Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: New Abraham Lore just dropped. Turns out Abraham was actually an astronomer who taught the Egyptians about the stars, just like the book of Abraham talks about, which we've recently come to know thanks to new scholarship that's come out recently published in Abraham and his Family in Scripture, History and Tradition. This, these are the proceedings of a conference the Interpreter foundation did. And Stephen, you wrote a paper in it that is really quite fascinating because it ties in traditions from the biblical world and later Jewish traditions and how it really ties into the book of Abraham. Really well. So was Abraham an astronomer?
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Yes, he was basically based on all this lore.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: According. Yeah, according to the lore or the tradition.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:00:42] Speaker C: And I do want to just maybe. Sorry to interrupt here, but I do just want to plug. It's published here. But Stephen also has some big boy scholarship on this one.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: That's right, Neil.
[00:00:53] Speaker C: He, he actually the core of this paper was published in a volume called Imitating Abraham by. Published by Brill, which is, if you.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Don'T know, an apologist hack press.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: If you don't know what Brill is, it is like it is one of the top tier places to publish for biblical scholarship, an ancient Near Eastern scholarship, Jewish and Christian history scholarship, all kinds of stuff like that. And he has a paper in that volume called Look Toward the Heavens and Count the Stars, Abraham the Astronomer in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. So this, this is not just Mormon apologetics. This is like this is legit stuff.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: When was the last time you published in Brill, Neil? Thank you very much. No, I'm just kidding.
[00:01:34] Speaker C: Exactly. Never.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Here's the thing, here's the thing. You should read this article published by Interpreter because it will not cost you a second mortgage on your house to buy one of these books. Brill volumes are notoriously very expensive. They kind of do that on purpose because they want like universities to buy their books for their libraries and institutional access. So I think the Imitating Abraham volume is like $130 or some crazy thing like.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: Yeah, it's expensive. Yeah, this is way more affordable. And look, you get, you actually get two volumes with this.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: Right, but.
And this is being digest. Like this is being presented for a latter day audience. Yeah, but I do want people to understand like the evidence we're going to talk about in the core argument really that you're making, this is this went through peer review and a top tier.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Went through non LDS peer review publication. All I did was once I published that and I took the core that material, I then, you know, put a little salt and Pepper on top and a little cherry for the book, for LDS audience for the Book of Abraham significance. And I put it in an LDS conference.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: So in the Book of Genesis, I'm familiar with how Abraham makes a covenant with God and God talks about how, you know, your posterity is going to be as the sands of the sea and the stars in the sky. So stars, like, appear in the Book of Genesis. But then when we go to the Book of Abraham, like, astronomy is everywhere, Stars are everywhere. We got Kolob coming in in the Book of Abraham and so seems to come out of nowhere. What do Jewish traditions, biblical traditions and other scholarships say about Abraham and astronomy?
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Great question, Jasmine. So let's start real quick with the material in the Bible. So there's a few key passages in the Bible that later Jewish readers of the Bible and Christian, but especially Jewish readers of the Bible, they notice and pick up on. And it informs this tradition that develops about Abraham as an astronomer. One of them is Genesis 15. Look to the heavens, count the stars. Right? With the Abrahamic covenant. Covenant. It happens again in Genesis 22, where this imagery is picked up. Again, this is in the context of the binding of Isaac. But there's Also Genesis chapter 11, verse 31 identifies Abraham is coming from a place called or of the Chaldees.
And the reason why that's significant is in later Jewish tradition.
By the way, I'm going to use the term Second Temple Judaism in our conversation. That is basically referring to the period of Japan Judaism when the Second Temple in Jerusalem was built. So the Jews come back from exile.
[00:03:52] Speaker C: Like 500 BC to when the Romans.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Destroyed in AD 70. So, okay, so second temple Judaism, is that good four or five centuries after the exile, up to the time of Christ. So in Second Temple Judaism, they look at these texts, including Abraham is a Chaldean. Well, by that time, the Chaldeans, these guys in Babylon and Mesopotamia, they had the reputation of being astronomers. And so they realized, oh, Abraham must be an astronomer because he said to be a Chaldean. Right? So what they're doing is they're picking up these biblical texts and developing a tradition that Abraham is an astronomer. Okay. And so the big chunk of my paper both here and with Brill is just laying out these sources. Who are the ancient authors? Jewish authors and some Christian who are saying Abraham is an astronomer. And we have both preserved texts that mention this and we have mention of texts that are no longer extant that seem to attribute this tradition to sources that we no longer have available to us.
