Abraham, as Osiris was allowed broad scope to substitute on the throne, wear Osiris' Atef Crown, and then teach what only the king had right to teach. Not far off, fair Sarah glitters like the desert sun. It's the Ammon and Lamoni story in the Book of Alma all over again: role-reversal, deathlike trance, and the message of salvation. (And can there be any doubt as to the reception of the message?)
That's what Brother Nibley meant to convey, and the latest findings are bearing him out.
IV
In fact there is nothing--not even the recovered Apocalypse of Abraham--that attests more to the reality of an Egyptian record of Abraham and Joseph than the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings (an Egyptian Endowment), along with its vignettes, Book of Abraham Facsimiles 1 and 3. The discovery of the Kirtland papyri, as we now have it, thus paradoxically delivers more evidence of an authentic Egyptian setting for Abraham than if we had simply recovered the very papyrus portions from which the Prophet Joseph translated the record itself (and Doctrine and Covenants 5:7 so attests!).
Since the Book of Abraham describes both Abraham and his posterity, as also his ancient fathers, as priestly, patriarchal initiands, why should we be startled to find his papyrus roll, written in Egypt, in proximity to a Book of Breathings and assorted chapters from the Book of the Dead (certain scraps of which are now housed in the Church History Library)? And yet it is marvelously startling!
Abraham himself claims to possess--"in mine own hands"--patriarchal records of ancient date (Abraham 1:31). The Theban priesthood in Ptolemaic times included direct line descendants from the royalty and officials of Abraham's day. Is the preservation and copying of the sacred records marking lineage throughout the centuries in any way far-fetched? Certainly not. We know both the family lineage and the high offices held by the fathers and sons of Hor, the owner of the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings. Marc Coenen has reconstructed at least six generations of this important priestly family. Abraham himself is good enough to provide us with a description of a like textual transmission from the ancients: copies, abridgments, and all (Abraham 1:31). That's the pattern.
These records of Abraham and Joseph, along with documents of priestly initiation were passed down, either as one set or as associated documents, from fathers of both royal and priestly blood to their priestly heirs in Ptolemaic Thebes. The Egyptians had libraries--in the House of Life were collected the books of ceremony, cosmology, and initiation--but every indication suggests the Joseph Smith papyri belonged to an assortment of family lineage documents. These records, taken together, thus constituted the very authority that confirmed priests like Hor (the principal actor or initiand of the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings) and his father, Osoroeris, in their offices. Hor, a priest of the Ptolemaic Period, aspires to possess the "greater [and ancient ceremonial] knowledge," even as Abraham himself once sought, and even as Pharaoh, through Abraham, sought. Thus we see "the claim of both the King and the Patriarch to exclusive possession of and access to certain written records that went back to the beginning of time and confirmed his particular claim to legitimacy of priesthood and kingship" (Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 92ff.). To the discerning reader the Book of Abraham narrates not only the stunning travels of the patriarch, it also reveals, with laser-like precision, just how we are to understand all these remnants of papyri that have fallen into "our own hands" today. Case closed.
Latter-day Saint students, running in the track of Professor Marc Coenen's clarifying publications about the ancient owners and dating of the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings (at 200 B.C. "the oldest Book of Breathings text that can be dated"), all take note that Hor's lot in the priesthood includes a rare office associated with Resheph-Min: "Prophet of Min who massacres his enemies." Mention of this office (and of others) appears on the papyrus, just next to the vignette showing Osiris on the lion couch. Does the office somehow correspond to the action depicted on Facsimile 1? Resheph (who dwells in the house of Montu [Manti]), a Canaanite god of war inducted into the Egyptian pantheon, shares an identity in Min, who, in turn, shares a role with Horus as avenger of his father, Osiris. The name of our priest, Hor, is that of Hor, avenger of Osiris. So why not take on Horus' avenging role, which is also the role of Min and of Resheph? Any other likenesses? That the Book of Abraham's violent "god of El-Kenah" bears comparison with Canaan's Resheph, whose name (r-sh-p) bespeaks the vivid lightning and flames of fire, has not escaped the notice of Latter-day Saints! Abraham, the survivor of lightning, flame, and earthquake (see Abraham Chapter One), also escaped Min-Resheph-Hor. Besides, one of Abraham's own descendants, through Ephraim, bears--and here's ritual reversal and the sign of escape--the name Resheph, perhaps now to be understood as descriptive of the God of Israel: "I cause the wind and the fire to be my chariot," Jehovah tells rescued Abraham (Abraham 2:7; see 1 Chronicles 7:25).
Though Professor Coenen sees in Facsimile 1 not a scene of sacrifice but one of Osirian resurrection and the conception of Horus (and Osiris not only escapes death, he lives to found a dynasty (to beget an avenging Resheph)--the figure on the vignette that Joseph Smith names the priest of Elkenah, or the priest of Pharaoh (who is thus the priest of the living Horus, the living king), does something recall a surviving bronze figure of "Min who massacres the enemy," "dressed in a short kilt, held up by two bands that cross over the breast and back" (p. 1113). We can add sacrifice to Coenen's picture of Facsimile 1. Sacrifice, resurrection, and conception all form a single constellation--an Osirian constellation--that Facsimile 1 delicately manages to display.
Bibliographical Note: Marc Coenen, "The dating of the Papyri Joseph Smith I, X and XI and Min who massacres his enemies," in Willy Clarysse et al. (eds) Egyptian Religion: The Last Thousand Years II, 1103-14, and esp. pages 1111-3 (Leuven, 1998). A detailed review of the Hor Book of Breathings (or Document of Fellowship) and the nature and historical context of the priestly offices of Hor and Osoroeris, including examples of symbolic slaughter and burning with correspondence to Facsimile 1, is John Gee, "Some Puzzles of the Joseph Smith Papyri," FARMS Review 20:1 (2008), 113-157. Professors Kerry Muhlestein and W.V. Smith have also noted the import for Latter-day Saints of Marc Coenen's breakthrough studies.
III
The Egyptian record attests a symbolic, ceremonial killing of foreigners, at centers like Philae, Edfu, and Karnak, with special maces, swords, and clubs, including "a particular kind of [bladed] mace much resembling in shape the Dd-pillar, the symbol of Osiris' enduring life and dynasty," as also resurrection (Val H. Sederholm, Papyrus British Museum 10808 and Its Cultural and Religious Setting, Leiden: Brill, 2006, 114). How strange that the bladed mace used to kill foreign victims in royal ceremony also symbolizes the perpetuity of the Osirisan dynasty. But the Egyptians are not finished: "The king, playing Horus-Min, cuts off the heads of his father's enemies at the stroke of a pole-axe [or bladed mace, both sword and club]. The special word for killing at Edfu [also Ddj!] alludes to Osiris and the stability of his dynastic line" (Papyrus 10808, 117). Both name, and action, and instrument of sacrifice thus confirm the dynastic line. No sacrifice; no posterity. (That's also the paradox of Abraham and Isaac.) Did the Pharaoh of Abraham's day sacrifice virgins, children, and Abraham himself (as described in Abraham Chapter One) to promote fertility? So Nibley suggests. Did he himself lack an heir? Not until Facsimile 3, the throne scene, do we first encounter the "prince of Pharaoh," in the form of Ma'at. Ma'at represents the return of order to the disjointed world. In the scenario provided by Joseph Smith, we find all the constituent parts of the play.
At Karnak we see paired depictions of Resheph and "the pharaoh stabbing two prisoners kneeling in a metal kettle [for burning] with their arms tied behind their backs in front of [a representation of] 'Min who [massacres] his enemies' " (Coenen, 1113). Why the doppelganger? Does the depiction show Pharaoh as both priest and king? Or does it hint of both king and his priestly representative at work? Pharaoh, twinned with a Canaanite god, here acts in the office of Min who massacres his enemies; and as Pharaoh, so Abraham's "priest of Pharaoh," who is also the priest of the Canaanite god of Elkenah. Also so also Ptolemaic priest Hor. Behind Min "stands a tree on a hill surrounded by a wall," a setting that evokes for any Latter-day Saint student "the hill called Potiphar's Hill, at the head of the plain of Olishem"; the tree (or, Heliopolitan pillar) likewise recalls the sacrifice of the "three virgins" who "would not bow down to worship gods of wood or of stone" (Abraham 1:10-11; Coenen, 1113; for ceremonial hills marked with standing stones see One Eternal Round, 170-3; for another royal massacre and burning of enemies, 179).
By killing the enemies of Osiris, Pharaoh and his designated priest, or double, reverse the enemies' own act of killing Osiris himself, and thus ensure both Osiris' resurrection and Horus' (that is, Pharaoh's) dynastic claims. It bears repeating: As the priest of Min who massacres his enemies, Hor himself becomes Pharaoh's (Horus') stand-in, a role evoking the sacrifice-mad "priest of Pharaoh" in Abraham's account. The role, however essential, is not without its risks. And here's a genuine touch: "And the Lord. . .smote the priest that he died; and there was great mourning in Chaldea, and also in the court of Pharaoh" (Abraham 1:20). "Great mourning" in Pharaoh's court? for a distant priest? To the Egyptian reader, all is clear: by smiting the Pharaoh's ceremonial agent, God has smitten the Pharaoh himself and has also smitten his dynastic line (cf. the slaying of the firstborn in Exodus and the subsequent swallowing up of Pharaoh in the Red Sea). It's the priest's office, as agent, that matters, and the mourning over his death must then match in intensity and cloud of disaster that which prevails at the actual death of a king. One can picture the choking dust storm at Ur sweeping down to Egypt. A panicked herald runs with the news. Mene, Mene: The king must die.
