Almost nine months ago I had the great opportunity of interviewing author Jeffrey M. Bradshaw about his outstanding (and very large) book, In God’s Image and Likeness (you can read that multi-post interview starting here). It is now my great pleasure to present to you my brief interview with Dr. (Bishop) Bradshaw regarding a new book of his that has just been released, entitled Temple Themes in the Book of Moses. I have had the privilege of having a look at this new book and I can tell you that it is exciting, inspiring, and contains many new and fresh insights that will greatly enhance your understanding of the temple and its purpose, as well as give you a richer appreciation for how much the Book of Moses really has to offer us.
What motivated you to write “Temple Themes in the Book of Moses”?
Jeff Bradshaw: My hope in writing this new book was that readers would gain a greater appreciation for the depth and sophistication of temple teachings—and the implications of those teachings for our daily lives. We are naturally drawn to the temple because it is a place apart where we can feel the peace and joy of God’s presence as we participate in sacred ordinances for ourselves and others. We take our problems to the temple and pray for help and guidance, and we also engage in group prayer for others with particular needs. These things alone are great blessings.
Often less appreciated, however, is the fact that the temple is intended to be a place of profound and very personal learning, not only with respect to the answers we seek to prayers about our immediate concerns, but also about our place in the overall economy of our divine Father’s Creation. Noting the magnitude of our opportunities in this respect, Elder Neal A. Maxwell once remarked: “God is giving away the spiritual secrets of the universe,” and then asked: “but are we listening?”[i]
To help prepare our minds and hearts to receive this divine instruction, we have been counseled to study the scriptures and the words of latter-day prophets. Allusions to temple themes can be found throughout these writings, but it is not always easy to recognize them. Efforts have been made to bridge this gap through books that explain the meaning of specific symbols used in scripture and temple worship. However, most of us not only struggle with the meaning of individual concepts and symbols, but also—and perhaps more crucially—in understanding how these concepts and symbols fit together as a whole system. The symbols and concepts of the temple are best understood, not in isolation, but within the full context of temple teachings to which they belong.
Chesterton has compared our position to that of a “sailor who awakens from a deep sleep and discovers treasure strewn about, relics from a civilization he can barely remember. One by one he picks up the relics—gold coins, a compass, fine clothing—and tries to discern their meaning.”[ii] The point is that the essential meaning is to be found not so much in the individual relics as in a true grasps of the milieu that produced them.
As Latter-day Saints, we have access to more knowledge about the temple than has been available generally in any other dispensation. As a result, we are in a privileged position to have “the scriptures laid open to our understandings, and the true meaning and intention of their more mysterious passages revealed unto us.”[iii]
Because its stories form such an important part of the LDS temple endowment, the book of Moses is an ideal starting point for a scripture-based study of temple themes. It is well known, for example, that the endowment, like the book of Moses, includes “a recital of the most prominent events of the creative period, the condition of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, their disobedience and consequent expulsion from that blissful abode, their condition in the lone and dreary world when doomed to live by labor and sweat, the plan of redemption by which the great transgression may be atoned.”[iv] What is more rarely appreciated, however, is that the relationship between scripture and temple teachings goes two ways. Not only have many of the stories of the book of Moses been included in the endowment, but also, in striking abundance, themes echoing temple architecture, furnishings, ordinances, and covenants have been deeply woven into the text of the book of Moses itself.
In short, this book, though neither authoritative nor definitive, attempts to highlight a few of the temple themes that once seem to have been part of a widely-shared background of understanding for scriptural interpretation and to apply these themes as latent interpretive possibilities for the book of Moses. Though many of the arguments made will, no doubt, someday prove to have been ill-founded, my hope is that bringing such perspectives into discussion will, at the very least, help in some small way to spur deeper study and appreciation of the book of Moses and the temple.
New “Exagoge” of Ezekiel the Tragedian Fragment
Via my professor James Davila at PaleoJudaica.com:
PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WATCH: Bob Kraft e-mails:
This text is a retelling of the Exodus story in the form of a Greek verse drama by the Hellenistic author Ezekiel the Tragedian. (We covered this in my Old Testament Pseudepigrapha course some years ago. And for much more, see here and here.) Apart from this manuscript, it survives only in quotations (and quotations of quotations) by later writers. Assuming, that is, that this is a manuscript of the Exagoge and not one of the later embedded quotes. Still, an actual manuscript of the work of Alexander Polyhistor would be pretty cool too.
The website for the 26th International Congress of Papyrology is here.
I am very interested in this text as I gave a paper on the Exagoge at last year’s SBL conference (I have also mentioned it on this blog, here and here and here). It is a very interesting text that deals with the enthronement of Moses on a heavenly throne. The most peculiar aspect of the text is that the divine figure who is on the throne actually gets off, seating Moses in his place. There is much debate regarding the identity of the figure who was previously enthroned.