Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Critics of the Book of Abraham like to say that the facsimiles are just standard funerary papyri. And well meaning, enthusiastic members of the church have also gone to the facsimiles to tease apart the mysteries of the kingdom and find cool little symbols here and there. But what if the facsimiles weren't even meant to be read separately but all together? Welcome to Informed Saints. I'm Jasmine, we've got Stephen and Neil and today we have John Thompson with us. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Great to be here.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Awesome. So John Tomson, you are one of the experts on the book of Abraham in some capacity. Could you tell us a little bit about your background and what brings you here today?
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Well, I did a lot of studies in Ancient near east similar to Stephen here. Did Biblical Hebrew for a while in my undergrad at BYU and then I did a master's at Berkeley with a Hebrew emphasis.
Studied with people like Robert Alter and Jacob Milgram who are really good world class scholars.
[00:00:53] Speaker C: Yeah, nothing famous about those guys. Robert Alfred, Jacob Milgrove.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: But while I was at Berkeley I decided to kind of do some Egyptian. I just love the Egyptian religion and I think Hugh Nibley's works have influenced me when I was younger as a teenager and early young adult years.
And so I went started doing some Egyptology just because they have a lot of stuff symbolism and temple centric kind of concepts.
So did that for a while as a minor and then when I did my PhD at UPenn I swapped those instead I did Egyptology major with a Biblical Hebrew minor.
But yeah, that's obviously helped me to interact a lot with Book of Abraham and I'm probably newish coming into the field a little bit. A lot of my earlier research and writing has been with the Book of Mormon.
But you know, I just felt like, you know, wanted to jump in the fray here and I guess and working with Stephen and John Gee and Kerry Muelstein, we put together a book.
Actually it was a bunch of series of articles for it's
[00:02:11] Speaker C: kind of a book.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Yes, Scripture central, Pearl Gate price central website for a while and then that kind of, we kind of revised it and put it into a book form. And so anyway, through that process and a couple other avenues, I kind of got involved with Book of Abraham a little bit more.
[00:02:29] Speaker D: So yeah, and we've already had Carrie Muhlstein and John Gee on. Of course Stephen is a regular here. So we're kind of like Thanos with the Infinity Stones. Like we're just collecting Egyptologists.
Egyptologists here,
[00:02:42] Speaker C: Michael Rhodes on David Cal.
Yeah, we've got some others out there. One by one, we'll get them on.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: So You've got your PhD in Egyptology. You spent a lot of your career in seminaries and institutes, but now you are working at Scripture Central as a research there, correct?
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Awesome.
And so when it comes to the facsimiles, I mean, it's the pictures of the scriptures, it's really cool. I mean, even from as a kid, you flip through the scriptures, you're like, oh, that's cool. What is that? And we've had people come on the show to talk about, like, facsimile one, facsimile two, facsimile three in different ways. How. How do we approach the facsimiles? How are we supposed to make sense of what these are and what they're doing?
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, obviously we all build on the shoulders of others. On the shoulders of others. Right. And the work others have done, I think, have influenced us. And so we look to Hugh Nibley laying some groundwork as far as how the facsimiles and, you know, relate to the temple and other kinds of things. And so I just wanted to start off by saying that a lot of this work has been done there.
And then another part I'd like to just mention is that how we approach the facsimiles and how Joseph Smith might be interpreting them.
There's been some research that's been done in the past.
Blake Ostler wrote a paper that never got published, but it circulated, I think, pretty well back in the 80s that kind of tapped into this idea of.
Of pictures being reinterpreted in the ancient world. And that's pretty common thing that happens where you go into a culture and you want to understand that culture. And so oftentimes you will look at their iconography and you look at their art and you try to make sense of it by looking at, thinking of your own culture and what things in my culture might relate to their pictures and their iconography. And so you kind of, what they call syncretize, you kind of make some syncretic connections. And especially if you know something about their culture and you know something about your culture, then it's easy to kind of bring things together.
And so I think Blake Ostler's paper kind of approached that a little bit, and then that was picked up and kind of formally published in an earlier volume, My Blank.
[00:04:53] Speaker C: Is it Astronomy Papyrus Covenant Volume. Yeah. Kevin Barney,
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Kevin Barney's article, he took a lot of the same things that Blake Ostler had mentioned in his paper and kind of fleshed that out some more.
But I think what was interesting about those papers, that they kind of addressed what they felt like maybe there was some ancient redactor, Right. Somebody in Greco Roman period times that was taking the story of Abraham, and then they were syncretizing or looking at these pictures in Egypt and kind of bringing it into the story of Abraham. And I don't know if that needs to be the case, actually. I think Blake Ostler kind of felt like it was Joseph Smith that was kind of doing that.
Anyway, I've kind of picked up on those ideas and kind of just thought about them a lot, and so that's kind of where I'm kind of spending my time researching. So looking at the facsimiles, and I guess we'll say this, too, when you look at the three facsimiles, they start with an altar and they end with a throne. I mean, it's kind of a giveaway to what kind of progression seems to be going on here. And so just looking at them holistically, like you said, I think there's something that we can learn from the pattern of the way that Joseph Smith laid them out. The fact that he took a faculty number two, which was a separate papyri altogether, and stuck it in between faculty number one and three.
Why did he put it in the sequence? He put it.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: Yeah. That is peculiar. You've got facsimile one is coming from the Book of Abraham. Papyrin.
[00:06:29] Speaker D: The Book of Breathings.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Book of Breathings, Yeah,
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Breathings papyri. And you've got facsimile three, which is also coming from that scroll and papyrus material. But then facsimile 2 is a hypocephalus. So it would have been like sitting behind the mummy's head, completely separate document, and yet that one's labeled number two in a sequence.
[00:06:44] Speaker D: Yeah. And it's from a different mummy. It's not from the same person, different zest.
The Book of Mormons.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: And it's a different shape. It's a circle. The others are square. Like it's. It's odd.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:53] Speaker C: Yeah. It's even more odd and maybe problematic in why there's people get a lot of their wires crossed, is you can approach these images from a purely, strictly gyptological perspective. Right. How. How did these images function in their funerary context with the Book of Breathings or whatever?
And most people just kind of end there, and they'll want to say, okay, we Know what the Egyptian meaning behind these images are and they don't match what judgment is saying. Yeah, end of the game, case closed, right? Game over for the Mormons. You know, it's all fake, it's all made up.