Hugh Nibley makes much of masking, mummery, and substitutes, including the broadly attested rituals of substitute sacrifice. And substitute mourning reflects substitute sacrifice, priest for king--after all, as Nibley notes, the priest also "is slain in [Abraham's] place" (Abraham in Egypt, 26).
Every ceremonial preparation of a mummy for burial follows a similar, Osirian, pattern: a sacrifice "after the manner of the Egyptians"--the Osirian manner. To wrap (wt) is itself both to kill and also to resurrect; for, without wrapping, there can be no subsequent rising (wt resonates with mwt, put to death, die). Addressing "the Asiatic, Libyan, Medjay, and Nubian threat at Egypt's four borders" (matching in exact cardinal order--east, west, north, south--the regional gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, as carefully listed and depicted in the Book of Abraham), the priest intones: "You are the rebels that 'made a wrapping,' 'made a wrapping' Father Osiris. Accordingly, Father Osiris commanded that I, in the form of Mekhenty-Irty [~ Horus], should smite this your enemy" (New Kingdom Netherworld Book of the Night II, 87-8 = Sederholm, Papyrus 10808, 126). Wrapping and killing collapse in one: to wrap the Osirian mummy, the action of Anubis is thus also to kill the god with a knife. "Smite this your enemy" (not simply "smite you") is euphemistic, ironic, delicate: the notion of substitutes runs very deep in the Egyptian sacrificial night.
Danger is everywhere.
The act of sacrifice meets the idea of resurrection; each notionally requires the other. Well-known is that paradox of Osirian ceremony in which the sharp-clawed jackal, Anubis, troubler of desert burials, first cuts into the body, then wraps it, preparatory to resurrection. Facsimile 1 at once, illustrates Osiris' resurrection described in the Book of Breathings and the sacrifice and escape (in token of resurrection) of any Osiris, including the special case of Abraham. Abraham becomes as Osiris, for the Egyptians found in Abraham's heralded escape from sacrificial death a living token or surety of Osirian promise. All this makes of Abraham, to Egyptian eyes, a king, Osiris redivivus. No wonder, "by [jittery] politeness of the king," Abraham, as Osiris was allowed broad scope to substitute on the throne, wear Osiris' Atef Crown, and then teach what only the king had right to teach. Not far off, fair Sarah glitters like the desert sun. It's the Ammon and Lamoni story in the Book of Alma all over again: role-reversal, deathlike trance, and the message of salvation. (And can there be any doubt as to the reception of the message?)
That's what Brother Nibley meant to convey, and the latest findings are bearing him out.
IV
In fact there is nothing--not even the recovered Apocalypse of Abraham--that attests more to the reality of an Egyptian record of Abraham and Joseph than the Joseph Smith Book of Breathings (an Egyptian Endowment), along with its vignettes, Book of Abraham Facsimiles 1 and 3. The discovery of the Kirtland papyri, as we now have it, thus paradoxically delivers more evidence of an authentic Egyptian setting for Abraham than if we had simply recovered the very papyrus portions from which the Prophet Joseph translated the record itself (and Doctrine and Covenants 5:7 so attests!).
If that seems a bold claim, consider the following specific and peculiar parallel (not parallel mania so-called) between the story of Abraham in Egypt and the title of the Book of Breathings:
"The very first line of the hieratic text bears a remarkable resemblance to Abraham's words in both Genesis and the Book of Abraham: 'Here begins the writing which Isis made for her brother Osiris to cause his ba [soul] to live.' In the Book of Abraham and the Bible, Abraham says to his wife (and sister), Sarah, 'and my soul shall live because of thee' " (Nibley and Rhodes, One Eternal Round, "The Book of Breathings Bears Witness," 148).
" 'Therefore say unto them, I pray thee, thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake, and my soul shall live because of thee.' Why not simply, 'I shall live'? Why the awkward Egyptian idiom, 'My ba shall live'? That is an Egyptian doctrine" (Ibid. 148).
" 'Therefore say unto them, I pray thee, thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake, and my soul shall live because of thee.' Why not simply, 'I shall live'? Why the awkward Egyptian idiom, 'My ba shall live'? That is an Egyptian doctrine" (Ibid. 148).
"What is going on here? Abraham and Sarah identified with Isis and Osiris? That is just the beginning of the parallels that affirm their identity," a dozen or so of which duly follow to the astonishment of the reader (151).
Astonishment will overtake the diligent student of the Book of Abraham, for, as prophesied, even "the kings will shut their mouths at him; for that which hath not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider" (Isaiah 52:15).
Of Sarah, as of Isis, are gifts of crown and throne. These gifts must be granted; they can never be bought. Thus it is the egyptological reading of the role of the characters surrounding the throne in Facsimile 3 that paradoxically sheds necessary light on the Prophet Joseph's counterintuitive interpretation which renders King and Prince for Hathor and Isis. We begin to detect, seize hold of, in a word, comprehend, the prophetic light, only after we have seen unfold the dark masking and mumming of the Egyptian drama. Then the prophetic explanation also unfolds (Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, Chapter 5: "All the Court's a Stage: Facsimile 3, A Royal Mumming", 116-148; One Eternal Round, "Isis and Sarah," 155-160).
Pharaoh "would fain claim" the new and everlasting covenant of the Priesthood (Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, I, 223):
"In the love he bore Sarah, he wrote out a marriage contract, deeding to her all he owned in the way of gold and silver. . ."
But it is Abraham who claims the throne.
This is Sarah to the rescue! And we remind the reader that the purpose of having a Book of Abraham and Sarah at all lies in our having had restored to us, by the ministration of Elias to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland Temple, the keys of the Abrahamic covenant, the covenant of eternal marriage (Doctrine and Covenants 110:12). Elijah then conferred the sealing power of the Holy Priesthood. Sarah and Abraham example the new and everlasting covenant of marriage.
We now have the Book of Breathings, that ancient claim to the covenant. Even time shrinks before the pyramids; eternity is another matter. Though lacking contractual efficiency in either time--now spun out--or eternity, the fragmentary papyrus roll, like that old contract or testament called the Holy Bible, concretely serves to remind all mankind of the possibility of true authority and valid covenant. It stirs hope, and hope stirs the heavens. Because Elijah returned Joseph Smith and his prophetic successors hold the key of the ancient order of the Priesthood belonging to the Patriarchs, the order of Adam, the order of Abraham, the Patriarchal Priesthood.
Astonishment will overtake the diligent student of the Book of Abraham, for, as prophesied, even "the kings will shut their mouths at him; for that which hath not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider" (Isaiah 52:15).
Of Sarah, as of Isis, are gifts of crown and throne. These gifts must be granted; they can never be bought. Thus it is the egyptological reading of the role of the characters surrounding the throne in Facsimile 3 that paradoxically sheds necessary light on the Prophet Joseph's counterintuitive interpretation which renders King and Prince for Hathor and Isis. We begin to detect, seize hold of, in a word, comprehend, the prophetic light, only after we have seen unfold the dark masking and mumming of the Egyptian drama. Then the prophetic explanation also unfolds (Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, Chapter 5: "All the Court's a Stage: Facsimile 3, A Royal Mumming", 116-148; One Eternal Round, "Isis and Sarah," 155-160).
Pharaoh "would fain claim" the new and everlasting covenant of the Priesthood (Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, I, 223):
"In the love he bore Sarah, he wrote out a marriage contract, deeding to her all he owned in the way of gold and silver. . ."
But it is Abraham who claims the throne.
This is Sarah to the rescue! And we remind the reader that the purpose of having a Book of Abraham and Sarah at all lies in our having had restored to us, by the ministration of Elias to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland Temple, the keys of the Abrahamic covenant, the covenant of eternal marriage (Doctrine and Covenants 110:12). Elijah then conferred the sealing power of the Holy Priesthood. Sarah and Abraham example the new and everlasting covenant of marriage.
We now have the Book of Breathings, that ancient claim to the covenant. Even time shrinks before the pyramids; eternity is another matter. Though lacking contractual efficiency in either time--now spun out--or eternity, the fragmentary papyrus roll, like that old contract or testament called the Holy Bible, concretely serves to remind all mankind of the possibility of true authority and valid covenant. It stirs hope, and hope stirs the heavens. Because Elijah returned Joseph Smith and his prophetic successors hold the key of the ancient order of the Priesthood belonging to the Patriarchs, the order of Adam, the order of Abraham, the Patriarchal Priesthood.
To deny either the genuineness or the eternal worth of the revealed Book of Abraham would accordingly be to deny oneself the opportunity to become "the seed of Abraham" and thus a lawful inheritor of the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant of Priesthood (Doctrine and Covenants 84:34). The Book of Abraham serves as a surety of the promise of eternal life. It amounts to a sefer, a ketubah that secures the heritage of Jacob: "Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah who bare you" (Isaiah 51:2; 50:1). And nothing was more important to Brother Nibley than his own covenantal contract of eternal marriage. And that's how Hugh Nibley lived.
The story of Sarah saving her husband's life from Pharaoh by claiming to be his sister (Abraham's second Osirian escape from death) is a story we can now come to terms with thanks to the latter-day recovery of the lost Document of Breathing which Isis made for her brother, Osiris (as the title of the sefer runs), a more precise reading of which may be the Document of Covenantal Unity (sn-sn). It's a Marriage Certificate. It's a Certificate of Dynasty. (The kings of Europe never produced like certificate; the clergy invented the Donation of Constantine.) It's a document certifying receipt of the royal decorum: the deceased, passing by Orion and the stars, now enters into the fellowship of the sun god and his retinue in The Eternal Round.
