Excerpts from:
Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism by Samuel Morris Brown
Note: Words in bold, italics and underlined are my own for emphasis
Pages 69-75:
Life in Yon Time
Joseph Smith’s primordialism is staggering; for him, the past had to be fully available in the present. With this as a goal, he implemented or proposed at least two striking practices that indicated the extent to which he expected that he and his followers would live in yon time. Both sound outrageous to a modern ear: biblical polygamy and animal sacrifice. (I discuss a third revival, the Nauvoo temple liturgy, in chapter 7.)
Smith’s polygamy arose for multiple reasons. It resisted the shrinking Victorian nucleus, solved a logical puzzle from the Bible (the Sadducean thought experiment on remarriage after bereavement), served as a test of commitment that strengthened members’ resolve, integrated the ecclesiastical family, concentrated power in the hands of the Latter-day Saint hierarchy, and much else.[88]
Many practicing Latter-day Saints have argued that, most importantly, God commanded it. But this polygamy also invited Smith and his followers to observe, bodily, certain customs of the Hebrew Bible. Abraham, Jacob, and David were notorious polygamists, and so would the Latter-day Saints be. (This was not the first time that Christian primordialism resulted in polygamy, as many critics observed, citing especially the sixteenth-century Munster Anabaptists.[89]) ...
The relationship between polygamy and time is important to understanding Joseph Smith’s theology. The main public argument justifying polygamy during Smith’s lifetime was the temporal displacement of remarriage after bereavement.[90]
Polygamy resisted the separation that time imposed on serial monogamy occasioned by premature death. … In the official, confidential revelation sanctioning the practice (D&C 132), the Old Testament precedent played a central role. ... That the Saints felt they needed to adhere to ancient Hebrew marriage practices demonstrated that they were living ancient lives to an outrageous degree.[91] Early Church members weren’t just attempting to pattern their lives on biblical templates. They were reworking time. ... The rules of Smith’s marriage system “were instituted from before the foundation of the world” (132:5) and they would last beyond time [see 132:7, 13] … This is the language of sealing and binding, of merging earth into heaven. This language is deeply anti-secular: no marriage for time only is considered worthy. …
… Smith, ever worried about the implications of human mortality, made clear that he was, in polygamy, creating a system that would defy death by binding the transcendent realm by rituals performed on earth. ...
… Polygamy has always defined people out of polite American society—the eradication of Latter-day Saint polygamy was one of the basic tenets of the Republican Party’s first platform and generated seemingly endless recriminations and persecution— …
… Another radically primordial practice never made its way into Church life: liturgical animal sacrifice. … In the Visions of Moses [by Joseph Smith] … we encounter an expanded treatment … an angel comes to Eve and Adam, leading them in a brief Socratic dialogue to ascertain the reason for animal sacrifice ... (Moses 5:7–8). In this phrase, Smith’s revelation sets the tone for both the Latter-day Saint understanding of time and the persistence of animal sacrifice after the coming of Christ. ... ” ...
... This was Smith’s signature antidispensationalist primordialism brought to its apogee. The Latter-day dispensation included even “the offering of Sacrifice ... Specifically, Malachi 3:3 required that the “sons of Levi” should “offer unto the Lord an offering,” and Malachi had to be fulfilled.[94] This offering, Smith knew, was animal sacrifice, that powerful emblem of the sacrifice of Jesus that began right after the Fall. If baptism extended before Jesus, then sacrifice would have to persist after Jesus.[95] If Smith’s merger of all times was going to be real, then it would have to include even the strangest and most ancient aspects of the Bible.
… Smith’s priesthood was assiduously concerned with returning ancient Hebrew priests to the modern world. … A few months after his October 1840 sermon (D&C 124:39), Smith indicated that one reason for building the Nauvoo temple was to provide an authorized space for “your memorials for your sacrifices by the sons of Levi.” The problem of dispensational restoration was still on his mind. He made similar reference to the restoration of “daily sacrifice” by priests in the Millennium in 1843.[98]
... Smith .... clearly intended to recover the ancient Hebrew— indeed, Edenic, according to Smith’s revelations—religion in its entirety. This would include all the trappings of ancient priesthood. These trappings would one day include real ritual sacrifice of animals at the temple. Smith and his peers would have been more familiar with the slaughter of animals than we are in the twenty-first century. …
… Note this time-erasing symmetry: Smith’s Book of Mormon had ancient Hebrews worshiping Jesus in deprecation of the then-current Law of Moses, and his nineteenth-century Latter-day Christians could look forward to practicing key aspects of the Law of Moses and patriarchal Hebrew life. ... [Smith] was arguing that time could not constrain his followers.