But on the other end, you have some letters in to say, who cares what the Egyptians thought about this? We just care what they mean for us in our Pearl of Great Price. And they'll just totally ignore any Egyptian context of this. And just as you were kind of saying Jasmine at the beginning, kind of make hay out of this however they want, how it relates to them. I've seen kind of both extremes here. I think really the productive path forward to understanding these more holistically is to take these two perspectives. And when I say the Latter Day Saint, I mean like, you know, Joseph Smith's perspective on them with the Egyptian perspective. And is there any clicking together? Right. Is there any logical mesh between the Egyptian context and the Abrahamic context? And I think, and hopefully we can get some examples is I think you've shown many cases where, yes, that does make sense, this syncretistic approach. So I think there's a lot of value to that approach.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I do too. And I think it solves a lot of problems.
And I don't want to, you know, because some people will take that extreme view that you mentioned of. It doesn't matter what the Egyptians thought. Let's just, let's just let it, you know, let Joseph Smith's interpretation stand as it is. And I think that that's problematic too, because when he actually gives you the explanations, he says from time to time, this is what the Egyptians called or,
[00:08:32] Speaker D: you
[00:08:33] Speaker B: know,
[00:08:33] Speaker D: according to the Egyptians.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: According to the Egyptians, right. So he's trying to bring out Egyptian culture in some way. And so Terrell Givens wrote a book, the Pearl of Greatest Price, and in his Abraham chapter, he kind of made the case that maybe Joseph Smith was taking these documents out of their context and doing what we call today junk art, right? Bricolage, which is you take something out of the trash and you're like, I'm going to make some art out of this. And you don't consider whatsoever what it used to be, Right. You just consider maybe the shape and color and you use that to create new art.
And so that's one way you can take it. But I think
[00:09:15] Speaker A: kind of like a catalyst, like, you know, this inspired him to come up with something completely new and completely different that's not attached to the ancient world.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Right. And so I think that Again, I think that's a problematic approach just because it kind of ignores what Joseph Smith is saying when he gives us the explanations.
[00:09:33] Speaker D: I do think it is interesting though.
I think you could argue that the holy, like the approach that goes full on Egyptological is also ignoring it. Right.
Because Joseph Smith doesn't say after every explanation according to the Egyptians or as understood by the Egyptians. It's kind of curious, like why is that specified in only a few cases, but not in all?
One way to explain that at least would be that only sometimes did Joseph Smith at least believe he, he was tapping into the ancient Egyptian understanding of the images or iconography.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: So we've been using the word syncretize a lot and we've talked about what that means a little bit. But could that just mean that basically, like bricolage, like what you're saying, that Joseph Smith's taking an ancient thing and just fabricating something for us today and that's a syncretism, or do we have examples where they would syncretize in the ancient world where we might get something like we see in the facsimiles?
[00:10:30] Speaker B: I think to not do violence to the idea of syncretism, it needs to be grounded in two cultures.
And as I mentioned earlier, when you go into a new culture and if you learn something about that culture, then you'll start thinking about your own worldview and you'll start making some connections.
So when a Roman goes into a Greek land and he learns about Zeus, who's he going to syncretize Zeus with? Who's going to think about in his own culture will think of Jupiter. And so he'll think of Zeus and Jupiter as kind of being similar. It's like we would think with Islam that Allah is our God or Elohim.
[00:11:14] Speaker D: Some examples that I know I'm at least somewhat familiar with is like if you look at colonial period Maya and Aztec stuff, you see them like they're being converted or having Christianity imposed upon them, particularly Catholicism. Right. And you see some syncretism going on with their indigenous religious worldview and the Catholic worldview of the conquistadors and what have you. And then honestly, you still see that a lot in indigenous communities today down in like Guatemala and Mexico and stuff is they'll syncretize their Christianity with their old traditional religions. So
[00:11:54] Speaker A: it
[00:11:54] Speaker D: happens
[00:11:55] Speaker A: in colonial America we adopted some like ancient Egyptian symbols like the pyramid, the all seeing eye. We put them on our dollar bills and stuff. And we don't. Those symbols don't mean the same things that they would have meant to ancient Egyptians. But we see them and we adopt them for this new American ethos of, like, who we are and what we represent.
So is there a scenario where there's an ancient Abrahamic tradition that gets syncretized with stuff that we might see in the facsimiles?
[00:12:20] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's, you know, that's been some of the beauty of the previous research that many have done.
One of my favorites is John Gee's paper he did on the Khoyak festival in ancient Egypt that involves lying couches, and it involves chia pet mummies.
You get these little mummies that you pack mud and you put seed in it and you let it grow. That is so funny.
Yeah. So,
[00:12:51] Speaker D: well, and lion couch being the altar form that we see facsimile one. Right.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: And so in this Koyak festival, they. They. And these are described in Dendera, which is where a lot of the lion couch images come from.
And.
And they have these corn mummies that are sprouting as a. Like, they even give you the recipe, like on the temple walls. Right. How to make these things.
And so you make them.
And that whole idea, of course, of growth is rejuvenation.
It's the idea of resurrection. Resurrection, rebirth. And so anyway, the Khoyak festival gets brought in to Judeo Christian elements when they start moving into Egypt, and some of them adopt it.
Rather than an Osiris corn mummy, it's.
That's related to the world of the dead and of rebirth.
It becomes associated with Abraham.
And so we see a synchronization there where they see Abraham as kind of the Lord of the dead, you know, the bosom of Abraham that we have in the book of Luke. Right.
[00:14:04] Speaker D: Well, and there's. I know Kerry Muhlstein has published some Egyptological research where he's shown other instances where.
Where people with a Judeo Christian background are making substitutions, or even some Egyptians are making substitutions between Osiris and Abraham. So that does seem to be a pretty consistent pattern there, some kind of connection that people saw.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: It definitely has happened in the ancient world where Abraham and Osiris, for whatever reason, do get syncretized. They're not the only ones, but it happens.
And so then we have to look at. Why. Why did they look at Osiris? And they think, that reminds me of Abraham, you know,
[00:14:43] Speaker C: could be because he had a wife who was a sister.
No, you know, that's.
Yeah, there's. There's many examples we can give. We don't have to be exhaustive here. You've provided some in your article in response to Teryl Givens on the interpreter website. We may not understand our words, the book of Abraham and the concept of translation of the pearl of great price. We can also shout out your YouTube channel and heaven's Code, where one of the first videos you posted was on how to approach the facsimiles kind of from this perspective.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that, to your point, I think the.
