When I was in primary and in young men's, the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price was my favorite book in the scriptures. I didn't like it necessarily because of any of the specific scriptures or teachings in it—though there are some good ones in there! We learn about foreordination, the premortal life, the council in heaven, and lots of other fundamental doctrines.
I liked it because it has neat pictures.
I've long been interested in Egypt—while some kids love dinosaurs, or trains, or Greek mythology, I was an Ancient Egypt kid. There are three facsimiles from Egyptian papyri included in the Book of Abraham, and I would pore over the symbols and little interpretations during boring talks and lessons. I would try to replicate the little pictures and include different hieroglyphics in doodles. I just thought they were cool. They made the Pearl of Great Price feel ancient and special.
As an undergraduate student at BYU, I majored in Arabic, which meant that we lived in Jordan for a summer to study Arabic in the Middle East. During our time there, we got to visit Egypt for a week, and I loved it. We got to see the pyramids in Cairo, of course, as well as a bunch of ancient temples and other religious and royal complexes in Luxor. There's a modern Egyptian saying that once you've metaphorically "drunk from the Nile," or been to the country, you're hooked and have to get back to Egypt. After graduating from BYU, we did just that—we moved to Egypt for two years for graduate school.
During our time in Cairo, we traveled all over the country and visited as many ancient sites as possible. I particularly loved going to the different ancient temples and looking for temple symbolism in the architecture and art. During one trip, we rode on a rickety little minibus for an hour up the Nile to visit Dandarah, one of the best-preserved ancient temples in Egypt. The art still has bright colors and most of the buildings are intact. Surprisingly for me, one of the Dandarah temples has a large mural that—with some differences—is essentially Facsimile 1 from the Book of Abraham, which Joseph Smith interprets as the story of Abraham almost getting sacrificed to heathen gods in Babylon. I was so excited to see it!
We have the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price because in 1835, Joseph Smith purchased two recently-excavated mummies and some papyrus scrolls that were being toured around the United States. Joseph translated the papyri in November 1835 in the span of just a week, and didn't publish the translation for another 7 years until 1842.
However, Egyptologists have found very little linguistic evidence connecting the Book of Abraham to what the facsimiles actually say and depict. Facsimile 1, for example, is likely a depiction of the embalming process, with symbols of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. It could be related to a sacrifice, or maybe not. This has been a troubling issue for many people—both in and out of the church—so much so that in 2013 the church published a special Gospel Topics essay about the translation and historicity of the Book of Abraham. It's really well written and I recommend you all read it sometime—it's in your Gospel Library app right now.
The essay ultimately concludes that the Book of Abraham's truthfulness doesn't rest on whether Joseph Smith knew ancient Egyptian and could read hieroglyphics—he couldn't. Instead, its value as scripture comes from our "faith in the saving truths found within the book itself as witnessed by the Holy Ghost."
This is also the case for all other scripture. In the end, historical details about any book of scripture can be debated and proven or disproven, but that's not where the value comes from. The value of scripture is what we can learn from it and how it can change our lives.
We can read ancient scripture in a couple different ways. One way is to focus on the exact historical details and ask "Why did this story happen this way?" and "How did this story happen?" We can do this with all sorts of bible stories: How precisely did God create the world in six days? How did he flood the entire earth so quickly? How long might it have taken to get the animal populations to return to full capacity after the flood? How did Moses part the Red Sea? How wide was the path through the water? Was it muddy? And so on. This approach can be fun and interesting, but I find that it creates a shakier foundation for a testimony. If something historical or scientific challenges a specific minor detail in a story, it can derail our understanding—and potentially our faith.
Another approach is to study these stories by disconnecting them from history and instead asking things about the narrative and trying to understand the perspectives of the scribe, author, editor, translator, and intended audience. This leads to questions like: Why was the story told this way? What was happening when the story was written down? Why did the author, editor, or scribe decide to include these details and who were they writing for? What did the audience at the time of writing need to learn? How were they feeling? What lesson can we learn from this?