Pages 215-224:
The Priestess and the Multiplication of Power
In addition to sacred pictography, another important theme in the grammar documents is the divinity of women. Given the centrality of Eve to the Garden of Eden story and the intimate ties—mediated through Abraham and Sarah— between priesthood and reproduction, we should not be surprised to see images of female power in the Egyptian Bible [that is, the LDS Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price]. In fact, the Egyptian materials, especially the grammar documents, abound with accounts of women’s sacred authority. The gender association may have benefited from the depiction of several female figures in the papyri themselves. … Smith…had other things in mind for the figure of Eve. Eve permeated the grammar documents both directly and through her female offspring. Notably, Eve was the one God instructed to multiply and replenish the earth (Genesis 1:28) in the Bible account. That sense of multiplication, kindred to the notion of semantic ramification, played an important role in Smith’s Egyptian targum and its engagement of the priestess. Especially as it connected with the recreation of the world in the aftermath of the flood—when Noah and his wives received the same commandment as Eve, to multiply and replenish the earth (Genesis 9:1)—Smith’s Egyptian project contains accounts of female priestly power spread across multiple figures and scenes. This female sacerdotal power, tied to reproduction, is in many respects a prequel to the full flowering of Smith’s parental system of priesthood in the Nauvoo temple (chapter 7), in which women were formally ordained as queens and priestesses.[105]
The priestess theme in Smith’s Egyptian Bible encompasses two main aspects. The first concerns the discovery of Egypt by a woman who is the eponym for the Egyptian nation. ...
… the second is his connection between women, priesthood power, and the generations of time. The specific female figure—the eponymous matriarchal founder of Egypt—joined others in wielding female power in the expression of matriarchal authority over later generations. …. Repeatedly, then, glyphs for women represented royal power and authority. Commonly in early Restoration thought, such invocations of royal power were tied to priesthood.[114]
.... We can trace this figure, Katumin, through the grammatical degrees of the GAEL. A series of glyphs follows her, an archetypal princess, through a process of maturation from a young virgin to an established mother. In other words, the grammatical degrees track her ascent along a reproductive hierarchy that parallels the extension of priestly power.[116] The grammatical degrees of reference run alongside the expansion of a genealogical priesthood power through marriage and reproduction in Katumin’s life. … .
[114] The suggestion of a royal priesthood underlying the equivalence of kings and priests seems to be an exegesis of Revelation 1:6 and 5:10, which Smith understood to be using the term “kings and priests” as a synonymous couplet rather than a list of separate statuses. Smith used that imagery in his 1832 Vision (D&C 76:56–58), journal entries in 1843 (JSPJ3, 66, 86), and sermons in 1844 (Historian’s Office, General Church Minutes, April 7 and April 8, 1844, CR 100 318, bx. 1, fd. 19, CHL). ...
To recap, a princess named Katumin, bearing specially charged records, represents a lineage and exemplifies the idea of grammatical and reproductive degrees as fulfillment of the biblical mandates to multiply.
The Egyptian Bible and the Cosmic Order
… appears to be tied to parenthood, procreation, and the cycle of generations. In other words, women are central priestly participants in the realization of the Abrahamic blessing in the world.[120] … Within the canonized Book of Abraham, the main reflexes of princess Katumin’s story are a brief reference to priestly virgins sacrificed by pagan priests (Abraham 1:11) and the ongoing emphasis on genealogy and reproduction. While the Book of Abraham doesn’t make this point explicit, this merger of reproduction and priesthood power suggests that the instructions to Eve and Adam to “multiply and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28), mirrored in the parallel instructions to Noah and his family (Genesis 8), were in fact priesthood callings. According to the Egyptian project, men exist with power parallel to that of women. One glyph for a powerful patriarch describes the “extension of power by marriage or by ordination,”[122] suggesting the ongoing interconnection of marital and priestly power. This reference again ties the priesthood that Smith associated with both Egypt and his temple to parenthood, a physical and metaphysical force in which both men and women participated. ...