The explanations do clearly show us that that's what Joseph is doing. Right. Because he's, you know, and I. You mentioned Matt Gray's article. He is definitely bringing Hebrew elements to bear on these Egyptian pictures. Like, why is he doing that? Right. And, you know, and, and Joseph is, you know, by the time he's in Nauvoo, he has, you know, been learning some Hebrew and he's learning some Hebrew culture. And so he has learned, I'm sure, about as he writes, you know, the heavens, the Shemayim, and he's been writing about the firmament.
And then he looks at these Egyptian pictures and he makes a connection. Right. And it's interesting though, that he looks at the things at the bottom of the picture.
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Yeah, right.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: And says, that's heaven. Right. And like, what is he doing? You know, but that's. That's actually very classic Egyptian.
[00:16:07] Speaker C: That's spot on. It's spot on.
Let's talk about for just one second to highlight it for our listeners. So figure 11, he says, the pillars of heaven as understood by the Egyptians. He says, shout out to some research I have coming out here. That is a dead ringer. That is absolutely correct.
I will die on the hill. That's exactly what those figures can represent. These pylon niches that we see all over the place, they are conceptually identified as the pillars of heaven. Yeah. And people say pet. Right. There's the Egyptian phrase for it. So she has that.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: Rittner said. Oh, no, it's the pillars of. Or the palace facade. Right. Well, the palace facade is. That
[00:16:45] Speaker C: are holding up the heavens. Yeah, the pillars of heaven.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: I see it at the bottom there. And I see even above it, there's like a monster crocodile. I would assume that that's supposed to be like some kind of underworld or something.
[00:16:56] Speaker C: Well, here's what's funny. So with figure 12, these hatched lines, it's funny because for a long time Egyptologists had no idea what this was. You go read De Varya and some of these early Egyptologists, they just. Oh, I don't Know, they just kind of shrugged their shoulders.
I believe it was Klaus Baer back in the 60s, was the first to say, this looks like it's just water. It's just hatching of water. It's very standard to see this. So we have water on top of pillars. Well, how does that make any sense? And people have debated in its Egyptian context is this, you know, the Book of Breathings mentions the pool of Hounsuit. We don't even know if that actually existed at Thebes or not. There's debate. Is it the Nile? Robert Rittner suggested maybe it's supposed to depict the Nile that's flowing right by Karnak or whatever. But if you just look at it and Joseph says it's Rakhiya, signifying the expanse.
Well, John, I know you already know the answer to this. What do the ancient Egyptians in ancient Hebrews envision the heavens to be above their head?
[00:17:49] Speaker B: The goddess Nut. Right?
[00:17:50] Speaker C: Indeed. And she's a body of water. It's water. They imagine the celestial waters above them. Yeah, sometimes it's nutritious.
[00:17:58] Speaker D: I mean, in Hebrew, it's just the water.
[00:18:00] Speaker C: It's just the water,
[00:18:02] Speaker B: the waters above the firmament that we gather.
[00:18:04] Speaker C: Creation water. In some conceptions, it also stretches below. And so you have kind of like a continuous circle of water that's surrounding the created world that we know. Right. The primordial waters of chaos that indeed the pillars of heaven are holding up. They're holding up the rock. Hiya. The firmament. The Egyptians have a phrase for this too. The bia, the iron bia and pet, the iron of heaven. And there's waters above that. So I think this is a textbook example, Figures 11 and 12 of how this syncretism is working. He's drawing in indeed attested Egyptian concepts, Hebrew concepts, and he's merging them in his own vocabulary to illustrate Abraham's cosmology in the book of Abraham.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: So like you said, he's right on with that. But he's bringing up these Hebrew concepts to explain it.
Again, he's syncretizing that because that's where Abraham's coming from. It's the Abraham culture that he's trying to get us to think about.
I think it's important we understand that Joseph Smith is not trying to restore Egyptian religion.
[00:19:00] Speaker D: Right.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: Because he's not trying to give us.
How do the Egyptians think about the world? Because that's not his role. His role is to restore to us an Abrahamic religion.
And so I think he taps into Egyptian culture and I guess probably you can ask the question, like, why?
Why does he look at Egyptian pictures?
And even if he's trying to just bring them into an Abrahamic story and then syncretize them in some way, kind of line up the elements and, you know, if he's a seer, as we believe he is, and a seer can know of things that are past Book of Abraham phrase, Book of Mormon phrase, sorry, then he can recover something out of these Egyptian pictures and he can liken them to the story of Abraham, because again, there's some things that connect in that story.
But the question still remains, why? Why does he take, you know, pagan pictures and bring them into the story of Abraham? And I don't know.
Well, I have a thought, but get your ideas.
[00:20:07] Speaker C: All I want to say is if somebody is going to be upset for Joseph Smith bringing in, quote, pagan images into sacred scripture, they better get mad at the authors of the Hebrew Bible because they do it routinely.
Not the least being the fact that speaking of syncretism, the Israelites take the attributes and the epithets and the characteristics of baal, that bad false deity you're not supposed to worship. Well, one way they kind of delegitimize him, perhaps, is by taking his attributes and attributing them to Yahweh, Jehovah. So famously in the Psalms, Yahweh becomes the one who rides on the clouds. Right. He's a storm God. He's a storm God with his arms stretched out, ready to smite the earth. Guys, that's like textbook Canaanite imagery for BAAL and El and these Canaanite deities that the Israelites are now appropriating for Yahweh. So you can get mad at pagan stuff in the scriptures if you want, but you got to get mad at the Hebrew Bible. For
[00:20:58] Speaker D: in other words, right in the Bible we have syncretism going on with other surrounding religious worldviews.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: The proverbs come from several, you know, Egyptian. Ancient Egyptian wisdom literature. Yeah. I think even Jesus does it.
[00:21:13] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. As
[00:21:14] Speaker B: he tells the story of the rich young man and Lazarus. Rich. Yeah. And the rich man and Lazarus that, you know, there's evidence that that's barren for what Setna
[00:21:25] Speaker C: Hamwas an Egyptian demotic tale.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that seems like Jesus is taking some Egyptian culture and bringing it into an Abrahamic story.
[00:21:33] Speaker D: I think there's maybe a point to be made and maybe this is overstating things, but, like, really, everything's syncretism.
