In this Essay, we review the instructions given to Adam and Eve: the commandments to be fruitful and multiply and not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge; the instruction for Adam to cleave to Eve, the most unique of God’s creations; and the commandment for them to “dress” and “keep” the Garden....
read moreIn Essay #32, we discussed the view of Latter-day Saint scholar Donald W. Parry that the outbound journey of the Creation and the Fall is mirrored in the inbound journey of the Tabernacle, the prototype for later Israelite temples. The Garden of Eden can be seen as a natural “temple,” where Adam and Eve lived in God’s presence for a time....
read moreIn this Essay, we explore what is often considered to be the opening of a “second” Creation account in Genesis and the Book of Moses (Moses 3:4–5). Modern scholars have written at length about differences between the accounts that seem to point to the joining of multiple ancient sources....
read moreThe beautiful copper engraving above by Noël Pisano was made from meticulous observation of one of the many prehistoric paintings in the caves of Pech-Merle, in the heart of the massif central of southern France....
read moreIn this Essay, we will discuss the Moses 2 account of the creation of Adam and Eve. We will focus on the interpretation of two difficult phrases in verse 26: “let us make man” and “in our image, after our likeness.”...
read moreIn this Essay we will explore the creation of light on Day One....
read moreThis Essay examines the ancient literary form of chiasmus within Moses 1. Chiasmus includes “several types of inverted parallelisms, short or long, in which words first appear in one order and then in the opposite order.”...
read moreIn the immediately preceding set of Essays, we focused on the narrative of Moses 1 and its interpretation. However, beginning with this Essay, we will turn our attention to some of the beautiful and meaningful ritual allusions and literary details of the chapter....
read moreIn this Essay, we will discuss how Moses and Abraham speak with the Lord, and how both are given a vision of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall from within the heavenly veil. ...
read moreIn light of our cultural and conceptual distance from the milieu of Moses 1, we are fortunate that imperfect documents from antiquity like the Apocalypse of Abraham (ApAb) may nevertheless provide keys for understanding that “mysterious other world,” even when existing manuscripts were written much later and, not infrequently, have come to us in a form that is riddled with the ridiculous....
read moreIn the depiction of the Garden of Eden above, Jan Brueghel the Elder masterfully fills the foreground of the scene with the abundance, happiness, and beauty of newly created life. From there, however, he skillfully draws our eyes toward the two tiny figures in the background ominously reaching for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge....
read moreThis magnificent painting by Gaetano Previati shows the heavenly hosts as part of the light that appeared at the beginning of Creation. Some ancient sources assert that the heavenly hosts — variously described as including the angels, the sons of God, and/or the souls of humanity...
read moreIn ancient Near East creation accounts, “rest” is not only the motive for undertaking Creation in the first place, but also the happy end that follows Creation as the culminating event of the triumphant victory of order and divine dominion over chaos....
read more“And I, the Lord God, caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam. … And the rib which I, the Lord God, had taken from man, made I a woman.”...
read moreDistinction and separation are the central themes of the creation account: “And I, God, said: Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven, to divide the day from the night” (Moses 2:14). ...
read moreThe illustration from M. C. Escher depicts the first day of Creation, when “the earth was without form and void; and I caused darkness to come up upon the face of the deep; and my Spirit moved upon the face of the water; for I am God.” The Hebrew term here translated “moved” is used in Deuteronomy 32:11 to describe an eagle hovering attentively over its young. In addition, one cannot help but recall the imagery of Jesus’ mourning for Jerusalem: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, … how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”...
read moreThis Essay continues our look at the literary features of Moses 1. Since Moses 1 leads directly into the narrative flow of JST Genesis, it is natural that it should share stylistic and literary features of the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament). Below, we will highlight three topics: parallelism, Hebraisms, and figures of speech or idioms....
read moreMoses 1 constitutes a self-contained literary unit and prologue to the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, demarcated by an inclusio. The Latin word inclusio (literally, an “inclosing” or “closing-in”) serves as “a technical term for a passage of scripture in which the opening phrase or idea is repeated, paraphrased, or otherwise returned to at the close.”...
read moreHaving traversed the veil, Moses and Abraham experience a comprehensive vision of the earth and its mortal inhabitants through the ages. In both texts, this raises questions for the prophets, but the nature of the questions differs somewhat in Moses 1 than in the Apocalypse of Abraham (ApAb)....
read moreIn light of our cultural and conceptual distance from the milieu of Moses 1, we are fortunate that imperfect documents from antiquity like the Apocalypse of Abraham (ApAb) may nevertheless provide keys for understanding that “mysterious other world,” even when existing manuscripts were written much later and, not infrequently, have come to us in a form that is riddled with the ridiculous....
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