Stephen Smoot
Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in The Temple: Symbols, Sermons, and Settings, edited by Stephen D. Ricks and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/the-temple-symbols-sermons-and-settings/.
“In a 1983 study, Lynn M. Hilton explored the concept of the hand as a cup in ancient temple worship.1 Hilton’s analysis of the imagery of the cupped hand as a ritual gesture offered some useful initial exploratory insight. This article builds on Hilton’s analysis and points to additional iconographic, textual, and artifactual forms of evidence for the cupped hand as a ritual gesture in ancient Egypt and Israel. As this evidence makes clear, in both ancient Egypt and ancient Israel, an important ritual action was to fill the cupped hand with offerings for the deity. These offerings could be made by either directly filling the palms of the hands or through the use of cultic vessels shaped as a cupped hand. Furthermore, in ancient Egypt, the outstretched cupped hand could also represent the petitioner receiving blessings from the deity as opposed to making an offering, while in ancient Israel, the action of filling the (cupped) hand was directly linked with being consecrated in a priestly capacity.”
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About the Interpreter Foundation Book Chapter Reprint Series
The purpose of this reprint series is to make individual chapters from books published by The Interpreter Foundation more accessible to readers. Although in some instances the formatting and pagination may have been changed, the content of this chapter, like others in this reprint series, is identical to what appeared in its original book publication. It has not been updated to incorporate research that has appeared subsequently nor to reflect the current practice of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to use the full name of the Church and to avoid terms such as “Mormon” and “LDS.”