Everything
[00:21:42] Speaker C: sync is all the way down all
[00:21:43] Speaker B: the time.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: Appropriate images and symbols all the time.
[00:21:47] Speaker D: Nothing happens in a cultural vacuum. Revelation does not happen in a cultural vacuum. And so ancient scripture, modern scripture, all of it is syncretizing with ideas and things out in the broader culture. But that doesn't mean it's not revealed. That doesn't mean it's not inspired. We know we've quoted it before on other episodes. We'll probably quote it again. Right. But doctrine and covenants 120, 24, is it? Or is it 28?
God reveals things according to our language and our understanding. And it's actually Mark Wright, who has a great paper on this from a Book of Mormon perspective, but he's arguing language is not just words. Right. It's cultural, conceptual ideas and things like that. Right. It's how we come to understand things. And God, in trying to speak to us through prophets, allows for syncretism with our broader culture and with ancient stuff, too. Because he wants us to understand. Right,
[00:22:42] Speaker B: yeah.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: Scrolling up and looking back at facsimile one, like, an Egyptologist might say, okay, this is supposed to be a funerary scene where someone's being, like, mummified on a lion couch here.
Although we've all done an entire episode about how even that might be a simplistic overgeneralization of this. But then Joseph. But it's
[00:23:02] Speaker B: accurate. And actually, we do have Egyptian sources that say that this is an embalming scene. So it's.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: And then Joseph Smith says, this is actually Abraham being sacrificed on an altar from, like, a syncretistic perspective. How do you bring those two together?
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think, again, previous research has looked at this image and has asked the question, is it only an embalming scene? Because that's how it gets presented sometimes. But I think even Nibley pointed out none of the Egyptologists agree.
[00:23:30] Speaker D: Right.
[00:23:30] Speaker C: Precisely.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: Yeah. On what they're looking at. Right. Because again, it's not monolithic, the Egyptian religion, it's evolving through time,
[00:23:40] Speaker A: thousands of years,
[00:23:42] Speaker B: and there's all kinds of ideas that are kind of floating around regionally.
And so these things get interpreted different ways. So can it represent any kind of a slaughtering of an enemy or any kind of sacrificial scene? And the answer is definitely. So the idea that we do have capital punishment in Egypt, and you'll take an enemy of state, and because everything is ritualized, everything is religious, nothing happens in state. That's separation of church and state. It's all together.
And so when you slay an enemy of the state, you are slaying chaos. Right. You're bringing order back to your community. And so that's kind of why it gets ritualized, I guess, in different ways.
But we have a lot of examples in ancient Egypt of ritual sacrifice in the sense of a capital punishment being ritualized. And so that's already been addressed. And so then Joseph Smith seems to have gathered that from the picture as he looks at it, that, that mummified, you know, is it an embalming scene? Yes, but it can also be a sacrificial slaughtering of enemy scene.
And there's more work being done on that, I think that helps us see that even this specific instance, it may be that.
[00:25:10] Speaker C: Yeah. And if you go back to the classical myth of the death and resurrection of Osiris, which this seems to be recreating in some ritualized sense, you will recall that in the mythology, part of the final vindication of Osiris and his son Horus is them defeating Seth, the agent of chaos that was kind of responsible for wrecking all this havoc right on the ordered world. He's the one who slays Osiris, Horus has to vindicate him, etc. So the idea of it's explicit in the inscriptions that go with these lion couch scenes.
A big part of it is slaughtering the enemies of Osiris to protect Osiris in the process of him being resurrected or revivified or even mummified. Right,
[00:25:50] Speaker A: let's hop over to facsimile two. So this one's a little different because, remember correctly, Abraham is not explicitly mentioned in the explanations for facsimile 2. And this is not as part of a text. This is a hypocephalus. It's a circular piece of papyrus that's placed behind a mummy's head. So it's its own standalone document from an Egyptological perspective.
And an Egyptologist might say that this is supposed to represent like the journey of the sun across the sky. And then Joseph's Smith is saying that there's all these different little symbolisms that are related to temple teaching. So help us bring these two together in some way.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I think this one's probably the most fascinating just because there's so many elements here that are moving
[00:26:35] Speaker A: and it's upside down. It's cool. This is the one you want to spend looking at in sacraments.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: So again, we mentioned at the beginning that facing number one starts with an altar. Facing number three. Right. It, the story, the way that Joseph Smith lays him out, it ends with a throne.
And of course you can lay that in a temple context, pretty easily, where you have an altar in the courtyard as you make your way to God, who's on his throne in the holy of holies.
And so Egyptian religion has similar concepts in that they have a.
The journey of the sun is kind of the journey of the soul through life. And.
And you have a day journey and you have a night journey. And this becomes part of Egyptian art throughout all ages.
It's in the Old Kingdom, Pyramid texts, all the way to New Kingdom, and then later into later periods of Egypt, where you have the sun's journey through the day and the sun's journey through the night.
The more I'm looking at this, the more I'm beginning to believe that the day journey is kind of like what the courtyard of the temple would represent and the night journey would be representative of. When you're inside the temple in the holy place and you think, well, the night journey, you know, isn't that kind of like, kind
[00:27:50] Speaker C: of bad.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: And bad things happen in the night journey? Because in the Egyptian mythology, they're battling Apophis. You know, they're doing all kinds of
[00:27:59] Speaker C: big snake chaos.
[00:28:02] Speaker D: Yeah. All these demons that they've got to fight in the underworld.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: And I. But I think that again, when you look at Israelite temples, they have two altars, there's two places of sacrifice, the courtyard, and they have an altar inside the temple. And so that means there's going to be two great sacrifices you're making. In other words, I think you can make the case. We won't be able to get into the details, but just making the case that part of your journey, even though it's a higher, holier path, the tests become higher and more difficult. Right. And so. So I think that when you see these battles with demons and in the underworld stories, it's because you've. You've already kind of battled your demons in life. Now you're going to go and. And you're going to become even more powerful and greater and more glorious as you overcome, you know, these higher, more difficult tests. And so again, that's why I think there's two altars, because you have two different tests you have to kind of get through anyway. So this particular facsimile starts the way the Egyptians would have read it. They start in the middle. And Jack Welch and Michael Rhodes did a paper where they looked at the numbers and they kind of argued that the numbers are following how Joseph Smith is reading this. And I think generally they're right.
Joseph seems to start in the middle with Number one, he goes up to the middle and then over to the right and then over to the upper left.