The story of Sarah saving her husband's life from Pharaoh by claiming to be his sister (Abraham's second Osirian escape from death) is a story we can now come to terms with thanks to the latter-day recovery of the lost Document of Breathing which Isis made for her brother, Osiris (as the title of the sefer runs), a more precise reading of which may be the Document of Covenantal Unity (sn-sn). It's a Marriage Certificate. It's a Certificate of Dynasty. (The kings of Europe never produced like certificate; the clergy invented the Donation of Constantine.) It's a document certifying receipt of the royal decorum: the deceased, passing by Orion and the stars, now enters into the fellowship of the sun god and his retinue in The Eternal Round.
And that's what Hugh Nibley meant!
Notes
For the like episode of Sarah's escape from King Abimelech (in light of the changes in the Joseph Smith Translation), see the essay, "A Covering of the Eyes," posted 30 June 2010, on valsederholm.blogspot.com.
Copyright 2011 by Val H. Sederholm, PhD (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA, 2001). Additions and corrections also made in March 2016.
Notes
For the like episode of Sarah's escape from King Abimelech (in light of the changes in the Joseph Smith Translation), see the essay, "A Covering of the Eyes," posted 30 June 2010, on valsederholm.blogspot.com.
Copyright 2011 by Val H. Sederholm, PhD (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA, 2001). Additions and corrections also made in March 2016.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
The Latter-day Saints and Politics, Round One: Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln (1 March 1840). Or, What Romney's Really Up Against
I’ve thought long thoughts on the 1 March 1840 letter of Abraham Lincoln to John Todd Stuart
(his senior law partner) in which Lincoln mentions Joseph Smith in a postscript. The postscript
comprises several lines reflecting sundry input from friend Josh Speed, who must have been
present when these last were penned:
“Speed says he wrote you what Jo. Smith said about you as he passed here. We will procure the
names of some of his people here and send them to you before long.”
The Smith postscript has been noted in publications by a couple historians (and read by
hundreds), but never satisfactorily explained. (Richard Bushman kindly acknowledges my
bibliographic digging in his “Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln”:
http://rsc.byu.edu/archived/joseph-smith-and-abraham-lincoln.)
The letter is famous for Lincoln’s first mention of Stephen Douglas, and opens a window onto
the personalities of both men, yet young in the law, unmarried, and as fiery as Jackson,
ambitious as Clay. Enter Jo. Smith: Postscript.
So what can be squeezed out of this sentence? Just for starters, it confirms the John Smith Diary
entry for 1 March 1840 that shows the Prophet, returning from Washington, already back in
Nauvoo, an entry which contradicts the 4 March arrival date given in History of the Church (for
the diary, see Andrew Ehat and Lyndon Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith, 35, 47).
The worth of the document consists in how it reveals the willingness of Illinois politicians, from
the first (compassion for driving and confinements aside), to make political hay out of any nod
of gratitude made by the Prophet. And it shows just how fully the politicians saw the Prophet as
sole voice of his scattered sheep: Joseph praised Stuart for his help in Washington, and Speed
jumped at this praise as signal of full support at the ballot box.
The Smith postscript is remarkable because it gives the first instance of what would become a
baffling pattern of favors given, gratitude expressed, votes expected, and elections topsy-turvy,
all of which would sour Whigs and Democrats alike on the Latter-day Saints. Lincoln later
moralized about the Utah Saints as the log the farmer had to plow around. Why? Joseph
Smith would not, or could not, play the game—a matter inexplicable to the man of
ratiocination. As for Douglas, he openly envied the absolute independent stance of the Prophet.
No Illinois politician ever mourned the exodus from Nauvoo. Here’s an early clue why.
(his senior law partner) in which Lincoln mentions Joseph Smith in a postscript. The postscript
comprises several lines reflecting sundry input from friend Josh Speed, who must have been
present when these last were penned:
“Speed says he wrote you what Jo. Smith said about you as he passed here. We will procure the
names of some of his people here and send them to you before long.”
The Smith postscript has been noted in publications by a couple historians (and read by
hundreds), but never satisfactorily explained. (Richard Bushman kindly acknowledges my
bibliographic digging in his “Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln”:
http://rsc.byu.edu/archived/joseph-smith-and-abraham-lincoln.)
The letter is famous for Lincoln’s first mention of Stephen Douglas, and opens a window onto
the personalities of both men, yet young in the law, unmarried, and as fiery as Jackson,
ambitious as Clay. Enter Jo. Smith: Postscript.
So what can be squeezed out of this sentence? Just for starters, it confirms the John Smith Diary
entry for 1 March 1840 that shows the Prophet, returning from Washington, already back in
Nauvoo, an entry which contradicts the 4 March arrival date given in History of the Church (for
the diary, see Andrew Ehat and Lyndon Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith, 35, 47).
The worth of the document consists in how it reveals the willingness of Illinois politicians, from
the first (compassion for driving and confinements aside), to make political hay out of any nod
of gratitude made by the Prophet. And it shows just how fully the politicians saw the Prophet as
sole voice of his scattered sheep: Joseph praised Stuart for his help in Washington, and Speed
jumped at this praise as signal of full support at the ballot box.
The Smith postscript is remarkable because it gives the first instance of what would become a
baffling pattern of favors given, gratitude expressed, votes expected, and elections topsy-turvy,
all of which would sour Whigs and Democrats alike on the Latter-day Saints. Lincoln later
moralized about the Utah Saints as the log the farmer had to plow around. Why? Joseph
Smith would not, or could not, play the game—a matter inexplicable to the man of
ratiocination. As for Douglas, he openly envied the absolute independent stance of the Prophet.
No Illinois politician ever mourned the exodus from Nauvoo. Here’s an early clue why.
Copyright 2011 by Val H. Sederholm
Notes
When I first read the letter, I wanted to find out whether anyone had written anything about it. As noted below, I found it mentioned only twice in print (one a mere footnote). Two mentions are more than sufficient; yet scholarship does lack one thing: Readership. All during 2005, the bicentennial of the Prophet's birth, I mused to myself: "Many Latter-day Saints might not know about this letter. It ought to be published in the Ensign or someplace where it can be seen by everyone."
The Prophet Joseph, much to the chagrin--and deep amusement--of his friends was popularly known as Joe or Jo or ol' Jo Smith. I note the "." in the Lincoln postscript: "Jo." "Jo." signals "Joseph" (I think), and not "Jo". Just me, but my awe for Lincoln is so great I'd like to imagine him speaking and writing of "Joseph Smith"--and here's evidence for it--although, knowing Lincoln, he probably did say "Jo". But, then, everybody stills calls Lincoln "Abe"--what goes around. . .
The autograph letter is now on auction at Swann Auction Galleries and has a $40,000 to $50, 000 value. Small scanned images of the letter are to be found on the auction's Web page. It is a bit difficult to say whether the "." really is to be found after the abbreviated "Jo". . .
In all published articles and books on Joseph Smith and politics, prior to 2005, I find only two references to the letter: George U. Hubbard, "Abraham Lincoln as Seen by the Mormons," Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (Spring 1963), 93, and E. B. Long, Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War (University of Illinois, 2001), 17 n. 13. Neither Hubbard nor Long attempt analysis of the letter. (I don't blame them: there's not much to analyze, other than to say Joseph Smith held John Todd Stuart in high regard.) The letter may be found in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln I: 206 (ed. Roy P. Basler).
More recently (2008), Gary Vitale has succinctly and wisely commented on the letter in his "Abraham Lincoln and the Mormons: Another Legacy of Limited Freedom," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 101 (Fall-Winter 2008).
Latter-day Saint Lincoln historian, Bryon C. Andreasen, mentions the letter in a presentation reported by R. Scott Lloyd, "World of Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Smith," LDS Church News (26 May 2009).
Richard L. Bushman, "Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln, in Joseph Smith and the Doctrinal Restoration (Provo, 2005), 89-108.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Book of Abraham Facsimile 2 and the Lord of Sabaoth (D&C 95:7)
The Doctrine and Covenants, a selection from the Lord's new revelations, also brings us glimpses of ancient understanding. I recall Hugh Nibley telling a Sunday School class about the Egyptian nature of Section 88 of that book, a section he cites time and again in his elucidation of Abraham's cosmos, One Eternal Round. That cosmos indeed courses One Eternal Round, as depicted also in the round figure of the hypocephalus (Book of Abraham Facsimile 2).
One Eternal Round speaks to continual renewal, to a newness of life, to creation and resurrection; it bespeaks a timeless Day in which all things are present before the Lord. Latter-day Saint Prophets teach of a great assembly of all Father's children, prior to the Creation of the Earth, in which the Plan of Happiness, even the Gospel of Jesus Christ, was first revealed. I once asked Brother Nibley whether the hypocephalus had anything to do with the Grand Council in Heaven. "Yes," he replied, with his manner of swift surprise. (Facsimile 2: http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr/fac-2?lang=eng)
The same ancient ideas about the Grand Council and Creation also appear in the Doctrine and Covenants. Take the revealed interpretation of the Divine Title, Lord of Sabaoth (or Lord of Hosts) in Doctrine and Covenants 95:7; 35:1; 38:1. (See also Abraham 3 and Abraham Facsimile 2.)