[00:04:53] Speaker C: And what's Actually kind of interesting about that, as I read your paper, is some of these other sources that we don't have extent that are just mentioned like, oh, this, this person says he was an astronomer and this person says they are non Jewish.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:05] Speaker C: Non Christian. They are, I mean, what we might call pagan. Right. But that I think is kind of interesting in light of the book of Abraham purportedly being on papyri, found in an Egyptian tomb owned by an Egyptian priest. We talked about this with.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: I would kind of assume that all traditions about Abraham would just be limited to the Abrahamic faith.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: He's having an influence outside of that.
[00:05:28] Speaker C: But yeah, there were non Jewish authorities, if you will, sources that Josephus cites and things like that that talk about Abraham as an astronomer. So he had a reputation as an astronomer during this period that went beyond just like the Judeo Christian world.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Yeah, the scholars I quote discussing this, they basically say that in the pagan world, Abraham is primarily known as being an astronomer, a learned astronomer, basically. Right. So yes, for all those reasons that's interesting, why we get non Jewish, at least attributions of Abraham as an astronomer.
[00:06:03] Speaker C: So a hypothetical lost Egyptian source that portrays Abraham as an astronomer, astronomer, who maybe is too crazy. Right?
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Too crazy, exactly. Now, you know, we can't prove that, but it's not within the realm of crazy. It could never have happened. Right.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: Do you have an example of one of these sources? Like what do they say about Abraham?
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Well, okay, so Neil mentioned Josephus. So Josephus. We all know Josephus. We love Josephus. Right, Everybody. He's the Jewish historian, first century A.D. right. He writes about, among other things, the Jewish war with Rome. And, and he has a book called Antiquities. Right. And basically the punchline is, in the Roman era, if you wanted your people and your religion, your culture to have respectability, you needed to show it was old. You needed to have like a respectable pedigree for your faith tradition, show some legitimacy. Exactly. So Josephus, one of the big things he's trying to do is he's trying to impress his Roman audience. Hey, look, us Jews here in Israel, Palestine, right?
We, you can respect our traditions and our faith because it has deep antiquity. And so he gives these, he retells the stories from the Bible, but he provides a lot of new details or information about it that's not in our biblical account.
And there's big discussion. Where is he getting this information from?
On the one hand, scholars will say he's just making it up. Right. I think that's a little reductive on the other hand, you can't just take everything at face value, so you have to be a little bit critical. But when he gets to Abraham, he specifically mentions three people.
Hecateus of Abdera, Barossus, who's a Babylonian priest, and. Shoot, I can't remember who the third person is.
[00:07:38] Speaker C: Nicolaus of Damascus.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Thank you, Neil. We'll just go with that.
[00:07:41] Speaker C: I've got. I've got Stephen. It's not me.
I've got Stephen's paper.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: I'm trying to score my little notes here. Yeah, Neil's better than I. That was my. My Rick Perry moment. Right, in the presidential debate. Yeah. So he names these three people. Unfortunately, though, he just basically paraphrases what they say. He doesn't really provide extensive quotations, but he says all three of these guys say that Abraham was an astronomer. The reason he's doing this is because he wants to show, like, legitimacy for why the Jewish faith can be. And the Jewish people can be respected among the Romans. Okay, so that's one example that Neil was mentioning about how we have non Jewish authorities being cited by Jewish authorities and historians trying to say, look, Abraham's an astronomer.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Do any of these date to, like, the time of the Joseph Smith Papa?
[00:08:25] Speaker B: So. Yes, pretty much all of them do. Yeah.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: Or the time of Book of Abraham.
[00:08:29] Speaker C: So the Hektaeus. I don't know if I'm saying that. Right. Of Abdera, he dates to the 4th century BCE, and Nicolaus of Damascus is the 1st century BCE. And basically between there, like, that's your time period of the Book of Abraham papyri, or the. I should say the Joseph Smith papyri. Right.