So he goes from the middle and then he goes across the top and then he drops into the upside down portion in the lower section.
And that is exactly how Egyptians read it. They go from the middle top and then to the bottom.
And then Joseph goes back to the middle, his numbers complete by going back into the center.
And so I think that was one of the reasons why Jack and Michael are like, what's going on? Why is this starting in the middle, going around, then coming back to the middle?
[00:29:57] Speaker D: I mean, it certainly seems counterintuitive that right in the middle you have one and then next to it you 22 and 23. Right.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: So I think it was insightful paper.
And the idea that we have in the Egyptian perspective is that number one is kind of God about to emerge. Right. The sun is about to rise out of the horizon. So number one is kind of like pre birth,
[00:30:27] Speaker C: the pre created condition of the cosmos.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: Right. And so the sun has not yet come out.
And so it represents all kinds of interesting developments. And again, here's another issue that I think we have problems with as we try to do temple theology in our own culture.
You can read a temple out and you can read a temple in. Right. When you read the temple out, you're starting in the premortal council, that you go to the Garden of Eden and then you fall into the world, and then you turn around and go back in.
And then when you go back in, it's no longer the Garden of Eden. Now it's a millennial paradise. Right. But there's still kind of some connections. Right. And then you go back to the presence of God. And so symbols can have dual meaning in the sense that you're.
When you're coming out, there's a certain concept and meaning, and then when you're going in, there's a certain concept and meaning. And I think that's also true here, that even though you're starting in the center and it is kind of a premortal pre creation, pre,
[00:31:27] Speaker D: pre dawn,
[00:31:28] Speaker B: pre earth, pre dawn. Right.
That it also is the end of the journey where you have now become exalted and you are now ready to rise into the heavens with God. Right.
[00:31:40] Speaker C: We've got a nice Mormon ease term for that. We call it one eternal round. Yeah, exactly. Hugh Nibley's
[00:31:46] Speaker A: pretty round
[00:31:47] Speaker C: Hun's magnum opus on the Hypocephalus, published after his death with Michael Rhodes, is called One Eternal Round. That's language from the Book of Mormon. But we as Latter Day Saints have applied it. William Phelps applied it in his hymn about Kolob. Right. We've turned that idea into like. Yes. The one each and around the undeviating course towards exaltation and deification that starts in the premortal world and ends up back in God's presence. Ends up back in that same world in God's presence. Yeah,
[00:32:12] Speaker B: yeah. So in a temple context, Ancient Egyptian temples, when you look at the Egyptian temples, they have in the front of them pylons that are shaped to look like the horizon mountains.
Because when you go beyond that gate, you are going below the horizon, you are stepping into the hidden realm. Right.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: Like an underworld.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: Yeah, like a
[00:32:36] Speaker C: duat.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And again, depending on which way you're reading that, are you coming out or are you going in?
So when the sun is coming up, it's coming out from underneath the. The world, the horizon, and it rises up and you see it on the horizon as, you know, as it rises in the east.
And so that's kind of what's happening with figure one. It's God, the hidden God. And they actually label this the great God and they'll reference it as Amun. Re, also syncretized with Khnum.
[00:33:10] Speaker C: Yeah, the ram headed deity who's also a creator deity.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Right. And so. And several other deities too. But. But the idea is that Amun literally means the hidden one. Right. So he's hidden because he's in the holy place. Right. He hasn't come out of the temple yet. And so if you're reading coming out of the temple, you got to read it that direction. So he's about to emerge.
Right. And so you have Amun, the hidden one, hidden beneath the horizon. He rises and so then you go into the upper level of, or the top register. Thank you.
And so up there you have the day journey of the sun.
And again, there's a lot of debate and argument about each of these symbols and what they mean. There's
[00:33:59] Speaker A: a lot here that we won't have time to unpack all of it.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: But in general you have the day journey, the sun, probably easiest to think of, moving from right to left.
And Joseph goes to the center. Right, left, and maybe the center. Because that central figure for the Egyptians is especially that little standard he's holding in his hand with a jackal on top is Wepwe, meaning the opener of the way. Right. This is kind of like the herald. This is like the Christian John the Baptist. Right. Who goes before the Lord.
And that's exactly what Wep Waiwet does. He opens the way before the God ray as he travels through the sky. And matter of fact, he'll show up as a scout going in front of the king's armies. He'll go out there and scout around and then come back and tell him what to go do. He has a lot of different functions. And so if you think about the courtyard of a temple as kind of being an ironic preparation, then this day journey would likely syncretize well with that.
And so you have that. And then figure four on the left, Joseph likens unto a firmament, which in temple theology usually means a door or a veil that you're going to cross some kind of a threshold. Right. And of course, what happens at that point is the sun is setting.
Sometimes in the boat there's a mummy. So the idea is that it's death and it's about to sink into the underworld on the western horizon. And then you go into the bottom register and you're traveling now through the netherworld, AKA once again entering into the holy place, where you have higher, more difficult challenges. You have 12 hours of the night, 12 gates, depending on which Egyptian book you're reading.
And there's demons you have to get past, and you give them keywords and then you can get past them.
And so
[00:36:02] Speaker D: keywords you say, like
[00:36:04] Speaker C: there's stuff from the Book of the Dead,
[00:36:06] Speaker D: Figure seven there, for instance. Indeed.
[00:36:08] Speaker C: And there's explicitly stuff from the Book of the Dead where the deceased, who's traveling with the sun God on this journey, he'll confront some kind of a guardian figure, a demon figure, whatever. And he'll say, I know your name. Yes. And so you have to give me access. And so the idea is the. The deceased is being equipped with that knowledge. The name, literally the name is the key word for the deceased ceased knowing the name of the figure, is able to pass by him. Yeah, absolutely
[00:36:32] Speaker D: right. And like I said, in figure seven, that's literally what Joseph says is happening. Right. His grand keywords are being presented to the deity to enter into or to pass by.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Interestingly, he actually says there's two keywords mentioned in the upper register.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: 1, 3, 2, and 7.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Yep. And then two keywords he mentions in the bottom register. So figure 5, the cow. Right.
He mentions. He starts talking about night sky stuff with figure five, he starts talking about the moon and the sun and the stars moving in their order, because this is the night journey of the sun. It makes perfect sense.