And for this cause I gave unto you a commandment that you should call your solemn assembly, that your fastings and your mourning might come up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, which is by interpretation, the creator of the first day, the beginning and the end (95:7, http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/95?lang=eng).
The Lord expands on the interpretation of his Eternal Name in the final verse 17, while also leaving us, as always, to ponder the implications and connections:
And let the higher part of the inner court [of the House] be dedicated unto me for the school of mine apostles, saith Son Ahman; or, in other words, Alphus; or, in other words, Omegus; even Jesus Christ your Lord. Amen.
The first part of verse seven reflects the themes and imagery of the second chapter of Joel, and note the emphasis on calling a Solemn Assembly in the Lord's House; while the second part, the interpretation of "Lord of Sabaoth," catches the breath away, as does sacred verse 17.
The revealed interpretation of Lord of Sabaoth cleanly and simply by-passes the dictionary definition (a transliteration of the Hebrew word for hosts = tzabaot) and instead proposes an interpretation. Now it's likely--although it hardly matters one way or the other--that the Prophet Joseph, prior to his formal study of Hebrew, had no idea what Sabaoth meant; nor might he have grasped how the revealed interpretation refers back to the creation story and its summation (its beginning and end) in Genesis 1:1 and 2:1:
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
And what is "all the host of them"? Answer (as found in any lexicon or commentary): the stars and planets and the holy angels make up the hosts of heaven. Indeed Latter-day students have often treated Genesis 2:1 as one key to the revealed interpretation of Lord of Sabaoth (Dana Pike, Robert Boyle).
Semiotics, the theory of signs, differentiates between dictionary and encyclopaedia. The interpretation in Doctrine and Covenants 95:7 touches on dictionary and expands into encyclopaedia. In fact the verse packs both denotation and connotation into a surprisingly small compass of eleven words. Let us first recall that many students have wrestled with the interpretation and origins of the name, a title which Professor Choon Seow terms "one of the most enigmatical divine names in the Holy Bible" (cited in Maire Byrne, The Names of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).
We start with two of the formulaic introductions to revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants (Joseph McConkie considers these one key to Doctrine and Covenants 95:7). These formulae introduce God, in his own terms, to humankind.
Listen to the voice of the Lord your God, even Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, whose course is one eternal round, the same today as yesterday, and forever (Doctrine and Covenants 35:1).
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/35?lang=eng
Here we have the name of God, as found in the Apocalypse of John and taken from the Greek letters, Alpha and Omega.
Or, in other words: Why, then, should the 95th Section speak of Alphus and Omegus, using an unusual, indeed unknown, form of the Greek letters? The names--and note these are presented more as names than name--are not Latin, rather Anglicized forms, that is, made-up forms--"in other words" is how the Lord phrases it. Greek Alpha and Omega here take Latinate (as if 2nd declension), or even general Indo-European nominative masculine case endings. Hugh Nibley explains the word Telestial as a like coinage, framed in harmony with Latin celestial and terrestrial, that combines both Greek root and Latin ending in an Anglicized form (to telos, the ultimate or lowest kingdom of glory in Doctrine and Covenants Section 76).
To show another example, the same verse speaks of Son Ahman, a purely semiotic construct consisting of an English word or name plus a name in a different language. We are given a sacred revealed name, true; but we are also presented with what linguists call a sign, signifier, or semiotic pointer to the Divine, not the Divine itself. Our word son is hardly newfangled anyway: sunus in Vedic and Gothic is the very same word, minus the archaic masculine nominative case -us; as for Ahman, for Hugh Nibley the name evokes, among other, deeper things, the Egyptian Pantocrator, Amun. The Cosmic Amun, or Transcendent Amun-Re, as Professor David Klotz calls the figure, appears at the center of all Egyptian hypocephali (Abraham Facsimile 2).
I'll not forget meeting one rabbi in Long Beach, California: learned, perceptive, keen. No introductions about my own faith were necessary; he let me know I was a Latter-day Saint the moment he saw me and, in a trice, had my Hebrew Bible open and therefrom began to expatiate on the Hebrew origins of the name Ahman. (He startled me by saying I should publish these findings.) Someday we'll know more about God's Divine Names; for now, He clearly is inviting us all--Jew and Gentile alike--to ponder, to study, to compare. (For the Indo-European cases see Frederik Kortlandt, "An Outline of Proto-Indo-European," www.kortlandt.nl.)
This is good news because if there is anything new to be published in Biblical studies, I'll give you five dollars. I wouldn't be caught dead in Biblical scholarship. But, you see, the Doctrine and Covenants is "all things divinely new."
English alone often seems to be an inadequate vehicle for what the Lord wishes to teach the Latter-day Saints. One possible reason for the Lord presenting us with these startling new or archaizing names, or Alpha and Omega in other words, lies in the origins of that name in the Hebrew encyclopaedia. From the Hebrew perspective, the world was organized or framed in One Eternal Round and, in the semiotic system which encodes said organization, the first and last letters of the alphabet round that world. These letters are aleph and tau. The observation is nothing new. . .
But the Doctrine and Covenants always intertwines the ancient with the everlastingly new (for Christ is primus et novissimus). By emphasizing the translated, approximated, European nature of the name (or names) Alpha and Omega, or Alphus and Omegus, the Lord points our minds back to the ancient name Aleph and Tau and thus invites us not only to look at the Greek symbols as mere signifiers of a former semiotic system but also at all these earthly symbols as purely signifiers of an Eternal Order. Doubtless He is also letting us know by means of Section 95, if we choose to ponder further, that the use of Alpha and Omega in the Book of Mormon, is only by way of translation; or in other words, in accord with our own English usage, as taken from the Greek Testament. Christ introduces himself in our translated Book of Mormon as Alpha and Omega, although to the Nephites He would have introduced Himself as Alpha and Tau (another insight from Hugh Nibley!).
In the same way hosts and armies only approximates the calling forth of the Sabaoth, which name, studied over centuries, also sorely calls out for illumination! By way of stunning originality, Frank Moore Cross reads the name Lord of Hosts, or Jehovah Sabaoth, as YHWH Tzavaot as Elohim YHWH Tzavaot, or, in other words, "God, He (Who) Causes to Come Into Being the Hosts." The reading, whether indeed correct, evokes Joseph Smith's interpretation, "Creator of the First Day," and also references Genesis 2:1. None of these readings need exclude another. Consider the name, eternally open-ended, which God revealed to Moses in the burning bush. And He Will Be what He Will Be.
The introduction of Section 35 answers to the second part of the interpretation of Sabaoth: "the beginning and the end"; in fact the Lord reveals four titles by way of elucidation. One of these four titles is not to be found in the Holy Bible but occurs three times in the Book of Mormon: "Whose course is one eternal round" (the One whose course is one eternal round). The phrase one eternal round also appears more than once in the Doctrine and Covenants. Its use by both Nephi and Alma, and similar wording in the various other places in Scripture, clearly shows it to be a quotation (with its own tradition of variants!) from yet other Scriptures in their possession. The phrase does recall the theme of the first chapters of the Book of Enoch: "And all His works go on thus from year to year for ever" (Enoch 5:2; tr. R. H. Charles), the Semitic word for year deriving from "that which goes round." The phrase also appears in Watts's hymns, and in various British and American poets, but any future study of it must show just how unique it is to Restoration Scripture. The Prophet used what language was at his disposal to teach the gospel, or to translate the gospel in a familiar way, but the phrasing of the Scriptures from which he translated reflects ancient wording time-out-of-mind.
Doctrine and Covenants 38, although revealed prior to Section 95, not only revisits the titles found in Section 35, it also expands upon the first part of the interpretation of Sabaoth as "creator of the first day":
Thus saith the Lord your God, even Jesus Christ, the Great I AM, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the same which looked upon the wide expanse of eternity, and all the seraphic hosts of heaven, before the world was made. The same which knoweth all things, for all things are present before mine eyes; I am the same which spake, and the world was made, and all things came by me (38:1-3).
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/38?lang=eng
Seraphic is the only way to describe this prelude to revelation, and seraphic is surely another of those Hebrew words (found only in Isaiah 6) that comes unelucidated into our own tongue (s-r-f or ll-r-f, to burn, be fiery); its interpretation requires, in fact, the cloven "tongue of angels" and of fire. In the revelation given to Brother Joseph, seraphic describes the premortal spirit sons and daughters of Father and also evokes the glory that emanates from God and fills the seraphim with everlasting burnings. I hear the glowing stars "Forever singing as they shine: 'The hand that made us is divine' " (Addison).
The First Day is that Seraphic Day. God, sitting on His Throne, surrounded by His Seraphim (as in Isaiah 6), looked upon the wide expanse--the great maidan of eternity--and made the First Day. "This is the Day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice--sing the angelic hosts--and be glad in it" (Psalm 118:24). For Latter-day Saints, the very words Isaiah speaks in the sod, the Council, "Here am I, send me," bespeak imitatio christi. In the Grand Council in Heaven, standing before the Throne and in the presence of all the seraphic hosts of heaven, in blessed witness, Christ offered Himself a sacrifice for sin with these very words: "Here am I, send me" (Abraham 3:27). Here I AM, send me. Isaiah Chapter Six therefore also fits our scenario of the Grand Assembly, before the world was. After all, God dwells in an Eternal Present; Isaiah was not in time, temporal, when he so communed. His offering and call, in imitatio christi, was also first made "before the world was made."