... In the published scripture, God tells Abraham that he and his seed are, by definition, “Priesthood” (Abraham 2:11). ... In place of the relatively simple announcement of Abraham’s covenant in Genesis, Smith’s Abraham offered an expansive reframing in terms of a priesthood that could interconnect all of humanity.[124] As opposed to the terse promise of plentiful offspring in Genesis, the Book of Abraham reveals that Abraham’s progeny “shall bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations.” The ministry is the evangelism of strangers into Abraham’s family—“as many as receive this gospel shall be called after thy name and shall be accounted thy seed.”
[120] Hovorka, “Sarah and Hagar” suggests that women are involved in the Abrahamic covenants in the Bible. Hovorka probably did not go far enough in her appreciation of the power attributed to women in Smith’s Egyptian project. Stapley, Power of Godliness, does emphasize the role of women in that early notion of priesthood.
... The Book of Abraham hammered home the deep and necessary dependence of priesthood (the power that converted believers and organized them in the church) on parenthood (biological multiplication), specifically that of Abraham and Sarah. Priesthood was thus explicitly the power by which Abraham’s and Sarah’s sacred parenthood could unfold across the globe. ...
The promise of priestly power for women was exciting for many participants, even as it unfolded in the context of assumptions about the nature of gender that have not weathered the interceding decades well. Smith and Phelps were endorsing neither late modern gender equality nor Victorian sexual norms. The priestess theology of the Egyptian Bible engaged the intersection of heavenly and earthly powers as they concerned genealogy and reproduction.[125] In Smith’s Abrahamic system (especially as manifest in the Egyptian Bible and the accompanying temple liturgy), women were sources of power, although their power could only be wielded in company with men. This was true throughout the early Restoration—women had striking power, which they could not wield in isolation. … This was the combination consistently present in Smith’s thought—women had vast cosmic powers that they wielded with men who stood higher in an ontic hierarchy.[127] Smith’s Egyptian Bible highlights aspects of a female priesthood—centered in the fulfillment of the Genesis command to multiply and replenish the earth— that came to fruition over the course of the Egyptian project as it became the Nauvoo temple liturgy. While in the temple that female priesthood became formally codified and implemented, the textual tributaries appear in Smith’s Egyptian Bible. Women’s connection to life, mediated through the first mother Eve, makes the human family possible. Smith’s Egyptian Bible, with its focus on parenthood-based priesthood, brings women directly into the royal line. ...
… Women thus stand at the center of the Chain of Belonging, another major theme within the Egyptian project.
Pages 260-263:
Living the Temple
The Nauvoo liturgy was pretty heady stuff. … The temple included preparation for evangelism, proxy baptism, anointings, an initiation ceremony, and celestial marriage (with celestial marriage divided into marriage per se and a royal anointing called the anointing for burial or Second Anointing). Celestial marriage encompassed the eternity of family ties, the postmortal durability of community, and the plurality of wives. We can’t blame participants for being distracted by polygamy—plural marriage was a huge pill to swallow for most people. We should also remember that only the elite participated in Smith’s live temple liturgy; the vast majority of Latter-day Saints only participated in temple rites after Smith’s death ... Most Saints encountered the rites under Young’s hand ...