And so Joseph is nailing a lot of the Egyptian concepts here as he gives us his explanations. Even though a lot of his explanations are, I would say they're esoteric. I think again, I think they're related to temple concepts of progression through a temple. And he's probably again thinking more about Hebrew temples or Israelite temples because that's the religion he's trying to restore.
[00:37:38] Speaker A: Good setting in Egyptian temples as well. It sounds like.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:37:41] Speaker C: oh yeah. The idea of the Egyptian temple as the micro cosmos, that's well attested.
Dieter Kurt, who's the expert of the, at the Edfu temple, publishing the text there, he's talked about how like this temple, this building was imagined as the cosmos itself. Right. The ceiling is the sky, the pillars are. The columns are the pillars of heaven. The, the outer facade of the pylons. Yeah, the two horizons holding up heaven that you're passing through. Like it's, it's pretty explicit. So syncretizing this in both an Egyptian and a biblical temple context makes total sense. Yeah, yeah.
[00:38:19] Speaker B: So then, so you're going from, again arising out of the underworld, out of the pre dawn, right. Go through the day sky, you then cross a threshold, you go into the night sky, and in the night sky you're going to go through some transformations and you're going to have some, again some gates that you have to get through or some guardians. You have to get through
[00:38:42] Speaker A: ordeals.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Right.
But then at the very bottom of that journey, as you hit the sixth hour, I think is when the Ba, the spirit, I guess Ba, I guess we're about to synchronize with spirit, right? The soul, the soul of Ra and the soul of Osiris kind of come back together. And then, so now we're ready to ascend and start a resurrection kind of motif. And then you start the process all over again. You go back to the center, you know, you're glorified. You see the sun.
When the rays of the sun show up in the east, they see that as kind of a glorification moment and then the sun rises. Right. And so that pre dawn ray, that's really part of their theology is really important, right. To see that light.
And they think about that in temple contexts or in the soul's journey that you're going to be glorified, then you rise.
[00:39:36] Speaker C: They use the word they want to occify the deceased, turn into an effective one is kind of literally, but they channel the idea of the brilliance of celestial bodies, the sun, the stars giving off a radiating glow. They use that concept to sort of describe what an A is. Yes, it's an effective one, meaning he's effective in doing what you do in the afterlife. But you're conceived with these heavenly bodies that have a brilliance, a glow to them and they kind of connect that there, there's.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it can be translated as glorifying or making someone effective. Right. And, and interestingly, the horizon glyph, right. The, the, the temple horizon is called the Akhat, meaning the place of occupying. Right. Where you become glorified and then you come out. Yeah,
[00:40:24] Speaker C: there's a lot. This is. I mean I could go on, I know, but hopefully just for our listeners are knowing like there's so much meat here to these facsimiles beyond just. Well, it's a standard funerary thing, right. Like that's just a very low level way of understanding this. That's not digging below the surface. When you do dig below the surface, you find all these interesting connections. I just want to say with all that that's been explained about like just figure one basically, right? This primordial creator deity from whom all creation emanates when he manifests himself.
Sometimes Amun, sometimes Khnum.
In some hypocephaly, the central figure has four heads, sometimes it's two, a lot of times it's ram heads, you know, so it's a ram headed deity. Joseph Smith. Figure 1, Kolob, signifying the first creation, the nearest to the celestial or the resonance of God, first in government, last pertain to the measurement of time Rose by any other name. My friends swap out Kolob with Amun or Khnum. You have a very similar conception there of how these deities function in this context.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: Yeah, and teasing that a little bit more. I think it's interesting that Joseph says that this central panel is nearest to the celestial residence of God. So again, if you think of this in a temple context, the celestial residence of God is the holy of holies.
But Joseph is seemingly creating in figure one a holy place, kind of like the earth when it's first created as a paradisiacal Garden of Eden. It is a terrestrial holy place. Right.
And so that's what he seems to be syncretizing figure 1 with is a holy place that's nearest to God who's in the holy of holies. So the holy place is the nearest you can get to the holy of holies.
And then figure two, he's like, okay, now we're going into the courtyard because now we've where it stands next To Kolob. So it is next in its order of a temple
[00:42:20] Speaker C: near to the celestial or the place where God resides. Yeah.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: So anyway, so I just think it's kind of interesting if you again, think of this as a temple progression, it will have a lot more meaning for us. And the explanations, they start making a lot more sense because they are very esoteric when you read them.
They're very difficult to try to figure out,
[00:42:43] Speaker C: very context dependent. If you just show up sight unseen, not knowing anything more about this.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: Yeah, we start with an altar, we end with a throne. Joseph sticks this one in between. So why.
But again, he nails the journey of the soul. Because the whole point of a hypocephalus in Egyptian religion is so that the soul is not held back at the gates of the netherworld. That's actually what they wrote in their Book of the Dead, like when they're teaching you how to make a hypocephalus. And this is what they're for. Right.
And so the idea is that we're going to help the soul get from point A to point B. You got to go through a journey and we're going to keep you from getting held back.
So Joseph sticks it right between numbers one and three, exactly where it needs to be, right. To help someone go from the altar to the throne.
[00:43:30] Speaker A: So it sounds like with facsimile one, we have the sacrificial altar at the beginning where Abraham is being sacrificed. But this is also something you might see at an Egyptian temple or an Israelite temple where the altar is on the outside. And then facsimile two, you're suggesting, is following kind of a progression through this temple. And it mimics this progression of the soul, or as Egyptians might see it, the progression of the sun through the sky. So then.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: And through the underworld
[00:43:54] Speaker A: and through the underworld. Okay, so then facsimile three, how does that play into the picture here?
[00:44:00] Speaker B: Yeah, so facsimile number three is.
And again, John Gee did some great work on this.
You know, we all thought, well, this is a judgment scene, right. Because typically you might have, in Book of the dead 125, a person, you know, the deceased coming before Osiris, who's sitting on his throne, and his heart is taken and weighed against the feather of Maat. The feather representing Maat, the goddess representing order and truth and being true of voice. Right. And. And so you have this weighing of the heart scene. And we do have Maat right in the center here. She's got the feather on her Head. It's an ostrich feather. And she's holding hands with Horus, who is the owner of this papyri.
His
[00:44:50] Speaker C: name's right there on the bottom, by the way. Osiris Hor. Yeah, we'll highlight it for our viewers.
[00:44:54] Speaker B: Maat in the middle, holding hands with Horus as he's being presented. And Anubis is standing right behind him.
And then you have Osiris sitting on his throne and Isis right behind him.