As a quick example of this second approach, we can think about the books of Genesis and Exodus in a slightly different perspective. The first five books of the bible—or the Torah—weren't written down in a unified form until some time between 500 and 600 BC, when Israel was conquered by Babylon, the temple was destroyed, and many Israelites were taken captive and enslaved. This was the time of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; the time of Daniel; and the time of Nephi and Lehi. The editors of the Torah were mostly working in exile. Their nation had just been conquered and destroyed. I'd imagine that they felt devastated and unmoored. They were God's chosen people, and that was all lost.
As these scribes and editors compiled Genesis, Exodus, and the other early books of the bible, they were building a narrative that God actually did still care about them, and that all of prehistory pointed to Israel's special covenant relationship with the Lord. Each of the famous stories like Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses can be read as examples of God making promises to a future nation of Israel. Most of these stories involve some sort of exile—Adam and Eve are kicked out of the Garden of Eden; Abraham goes to Egypt and comes back; Joseph is sold into Egypt and his brothers find him; Moses leaves Egypt for Sinai, goes back to Egypt to free the people, and then leads them out of exile.
These authors were building a narrative to help create a new post-Babylon nation after retuning from exile. This new retelling of their history would remind the people to remain in a special covenant relationship with God. I would guess that all of these exile stories brought comfort to the Israelites who themselves were in exile at the time. These stories have had a lasting impact for thousands of years since then, too. Enslaved and oppressed groups have used and reframed these same stories throughout history—for instance, enslaved Africans, abolitionists, and civil rights activists in the United States drew on similar narratives for centuries.
This approach is where I find power in the scriptures. Not in questions like "how long did Moses have to keep the Red Sea separated to get everyone across," but "why would scribes in exile in Babylon include these details? what are they trying to communicate? what can we learn from that?"
We can ask the same kinds of questions about Abraham chapter 1 and facsimile 1. Instead of exploring the exact meaning of each little hieroglyph and detail—which are likely not 100% accurate—we can look at why the story is told the way it is, what was happening during the translation and publishing process, and what we can personally learn from Joseph Smith's inspired pseudo-translation.
This story is unique to LDS scriptures and it's essentially a prequel to Abraham's story. Abraham is one of the central characters of Genesis. He's in more chapters than Adam or Noah or Joseph. The most famous story about Abraham is when God commands him to sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of his obedience. Abraham almost goes through with it, but is miraculously stopped at the end. This situation is particularly difficult for Abraham because he was promised innumerable posterity as part of the Abrahamic covenant, and killing Isaac would ruin all that. He persisted, though, and passed his test, and all was well.
Abraham chapter 1 inverts this story in a fascinating way. The book of Abraham starts with Abraham as a young man. He describes himself as "a follower of righteousness" who wanted to "possess a greater knowledge" and was purposely seeking out blessings. In particular he wanted to "be a father of many nations." Here, Abraham is basically telling us that he sought out all the promises of the Abrahamic covenant when he was young. He felt that something was missing in his life, he prayed for help and knowledge and blessings, and was then able to receive covenants and promises.
This sounds a lot like Joseph Smith's own experience. Joseph felt inspired to seek out truth. He prayed, witnessed the first vision, gradually received priesthood authority, established a newly restored church, and was working on restoring the fulness of the gospel and all its associated covenants.
But not everything was going well for Joseph Smith in 1835. He translated this during a really difficult time. The church was only five years old. It was tiny, it was split between Ohio and Missouri, and members were persecuted and kicked out of their homes. He was intensely worried about the future of the church. God had promised him that the church would fill the whole earth and that the fullness of the gospel would be restored, but I'd guess that it was really hard to imagine how that might happen that in the middle of all the persecution.
Abraham faced similar issues. Back in Abraham 1, after he received his promised blessings, Abraham was betrayed by his father and turned over to wicked priests who regularly performed human sacrifices. Abraham was tied up, put on an altar, and was very nearly killed, but the priest was miraculously stopped at the end. This is an almost perfect mirror image of Abraham's future sacrifice of Isaac and it forms a fascinating narrative bookend to his life—he begins and ends his life with a traumatic scene of sacrifice. When we read about Genesis Abraham being commanded to sacrifice his son, we can think about Pearl of Great Price Abraham and how his earlier experience might shape his perception of that command. Did it bring back traumatic memories? Did it give him hope that a miraculous intervention might happen for Isaac, just like it happened for Abraham? This prequel sacrifice changes how we think about Abraham and his story.