Or, in other words, all things were decided and planned spiritually in the Council, for "all things were before created; but spiritually were they created," then "naturally" (Moses 3: 5,7). God, who knows "the end from the beginning" (Abraham 2:8), planned the creation and called forth, in Grand Council, the First Day. The Babylonians had a word for all these actions, a word very much like tzabu (hosts, troops): tzubbum ("to look at something from a distance; to carry out, execute properly, according to plan"--John Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian, 519-20). My point, by means of wordplay, is that our English "looked upon" should be read as compactly, as poetically as possible. To look upon the wide expanse of heaven and its hosts of seraphim is to plan for them: it is the First Day of the Plan of Happiness--and what a beautiful day that would be! All the sons of God sang for joy. The Lord of Hosts is the Lord of the First Day--the day of the mustering of the hosts, that is, the Day of the Mustered Ones, in glorious though Solemn Assembly (Hebrew tz-b-'-t). "Call your Solemn Assembly," says the Lord, even as I have called Mine: "on earth as it is in heaven."
We're already deep into the Pearl of Great Price, so let's move at once to Facsimile 2. There, too, we see "God sitting upon His throne" and revealing his light and knowledge "through the heavens." At center, we find what the Prophet Joseph calls the grand, governing star Kolob, the "first creation," or, in other words, "lord of the first day." Kolob stands nearest of all created things to the throne of God, and students notably associate the title Lord of Sabaoth with the enthronement of God, of which the Mercy Seat on the Ark of the Covenant is symbolic (William F. Albright, Frank Moore Cross). Describing Facsimile 2, Hugh Nibley concludes: "The theme of the hypocephalus is the creation drama" (Hugh Nibley and Michael Rhodes, One Eternal Round, 137).
"God sitting upon His Throne" and surrounded by his assembled hosts (his Sabaoth), announces, or calls forth the First Day. It is also the Day of the Grand Council in Heaven, the heavenly panegyris or Solemn Assembly. We again recall how Section 95:7 begins by referring to the Solemn Assembly, what in Hebrew is called 'atzarah (lit. "cessation of work," and thus, following call of trump and preparatory fasting, "festive assembly") or eidah (assemblage, gathering = Koehler-Baumgartner Lexicon) and, in Greek, the panegyris (Hebrews 12:23: "the general assembly"). The Greek lexicon yields: pas, aguris/agora, "all, assembly or council," that is, "an assembly of a whole nation, a high festival, a solemn assembly" (Liddell-Scott Lexicon). You recall I once asked Hugh Nibley whether Facsimile 2 had reference to the Great Council of Heaven. "Yes," he answered directly--and many other things:
"The great year-rite in one form or another seems to be found throughout the ancient world. What we are talking about is what the Greeks call the panegyris, the great assembly of the entire race to participate in solemn rites essential to the continuance of its corporate well-being. . . .At hundreds of holy shrines, each believed to mark the exact center of the universe and represented as the point at which the four quarters of the earth converged---'the navel of the earth'--one might have seen assembled at the New Year---the moment of creation, the beginning and ending of time--vast concourses of people, each thought to represent the entire human race in the presence of all its ancestors and gods" (One Eternal Round, 103-4). The ceremonies "at the hierocentric center" become "the exact reflection" "of what goes on in heaven" (106-7).
And an "exact reflection" of the places in the Doctrine and Covenants!
The "timing" marks "the ending of one cycle and the beginning of the next," as "the sun begins a new life every year at the winter solstice" (One Eternal Round, 108); "The whole universe and all that is in it must be 'jump-started' for a new round of existence" (109); and it is Facsimile 2 that "touches on the New Year's rites at many points" (130). According to Hugh Nibley, the Book of Abraham opens with a retelling of the Year-Rite, the scenario that matches all three facsimiles from altar to coronation.
The expression Lord of Sabaoth thus marks the First Day, the "moment of creation," of renewal in the on-going cycles of existence: to Latter-day Saints not the ultimate beginning but an again-beginning order of creation, "for the works of God continue"; "My works never cease."
The First Day is thus both end and beginning. The Assembly always comes at the end of the festival, and here we have the end of our first primordial childhood and the beginning of a fresh plan of happiness. The Doctrine and Covenants yields a glimpse of the panegyris or Solemn Assembly, the Seraphic Sabaoth that encircle the Throne at Center of the Universe--and that's also what we see depicted on Facsimile 2: the starry hosts encircling the Center, all standing in hierarchic order, as planned from the beginning "before the world was." These are the Ogdoad, the Council of Eight Souls or Powers--and the Prophet associates them with stars (for the Ogdoad, see Nibley and Rhodes, One Eternal Round). We also see depicted therein, in the lower panel that represents solsticial North, the Hathor Cow (mother of the Sun, or feminine sun), the Four Quarters of the Earth, as also the four elements of life and creation, and the Lotus-Lion-Lam cryptogram (s-m-s = to cause to be born; or come into existence; smsw = the Eldest) that works renewal. It is both the Birthday of the Sun and the day of coronation and royal endowment of power. Kolob, near the throne of God, sits surrounded by the hierarchy of the wide expanse of eternity, as that describes a circle or sphere. Here are the stars; here, the encircling seraphic hosts praising God with uplifted hymning hands at the morning of the world, the beginning and the end. "It's a hologram," Brother Nibley went on to tell me that day in chapel.
Why labor such an obscure theme? It burdens the scriptures. Considering the apocalyptic literature on Abraham, now being taken seriously for the first time, Nibley asks:
"Why such an obsession with the year-rite? It is because Abraham is a prime example of the tradition in literature, while Joseph Smith, long before the phenomenon emerged, provided us with at least five splendid examples of the great assembly. There is the celebration before the throne of God (1 Nephi 1:8-11); then there is the gathering of the righteous posterity of Adam at Adam-ondi-Ahman just before Adam's death (Doctrine and Covenants 107:53); the future gathering of the righteous at Adam-ondi-Ahman before the second coming of the Savior (Doctrine and Covenants 116:1); and the gathering at the temple after Christ's resurrection (3 Nephi 11-26). But the most striking of all is the coronation of King Mosiah, which we are explicitly told took place at the beginning of a new age," One Eternal Round, 167.
To this list, Hugh Nibley now adds the Book of Abraham (coherently assembling all three of the accompanying facsimiles), and shall we not then also include the Prophet Joseph's many other teachings about the Grand Council in Heaven, a description of which clearly appears in Doctrine and Covenants 38:1 and 95:7? These are events heralding a spiritual rebirth and a "renewing of their bodies" (Doctrine and Covenants 84) as well, for: "It was the universal birthday, also the day of creation," One Eternal Round, 168, and resurrection, the beginning and the end.
Hugh Nibley frequently compared the rescuing visit of Christ to the Nephites with the Descensus motif ("Christ among the Ruins," Ensign, July 1983). (The first time I ever saw or talked to him, was the occasion this very talk in Long Beach, California.) And President Joseph F. Smith saw in vision "gathered together in one place an innumerable company of the spirits of the just"; "all these. . . mingled in the vast assembly"--then "the Son of God appeared, declaring liberty to the captives" (Doctrine and Covenants 138: 12, 16, 18, 49; see Isaiah 61:1). Professor James A. Sanders, ever sensitive to how one prophet quotes another, often observed to his students at Claremont College how Isaiah's "declaring liberty to the captives" refers to the epoch-marking celebration of Jubilees, a new beginning. Now we have a modern prophet quoting from Isaiah's Messianic verses; and, by so doing, opening to our view Christ's Descensus as a Jubilee Panegyris, even the jubilee trump of resurrection.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/138?lang=eng
The scriptures of the restoration are telling us something again and again, and by means of various media and using a variety of titles and phraseology. The scriptures teach that the power of creation is awesome and indeed purposely beautiful, and they even bring us directly into the picture as participants (Nibley was keen on that idea). We join with God in the work of creation. We are Sabaoth--the Seraphic Sabaoth that "at His bidding post." In the Explanation of Facsimile 2, given by the Prophet Joseph Smith, God shares His power, or priesthood blessings with a succession of named patriarchs, Adam, Seth, Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, and thence with their children. Fittingly, the four heads of the Kolob figure, say all who have studied the hypocephali, represent the first four divine kings, the first patriarchal dynasty, of Ancient Egypt. Kolob, "as the great, governing star," is exactly that--an embodiment, says Donald Redford, of the nationhood of Egypt. The iconography of the hypocephalus thus fits the prophetic Explanation.
This priesthood bond is the Abrahamic covenant. President Lorenzo Snow long pondered the scripture: "Behold, I am from above, and my power lieth beneath. I am over all, and through all, and search all things" (Doctrine and Covenants 63:59; Conference Reports). This Latter-day Prophet came to perceive that God's power lay below in and through the power of His priesthood hosts on earth. Through this divine priesthood army or Sabaoth or Baneemy ("my sons"--another semiotic "construct" of archaic feel), God will finally subject all things to himself: "And the day cometh that all things shall be subject unto me" (63:59), in perfect harmony and cooperation, after the pattern of the stars, after the music of the spheres.
"Behold, I am Alpha and Omega, even Jesus Christ" (63:60).