Is, you know, those last few centuries B.C.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:53] Speaker C: If I'm.
I mean, Stephen would know better.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: Yeah, no, yeah. Ptolemaic period, Greco Roman period. That's when these sources, at least their earliest attestation are coming from. When we can sort of say, here's when they're being discussed and cited.
There's others besides Josephus. So one of our earliest sources we get on this is what's called Jubilees, Book of Jubilees.
A copy is preserved among Dead Sea Scrolls. It's actually, like, hugely influential in antiquity. I'm kind of surprised that it make the cut for getting in the Bible because of how influential it is. Jubilees is a retelling of the story of Genesis, basically.
But it's like they're obsessed with the calendrics of the timing of these events. That's why it's called Jubilees, because it's Divided into these Jubilee years.
[00:09:31] Speaker C: Yeah, they frame it into these 50 year Jubilee periods.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: But Jubilees has a story of Abraham being an astronomer, specifically in the sense that he studies the stars. And from his study of the stars he learns that there's only one God. He becomes a monotheist. Right.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. And that's kind of like in the book of Abraham you've got God teaching Abraham about Kolob, the greatest star, and how this God might. I am the greatest God of them all.
[00:09:53] Speaker C: Well, you do, but he doesn't become a monotheist in the book of Abraham.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but no, but there is continuity there in that. His study of the stars, it's not just for fun, right? It's to import religious significance to Abraham and his life story.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: He's becoming a prophet.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: Exactly. Right. So that's Jubilees in Qumran, there's actually pseudo Jubilees at Qumran, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Right. It's sort of a, they're riffing off of Jubilees.
They, they revise the verbs from Genesis for Abraham looking at the stars, probably in the, in the context of astrology.
So the scholarship I cite here, he's, he's staring and studying the stars for the purposes of like astrological significance. We'll touch on that in a minute here. So that's like at Qumran, Dead Sea Scrolls, we've mentioned Josephus, Philo, my boy Philo. If you ever having problems with insomnia, falling asleep, go read Philo. No, no shade on.
Did you study him in AES doing Greek? Yeah.
So Philo, he's in Alexandria, he's in Egypt, He's a Greek speaking Jewish author, right? And he did not find a verse in the Bible. He did not love to just like go to algorithm. That's his deal, right? Like he beats it to death, right? Like every little word means some allegorical significance. He calls Abraham a meteorologist, basically, right? He's studying weather patterns as predicted in stars and other celestial phenomena. He's doing it because he wants to make Abraham look super smart, right? Like, and hey, just like me, Philo, us learned Greek speaking intellectuals. Abraham was a learned scientist. Meteorologist, no backwater. Exactly. So you get. So those are some of our main sources from the second Temple period. And they're not all the same. They have differences in how they present Abraham again in Jubilees, he studies the stars to become a monotheist. In Philo, he's a learned scientist, right? A Greek speaking scientist. In Josephus, well, he's, you know, there's all these ancient authorities and these respected historians that call him an astronomer. So therefore we can respect him as a figure of our religion. You see the sort of little nuances there, but the bottom line of all of it, astronomer. Abraham is an astronomer. And they're not just interpreting the Bible. I think, I think they also are drawing on independent sources that are also building on this idea, this motif. And as Neil said, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that there are other independent sources out there, maybe our Book of Abraham. Nudge, nudge, right. That talk about Abraham being an astronomer that these authors from antiquity could also have been drawing from.
[00:12:27] Speaker C: In addition to these sources you talked about, you also bring into the conversation.