One thing I find really inspiring here is that, according to Joseph Smith's telling of the story, Abraham knew that he was promised to be a father of many nations from the time he was young. When Joseph Smith was young, he was promised that the restored church would spread throughout the world. Neither of them ultimately saw that happen. After a really long life, Abraham ended up with a couple kids—Isaac and Ishmael. At that point, that's hardly "many nations". Joseph Smith was martyred when he was 38 years old. There were 26,000 members of the church. Truist Park here in Atlanta can fit 41,000 people—the entire church in 1844 would fill up 60% of the stands at a Braves game.
The experience of both Abraham and Joseph Smith fits with what we learn in Hebrews 11:13:
These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
Neither Abraham nor Joseph Smith ever saw the realization of their promised blessings. They instead saw them "afar off." They both lived their lives with hope and faith for the future. They drew strength from those promises.
The Pearl of Great Price Abraham goes on to receive more revelations from God and builds a strong, unshakable faith in those promises, even though he won't see them during his life.
Joseph Smith was driven by his own unshakable faith and hope. The Doctrine and Covenants is full of examples of Joseph receiving counsel and strength and hope for himself and for the church. For instance, a few years before translating the book of Abraham, the Lord said this to Joseph and the saints in D&C 78:17–18:
17 Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye are little children, and ye have not as yet understood how great blessings the Father hath in his own hands and prepared for you;
18 And ye cannot bear all things now; nevertheless, be of good cheer, for I will lead you along. The kingdom is yours and the blessings thereof are yours, and the riches of eternity are yours.
Or, in other words, everything will work out somehow. You have all these promises and you can't understand everything now, but "be of good cheer". Don't worry.
We all are part of the Abrahamic covenant and we are promised those same blessings. We have many other kinds of promises too. We are promised a whole host of blessings that come because of our temple covenants. If you receive a patriarchal blessing, you'll have many promised personalized blessings. These won't always seem to work out though!
I chose to study Arabic and global politics in part because I felt inspired to. We chose to move to Egypt in part because we felt inspired to. God had a need for us, and we were ready to fill that need. Every time we've considered moving since then, we've always prayed for—and received!—confirmation of our choice, but, as Nancy just explained, it hasn't always worked the way we thought. Many times, we've applied for schools or jobs where everything looked ideal and ready to go, only to have plans change at the last minute. And it's been so frustrating to have plans and goals and dreams that feel promised and backed by God not work out. But in spite of that frustration, we continue with hope, just like Abraham from the Pearl of Great Price, and just like Joseph Smith. Things somehow work out if we maintain that faith
As the church says in its essay on the translation of Abraham, the power of the book doesn't come from its historical accuracy or from whether Joseph's interpretation of the hieroglyphs is correct. The power comes from the spirit we feel when studying the stories and doctrines contained in them.
I still enjoy the facsimiles, even if I don't see them as 1:1 translations of the book of Abraham. Twenty years ago, some LDS members convinced a local artist in Cairo to recreate the facsimiles on papyrus and sell them as souvenirs and told him that there's a weird group of Christians who would want copies. Since then, most LDS members who spend time working or studying in Egypt track down this guy and ask for the Abraham papyri. He takes them to a back room and pulls them out of a drawer and gives them a "special price" (more expensive than his standard souvenirs). It's a goofy touristy thing, but we got our own set and have them hanging on a wall in our house. I like them because they remind me of Abraham's hope amid decades of uncertainty and despair. They remind me of Joseph's hope amid uncertainty and despair. They remind me that I can also have hope amid uncertainty and despair.
I challenge us all to remember Abraham and Joseph Smith and everyone else in the scriptures who saw their blessings from "afar off." Things can and will work out when we remain rooted in our covenants, remember our promised blessings, and maintain our faith and hope.
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