Now, Joseph, of course, syncretizes this with a
[00:45:15] Speaker C: scene.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it's definitely an enthronement scene. It's a. I want to say. I was going to say a court, but what's the word I'm thinking of when you're in the Gospel?
[00:45:23] Speaker C: Well, he does say in the king's court.
[00:45:26] Speaker B: Exactly right. And so he's got, you know, he's taking figures that are gods, like Anubis and Ma', at, and he's making them into a slave.
And then Horus himself, he's saying, as a waiter.
And then Ma', at, he says, is that the prince? The
[00:45:46] Speaker C: prince. Prince of Pharaoh.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: Right, the prince. And then you have Abraham on the altar, and then the pharaoh himself.
And I guess you could say, okay, that's pretty loose, you know, syncretization.
But there's actually some basis for some of those ideas.
One of the titles of Anubis is the slave of the gods, interestingly. Or servant, if you want to translate it that way. It's probably a little more politically correct. Yeah, sure.
[00:46:12] Speaker C: John G's pointed out that Shulem is an attested Semitic name, and there are Semitic servants in the royal household in the Middle Kingdom. And other times, even the king's principal waiter, even that is a title or a job that shows up as an attested sort of epithet for members of the royal household, of the servants of the household, I guess. Yeah,
[00:46:31] Speaker B: yeah.
I think people really kind of come down on Joseph Smith for syncretizing two female figures with two male figures, the prince and
[00:46:41] Speaker A: pharaoh.
[00:46:42] Speaker B: Right. And.
And, you know, Nibley has brought out some interesting ideas that when you're doing dramas that oftentimes you do have male characters playing female characters.
But. But then you also. You can syncretize Pharaoh with Isis because literally the throne of Pharaoh is Isis. Yeah.
[00:47:05] Speaker C: Ised in Egyptian means seat.
[00:47:08] Speaker B: Yeah,
[00:47:08] Speaker C: throne.
[00:47:09] Speaker B: And so. So there are some. I think. And again, the way that Joseph Smith says it in his explanations, I like the way he uses. He uses the word signifies a lot. Right?
[00:47:21] Speaker C: Yeah. Figure three signifies.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: And so. So I think that that's a word that we have to think about too, that
[00:47:27] Speaker A: it's not translates. It's
[00:47:28] Speaker B: not translates as right. These characters or these ideas signify something. Right. And he's trying to give us a sign meaning of them. And so he's putting this into like a dramatic context where the Pharaoh gives Abraham the throne and so he reinterprets Isis as pharaoh, which again, there are some cultural reasons you could do that that are not far fetched.
But I don't know if Joseph is being a little more looser in the way he's doing these or not.
What are your thoughts?
[00:48:03] Speaker C: No, I think that I agree. And like I said earlier, I think that this methodology of syncretism can help explain, on the one hand, the places where we have sort of tantalizing bits of evidence to associate these characters with how Joseph Smith identifies them.
But just sort of on their own, it doesn't fully explain what's happening. Right. So the individual threads of evidence, we have to connect them more. They're kind of the connective tissue to a bigger picture that we're seeing here. And I think that's why we have to take them from the syncretistic perspective, if that makes sense.
[00:48:33] Speaker A: Correct me if I'm off base here, but as I've been hearing you explain this, you know, I hear the explanation of like, oh, Abraham sitting on the throne. I'm like, well, that sounds outlandish from like a historical perspective. Like, why is Abraham the king now all of a sudden? But have kind of presented this idea where it's a typological journey of the soul through the temple where the final step is enthronement. So can that help us make sense of this? That this is like a symbolic enthroning of Abraham more than a historical. He was king for the day in ancient Egypt.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I wouldn't rule out either of those. They're both possible, I suppose.
But yes, definitely, we can look at it as a symbolic enthronement of Abraham.
And I think even if you look at the book of Revelation, as John talks about overcoming the world, he starts saying that all who overcome the world are going to receive a throne and a crown and a rod of iron, the scepter, and they're going to receive a white stone and whatever else he says in those opening chapters.
[00:49:40] Speaker C: The one thing I would just add, Jasmine, to your earlier question about what's happening in facsimile three, I think one of the reasons why we need to be a lot more tentative with facsimile 3, we do not have the narrative that goes with it from the Book of Abraham. Right. So we have Joseph Smith himself and John Taylor when he becomes the editor of the newspaper. Apparently, people are clamoring for give us more Book of Abraham because John Taylor publishes a notice saying, brother Joseph has promised us to furnish us with more extracts from the Book of Abraham. Sadly, he never does. Right. But from. From where we know things are going in the narrative from Abraham, chapter three, it's clear that Abraham is supposed to go teach astronomy to the Egyptians.
Facsimile 3 is depicting that or illustrating that in picture form. But we don't have the narrative that goes with it. So we do need to be a little more careful and tentative. For instance, is he literally sitting on, you know, the king's throne in the story, or is this just the more sort of abstract, symbolized version of that story? We just don't know because he doesn't. We don't get there in the story. So there's a lot more caution with facsimile 3. Again, the names of these peoples, Shulem and Olimla, like what. What role do they play in the story? Are they just supposed to be there? We don't know. Presumably they play a role because they're named,
[00:50:47] Speaker A: whereas facsimile 1, we get the narrative where we hear about, like, this priest and that he's being sacrificed by the altar and things like
[00:50:54] Speaker C: that. Yeah, exactly. So we just need to be a little more cautious is all, with those sorts of specific questions.
[00:50:57] Speaker D: We talked about lots of reasons to be cautious with facsimile 3 when we had Quentin Barney on. And I did just want to note because some people may pick up on this. John makes some identifications of the figures here in facsimile 3 that differ from what Quinton concluded or argued may be the case.
And that's okay. People are gonna. You know, that's how scholarship works. Scholars come to some different conclusions. I would hate for people to get hung up on that rather than miss the point here, though, that, like, we're talking about a progression for Abraham in this particular case, but it can be for all of us. That is going from the altar in the courtyard where he's very nearly made the sacrifice himself, to then this journey through the underworld and all of. To ultimately being exalted and enthroned as depicted here. And, you know, some of the fine details may need to be hashed out between different scholars and what have you, but that is kind of this holistic approach to the facsimiles that John is talking about. And I, you know, I'd hate for people to get lost in the weeds and miss that big picture.