And those are some of the standard sources when like other people have talked about Abraham as an astronomer, but you also bring into the conversation the book Apocalypse of Abraham. Right. Which is also a second period Second temple text, or at least it's believed to be. It's only attested in like medieval late.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Church Slavonic, I think, Ethiopic or something.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: But fascinatingly, actually using the exact same arguments we do for Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham being a translated text, scholars detect Hebraisms and they detect. Or Semiticisms, I should say, because there's debate is it Hebrew or Aramaic was the underlying language they depict, but they see Semiticisms, they look at like word plays in the text that would work in Semitic and things like that. And they say, okay, this was originally a Semitic text. And they look at other clues and they say, okay, it was probably written in like the first century A.D. or something like that. And it's not, I don't know that it explicitly talks about him as an astronomer, but you do point out that he's like, it's, it's this heavenly ascent.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:36] Speaker C: And it has some, it, it has some bearing on how we might perceive him as an astronomer, if I'm.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: Yeah, your argument right, exactly. Because basically in the Apocalypse of Abraham, which by the way is narrated in the first person, which is kind of fun for us, like the Book of Abraham in that Abraham has a vision of the cosmos and it seems to describe him being brought outside the firmament, so like beyond the dome of heaven or whatever. And so whatever he's seeing is like beyond the astral realm into the spiritual or heavenly realm. Right. And conceptually it's blurred because obviously sky, heaven, it's all the same thing, but like it seems to be launching him into the revelatory, apocalyptic sort of world as he's looking at the stars. That converges very nicely with our Book of Abraham, which, as we discussed in our episode on this, Abraham is in Abraham, Chapter three. Abraham is not just viewing the stars for the sake of. I'm going to look at the stars. It launches him into a revelatory, visionary experience where he learns about the premortion, immortal, divine council and the creation and things like that. So Apocalypse of Abraham is significant for the heavenly ascent motif that converges with our Book of Abraham and reinforces this.
[00:14:40] Speaker C: Idea and ties in with the astronomy, the cosmos, the things like that. I thought it was interesting that the Apocalypse of Abraham has like these multiple firmaments. Right.
There's like tears of heaven, if you will, which.
And the Abraham 3. Right. You have basically these different levels of.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a hierarchy. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:15:02] Speaker C: Of spirits and of intelligences. And so there's something. I don't know, there's a conceptual similarity there. I feel like that I found really striking as I was reading your paper.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: So I know in the Book of Abraham, it talks about how Abraham used the Urim and Thummim.
[00:15:17] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: Do we see anything like that in antiquity as well, when it comes to Abraham?
[00:15:23] Speaker B: Late antiquity, if you want to call it that. Yeah. Maybe we can transition into sort of medieval and Rabbinic Judaism. Okay, so Rabbinic Judaism, just broadly defined, is sort of normative Jewish belief and practice after the time of Jesus, the time of the rabbis. Right. So the Judaism most people are familiar with today descends from what we call Rabbinic Judaism. Right. So these are the learned rabbis after the time of Jesus who transmit and discuss both, like, you know, dietary law, kosher law and other Halakic laws. Right. Like religious practice. But they also provide, like, extensive commentary and midrash and expansions on biblical material as they're interpreting this. Right. So this is where we get, like, you know, the Talmud and the Mishnah and things like that. And within this body of rabbinic literature, you have a thing called the Zohar. Okay, the Zohar is a fun text.
It purports to come from a rabbi living in the first century A.D. but our earliest attestation of it is from, like the 13th, like the 14th century. I can. From Spain or something like that, Pretty late medieval.
[00:16:33] Speaker C: It's kind of fun because if I understand correctly, it's the source claims that, hey, I had this revelation of this text from the first century or whatever. And so from a restoration perspective, like, hey, that's what we. Like, Joseph Smith is doing that too. Right. He's having these revelations for these earlier texts and stuff.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: And before anybody asks us, no, Joseph Smith was not influenced by the Zohar or Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. Our friend Alan Hanson has a paper on this from the fair volume on defending church history. You can check out. I. I say that now to head off some of the comments. Are people gonna say Joseph Smith was influenced by Zohar? A couple of.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: So why wasn't he? Was it not discovered by then? Do we.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: It's not accessible. It's not really accessible in the United States. That's what Alan Hansen's research shows on this.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Is it published in English by that point?
[00:17:18] Speaker B: I think maybe excerpts are. But, like, first of all, the Zohar is massive, right? Like, it's not like, it's like just one little volume you can put in your pocket, right? Like, it's an. It's an expansive running corpus of texts. It's also a very complicated text too, right? Because there's. It's interspersed with biblical quotations and then commentary and things like that. So, yeah, the punchline here being most certainly. Right. I don't want to say for, like, we know for sure, but, like, most probably, Joseph Smith is not being influenced by the Zohar, despite what some people are claiming. The reason why I say that all is because in the Zohar, in the discussion of Abraham, in, like, Abraham 15, or rather, I think it's in Abraham 12, when he leaves his country, right?