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/63?lang=eng
Some years ago at UCLA, I examined the Gardner Library copy of Brother Nibley's dissertation, "The Roman Games as the Survival of an Archaic Year-Cult" (University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 1938). It's all about the ancient panegyris at the Year-Rite. Whether the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Hopi, Aztecs, Egyptians, or Abraham, whether Heliopolis or Stonehenge, Hugh Nibley never dropped the Year-Rite; he was always adding to his tally of knowledge about it and tying it in with all his work on the Restoration. I count eight decades of study on the Year-Rite. No wonder One Eternal Round sums things up in such concise language. Other students have written on the theme--Mircea Eliade for instance--but Nibley had both priority and control of languages and sources--and, thus, comprehensiveness. And what he accumulates still makes for new scholarship in the 21st Century.
And notice there's no mysticism in any of it: no bells, no incense, no inward absorption into the divine. It's all historical research. His argument perforce ranges over ideas borrowed by the mystics, and certainly Nibley had much to say about mystery: religious protocols, the lodge, the temple. But if there was one thing Hugh Nibley eschewed it was mysticism. I heard him voice this dislike time and again. To him, all systems of mysticism stand exactly opposite to what Facsimile 2 conveys and to what all modern and ancient revelation teaches. Mysticism and Mormonism have nothing in common. Panegyris is history, folks.
As the title of Hugh Nibley's last book reminds us, and as the Book of Mormon states in triplicate, God's "course is one eternal round" (Alma 7:20; 1 Nephi 10:19; Alma 37:12; Doctrine and Covenants 3:2; 35:1). The title refers to Facsimile 2, the round drawing on papyrus, the book's ostensible subject, but Nibley is reaching for something more--he is reaching into eternity. The facsimile is just that: a simile or mirror of God's continuing creative power, a work to which we are all invited. This coming-together party to participate in eternal creation, this assembly or panegyris, constitutes the burden of Hugh Nibley's ministry. We see Creation as Celebration.
Creation as Celebration as One Historical Round: "In ancient Egypt," notes Erik Hornung, "history was a religious drama in which all of humanity participated. . . From the earliest annals on, the elaborate festivals and their celebration by the king were recorded as historic events. Thus we might characterize the ancient Egyptian sense of history with the phrase 'history as celebration.'" "The ceremonial character of history" gyrates according to a "basic pattern" set at the first festive all-gathering at the first royal coronation (Erik Hornung, Idea into Image, 187). The three facsimiles of the Book of Abraham, taken together, capture that moment or "basic pattern" even better than the annals Hornung cites:
"And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;"
The vital teaching about One Eternal Round turns up (or comes round) everywhere in the scriptures, for "the works of God continue." The Eternal Round and the Plan of Happiness describe one and the same "work and glory"--"to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." For the Latter-day Saints, God is not the Creator, past tense, but the Creative: "for my works never cease" (2 Nephi; cf. Truman Madsen).
We end with the Divine Name I AM THAT I AM. What does the Hebrew tell us? The name is open-ended, an eternal going-around. In another Sunday School class, Hugh Nibley sat listening. In the Hebrew, our teacher (Jeff Lindsay) explained, the Name more fully expresses I SHALL BE WHAT I SHALL BE. "Is that right, Brother Nibley"? he asked. Brother Nibley nodded with gusto: "Yes!"
We glimpse Kolob, among the Sabaoth, as "the grand governing star," early to rise, "first in time," on the first day, even the gathering sunrise coronation of the earth, our eternal home. The renewed earth stands "crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father" (Doctrine and Covenants 88:19). In Creation as Panegyris we see God's work and glory for "the immortality and eternal life of man," for Adam redeemed: I SHALL BECOME FOR YOU WHAT I SHALL BECOME. And in that Name, I hear Jehovah saying to all Israel that--"Look and behold the condescension of God!"--He will become the Messiah and save His people "for ever, even for ever and ever" (Daniel 7:18--a panegyris text; 1 Nephi 11:26).
NOTES
A detailed overview of the name "Lord of Sabaoth" is to be found is Maire Byrne, The Names of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The quotes from Frank Moore Cross and Choon Seow come from this book, and someday I will even add the correct page numbers.
LDS commentary: Joseph Fielding McConkie and Craig J. Ostler, Revelations of the Restoration: A Commentary of the Doctrine and Covenants and Other Modern Revelations (2000). The authors note the tie between 95:7, 38:1, and 45:1.
The article to read is Dana M. Pike's "Biblical Words You Already Know and Why They are Important," in By Study and By Faith: Selections From the Religious Educator, Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, Kent P. Jackson (eds) (Provo, 2009), 183-201.
Robert Boyle's Web page also has a concise essay posted on this topic.
One Eternal Round speaks to continual renewal, to a newness of life, to creation and resurrection; it bespeaks a timeless Day in which all things are present before the Lord. Latter-day Saint Prophets teach of a great assembly of all Father's children, prior to the Creation of the Earth, in which the Plan of Happiness, even the Gospel of Jesus Christ, was first revealed. I once asked Brother Nibley whether the hypocephalus had anything to do with the Grand Council in Heaven. "Yes," he replied, with his manner of swift surprise. (Facsimile 2: http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr/fac-2?lang=eng)
The same ancient ideas about the Grand Council and Creation also appear in the Doctrine and Covenants. Take the revealed interpretation of the Divine Title, Lord of Sabaoth (or Lord of Hosts) in Doctrine and Covenants 95:7; 35:1; 38:1. (See also Abraham 3 and Abraham Facsimile 2.)
And for this cause I gave unto you a commandment that you should call your solemn assembly, that your fastings and your mourning might come up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, which is by interpretation, the creator of the first day, the beginning and the end (95:7, http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/95?lang=eng).
The Lord expands on the interpretation of his Eternal Name in the final verse 17, while also leaving us, as always, to ponder the implications and connections:
And let the higher part of the inner court [of the House] be dedicated unto me for the school of mine apostles, saith Son Ahman; or, in other words, Alphus; or, in other words, Omegus; even Jesus Christ your Lord. Amen.
The first part of verse seven reflects the themes and imagery of the second chapter of Joel, and note the emphasis on calling a Solemn Assembly in the Lord's House; while the second part, the interpretation of "Lord of Sabaoth," catches the breath away, as does sacred verse 17.
The revealed interpretation of Lord of Sabaoth cleanly and simply by-passes the dictionary definition (a transliteration of the Hebrew word for hosts = tzabaot) and instead proposes an interpretation. Now it's likely--although it hardly matters one way or the other--that the Prophet Joseph, prior to his formal study of Hebrew, had no idea what Sabaoth meant; nor might he have grasped how the revealed interpretation refers back to the creation story and its summation (its beginning and end) in Genesis 1:1 and 2:1:
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
And what is "all the host of them"? Answer (as found in any lexicon or commentary): the stars and planets and the holy angels make up the hosts of heaven. Indeed Latter-day students have often treated Genesis 2:1 as one key to the revealed interpretation of Lord of Sabaoth (Dana Pike, Robert Boyle).
Semiotics, the theory of signs, differentiates between dictionary and encyclopaedia. The interpretation in Doctrine and Covenants 95:7 touches on dictionary and expands into encyclopaedia. In fact the verse packs both denotation and connotation into a surprisingly small compass of eleven words. Let us first recall that many students have wrestled with the interpretation and origins of the name, a title which Professor Choon Seow terms "one of the most enigmatical divine names in the Holy Bible" (cited in Maire Byrne, The Names of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).
We start with two of the formulaic introductions to revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants (Joseph McConkie considers these one key to Doctrine and Covenants 95:7). These formulae introduce God, in his own terms, to humankind.
Listen to the voice of the Lord your God, even Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, whose course is one eternal round, the same today as yesterday, and forever (Doctrine and Covenants 35:1).
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/35?lang=eng
Here we have the name of God, as found in the Apocalypse of John and taken from the Greek letters, Alpha and Omega.
Or, in other words: Why, then, should the 95th Section speak of Alphus and Omegus, using an unusual, indeed unknown, form of the Greek letters? The names--and note these are presented more as names than name--are not Latin, rather Anglicized forms, that is, made-up forms--"in other words" is how the Lord phrases it. Greek Alpha and Omega here take Latinate (as if 2nd declension), or even general Indo-European nominative masculine case endings. Hugh Nibley explains the word Telestial as a like coinage, framed in harmony with Latin celestial and terrestrial, that combines both Greek root and Latin ending in an Anglicized form (to telos, the ultimate or lowest kingdom of glory in Doctrine and Covenants Section 76).
To show another example, the same verse speaks of Son Ahman, a purely semiotic construct consisting of an English word or name plus a name in a different language. We are given a sacred revealed name, true; but we are also presented with what linguists call a sign, signifier, or semiotic pointer to the Divine, not the Divine itself. Our word son is hardly newfangled anyway: sunus in Vedic and Gothic is the very same word, minus the archaic masculine nominative case -us; as for Ahman, for Hugh Nibley the name evokes, among other, deeper things, the Egyptian Pantocrator, Amun. The Cosmic Amun, or Transcendent Amun-Re, as Professor David Klotz calls the figure, appears at the center of all Egyptian hypocephali (Abraham Facsimile 2).
I'll not forget meeting one rabbi in Long Beach, California: learned, perceptive, keen. No introductions about my own faith were necessary; he let me know I was a Latter-day Saint the moment he saw me and, in a trice, had my Hebrew Bible open and therefrom began to expatiate on the Hebrew origins of the name Ahman. (He startled me by saying I should publish these findings.) Someday we'll know more about God's Divine Names; for now, He clearly is inviting us all--Jew and Gentile alike--to ponder, to study, to compare. (For the Indo-European cases see Frederik Kortlandt, "An Outline of Proto-Indo-European," www.kortlandt.nl.)