. … Sarah Dearmon Pea Rich remembered her experience several decades later. She felt a strong need to justify polygamy, but she also had found a way to remain deeply committed to her faith for fifty years by the time of her reminiscence. In her account, what the temple brought above all else was a confidence about salvation and family. “We ware his chosen people and had embraced his gospel,” she reported. For four straight months, she had a sister wife watch her children while she and her husband labored in the temple from seven in the morning to just before midnight. “Many ware the blessings we had received in the House of the Lord which has caused us joy and comfort in the midst of all our sorrows and enabled us to have faith in God.” She continued, “if it had not been for the faith and knowledge that was bestowed upon us in that temple by the influence and help of the Spirit of the Lord our journey would have been like one taking a leap in the dark.” ... The special secrets of the temple contained a set of ritual knowledge and an approach to the holy that bound Church members together .... Rich continued to think through the meanings of the temple, explaining, “As the gospel with all its fullness had been restord to the earth through the Prophet Joseph Smith of course all the former ordenences were restord. Allso among other things celestial marriage was restord and the ordenences there onto ware performed in the temple just eluded to.” Reflecting and responding to the close relationship for participants between temple and polygamy, she explained, “I could not have [accepted polygamy] if I had not believed it to be right in the sight of God and believed it to be one principal of his gospel once again restored to the earth that those holding the preasthood of heaven might by obeying this order attain to a higher glory in the eternal world and by our obedience to that order we ware blessed and the Lord sustained us in the same for through obedience to that order my dear husband has left on this earth a numers posterity like the ancient Apostles and Servents of God.”[107] In this account, Rich is working through polygamy and the Chain of Belonging simultaneously. Admitting that she’s writing in reminiscence, she says that she found in the temple a powerful reassurance that Smith’s Chain of Belonging made genealogy and salvation synonymous. One can see the threads coupling the different phases of the temple, especially its connection to marriage, reproduction, and the Abrahamic promise. Priesthood was tied to heaven, which was in turn tied to one’s offspring. The temple was about building a heavenly family modeled on that of Abraham and Sarah. Rich seems to have understood well what was at stake. The “higher glory” she refers to is a part of the deification of human beings effected within the Chain of Belonging. Mercy Fielding Thompson also essentially lived in the temple during its early operation. She was one of the few who received her endowment under Smith’s direction, in this case guided through the rituals by Smith’s first wife Emma. Of that initial endowment, she recalled primarily that Smith told her that the endowment ceremony “will bring you out of darkness into marvelous light.”[108] In this reference, he was retooling 1 Peter 2:9. Although other Christians wouldn’t read the passage that way, notably for his purposes, the verse starts with a reference to “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation.” For Smith the juxtaposition of generations, priesthood, royalty, and statehood seemed relevant to the promise of enlightenment associated with the temple rites. It was specifically the temple’s union of the various components that made its promise of enlightenment so portentous. He saw himself as expanding minds, translating bodies, and creating kingdoms. Mercy’s brother Joseph Fielding noted in his nearly contemporary diary regarding the Nauvoo temple, “I entered it for the first time, and I truly felt as though I had gotten out of the world.”[109] .... Phelps, reflecting shortly after Smith’s death on the prophet’s scriptural legacy—especially as it regards the Egyptian Bible, which played an important role in the Nauvoo temple—counterposed Smith’s revelations to the claims of “deists, geologists, and others.” The distance between the two was so great, in Phelps’s mind, “it almost tempts the flesh to fly to God, or muster faith like Enoch to be translated and see and know as we are seen and known!”[111] Phelps thus associated translation with obtaining knowledge. And not just any knowledge, but knowledge of the truths about human identity in the temple.
After the Saints arrived in Utah and had a little more time to attend to and process the temple experience, some waxed more eloquent about its meaning. A woman writing under a pseudonym described the practice of saving the dead in the temple. She wrote, “not only are men favored with these great and sacred blessings but women also are saviors of women. There is no inequality even in ministering for the dead. Woman acts in her sphere as man in his. Therefore is man not without the woman, nor the woman without the man in the Lord. The work of performing the ceremonies requires as much labor and falls with as much dignity upon woman as man. Therein is the goodness of our Father to His daughters made manifest. Holy women now minister in the Temple of God.”[112] In this account, the writer drew attention to both the priestly power of women within the temple and a complex variant of the notion of complementary gender spheres. She maintained that the language of Paul (1 Corinthians 11:11) indicated that both men and women would work together within the temple. For participants, the temple had a great deal to say about the structure of the world and their prospects for power both in this world and afterward. There was in that a sense of movement between spheres. God too would straddle the spheres.