It says that Abraham. Genesis 12. Yeah, I'm sorry. In Genesis 12. And Abraham leaves, right?
At one point in the Zohar, it says something to the effect of. And maybe Neil can pull it up because he's got it in front of him that Abraham had in his possession what it calls a tikla in Aramaic, in the Zohar, okay? A tikla. It comes from the Aramaic root takal, meaning, like to measure or to weigh something. Okay. Many, many tikal.
Farsheen from Daniel, right? The writing on the wall. The guy, the hand comes out and writes the thing, that word. Many, many tikal tikla later comes into the Zohar to mean, like, something that's balanced or weighted. Okay, measured.
What is this tikla that Abraham is said to have in the Zohar? It's some kind of an instrument. He uses it to observe the stars, and by doing so, he's able to gauge, like, the hierarchy of the heavenly beings, basically.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: Oh, interesting.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Yeah. What could this thing be? We don't know, because it's a neologism in the Zohar and I think it's a hapax Legomenon in the Zohar. Right. So it's. It's not widely. So scholars have debated. The best theory that I think works is that it is an astrolabe.
[00:19:03] Speaker C: A liahona.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: A liahona.
[00:19:05] Speaker C: Just kidding.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Yeah. No, just kidding.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Astrolabes are so cool. I remember learning about them in college. And I mean, it was. It's a pretty sophisticated instrument for being able to determine star positioning, sunsets, sunrises.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Eclipses, things like that, celestial bodies.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: But it is interesting, like I joke, a liahona. There is actually a theory that the liahona was an astrolabe. But it is interesting that, like, whatever the instrument is, it is. It's not just like it is being used to, like, divine.
Right. It's like he's observing the stars, but then there is some kind of revelatory process that seems to be a part of it as well.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Yeah, right, exactly. So. So that's in the Zohar, where he has a tikla, whatever that is. Maybe it's an astrolabe. Other sources from rabbinic figures say that Abraham, one of them, says that he has a glowing stone that he. That he wears around his neck and that people would come to him to get healing or blessings from. And like that glowing stone in another rabbinic source. And what's funny, when you read the rabbis, it's Rabbi so and so said in the name of Rabbi so and so that this verse means this or whatever. So you kind of have to play. It's kind of a game of telephone. You have to kind of parse out where's this ultimately tradition coming from. But some of the rabbis attribute the glowing stone Abraham has around his neck that he uses to heal people. Others say, well, he also used it to look at the stars.
[00:20:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: Which in our book of Abraham, Urim and Thummim, Right?
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Urim and thummim.
[00:20:27] Speaker C: Well, yeah. I mean, Abraham 3, verse 1, mentions the Urim and Thummim. And then he's like, and I saw the stars.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:20:33] Speaker C: And I. You know, he goes right into this big vision. Right. And so, yeah, there's this there.
I find it. These are obviously much later traditions, because the rabbinics, as Stephen mentioned, it's. It's really more medieval than. Or maybe late antiquity in some cases.
But it's very striking to me that you have this connection to a stone, a radiant stone, a glowing stone, a precious stone, or some kind of instrument like we were talking about with the Zohar. And. And it's connected to his. You doing astronomy and his broader, like, having broader visions about the heavens and the cosmology and all that stuff. Just like it is in the Book of Abraham.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it's hard for me to even, like, know it, how to make sense of it, because, like you said, it's really, really late. So does it. Can we really confidently say that tradition dates back to Abraham's time? Of course not. But at the same time, like, where on Earth. Where are they getting this from, this idea if it wasn't coming? We're getting it from the Book of Abraham. We're getting it from the Zohar, this medieval source. Joseph Smith would not have had access in all likelihood to this material. Like, there's got to be something ancient about this tradition that's passed on about Abraham's use of stones and stars. I mean, that's just cool.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Well, some of the rabbinic traditions are demonstrably ancient. Right. And there's been scholarship showing. So again, not everything. You have to be careful. But there are concepts and teachings and discussions that we can go back pretty far.