This is good news because if there is anything new to be published in Biblical studies, I'll give you five dollars. I wouldn't be caught dead in Biblical scholarship. But, you see, the Doctrine and Covenants is "all things divinely new."
English alone often seems to be an inadequate vehicle for what the Lord wishes to teach the Latter-day Saints. One possible reason for the Lord presenting us with these startling new or archaizing names, or Alpha and Omega in other words, lies in the origins of that name in the Hebrew encyclopaedia. From the Hebrew perspective, the world was organized or framed in One Eternal Round and, in the semiotic system which encodes said organization, the first and last letters of the alphabet round that world. These letters are aleph and tau. The observation is nothing new. . .
But the Doctrine and Covenants always intertwines the ancient with the everlastingly new (for Christ is primus et novissimus). By emphasizing the translated, approximated, European nature of the name (or names) Alpha and Omega, or Alphus and Omegus, the Lord points our minds back to the ancient name Aleph and Tau and thus invites us not only to look at the Greek symbols as mere signifiers of a former semiotic system but also at all these earthly symbols as purely signifiers of an Eternal Order. Doubtless He is also letting us know by means of Section 95, if we choose to ponder further, that the use of Alpha and Omega in the Book of Mormon, is only by way of translation; or in other words, in accord with our own English usage, as taken from the Greek Testament. Christ introduces himself in our translated Book of Mormon as Alpha and Omega, although to the Nephites He would have introduced Himself as Alpha and Tau (another insight from Hugh Nibley!).
In the same way hosts and armies only approximates the calling forth of the Sabaoth, which name, studied over centuries, also sorely calls out for illumination! By way of stunning originality, Frank Moore Cross reads the name Lord of Hosts, or Jehovah Sabaoth, as YHWH Tzavaot as Elohim YHWH Tzavaot, or, in other words, "God, He (Who) Causes to Come Into Being the Hosts." The reading, whether indeed correct, evokes Joseph Smith's interpretation, "Creator of the First Day," and also references Genesis 2:1. None of these readings need exclude another. Consider the name, eternally open-ended, which God revealed to Moses in the burning bush. And He Will Be what He Will Be.
The introduction of Section 35 answers to the second part of the interpretation of Sabaoth: "the beginning and the end"; in fact the Lord reveals four titles by way of elucidation. One of these four titles is not to be found in the Holy Bible but occurs three times in the Book of Mormon: "Whose course is one eternal round" (the One whose course is one eternal round). The phrase one eternal round also appears more than once in the Doctrine and Covenants. Its use by both Nephi and Alma, and similar wording in the various other places in Scripture, clearly shows it to be a quotation (with its own tradition of variants!) from yet other Scriptures in their possession. The phrase does recall the theme of the first chapters of the Book of Enoch: "And all His works go on thus from year to year for ever" (Enoch 5:2; tr. R. H. Charles), the Semitic word for year deriving from "that which goes round." The phrase also appears in Watts's hymns, and in various British and American poets, but any future study of it must show just how unique it is to Restoration Scripture. The Prophet used what language was at his disposal to teach the gospel, or to translate the gospel in a familiar way, but the phrasing of the Scriptures from which he translated reflects ancient wording time-out-of-mind.
Doctrine and Covenants 38, although revealed prior to Section 95, not only revisits the titles found in Section 35, it also expands upon the first part of the interpretation of Sabaoth as "creator of the first day":
Thus saith the Lord your God, even Jesus Christ, the Great I AM, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the same which looked upon the wide expanse of eternity, and all the seraphic hosts of heaven, before the world was made. The same which knoweth all things, for all things are present before mine eyes; I am the same which spake, and the world was made, and all things came by me (38:1-3).
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/38?lang=eng
Seraphic is the only way to describe this prelude to revelation, and seraphic is surely another of those Hebrew words (found only in Isaiah 6) that comes unelucidated into our own tongue (s-r-f or ll-r-f, to burn, be fiery); its interpretation requires, in fact, the cloven "tongue of angels" and of fire. In the revelation given to Brother Joseph, seraphic describes the premortal spirit sons and daughters of Father and also evokes the glory that emanates from God and fills the seraphim with everlasting burnings. I hear the glowing stars "Forever singing as they shine: 'The hand that made us is divine' " (Addison).
The First Day is that Seraphic Day. God, sitting on His Throne, surrounded by His Seraphim (as in Isaiah 6), looked upon the wide expanse--the great maidan of eternity--and made the First Day. "This is the Day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice--sing the angelic hosts--and be glad in it" (Psalm 118:24). For Latter-day Saints, the very words Isaiah speaks in the sod, the Council, "Here am I, send me," bespeak imitatio christi. In the Grand Council in Heaven, standing before the Throne and in the presence of all the seraphic hosts of heaven, in blessed witness, Christ offered Himself a sacrifice for sin with these very words: "Here am I, send me" (Abraham 3:27). Here I AM, send me. Isaiah Chapter Six therefore also fits our scenario of the Grand Assembly, before the world was. After all, God dwells in an Eternal Present; Isaiah was not in time, temporal, when he so communed. His offering and call, in imitatio christi, was also first made "before the world was made."
Or, in other words, all things were decided and planned spiritually in the Council, for "all things were before created; but spiritually were they created," then "naturally" (Moses 3: 5,7). God, who knows "the end from the beginning" (Abraham 2:8), planned the creation and called forth, in Grand Council, the First Day. The Babylonians had a word for all these actions, a word very much like tzabu (hosts, troops): tzubbum ("to look at something from a distance; to carry out, execute properly, according to plan"--John Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian, 519-20). My point, by means of wordplay, is that our English "looked upon" should be read as compactly, as poetically as possible. To look upon the wide expanse of heaven and its hosts of seraphim is to plan for them: it is the First Day of the Plan of Happiness--and what a beautiful day that would be! All the sons of God sang for joy. The Lord of Hosts is the Lord of the First Day--the day of the mustering of the hosts, that is, the Day of the Mustered Ones, in glorious though Solemn Assembly (Hebrew tz-b-'-t). "Call your Solemn Assembly," says the Lord, even as I have called Mine: "on earth as it is in heaven."
We're already deep into the Pearl of Great Price, so let's move at once to Facsimile 2. There, too, we see "God sitting upon His throne" and revealing his light and knowledge "through the heavens." At center, we find what the Prophet Joseph calls the grand, governing star Kolob, the "first creation," or, in other words, "lord of the first day." Kolob stands nearest of all created things to the throne of God, and students notably associate the title Lord of Sabaoth with the enthronement of God, of which the Mercy Seat on the Ark of the Covenant is symbolic (William F. Albright, Frank Moore Cross). Describing Facsimile 2, Hugh Nibley concludes: "The theme of the hypocephalus is the creation drama" (Hugh Nibley and Michael Rhodes, One Eternal Round, 137).
"God sitting upon His Throne" and surrounded by his assembled hosts (his Sabaoth), announces, or calls forth the First Day. It is also the Day of the Grand Council in Heaven, the heavenly panegyris or Solemn Assembly. We again recall how Section 95:7 begins by referring to the Solemn Assembly, what in Hebrew is called 'atzarah (lit. "cessation of work," and thus, following call of trump and preparatory fasting, "festive assembly") or eidah (assemblage, gathering = Koehler-Baumgartner Lexicon) and, in Greek, the panegyris (Hebrews 12:23: "the general assembly"). The Greek lexicon yields: pas, aguris/agora, "all, assembly or council," that is, "an assembly of a whole nation, a high festival, a solemn assembly" (Liddell-Scott Lexicon). You recall I once asked Hugh Nibley whether Facsimile 2 had reference to the Great Council of Heaven. "Yes," he answered directly--and many other things:
"The great year-rite in one form or another seems to be found throughout the ancient world. What we are talking about is what the Greeks call the panegyris, the great assembly of the entire race to participate in solemn rites essential to the continuance of its corporate well-being. . . .At hundreds of holy shrines, each believed to mark the exact center of the universe and represented as the point at which the four quarters of the earth converged---'the navel of the earth'--one might have seen assembled at the New Year---the moment of creation, the beginning and ending of time--vast concourses of people, each thought to represent the entire human race in the presence of all its ancestors and gods" (One Eternal Round, 103-4). The ceremonies "at the hierocentric center" become "the exact reflection" "of what goes on in heaven" (106-7).
And an "exact reflection" of the places in the Doctrine and Covenants!
The "timing" marks "the ending of one cycle and the beginning of the next," as "the sun begins a new life every year at the winter solstice" (One Eternal Round, 108); "The whole universe and all that is in it must be 'jump-started' for a new round of existence" (109); and it is Facsimile 2 that "touches on the New Year's rites at many points" (130). According to Hugh Nibley, the Book of Abraham opens with a retelling of the Year-Rite, the scenario that matches all three facsimiles from altar to coronation.
The expression Lord of Sabaoth thus marks the First Day, the "moment of creation," of renewal in the on-going cycles of existence: to Latter-day Saints not the ultimate beginning but an again-beginning order of creation, "for the works of God continue"; "My works never cease."