[00:52:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And this, this definitely is a, it's not a judgment scene. It is an initiation scene where Horus is being introduced into the presence of Osiris. He has been found worthy, true of voice. Right. He's now going to be
[00:52:20] Speaker C: Osirified, basically become an Osiris in Osiris presence.
[00:52:24] Speaker D: Hence his name appears as Osiris.
[00:52:26] Speaker C: Osiris whore. Bah. Right.
[00:52:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And so the idea that Osiris on the throne, it wouldn't be far fetched, I guess, maybe, but to see Horus on the throne because he's becoming Osiris in that sense.
[00:52:40] Speaker D: Yeah. It's
[00:52:41] Speaker C: culminating into that process for sure. Yeah.
[00:52:43] Speaker B: So I want to go back to the question that you asked earlier at the very beginning. Right. And that I asked, I guess like why, why do we have these three pictures that are relating to the book of Abraham?
Why does Joseph. And remember also that Joseph has to deal with what he has. Right. He, he, he received that we know of, you know, maybe three scrolls. And, and by the time they get to him, there's two scrolls and some fragments because one of the scrolls seems to break apart and that's the Book of Breathing scroll and, and the Hypocephalus and maybe some other fragments too. We don't know for sure. But, but, but Joseph is, he's having to deal with these pictures. He's got pictures on the scrolls. He's got pictures on these fragments and he does line them up quite nicely according to a soul's journey.
He lines them up. And I think his explanations take you through a temple journey.
And so I think he's syncretizing it with a temple.
But again, when you get to this scene, he's. As you mentioned, we got characters we don't know about because he hasn't published that part of the story yet.
But it would be okay to say that's going to be this Isis figures is Pharaoh, because that's all I have to deal with.
But again, his connections, his syncretizations are not just ignoring everything. They seem to be quite intelligent, quite spot on in many
[00:54:18] Speaker C: cases, quite grounded in many, many cases there's a very plausible Egyptian context for how these explanations can make sense. Perhaps not the way an Egyptologist would think it makes sense. Right. There will be some disconnect, but you just have to take it to the next step of what's the syncretic layer on this? We have an Egyptian Grounding an Abrahamic sort of gloss that's being put over it. And so I like to say, when people ask me, is Joseph Smith, like, restoring original Egyptian meaning? Is he giving an Abrahamic revelation? I think the answer is yes.
Right. There's both of these happening simultaneously.
[00:54:52] Speaker A: When it comes to, like, why pictures? I mean, I think if you're trying to. If you're a prophet trying to convey ideas about ritual, it's a very visual and immersive kind of thing to do. And we have lots of information about ancient Israelite ritual in the Hebrew Bible, but it's kind of hard to wrap your mind around in the book of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, all the. All the things there. And so from a pedagogical perspective, I think it's great that we have some visual portrayal of what this journey is going to look like for you, spiritually, symbolically, ritually and liturgically.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: Yeah, And I would say that he wants us.
And, you know, it'd be nice if he just kind of plainly said it rather than this esoteric explanations he gives us.
[00:55:30] Speaker A: Simpler.
[00:55:30] Speaker B: It does. It kind of. It's like the puzzle. Right. But I think that. I think the beauty of having these pictures next to the story of Abraham is he's trying to say, look at this story a little differently. Right. Don't just look at the story of Abraham as a narrative of a prophet.
Look at the story of Abraham as a, you know, something grander, something deeper. Again, the story of Abraham, I think. And, you know, my. My channel, Heaven's Code is I'm, you know, I'm sure people were like, you're going way too far on some of these. But the whole point of my. My channel is to say the scriptural narratives and sermons oftentimes will take you on a journey through the temple, that the temple is their worldview. Right. They have a worldview, a plan of salvation or a divine plan that people have in their lives.
And when they write a narrative, especially in the ancient world, I think they write the narrative in a way that conveys that worldview.
And that as you progress through your life, as you're writing your life story, you're actually going to be telling people the plan of salvation, because when you were 8, you were baptized, and then you received the Holy Ghost and you went through a ritual progression in your life and that kind of unfolds. And then you had to learn certain things and you had to make covenants to live a certain way. And you tried to practice that throughout your life. And then you had to make higher covenants and live a different way a little bit later in life. And so your life is the plan of salvation. I
[00:57:01] Speaker A: mean, I know that when I crossed the threshold into motherhood, it felt like kind of going through the underworld, dealing with those ordeals. But, like, I just very subconsciously, like, connected it to this broader plan of salvation, this idea that I'm, like, becoming something greater and holier through this very difficult process, because that's my worldview. So, like, why aren't this. Why can't the scriptures do that same thing?
[00:57:20] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think they do. And so that's why I try to say, look, this story of Abraham actually follows the temple. This story of Isaac actually follows the temple. And they all seem to follow the temple because their worldview is informing how they write their narratives. And so I think Joseph Smith is trying to tell us something by saying, here, I'm going to take you way out of your comfort zone. I'm going to throw some pagan pictures into this scriptural narrative. Because Joseph loves truth no matter where it is. Right. He'll grab truth from any source and he will bring it in. And he's like, the Egyptians have truth, and what's the truth? They have. They have a soul's journey. And there are certain things. And the more I dive into Egyptian religion, the more I realize that when they're making covenants, if you want to use that word, they don't use that word in Egyptology, but when they do their negative confessions and other kinds of things that they're doing, they're doing ritual practices like putting on clothing and being anointed and being washed and those kinds of things. But. But when you read the mythology, it starts to connect with the idea of clothing the naked and feeding the hungry.
And so they start seeing that their rituals have moral implications as well, which I think is beautiful, because we always think of the Egyptians as just this ritualistic, mythological society. But they have these expectations from making these rituals of how they're going to live in their lives. And. And so I think Joseph is tapping into that somehow. Right? And he's bringing out some of those ideas, or at least he's trying to get us to think beyond the text, using these pictures and see a progression.
[00:59:00] Speaker A: Well, that's beautiful. And I feel like that really makes it so much more cohesive, what we're experiencing from beginning to end with those facsimiles and the book of Abraham and our own journey. So if you do want to dive more into this kind of things, do check out John's channel, Heaven's Code, where he goes into a lot of this temple theology in various scripture passages. But also check out his book he published with BYU Studies, A Guide to the Book of Abraham. And we just find out you're working on a new another book that you'll have to look forward to on the Book of Abraham. So remember, guys, you can study deeply and believe boldly and we'll see you next time.