We can talk about this more kind of fully as we wrap up here and bring it into our Book of Abraham conversation. But this is just to say we can't dismiss out of hand the idea that the rabbis are preserving earlier material. In many cases, it seems likely that they are. We just also can't like, pin our hats on this and say this is proof for X, y, or z thing, because it's tentative. I will mention on the topic here, it's not just the Zohar. There are passages in the Talmud where Abraham is depicted as an astronomer or specifically an astrologer. That's a fun conversation I have in my paper today. We think of astrology as like, you know, a pseudoscience or what horoscopes, you know, or, you know, kind of the scene you just dismiss as something silly. And, oh, astronomy is what I learned at university. Right. It's real science. Anciently, those concepts are collapsed on each other. And so astrology and astronomy, they get blended. Right. It took. It took later enlightenment and post enlightenment for people to sort of separate them. So when you see depictions of Abraham as an astronomer and. Or an astrologer, usually it amounts to the same thing. The rabbis are kind of ambivalent on whether that's a good thing or not. So they never condemn Abraham for being an astrologer. And they use that term. They use the Greek loan word astrologos into rabbinic Hebrew. Right. They don't necessarily condemn him for that, but they are a little ambiguous about it. And the thrust of it is to say, well, Abraham was an astrologer, but more importantly, he became a prophet, and his astrology led him into becoming a prophet as God kind of led him in that direction using his astrology.
[00:23:21] Speaker C: Yeah. Okay, so. And I was about to say, I seem to recall at least one of the sources. I don't have it right in front of me. In your paper, you talking about how it was, one of the rabbis kind of said, yeah, like God used this to actually teach him about, like, the truth or whatever.
[00:23:40] Speaker A: Reminds me awful a lot of Joseph Smith's use of seers.
Well, if you're a skeptic, you would say, well, Joseph Smith was using folk magic, and so then he wrote that into his story about Abraham to kind of justify himself. But, like, if you're a believer, and obviously, I mean, we've been seeing a lot of great, compelling evidence that I think substantiates the book of Abraham. You see that and say, wow, that's like, very cool that God uses similar tools that maybe are foreign or maybe aren't the tools that God would use, but he uses them as a teaching tool to bring people up unto him and, like, lift them up and elevate them.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Okay, go ahead, Neil.
[00:24:12] Speaker C: I found what I was thinking of, and it's a little different than what I thought, but I think it works really well with the Book of Abraham in any case. But it's Rabbi Eleazar saying that astrology was in our father Abraham's heart, so that all the kings from the east and the west would arise early to his door seeking consultation. And so it's this idea that God used Abraham's knowledge of astrology to bring in, like, the, you know, the kings and from all around the world, the east and the west, as they say. And that's, you know, that's what happened, like facsimile 3. And presumably if we had gotten more of the translation, the book of Abraham would have continued on. He's. He learns astronomy. God gives him astronomy so that he can teach it to the pharaoh. Right. The king. And. And it can be. It basically is a missionary tool. And that's kind of what the rabbis are saying. Yeah.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Let's touch one more thing on this point, Neil, since you brought it up, because some people will say probably in the comments, and there's a kernel of truth to this, but what about Josephus? Because Josephus is a source that is conceivably available to Joseph Smith, he's popularly translated and disseminated in the Christian West. Right. Oliver Cowdery is citing Josephus in the messenger and advocate. In the 1830s, Hyrum Smith, famously in the martyrdom, they read a passage out of Josephus right before they die. Right. So very clearly that's a source Joseph Smith could have had. Right. What does Josephus say? So Josephus says specifically that Abraham taught the Egyptians astronomy and mathematics. Okay, he makes a point about that.