The First Day is thus both end and beginning. The Assembly always comes at the end of the festival, and here we have the end of our first primordial childhood and the beginning of a fresh plan of happiness. The Doctrine and Covenants yields a glimpse of the panegyris or Solemn Assembly, the Seraphic Sabaoth that encircle the Throne at Center of the Universe--and that's also what we see depicted on Facsimile 2: the starry hosts encircling the Center, all standing in hierarchic order, as planned from the beginning "before the world was." These are the Ogdoad, the Council of Eight Souls or Powers--and the Prophet associates them with stars (for the Ogdoad, see Nibley and Rhodes, One Eternal Round). We also see depicted therein, in the lower panel that represents solsticial North, the Hathor Cow (mother of the Sun, or feminine sun), the Four Quarters of the Earth, as also the four elements of life and creation, and the Lotus-Lion-Lam cryptogram (s-m-s = to cause to be born; or come into existence; smsw = the Eldest) that works renewal. It is both the Birthday of the Sun and the day of coronation and royal endowment of power. Kolob, near the throne of God, sits surrounded by the hierarchy of the wide expanse of eternity, as that describes a circle or sphere. Here are the stars; here, the encircling seraphic hosts praising God with uplifted hymning hands at the morning of the world, the beginning and the end. "It's a hologram," Brother Nibley went on to tell me that day in chapel.
Why labor such an obscure theme? It burdens the scriptures. Considering the apocalyptic literature on Abraham, now being taken seriously for the first time, Nibley asks:
"Why such an obsession with the year-rite? It is because Abraham is a prime example of the tradition in literature, while Joseph Smith, long before the phenomenon emerged, provided us with at least five splendid examples of the great assembly. There is the celebration before the throne of God (1 Nephi 1:8-11); then there is the gathering of the righteous posterity of Adam at Adam-ondi-Ahman just before Adam's death (Doctrine and Covenants 107:53); the future gathering of the righteous at Adam-ondi-Ahman before the second coming of the Savior (Doctrine and Covenants 116:1); and the gathering at the temple after Christ's resurrection (3 Nephi 11-26). But the most striking of all is the coronation of King Mosiah, which we are explicitly told took place at the beginning of a new age," One Eternal Round, 167.
To this list, Hugh Nibley now adds the Book of Abraham (coherently assembling all three of the accompanying facsimiles), and shall we not then also include the Prophet Joseph's many other teachings about the Grand Council in Heaven, a description of which clearly appears in Doctrine and Covenants 38:1 and 95:7? These are events heralding a spiritual rebirth and a "renewing of their bodies" (Doctrine and Covenants 84) as well, for: "It was the universal birthday, also the day of creation," One Eternal Round, 168, and resurrection, the beginning and the end.
Hugh Nibley frequently compared the rescuing visit of Christ to the Nephites with the Descensus motif ("Christ among the Ruins," Ensign, July 1983). (The first time I ever saw or talked to him, was the occasion this very talk in Long Beach, California.) And President Joseph F. Smith saw in vision "gathered together in one place an innumerable company of the spirits of the just"; "all these. . . mingled in the vast assembly"--then "the Son of God appeared, declaring liberty to the captives" (Doctrine and Covenants 138: 12, 16, 18, 49; see Isaiah 61:1). Professor James A. Sanders, ever sensitive to how one prophet quotes another, often observed to his students at Claremont College how Isaiah's "declaring liberty to the captives" refers to the epoch-marking celebration of Jubilees, a new beginning. Now we have a modern prophet quoting from Isaiah's Messianic verses; and, by so doing, opening to our view Christ's Descensus as a Jubilee Panegyris, even the jubilee trump of resurrection.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/138?lang=eng
The scriptures of the restoration are telling us something again and again, and by means of various media and using a variety of titles and phraseology. The scriptures teach that the power of creation is awesome and indeed purposely beautiful, and they even bring us directly into the picture as participants (Nibley was keen on that idea). We join with God in the work of creation. We are Sabaoth--the Seraphic Sabaoth that "at His bidding post." In the Explanation of Facsimile 2, given by the Prophet Joseph Smith, God shares His power, or priesthood blessings with a succession of named patriarchs, Adam, Seth, Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, and thence with their children. Fittingly, the four heads of the Kolob figure, say all who have studied the hypocephali, represent the first four divine kings, the first patriarchal dynasty, of Ancient Egypt. Kolob, "as the great, governing star," is exactly that--an embodiment, says Donald Redford, of the nationhood of Egypt. The iconography of the hypocephalus thus fits the prophetic Explanation.
This priesthood bond is the Abrahamic covenant. President Lorenzo Snow long pondered the scripture: "Behold, I am from above, and my power lieth beneath. I am over all, and through all, and search all things" (Doctrine and Covenants 63:59; Conference Reports). This Latter-day Prophet came to perceive that God's power lay below in and through the power of His priesthood hosts on earth. Through this divine priesthood army or Sabaoth or Baneemy ("my sons"--another semiotic "construct" of archaic feel), God will finally subject all things to himself: "And the day cometh that all things shall be subject unto me" (63:59), in perfect harmony and cooperation, after the pattern of the stars, after the music of the spheres.
"Behold, I am Alpha and Omega, even Jesus Christ" (63:60).
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/63?lang=eng
Some years ago at UCLA, I examined the Gardner Library copy of Brother Nibley's dissertation, "The Roman Games as the Survival of an Archaic Year-Cult" (University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 1938). It's all about the ancient panegyris at the Year-Rite. Whether the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Hopi, Aztecs, Egyptians, or Abraham, whether Heliopolis or Stonehenge, Hugh Nibley never dropped the Year-Rite; he was always adding to his tally of knowledge about it and tying it in with all his work on the Restoration. I count eight decades of study on the Year-Rite. No wonder One Eternal Round sums things up in such concise language. Other students have written on the theme--Mircea Eliade for instance--but Nibley had both priority and control of languages and sources--and, thus, comprehensiveness. And what he accumulates still makes for new scholarship in the 21st Century.
And notice there's no mysticism in any of it: no bells, no incense, no inward absorption into the divine. It's all historical research. His argument perforce ranges over ideas borrowed by the mystics, and certainly Nibley had much to say about mystery: religious protocols, the lodge, the temple. But if there was one thing Hugh Nibley eschewed it was mysticism. I heard him voice this dislike time and again. To him, all systems of mysticism stand exactly opposite to what Facsimile 2 conveys and to what all modern and ancient revelation teaches. Mysticism and Mormonism have nothing in common. Panegyris is history, folks.
As the title of Hugh Nibley's last book reminds us, and as the Book of Mormon states in triplicate, God's "course is one eternal round" (Alma 7:20; 1 Nephi 10:19; Alma 37:12; Doctrine and Covenants 3:2; 35:1). The title refers to Facsimile 2, the round drawing on papyrus, the book's ostensible subject, but Nibley is reaching for something more--he is reaching into eternity. The facsimile is just that: a simile or mirror of God's continuing creative power, a work to which we are all invited. This coming-together party to participate in eternal creation, this assembly or panegyris, constitutes the burden of Hugh Nibley's ministry. We see Creation as Celebration.
Creation as Celebration as One Historical Round: "In ancient Egypt," notes Erik Hornung, "history was a religious drama in which all of humanity participated. . . From the earliest annals on, the elaborate festivals and their celebration by the king were recorded as historic events. Thus we might characterize the ancient Egyptian sense of history with the phrase 'history as celebration.'" "The ceremonial character of history" gyrates according to a "basic pattern" set at the first festive all-gathering at the first royal coronation (Erik Hornung, Idea into Image, 187). The three facsimiles of the Book of Abraham, taken together, capture that moment or "basic pattern" even better than the annals Hornung cites:
"And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;"
The vital teaching about One Eternal Round turns up (or comes round) everywhere in the scriptures, for "the works of God continue." The Eternal Round and the Plan of Happiness describe one and the same "work and glory"--"to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." For the Latter-day Saints, God is not the Creator, past tense, but the Creative: "for my works never cease" (2 Nephi; cf. Truman Madsen).
We end with the Divine Name I AM THAT I AM. What does the Hebrew tell us? The name is open-ended, an eternal going-around. In another Sunday School class, Hugh Nibley sat listening. In the Hebrew, our teacher (Jeff Lindsay) explained, the Name more fully expresses I SHALL BE WHAT I SHALL BE. "Is that right, Brother Nibley"? he asked. Brother Nibley nodded with gusto: "Yes!"
We glimpse Kolob, among the Sabaoth, as "the grand governing star," early to rise, "first in time," on the first day, even the gathering sunrise coronation of the earth, our eternal home. The renewed earth stands "crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father" (Doctrine and Covenants 88:19). In Creation as Panegyris we see God's work and glory for "the immortality and eternal life of man," for Adam redeemed: I SHALL BECOME FOR YOU WHAT I SHALL BECOME. And in that Name, I hear Jehovah saying to all Israel that--"Look and behold the condescension of God!"--He will become the Messiah and save His people "for ever, even for ever and ever" (Daniel 7:18--a panegyris text; 1 Nephi 11:26).
NOTES
A detailed overview of the name "Lord of Sabaoth" is to be found is Maire Byrne, The Names of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The quotes from Frank Moore Cross and Choon Seow come from this book, and someday I will even add the correct page numbers.
LDS commentary: Joseph Fielding McConkie and Craig J. Ostler, Revelations of the Restoration: A Commentary of the Doctrine and Covenants and Other Modern Revelations (2000). The authors note the tie between 95:7, 38:1, and 45:1.
The article to read is Dana M. Pike's "Biblical Words You Already Know and Why They are Important," in By Study and By Faith: Selections From the Religious Educator, Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, Kent P. Jackson (eds) (Provo, 2009), 183-201.
Robert Boyle's Web page also has a concise essay posted on this topic.
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