And some have said, here's the source, the catalyst for Joseph Smith making Abraham an astronomer in the Book of Abraham. Right. Well, our friend Lincoln Blumel, who we interviewed about his new book on Lady Eclect Day. Check out our episode on that. Lincoln Blumel has a great article from about 10 years ago on the use of Josephus by Joseph Smith and other early Latter Day Saints. And Blumel makes a very interesting point that the book of Abraham's depiction actually diverges from Josephus's account. Because in the Book of Abraham, Abraham specifically teaches Pharaoh, not the Egyptians, and he doesn't. So, like, not broadly the Egyptians. See, because what Josephus is saying is that the Egyptians got astronomy from Abraham, like, broadly, like the Egyptian civilization. Right. He's doing this again in service of his idea to make Judaism respectable from antiquity. Right. And contributing to the, to the classical world. Joseph Smith says that on Pharaoh's throne, in Pharaoh's court, he taught Pharaoh and some select others astronomy. That actually does appear in an ancient Jewish source, Artipanus, who is not available to Joseph Smith. He's not in Josephus. But he says that Abraham specifically instructed Pharaoh in astronomy. Right. And that's what then ties in with the Rabbinic authors. Right. So this is to say, yes, it's conceivable that Josephus is a source Joseph Smith is familiar with. And if he wants to take the naturalistic route, okay, that's where he gets the idea. I think that explanation only gets you so far because it does not account for this divergence. It also does not account for the specific language of Pharaoh versus the Egyptians. Also, he leaves out mathematics. Abraham doesn't teach mathematics to the Egyptians, he just teaches them astronomy. Right. So there's all these differences. And you can check out Lincoln's article to get more into.
[00:27:24] Speaker C: Also just doesn't account for some of the other things we've talked about, like the hierarchy with the intelligences and the stars and the parallel there with the Apocalypse of Abraham. The potential correlation here with a stone or an instrument and the Urim and Thummim it's just like there's so many other things in so many different ways that are coming together when you look at the, like the, to use a star analogy, the constellation of this tradition, right. Of these different sources.
And it's really like only in the Book of Abraham that you get all of these pieces in one place, which is kind of interesting.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: So it is really interesting that this is the super cool evidence for the Book of Abraham's authenticity. That, wow, we've got this story about Abraham that we find parallels of in the ancient world. But why does God teach astronomy to the Egyptians? Like why does God, what does that have to do with understanding the Book of Abraham better?
[00:28:19] Speaker B: Well, there's, there's two ways we can approach that. The first way, which we have another episode. I don't know if it's going to come up before or after, but check out when the time is right. Check out our other episode on Abrahamic astronomy in the Book of Abraham where we discuss this in depth. The reason why he's using astronomy for Abraham in the narrative of the Book of Abraham is because he says in Abraham 3, verse 15, to go declare these words to Pharaoh and his people to the Egyptians. Right. So he is using astronomy as a sort of an object lesson or sort of a conceptual frame to then Abraham can then use to teach the plan of salvation and the creation and Adam and Eve and the fall and all that stuff to the Egyptians. Right. So that's within the context of the Book of Abraham. That's how it's being used. Abraham's not a learned scientist like with, with Philo. Right. He's not a monotheist that he just discovers like in Jubilees, although those are parallels. He specifically is an astronomer for the sake of teaching the Egyptians about the plan of salvation. Right. About the creation, the premortal council, that kind of thing. So that's one way in which this is very interesting evidence for our Book of Abraham. The Book of Abraham, in other words, absolutely fits in this ancient context of discussions about what does it mean for Abraham to be an astronomer. The Book of Abraham is participating, I believe, in a broader ancient discourse or discussion about Abraham as an astronomer. Right. It's not just a one off here or there, and there's different competing views and ideas about this. So that helps us situate the Book of Abraham anciently in that regard. The other way in which it helps us approach the Book of Abraham, as I said earlier, it's not proof for the Book of Abraham. Right. And indeed we cannot prove that all of these traditions go back to the time of Abraham himself. They do go back to the time of the Joseph Smith papyri, which may be significant. Right. But they don't go back to Abraham's day necessarily, at least as far as we can track.
So they're not proof in that regard, but they are evidence. It is evidence that the Book of Abraham is participating in an ancient cultural discussion about Abraham's an astronomer. It's not like just Joseph Smith woke up one morning in the 19th century and said, you know what? I'm going to make Abraham to be an astronomer. I think that'll be a nice little bit of lore dump for my fake Book of Abraham or whatever. You know, that's not what it is at all. There are literally centuries traditions amongst Jews and Christians. Right. Even pagans of Abraham. As an astronomer, our Book of Abraham fits in that ancient milieu, in that ancient context. And I think that naturalistic critics or skeptics of the Book of Abraham need to account for that. And they can't pretend like that's not evidence.
[00:30:49] Speaker C: Yeah. And what I really like about this, I feel like conversations around the Book of Abraham, as you probably understand more than we would or I would, I feel like they tend to revolve around, you know, Egyptology a lot.
And you will occasionally hear like the one off statements like, well, yeah, there's also like all these Abraham traditions that the Book of Mormon is consistent with. But we don't. I feel like we don't see people dig in to those specific details very often. Right.
There was of course the volume a number of years ago that collected all of those traditions. The traditions of the Traditions about the.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Early life of Abraham.
[00:31:28] Speaker C: Yeah, traditions about the early life of Abraham.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: Throw it in the show notes.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:31] Speaker C: Which is, which is just basically all the sources and then there's like footnotes saying, oh, this connects to the Book of Abraham, this connects to it. But I feel like we don't hear people talking a lot about that anymore. The conversation has gravitated so much to like the Egyptology and the papyri and all of this stuff. But there is still so much like great evidence, not proof, but evidence to be explored in the Abrahamic traditions or the Abrahamic lore, if you will.
And I think it's really cool. Like I had my mind blown reading your paper on this a couple of times.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Well, I have that effect on. What can I say, Neil?
[00:32:08] Speaker C: I think it's. I think it's really cool to see, see this, dig in on the astronomy aspect. I know There's a whole bunch of other aspects of like the Abraham traditions that could be explored this way.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: No, that's good. I would say the little analogy or metaphor I like to use is. Yes, I understand why the papyri are a question. The facsimiles are a question. We did an episode with Kerry Muhlstein discussing the facsimiles and the papyri. Right. That is an important conversation to have for sure. But let's not lose sight of our text of our Book of Abraham. And the metaphor I use is, it's like when you pop the hood and you look at the engine inside. It's like a well made Italian sports car in terms of like what the kind of engine this thing is running. It's really impressive. Yeah. You take these pieces of evidence and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and it paints a picture of basically the Mona Lisa, I think, in terms of everything working together. So I think you're totally right there, Neil.
[00:32:59] Speaker C: Well, and, and, and I think that actually sums up. I lost my train, but my train of thought there. But yeah, that's kind of what I was trying to build to is that like, when you actually dig into what some of these parallels with the broader Abrahamic traditions are, it really, it's compelling. It's this really compelling stuff that I like.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: The.
[00:33:19] Speaker C: The Book of Abraham comes out looking really impressive. Like, totally. I don't know how else to say. It's really impressive. And it's really unfortunate to me that people get caught up, like get hung up on the papyri and the Egyptology and they don't. Some people just aren't willing to get past that. There will be people probably in our comments being like, yo.
You know. But like, it's unfortunate to me that people, some people just can't get past that and won't like, just bracket that for a minute. Let's look at this other stuff and. Because it really is.
[00:33:51] Speaker A: And honestly miss the beauty. I mean, just having this discussion, talking about stars and how they connect to spirits and how God's the highest among them and how he uses that to teach about the plan of salvation. It's a beautiful and moving metaphor. I mean, it just. Anyone looking at the stars can't help but feel humbled by their insignificance and the greatness of God's creations. And so the fact that God incorporated that into the Book of Abraham I think is beautiful and it's inspiring and really, really cool that we get to discuss that. So thank you, Stephen, for those insights. If you guys want your mind blown by.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: Like Neil.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: Like Neil. By how Abraham was an astronomer. Check out this book. The proceedings of a conference the Interpreter foundation did called Abraham and his family in scripture, history and tradition.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Please do not buy the Brill volume. I'm begging you. You have so much to live for. Use that money.
Go take your kids out to a movie theater or something. No. But yes, you know, if you want the Brill volume, you get that. But this is the one to go for. For the. For the Book of Abraham conversation, guys.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: The Book of Abraham is true. You can believe deeply and study deeply. Believe boldly. We'll see you next.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Ra.
